What UX Designers can (and cannot) learn from games: Short guide

Fun is the easiest way to change people‘s behaviour. Fun from games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension. It is theact of solving puzzles that makes games fun. With games, learning is the drug. The core fun in games is learning under optimal conditions. To create it, we must be able to design goals and environments as well.Play depends on voluntary contexts without serious consequence.Game design gives us patterns, models and words for emotion and rule design.

Sebastian Deterding

UXCamp Europe

Berlin, May 30, 2010

c b n

Just add points?

what ux designers can

(and cannot) learn from games

The Fun Theory

2

3

4

Why games are fun

Problems

What we can learn

There‘s a meme currently circulating in the UX community that the best way to motivate user behaviour is to make it fun – and the best way to make it fun is game mechanics Today, I‘d like to (1) present this meme, (2) summarise the research on why games are fun, (3) show some problems with applying game design in other contexts, and (4) point out what we can actually learn from game design

The Fun Theory

So on to point number one

Can we get more people to use the bottle bank by making it fun to do?

The most articulate version of »The Fun Theory« is a recent viral video campaign by Volkswagen Sweden that runs by that name Here‘s one example how they use game mechanics to motivate users to use the bottle bank

Play video

1982: Thomas Malone

To wit, the idea that we can deduce heuristics for designing more enjoyable applications from video games is nothing new If you look

up the scholarly HCI databases, you‘ll already find papers on this in the early 1980s, the first heydays of video games (http://bit.ly/csscek.)

Work made fun gets done!

1994: The Fish! Strategy

In the 1990s, there was a business bible craze around »The FISH! strategy« Briefly, it states that for employees to be productive and creative, they have to be intrinsically motivated, which is best achieved by a playful attitude towards their work (In a sense, Dan H Pink‘s recent business bible »Drive« is just a reiteration of this focus on intrinsic motivation.)

Research Design Application

Yet there is also a growing amount of serious research (especially within the learning sciences) on creating more motivating work and learning environments by leveraging game design Within the design community, you find no shortage of presentations and blog posts

on the topic, and there are already some applications explicitly using game mechanics (links at the end of this presentation)

Games With A Purpose

Maybe the most well-known application are the »Games With A Purpose« by re:captcha inventor Luis von Ahn, like the »ESP Game«:

On the surface, players earn points by guessing which word comes to mind of an anonymous counterpart when seeing a picture In the background, the inputs are used as highly accurate image tags

Book Oven

Another example is »Book Oven«, a web platform for book publishing The platform crowdsources the otherwise tedious act of proof reading by presenting users with small snippets of text Users earn points for every snippet checked, and can compare themselves with other users on a leader board – to apparently amazing effects:

In a very similar way, Twitter has recently crowdsourced its translation – again with small snippets, points earned per snippet, and levels Even these bare bones mechanics seem to work quite well: To achieve level 11, one has to translate 1484 snippets – and I know quite a number of people in my twittersphere who are at level 10

Why games are fun

So the obvious question is: Why? Why is this so motivating, so much fun? What exactly is at work here?

Just add points!

The answer I find reiterated over and over in most of the current debate in UX design is: »Just add points (and leaderboards)!« Points are seen as a kind of monosodium glutamate you can spice up any interaction or product with

Foursquare best exemplifies this approach: To motivate a desired user behaviour (check-ins), users earn points for performing it The points are then displayed on leaderboards to stimulate competition, and users can achieve levels or badges with a certain number of points or combination of check-ins

Raph Koster

»Fun is just another word

for learning.«

a theory of fun for game design

However, this approach is way too simplistic if seen in context of the wealth of thought and research in game studies and game design Personally, I think that Raph Koster most concisely summed up what we currently know about why games are fun when he said: »Fun is just another word for learning.«

Raph Koster

»Fun from games arises out of mastery

It arises out of comprehension It is the act of solving puzzles that makes games fun With games, learning is the drug.«

a theory of fun for game design

Now, »fun is learning« sounds quite counterintuitive at first What Koster means (and what is backed up by research on intrinsic motivation) is that the fun of games is the positive experience of mastering something: a new skill, a solved puzzle, a recognised pattern We win a game by noticing and then mastering the rule patterns – and this experience of competence creates fun

We flee from We flee into

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sulamith/1342528771/sizes/o/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/photonquantique/3364593945/sizes/l/

To give you an example: The same kind of mathematics that school kids usually despise in school is actively sought out and performed

by them with intense focus and joy in Trading Card Games like »Magic: The Gathering«, where mastery requires complex

multiplication, fractions, and statistic analysis of which card combinations form a winning deck So what makes the difference?

Raph Koster

»Fun is just another word

for learning.«

a theory of fun for game design

under optimal conditions

What separates games from school (and what we have to add to Koster‘s definition) is that games create optimal conditions for learning Fun is learning – under optimal conditions And games show us just what exactly those optimal conditions are

Jane McGonigal

»Reality is broken.

Games work better … Games are the ultimate happiness machines.«

S.M.A.R.T goals

Principle #1: Games set specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and timed short- and long-term goals (you might say they do time management 101 for the user) Short-term: I am level 4 and want to get to level 5 Long-term: Level 11! In contrast, think of how often in life (or school) we have no, unclear, vague or even conflicting goals? Not so in games

Clear, bite-sized actions and choices

Principle #2: The available actions to achieve our goals are made explicit – and prepackaged so that we can directly execute them

Twitter presents the text we have to translate directly and in small doable portions: 1 Action = click & translate 1 sentence Game menus

in point-and-click adventures are overviews of objects and verbs – we »just« have to decide which action is the right one (cf designer Sid Meier: »A game is a series of interesting decisions«) In everyday life, the actions and choices available to us are mostly unclear, vague or not packaged into immediately doable steps, i.e »lose weight«, »write that novel«, »get rich«,

Clear action–goal

relations

Principle #3: The relation between the available actions and choices and our goals are clear It is uncertain whether we succeed in performing the action (here: translate the text), but how success brings us closer to our goal is immediately visible with numerical exactitude Conversely, do we know in everyday life whether a chosen action will really bring us closer to our goals, and how much so?

Clear status

Principle #4: Our current status ist absolutely clear In games, we always know »where« we stand – spatially (via map displays), in terms of our skills and possessions (listed in menus, inventories and character sheets), in relation to our goals (points and mission stats) and in our relation to other players (visualised in leaderboards or social graphs)

Excessive positive feedback

Principle #5: Games give instant, unambiguous, excessively strong positive (and negative) feedback My favourite example is the Pachinko-like game »Peggle« by Popcap Games The goal is to shoot all orange pellets from a screen with a bouncing metal ball Here‘s what happens if you clear the last orange pellet of a level:

Play video

Scaffolded challenges

That‘s the kind of feedback I‘d like to get for a successful project But on to principle #6: The challenges we face, the goals we strive for get a little more difficult with each step On twitter, we have to translate a little more each level to reach the next one Why is this

important?

flow: the psychology of optimal experience Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The answer comes from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: We usually feel best when the challenges we face perfectly match our skills More, and we are stressed, less, and we‘re bored Since we constantly learn and improve our skills, the challenges must grow with our skills – otherwise, boredom ensues

The well-formed action

http://www.flickr.com/photos/30279269@N04/3946300019/

Personally, I call these the principles of well-formed action, as they not only apply to games, but capture part of what makes any

everyday action satisfying and motivating – »optimal experiences« in the terms of Csikszentmihalyi or Jane McGonigal Games provide

a kind of crutches purpose-built to facilitate and guide well-formed action

Quick recap

• Clear status, goals, actions, decisions,

goal-action relations

• Excessive feedback

• Scaffolded challenges matched

to the users‘ growing skills

• Chunking

• Social comparison

So if we just follow these principles when designing our applications, they will be just as much fun as games – correct?

Problems

Well, yes and no These are certainly generally valid and valuable principles for the design of any interaction But I see three broad problems with the direct transfer of game design to software or websites

On the other hand, game designers come from the world of fun and leisure If you‘d ask a game designer to craft a bus ticket machine that is »exciting«, his solution might look like this:

Conflict of interest

game

Emotion Intensity Duration

work

Tasks Efficiency Speed

Behind these different cultures of thinking and design is a manifest conflict of interest: The whole point of games is to create intense emotions, and to prolong their experience as much as possible By contrast, productivity software is all about getting your work done as efficiently and quickly as possible How you feel is at best a secondary consideration

Only sometimes

game

Emotion Intensity Duration

work

Tasks Efficiency Speed

Only sometimes, ensuring intrinsic user motivation is so essential that emotion becomes conducive to or even a prerequisite for task completion – say, in creative work or unremunerated user work Another case are end-user products where the quality of experience is part of the selling proposition or market differentiator In those cases, we have to ensure usability and fun/emotion

Problem #2

Game Designers are mightier

Problem number two: Game designers are far more powerful than designers of software or websites What do I mean with that?

If this screen would be a typical screen of a user typing a document on Microsoft Word, which elements of this screen would an

interaction designer be able to design?

What we design

(the tool)

Answer: The interaction designer would only be able to design Mario: the tool the user uses to affect his/her world

What the user/manager designs

What the user/manager also designs

(objects and environments)

Likewise, the objects that the user works on with his/her tools and the broader environment of his/her task is set by the user or a supervising manager: the texts to be referred to, the colleagues who can be asked, etc

Skill/Time

game design

(HR) Management!

Yet the difficulty curve emerges from the relation of skills, tools, objects, environment and goals: How difficult something is depends

on what I try to achieve with which tools in which environment In games, this complex whole is designed by the game designer In work life, it is »designed« by our supervisors and HR people (a.k.a »job rotation«, »job enrichment«, etc.)

Business Process Reengineering?

http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=3225718

Put differently, if we as designers wish to craft a fun, engaging difficulty curve in productivity contexts, we have to step away from

designing the application in isolation and tackle the whole work context – which isn‘t interaction design anymore – it‘s business

process reengineering

let users easily integrate their environments and goals into our systems?

Two examples for this approach are the time management application RescueTime, which essentially tracks the amount of time you spend with different applications (and on different websites) and allows you to set goals (e.g »no more than two hours of YouTube per day«), or Chore Wars, which allows you to make household chores a part of an Online Roleplaying Game.

Problem #3

http://www.flickr.com/photos/musebrarian/443103590/sizes/o/

The third and last problem I like to call the »Tom Sawyer problem«: In the famous novel by Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer has to paint a

fence white and is derided by some passing friends who go fishing By insisting that he‘d rather paint the fence than go fishing, Tom is able to persuade his friends that painting is actually fun – and has them pay for the privilege of painting the fence for him

Mark Twain

»Tom had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it – namely, that in order

to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.«

the adventures of tom sawyer (1876)

There are two things happening in this story One is the psychological mechanism known as the »hard-to-get« phenomenon: If something is hard to get (e.g expensive, almost sold out, etc.), we usually conclude that it must be very valuable

Mark Twain

»If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have

comprehended that Work consists

of whatever a body is obliged to do,

and that Play consists of whatever

a body is not obliged to do.«

the adventures of tom sawyer (1876)

The second (and in our context, more relevant) thing is a core psychological and social difference between work and play: We usually experience as work what we have to do by some external force, whereas to experience something as play, we must feel that we have chosen to do it voluntarily (kthx @stephenanderson for pointing me to Twain‘s story.)

Johan Huizinga

»First and foremost, then, all play is a voluntary activity … It is done at leisure, during ›free time‹ Every child knows

perfectly well that he is ›just pretending‹,

or that it was ›just for fun‹.«

homo ludens (1938)

This actually goes back to the earliest definitions of play According to the doyen of game studies, Johan Huizinga, the two core features

of play are: (1) It is done voluntarily, and (2) it is a »make-believe« activity without serious consequences (There‘s a rich discussion on how games often do have consequences – think Russian Roulette – but we don‘t have the time to dive into the scholarly details here.)

no serious consequence

Now if you take a second look at all the examples where game mechanics work just fine – ESP Game, Bookoven, twitter translations – you‘ll find that they are all voluntary »leisure« activities that don‘t have any serious consequence for the user They are indeed »just a game«