Because of smartphones, today almost everyone plays games. Think about how mechanics used in games can be applied to influence our children and students, from home chores/rewards to teaching Sunday School. That’s what this talk is about. Importantly though, we’d not focus on pure behaviorism (think rats pressing levers for food) which can be manipulative, nor on too many extrinsic rewards that can extinguish intrinsic motivation. There’s others in the popular media who talk about that if you want to learn more – I’d recommend Daniel Pink (TED talk here) & Kevin Werbach.
LESSONS FROM GAMES
Video games can motivate & transfix us like nothing else we’ve invented has ever done before. How? Intense emotional rewards, both individual & collective. If we look at what’s going on inside someone’s head when they’re being engaged there’s two different processes: wanting (like ambition and drive), & liking (fun and affection and delight). Combined they form an intense engagement, E.g. flying on a dragon in a game feels powerful *and* it’s beautiful and pleasurable.
Most interesting is what you can measure with it – which is everything, everything the player has done. Far more detail on people than, say, websites. This allows something special to happen in games: the Reward Schedule. This is looking at what millions of people have done & calculating & calibrating the rate, intensity, type etc. of rewards that keep them engaged.
For example: Go & get a certain number of items, like 15 pies, which you can get by opening a box after killing a certain little pie monster. This would typically be boring but games make it incredibly compelling by using a combination of probability & data.
So if we want to engage someone in the process of finding pies we want to make sure it’s not too easy nor too difficult. What to do? Look at a million, a hundred million, people opening boxes for pies & you work out that if you make the pie rate about 25%, that’s neither frustrating nor too easy, keeping people engaged. It’s not all you do. There’s 15 pies – a thousand would be boring. 15 is pretty optimal number. Between 5-20 is a good number to keep people going. But we don’t just have pies in the boxes. 100% of the time when the box is opened there’s a little reward in there that keeps people progressing & engaged. In adventuring games it’s a little bit of in-game currency, a little bit of experience. But we don’t do just that, there’ll be loads of other items of varying quality and excitement: 10% chance you get a pretty good item, a 0.1% chance (low to keep the value, to keep it special) you get an absolutely awesome item. Each probability is carefully calibrated to the item.
Also we say, “How many monsters? Fill the entire world with a billion monsters?” No, we want one or two monsters on the screen at any given time so I’m drawn on – not too easy, not too difficult. All this is very powerful, but we are in virtual reality so we can do some rather amazing things. We notice, seeing all these people opening boxes, that when people get to about 13 out of 15 pies that their perception shifts, they start to get a bit bored, a bit testy. They’re not rationale about probability, this game’s not fair, it’s not giving me my last two pies, I’m going to give up. If those were real boxes there’s not much we could do but in a game we can say, well, when you get to 13 pies you’ve got a 75% chance, keep you engaged, look at what people do: adjust the world to match their expectations.
The point is we evolved to be satisfied by the world in particular ways over tens of hundreds of thousands of years; we found certain things stimulating & as very intelligent civilized beings we’re enormously stimulated by problem solving and learning. But now we can reverse engineer that and build worlds that expressly tick our evolutionary boxes…
7 WAYS TO USE THESE LESSONS FROM GAMES, OUTSIDE OF GAMES
1) Experience bars measuring progress: Don’t grade people incrementally in little bits and pieces, but give them one profile/character/avatar that’s constantly progressing in tiny increments and everything comes towards that and they own that as it goes along.
2) Multiple long & short term aims: Give lots of tasks. E.g. Do 10 of these questions, but another task is going to 20 classes on time, and another is collaborating with other people, another task is to show you’re working 5 times, another is to hit a particular target…. You break things down into collaborated slices & people can *choose* and do it in parallel to keep engaged that you can use to point them toward individual beneficial activities.
3) Reward effort: Games are great at this. Every time you do something you get credit, you get a credit for trying. You don’t punish failure. You reward every little bit of effort. Gold, credit etc – minute reinforcement.
4) Rapid, frequent, clear feedback: Looking at major issues today (global warming, etc.) it’s very hard for people to learn if they cannot link consequences to actions. Consequences distant in time and space. Hard to learn to feel a lesson. But if you can model things for people, that they can manipulate and play and feedback comes then they can learn a lesson and understand.
5) An element of uncertainty: The neurological gold mine. A known reward excites people but what really gets them going is the uncertain reward, they didn’t know whether they would get it or not. The right level of uncertainty, the 25% chance. This lights the brain up.
6) Windows of enhanced attention: Memory: There are moments when someone is more likely to remember. Confidence – game playing and reward structures make people braver, more willing to take risks, more willing to take on difficulty, harder to discourage.
7) Other people: In reward terms doing stuff with others is greater than “money” etc.
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