Mechanics in Gamification - Part 3
August 26, 2021
We’re back! In this post we are going to cover 4 more game mechanics in gamified applications. We will break down Story, Feedback, HP/Stamina, and Challenges.
Once again, we’ll give examples of how these mechanics work, what makes them effective, and either an example of how we have used them to help clients achieve their project goals, or a brainstorm of a potential use case.
Self Determination Theory - An Overview
As the gamification mechanics that we are talking about today will be analysed with the SDT (Self Determination Theory) framework, we’ll cover some key concepts in this quick review.
SDT has a focus on three psychological needs and explains how the fulfillment of those needs can impact personal motivation. An increase in the fulfillment of these needs will help move an activity from being externally motivated to internally motivated. External motivation is where a person performs an activity due to pressures from outside themselves, and internal motivation is when a person performs an activity because they enjoy it or find value in doing that action.
Competence:
Competence is a person's need to feel like they have the ability to do well at the activity they are engaged in.
Autonomy:
Autonomy is a person’s need to feel like they have a choice in what they do and that the choice matters.
Relatedness:
Relatedness is a person’s need to feel like they are a part of a community and that they contribute to the group.
With a quick review of Self Determination Theory under our belt, let’s break down some common gamification mechanics.
Story
How is the story a gamification mechanic?
Stories as a gamification mechanic are when a designer will add a storyline that progresses along with the user. This could be classified as a progression system but has the added benefit of tapping into the innate draw stories have over us. A story system doesn’t have to be directly told to the user. You can also have a significantly deep story that is initially hidden from the player. An example of this kind of storytelling would be in the Myst or the Dark Souls Series. Within dark souls the majority of the story of the world is told through item descriptions and optional character dialog. In Dark Souls there isn’t any Narration to the player except through the opening cutscene which sets the world and the player's goal. The purpose of the story in Dark Souls is to provide a deep mystery that is an optional bonus for any player who chose to explore it.
A more classic example of a story based system would be a point and click adventure such as Space Quest or Kings Quest. These games use story to give direction to players as well as being a draw for players to enjoy. There is a third kind of story as mechanic as well and it’s collaborative storytelling, which can be found in tabletop RPG’s and Improv. With a tabletop RPG players usually bring their own characters who they choose how to interact with different situations.
Players may help a certain character who then in turn helps them out later in the story or they may have fought and killed that character leading to an entirely different story play out.
Effectiveness of stories in gamification
Depending on the implementation of your story system, it can provide additional value. But as a baseline Humans are natural storytellers, and we are drawn to stories and a well written and enthralling story has proven to be some of the most engaging media ever. As a caveat any story in a game also has the same risks as any story does, but lets dive into what the mechanical benefits there are. A good story engages people by being unpredictable, covers relationships between characters, have clear goals, failures successes. There is a reason people still read and write stories today. By being a naturally compelling part of our history, people find stories to be enjoyable to follow along with.
If you go towards the hidden story where the user can explore and find bits of story they string together. Then you get to piggyback on the existing benefits of the rewards as a mechanic with the addition of rewards that build on each other given each piece more value. By having your rewards provide worldbuilding and an engaging story it makes them more attractive for users to follow. With this kind of mechanic your world building and story doesn’t have to be real time, you could be collecting journals of an explorer as you follow them along, or snippets of lore about why your world has the names and buildings it does.
A collaborative story can be incredibly engaging which will create a story that people will share in the future. The benefits from this methods are an increased sense of competence, relatedness and autonomy by the user. Being a part of an ongoing story where your choices matter and impact future events and characters in the story hits a home run for each component of SDT theory. Relatedness comes from the shared storytelling and being able to help their fellow players. When players are able to make choices that leave an impact on the world they feel a real sense of Autonomy. Competency can depend on the Game Master or Central storyteller and how an action is resolved. For example if a player wants to jump over a river how do you determine the result? Some games use dice but you could also use any number of skill or knowledge checks.
Lastly a storyline to follow can provide users with a sense of relatedness. If players are engaged in your story then you get the additional benefits of rewards as continuing the story is a reward every time they do an action that allows them to experience more of the world.
How stories are used in an educational game
Dialect is a card game designed by Kathryn Hymes and Hakkan Seyalioglu. The goal of the game is to explore creating a language in isolation and what it means for that language to then be lost. It is an excellent example of using storytelling as a mechanic to teach the players about what it really means to lose a language. The game starts with setting a reason for the players to be isolated from the rest of the world. Players then create new words depending on a prompt card and some aspect of their isolation. Throughout the course of the game players will develop their own dialect which will essentially die at the end of the session. It shows what can be lost when a language goes extinct.
Leaderboards
What are leaderboards?
Leaderboards in games and gamification have their roots in pinball machines and arcade cabinets of the past. It is a way to rank players based on some aspect of their performance: This could be time, points, levels or any other measurable aspect. Leaderboards have even been used by players to further engage with their favourite games in new ways. For example, speedrunning is where players time themselves to beat a game as fast as possible, and has become a huge community with players competing to see who can get the fastest time.
How do leaderboards motivate users?
Leaderboards have a great strength in starting friendly competitions between users of an app. In doing so, all three psychological needs from Self Determination Theory are fulfilled. It fulfills relatedness by showing users that their actions have an impact on their goal of being on the leaderboard and that they can visibly rise on the leaderboard. Competence is satisfied as users rise in the leaderboard, which is a signal for users that they are reaching the intended goals of the app.
Finally, autonomy is fulfilled with leaderboards as users can choose to push for the leaderboard ranking or not. Even if they choose not to pursue topping the leaderboard, having the choice to do so still provides the user with a greater feeling of autonomy. As described earlier, even unofficial leaderboards such as those used in speedrunning, apply extra motivation to play a game and continuously improve the user's skills. Leaderboards can drive those users with a competitive streak to continue engaging with an app for far longer than they initially would otherwise.
Leaderboards that motivate learning
We used leaderboards in our workplace training app, Bear in Mind. The leaderboard shows who has done the best throughout the training, and can influence participants to play through the training scenarios again so that they can improve their score. This also has the benefit of creating a friendly competition, rendering a sense of community as users engage in the app.
Feedback
What is Feedback?
The feedback system is how you present to the user what impact their actions have within your application. The implementation of a feedback systems work has a huge impact on how any other game mechanics affect your users. This is because the way in which you set your feedback will determine how the user understands their actions. As we are pulling mechanics from games we are looking at how games will display feedback.
For feedback systems the scale of importance of the feedback is important. Has the user accomplished a goal that would take some time and dedication or did they make a common action that would increase their points. The frequency of a feedback can turn an intended reward into an annoyance.
How does Feedback motivate users?
Feedback is one of the most important considerations when you are working at gamifying an application. Why? Because without users having any point of reference on their actions they will be robbed of the chance of engaging with your mechanics.
Imagine you are playing a mario like game and you jump on what looks to be a new enemy. They flash green, so what does that mean? Did you hit the enemy? Are they invunerable? Did they heal? Is there a weak point you need to hit that isn’t indicated? From this example do you want to play this game? Would it matter that later on it has some amazing set pieces you get to experience if the gameplay keeps giving you questions like that? I know I wouldn’t play that game because I can’t tell what’s happening. My actions don’t seem to matter and I can’t tell if I am doing better or worse.
How feedback promotes engagement
Let’s take a look at how the use of an effective feedback system helped researchers to develop a game that led to multiple scientific breakthroughs in biochemistry. Foldit was designed as a puzzle game where players try to fold protein structures as small as possible. Their score is updated in real time, so when they move parts of the protein their score will either go up or down. The choice to have a real time feedback system like that gives players the tool to understand what how they are progressing towards a solution.
Afterwards, players would have their solutions evaluated in the game and the highest scoring solutions would be tested by researchers to determine if the proposed protieve fold was a native state. They also have two different leaderboards which organize people into two different groups. Soloists and Evolvers, who either develop their own solutions or improve upon others. Giving users feedback in this distinction between play modes gives users a categorization to follow, and promotes both methods of play. As such the Foldit project has been running since 2008, and has formed 21 scientific papers.
HP/Stamina
What is a HP/Stamina system?
An HP/Stamina systems is one where you are looking to restrict user actions that will return over time. The most common example would be an energy system where users take actions that have a cost of energy. The goal of this mechanism is to have users use your app on a daily basis without using it for a long period of time each day. This kind of mechanic requires specific intent to use effectively, these systems can reduce people’s enjoyment if they want to use it for a long time, so to promote more daily user you can look at having daily rewards.
Effectiveness of HP/Stamina
So HP/Stamina mechanics are designed to limit the amount users can play your game. Why can it be an effective mechanic for gamification? Let's break down the different benefits for limiting user actions.
Benefit number 1: It develops a sense of scarcity, in moderation it makes every choice the user makes has a cost.
The user has limited interactions to progress with their goals which leads to users planning out how they want to achieve their in app goals.
Benefit number 2: It creates a daily drive for users to return. If your gamified application has a progression system that users find compelling, then having a limited resource such as health or stamina will prevent people from binging to achieve their targeted goals but encourage smaller incremental progress. By doing a daily interaction the user is more likely to develop a habit which can help users internalize them.
Habit Trackers
There are lots of different habit trackers but they all tend to use a hidden stamina system. It is such that each day at max you can complete your daily goal once. A famous example of this daily tracking being effective comes from Benjamin Franklin. He sought to improve himself in 13 different virtues, every day he would mark on a grid if he met his goal for each virtue. Over time he found that while he would still fail in some virtues he overall improved and had fewer instances of failure.
The restriction of only completing or failing a habit once per day is what makes tracking impactful. If you were to be able to track something multiple times a day it wouldn’t help you build a habit as from scientific research you need at least 18 days of working at a habit to truly develop it. Effective use of a stamina or HP system can help users develop a daily habit.
Challenges
What are Challenges?
Challenges can be similar to Achievements but can provide a greater degree of signposting. Quests in games such as World of Warcraft are an excellent example of a challenge. Giving the player several different tasks gives the player separate goals and the ability to choose how they go about completing the tasks. You can also lean challenges into being a more difficult option for players to strive for. These can be having users use less resources, or restrict some of their actions to provide a more interesting experience.
How Challenges adds value in gamification
So challenges are a great way to provide scaffolding for your users to make progress towards a larger goal. By making a challenge multi-part you not only provide an end goal like an achievement but you also direct the player on how to achieve the goal. An example of what this looks like is a quest where the player has to go to meet with a hunter, then talk with a herbalist, talk to a mentor then kill a griffin. Having just an achievement could lead to players attempting to kill the griffin under prepared. By making it a quest (series of challenges) players get directed to characters and shops that will help them prepare for the big fight. While you could have made each step an achievement you would end up with a massive list of achievements to have just a few well made quests. Setting challenges as a multi-step quest provides an excellent form of signposting and can be combined with rewards/achievements to provide users with great guidance and goals for them to follow.
Challenges can also be used to show players how they can increase the difficulty level so that they can remain in a flow state. An example would be to beat a level without harming an enemy or to beat a level entirely in stealth. The best designed versions of this are where users have a large variety of tools to use and things are designed where all the tools are not required.
You can also have specific challenge levels or areas that more experienced players can engage with if they want a more difficult challenge. Depending on the number of these more difficult options you have it may be more effective to have achievements for beating one, half, and all challenge areas then an achievement for each.
Challenges in a gamified engagement
For this we are going to look at how Gleam.io uses challenges to improve social media engagements. So when you enter a Gleam.io sweepstake you are presented with a list of challenges you can do for additional tickets into the sweepstakes. As the users goal is to maximize their chances in a given sweepstakes the list of challenges gives users a direct line to increase their odds. While none of these tasks are difficult they follow into more of a quest style of challenges.
Having each challenge be clearly identified as to what needs to be done, gives users a direct sense of what their task is and how to finish it. Their feedback system provides users a clear indication when they have completed each task. With this quest-like structure it’s no wonder that with over a million contests they’ve had over 3.5 billion entries. For scale that means for every contest they had roughly 3,000 interactions which bolstered the hosts social media across all platforms.
Closing Thoughts
I hope that you have found this series on using different mechanics in gamification. It’s been a fun exercise writing out why each different mechanic can be useful in gamification. There are many other mechanics that don’t have as much research behind them that would be fun to speculate on their effectiveness. If you’d like to read such blog posts let us know by leaving a comment.
If you have a project you’d like to gamify, please let us know in the contact us portion of our website, or email us at info@raccoopack.media!
Zach Bearinger, Game Designer @ Raccoopack Media
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References
Review of several studies about gamification in the wellbeing space.
Johnson, Daniel & Deterding, Sebastian & Kuhn, Kerri-Ann & Staneva, Aleksandra & Stoyanov, Stoyan & Hides, Leanne. (2016). Gamification for Health and Wellbeing:A Systematic Review of the Literature. Internet Interventions. 6. 89-106. 10.1016/j.invent.2016.10.002.
Self Determination Resource
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2021). Self Determination Theory. Retrieved March 17, 2021, from https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/theory/
Examples Referenced
Gleam.io
Benjamin Franklin virtuous
http://www.thirteenvirtues.com/
Foldit
Dialect