>> Donald Brinkman: Hi, everybody. How're you doing today? All right?
Thank you for coming out and thanks to everyone who's online as well for
this. I'm really excited today to have Sebastian Deterding here all the
way from Hamburg at the end of his cross-country tour...
>> Sebastian Deterding: Midway.
>> Donald Brinkman: ...of America. Midway through is cross-country
American tour. He's been traveling around giving this talk at various
places. Sebastian is truly in my opinion one of the brightest minds right
now looking at gamification, games for learning in the classroom from an
academically rigorous yet very, very pragmatic standpoint. And the talk
we're going to have today is going to be about some of the things that
he's discovered by studying classrooms and studying learner patterns and
looking at how games can be integrated into a classroom from a design
perspective. The format for today, we have an hour and a half. It's going
to be about an hour and fifteen-minute talk, so we're hopefully going to
have about fifteen minutes at the end for Q and A. On the Live Meeting
you should have a video feed and then I've passed along a PDF of the
presentation as well if you want to follow along with that. If you're
coming in late and you want a copy, just let me know. I'll send it to
you. At the end we'll also have fifteen minutes and we'll be able to
questions from the folks who are link as well. So that's all I'm going to
say. I'll leave it to Sebastian. So, welcome.
Sebastian Deterding: Thank you.
[applause]
Sebastian Deterding: Yeah. And thanks for having me. Thank you so much.
Yes, so 9.5 Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Gamification. So on the
one hand that's just a very handy way of saying I can ramble on for sixty
minutes about nine totally unrelated points and still pretend as if I
would have some structure. But it's not only that. Of course 9.5 Theses
is also a bit of cryptic historical allusion to Martin Luther's 95 Theses
on the power and efficacies of indulgences which he nailed on the door of
the church of Wittenberg back in 1517 and started The Reformation, so
basically the split up of the Christian Church. And if your history of
reformation is a bit weak, indulgences were the "remissions of temporal
punishments" for a sin that has been forgiven. So according to Catholic
lore at that point in time, even if a sin had been forgiven and it was an
immortal sin, you still had to burn for a couple of days, weeks or years
in purgatory before you were allowed to rise up to heaven. And
indulgences were basically things that would say, "No, you're fine. You
don't have to burn in purgatory for that." And the thing that upset
Martin Luther so that he has this very cocky face here is that these were
sold by the Catholic Church as documents in order finance the renovation
of the St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. So essentially indulgences were the
kind of Catholic "Get Out of Jail, Free" card in the game of life, only
that jail in that case was purgatory. And in a sense it seems to me that
the indulgence, the "Get Out of Jail, Free" card that you can just buy
yourself today for all kinds of social and educational and other design
problems is this: gamification. This idea that you somehow can use
certain elements, certain pieces of games and add them somewhere else in
order to make that somewhere else more fun, more engaging, more
enjoyable. Right? We see it everywhere, as in Khan Academy which I'm sure
every one of you will know, right, where you can earn points and unlock
badges for educational activities.
We see it all around the sustainability sphere here with Nissan My Leaf
where your kind of driving behavior is matched up with others to see who
drives the most fuel efficient way. Or for life itself, like Mindbloom's
"The Life Game" where you can earn points and badges for having a
meaningful conversation with your kids because why else would you? So
basically it's really everywhere, right? Microsoft is well on it's on its
way as well with Ribbon Hero and other examples.
But if you zoom out a bit across all of these kind of different spheres
and applications, you find that the defining blueprint for all of this,
for I'd say about 90% of what you see out there on the market is still
the early startup Foursquare where essentially you have an activity you'd
like your users to do more of than they're currently doing, in
Foursquare's case, check in. So you give points for that. Basically you
track the user's behavior and you feed it back to the user himself as a
kind of form of feedback. Secondly, for a certain set of activities or
certain kinds of activities you add a bit of goal-setting and a bit of
surprise with badges. Like if you checked in at an airport five times
then you unlock the Jetsetter Badge. And to spice things up with a bit of
competition you have something like leaderboards or similar where you can
compare your scores with friends and colleagues. And if that is not
enough then we add some incentives, like in Foursquare a lot of venues if
you become the mayor or check in there you get a certain special reward
like a free coffee or so. And that kind of still has been the blueprint
of what you see out there in the past two to three years.
So that's the blueprint that we see everywhere. Why do I look so angry
about this? What are my kind of 95 or 9.5 theses about this? Well, here's
the first thesis. Being a good academic of course I have to say this is
nothing. Right? We've seen this in history before. Actually one of the
early fathers of positive psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, already
wrote in his classic "Flow" that the goal of his book, trying to
understand what makes an experience optimal, right, what creates a good
flow experience, was to understand how to turn even routine activities -He was talking about things like mowing the lawn -- into meaningful games
that can provide optimal experience. He was already thinking about this
way back in 1990.
And of course in human-computer interaction as well as in game studies
and in games we have seen a lot of precursors and parallels to that.
Right? In human-computer interaction for instance already in the early
beginnings, in the 1980's, right, when the field was [inaudible], we had
people like Thomas Malone or John Carroll starting to say, "We not only
have to look at, you know, ease of use but also at fun of use," what
makes enjoyable interfaces. And already back then they were looking at
video games to say, "Okay, what are the design principles here that we
can look at and learn from for designing other interfaces?" Then
obviously with the rise of user experience, right, we have to get away
from just utility and usability towards designing experiences. A lot of
people became interested in how to design for pleasure or for emotion or
for fun. And, again, in all of these contexts people say, "Huh, games
might have something to teach us."
Something that came out of this tradition was basically a lot of
researchers more recently in human-computer interaction would try to
understand what makes up playfulness. What makes toying around with Siri
[inaudible] a playful experience? What are the kind of design principles
that we can learn and apply in other contexts? One researcher who has
looked into that is Bill Gaver who has coined the term Ludic Design for
kinds of interfaces and applications that, rather than helping us to get
things done, invite us to explore and reflect on the experience. Like the
Drift Table which you would move along the floor, and in the little hole
in there you would see how that thing would move along or above a kind of
virtual map. Right? Which is not really easy to use but it invites a very
different stance towards the thing that you are looking at.
And in human-computer interaction obviously we have things like
persuasive technology, right, coined by B.J. Fogg as term. So in interest
how can we use software digital technology in order to influence people
and in order to persuade them? And again people like here in this case
Dan [inaudible] in his design with [inaudible] have looked at video games
as a source of design principles in order to persuade people with things
like scores or collections or similar.
Shifting to video games we see already in the 1960's people like Clark C.
Abt and the whole kind of simulation in gaming and simulation in learning
movement thinking about how you can use video games for serious purposes,
most importantly learning outcomes, originally as kind of offline games
but later on obviously in the early 2000's then the whole digital serious
games movement.
In parallel to that we see things like pervasive games, right, where
people have said, "Can we move games and game elements outside of the
traditional home setting where you're just sitting there and doing this
for entertainment? And can we move this across time, across space, out
into the real world?" So that's the first thesis. This is nothing new. We
have seen a lot of precursors there, and there is actually a lot thinking
and research there that we can already draw upon. This is not a
completely new phenomenon.
Secondly, again being a good academic, it's always good to start off with
a definition of your term. So here's a definition I developed with a
couple of colleagues of mine: gamification is the use of game design
elements in non-game contexts. And as with any good definition, every
single element of that definition is important. So let's just decompose
that and see what do I mean with that game design elements in non-game
contexts.
Well to start off with "game" what we're basically talking about here is
a distinction that the French philosopher and anthropologist, Roger
Caillois, already made back in the last 1950's. He said if you look
across all the kind of different forms of human play that we can see in
reality, we basically find that they are organized around these two
extreme poles. One of which he called Ludus which you can basically think
of most of the traditional video games, board games, card games that you
see. That is basically a game that is structured around goals and rules
where people strategize and try to min-max their way in order to win it.
On the opposite pole of that you find Paidia or freeform play as we might
find it in improvisation theater or in kids pretend play or kids just
toying around with toys. Right? And what we discovered is when we look at
the majority of gamified applications you find that contrarily to
something like the [inaudible] they're very much not about toys or play
or improvisation involving that but they're very much on the ludus end of
things. They're very much about adding structure, adding rules, adding
goals to an experience. So that's the first part of definition.
Gamification is about gaming, it's about these structured things; it's
not about playing that much.
Secondly, and that is what separates gamification from serious games.
Most importantly it's not about designing full systems. It's not about
designing full games or full toys. Right? It's not the full Lego set.
Rather, it's picking individual elements from video games and applying
them somewhere else. Right? Rather than a full game, you take something
like a leaderboard. And it's not just any which element that gamification
takes because a lot of elements of video games have been appropriated for
other purposes, most importantly game technology. Right? We use video
game engines in order to make machine [inaudible] or use video game
controllers or game AI for other tasks, or we use game-based practices in
the kind of serious gaming movement, right, where people learn to program
by developing levels. That is not what gamification does. Gamification
specifically takes game design elements, elements of the design of video
games and applies them elsewhere.
And elsewhere leads me to my final part of the definition. It is non-game
context that is basically just us saying, "Well this is everywhere." This
is not specific to education or any other context because if you look
into kind of the early serious games movement you find that initially
people focused only in learning, and once serious games were expanded and
people found, "Oh, you can use this for sustainability and other
purposes," then there was the realization, "This is not tied to any which
specific context." And if you tie these things together then you
basically find how this large pre-history that we find. And all of these
precursors fall into a nice kind of MacKenzie-esque four-quadrant model
where we have gaming and playing and system and elements as the two axes.
So if it's about designing whole systems for gaming then you're talking
about games or serious games. If it's about designing whole systems for
playing then you talk about toys or serious toys. And I think serious
toys is a very interesting and under-explored area. If you're talking
about elements, design elements, design qualities of playing then you're
talking about things like [inaudible] that playful design. And finally if
you talk about elements or qualities of gaming then you're talking about
gamification.
So that was the history and the definition. Now may begin the bashing. My
third thesis: gamification is an inadvertant con. That's not my thesis.
That's an observation that the video game designer Margaret Robertson
already made very early on, very insightfully back in 2009 where she said
gamification is an inadvertant con because it tries to trick people into
believing that there is a kind of easy add-on way to give something the
full motivational and emotional quality of a video game. As I said, I
think her analysis is really spot on. And it is spot on because of
basically two big confusions that find prevalent in the current
gamification discourse. The first confusion is a confusion about why
video games are fun and engaging. Right? If you look across the marketing
material and the websites for all of the gamification software platforms
you find out there then you see one word that is repeated over and over
again this year, "Rewards." "Earn rewards." "Reward your users." "Give
them rewards." "Reward your fans the right way." Right? So the underlying
mental model here is that video games are basically a kind of Skinner box
where players get rewarded with a little sugar pellet every time they hit
the right button at the right point in time. And then what people usually
do is that they speak about the World of Warcraft and Loot Drop and
varying reinforcement schedules and then it all somehow makes sense.
But if that logic were the case, if the fun in video games came from the
reward that you get for a certain activity then this should be the
funnest game ever. Earning you a whopping trillion points every time you
hit the right button, right? And there are actually a lot of satirical
games out there that do exactly this and you play around with them for a
couple of minutes and you find out, "Yeah, some are fun for a minute but
not really the fun that I experience playing World of Warcraft." Right?
Or if you would translate that to World of Warcraft that game might look
something like this, right, one button press, "Drop all loot." That must
be the most fun World of Warcraft level ever. Or in terms of Super Mario
because getting the Princess, right, that's the final reward of Super
Mario. You just hit the button and you get the Princess. So if rewards
are not the core of what makes video games fun and engaging then what is
it? And to me the best answer to that question still comes from game
designer Raph Koster who actually wrote a whole book about this. And his
thesis is summarized in this one nice pithy statement, "Fun is just
another word for learning." That might sound counterintuitive to being
with because learning we usually associate with school and school not
necessarily with learning. So what does he mean with that? Let's unpack
that a bit.
He says, "The fun from games out of the experience of mastery" and
achievement. Games are basically machines that put out interesting
challenges in front of you that you try to overcome and that you fail at
and that you have to learn to overcome. And the good experience you get
from vide games is if you have learned to overcome a challenge that you
couldn't master before. Right? It's the curve in a racing game that you
couldn't take before when you finally make it. It's an NPC that you
overcome. It's a puzzle that you solve. It's a chasm that you finally
jump. It's the boss monster that you can finally beat. Those are the
moments where you experience fun in games. Right? Put differently, the
fun in games out of this tension between you being unsure whether you're
actually going to make it or not and then the happy release when you
finally realize, "Yes, I made it." Right? This I think everybody can say,
"Yeah, that's how video games feel." So the core confusion in the
gamification discourse right now in psychological terms is that they
confuse extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Right? Taking this from selfdetermination theory, and I'll get a bit on that later. The basic
confusion here is that they believe video game in rewarding people
present you with an extrinsic motivation. That is, there is an activity
that is in and of itself not valuable and interesting to you, like
sitting still, but in order to do that you get a reward that sits outside
of the activity, right, like a lollipop. Intrinsic motivation,
conversely, is the intrinsic enjoyment, the intrinsic motivation that
lies inherent in activity, an activity you like to do for its own sake
like cooking or dancing or playing.
And if you look into the psychology of intrinsic motivation for why
certain activities are intrinsically motivating then as I said the one
theory that you will ultimately end up with is self-determination theory
which is the most robust and empirically well-developed theory of
intrinsic motivation theory right now. And it makes the argument that
those activities are intrinsically motivating which satisfies certain
innate psychological needs, needs [inaudible] than physiological needs
like hunger or thirst. And the three needs that they have found across
cultures and across situations are these three; they are competence,
autonomy and relatedness. And if you match and compare these three with
what Raph Koster was talking about, right, the fun of learning, the fun
of mastery then you find that what Koster was talking about is basically
this: the experience of being competent, the experience of yourself
getting a sense of "Yes, I achieved something. I'm good at this. I'm
getting better at this." That's the core fun in video games. And Deci and
Ryan have actually done a couple of psychological studies on video games
enjoyment, and they found precisely this. They found video games are an
excellent source of competence experiences. But the other two, as we will
see, are also very important. So that's the first confusion: the fun in
playing games chiefly arises from intrinsic enjoyment not from extrinsic
incentives.
Let's move on to the second confusion. The second confusion is a kind of
[inaudible] idea, the idea that you can make something fun just by adding
something, just by tagging some game elements onto the existing activity.
Right? And that's something that we have known and seen over and over
again in the tech world. Right? If you remember Web 2.0 where everybody
tried to build a website that would allow you an architecture of
participation where you could harness collective intelligence and
everybody would point to Flickr and YouTube, what you usually ended up
with was something like this. Right? You would get a dropped vowel, you
would get RoundedCornr's and you would get a tech cloud or so. So instead
of understanding the [inaudible] as O'Reilly called it, The Architecture
of Participation, what were the structural features of sites like Flickr
and YouTube that enabled community participation, you got surface
features added to that. And that is as well a kind of confusion that
you've seen for a long time in the edutainment and serious games spheres
where if you just add, you know, cartoon characters and balloons and
cartoon sounds then it will make just as much fun as a video game;
although, in the end the actual experience itself is the road test to
begin with.
So if that's the confusion, and that's the confusion we see in
gamification, what's the opposite of that confusion? And here I think we
can take our cue from Csikszentmihalyi who spelled it out way back when
in "Flow" in 1990. He said even these rote activities like mowing the
lawn can become enjoyable, and here's the important bit, provided one
restructures the activity by providing goals, rules and the other
elements of enjoyment. So it is not about adding elements, but it is
about looking at a certain system systemically and asking how is this
system as a system well structured or poorly structured in order to give
rise to experiences of intrinsic enjoyment?
So that's the second confusion, gaminess is not a feature you can add.
Right? Like usability is not a feature you can add. It's usually about
taking features away. It's about the whole structure of the system. So if
that's the confusion, the issue here, right, gamification is an
inadvertant con, is there something we can still salvage? And I think we
can. Right? For if we take these two confusions that we see and add them
together then we basically end with a kind of positive idea of what
gamification could be. Just to make up a term for that I'd like to call
that motivation design and say motivation design is a promising
proposition. And the leading design question there is how might you
restructure a system in order to support intrinsic enjoyment using a game
design as a lens that guides you there? Or in simpler terms if the thing
that you were looking at were a game, in what ways would it be broken? In
what ways were it poorly designed? And if you find that speaking about
structures is a bit waving hands and sounds a bit abstract, what do I
mean with that?
Well, again going back to Raph Koster and other game designers like Dan
[inaudible] when they looked across games and said, "What's the
underlying structure? What's the core element of game beyond which you
cannot reduce games, once you take elements away it stops being a game
structurally?" Then you end up with something that is game atoms. They
say, "This is kind of the core element. If you reduce it any further,
it's not a game anymore." And they say a game element consists basically
out of a certain goal that a user has combined with a certain set of
skills or a certain mental model of a certain system with which he
engages in order to reach his goal, a certain set of actions that are
spelled out for the user. Right? In point and click adventures it's very
literally spelled out as a set of verbs and objects for you. And then a
certain rule system, the system that you try to understand which
determines whether your action was successful or not. And then you get
feedback, immediate feedback and progress feedback on whether you were
successful in achieving your goals or not. And out of this connection
between goals that I have, a rule system in front of me, feedback that
I'm getting emerges an interesting challenge, right, that I'm trying to
solve, that I'm trying to overcome, that gives me an experience of
achievement, of mastery, of competence when I mastered that challenge.
And once you use a structural model to look at an activity then you can
also look at the kind of different aspects and ask, well, are the goals
spelled out clear and attainable? Are they conflicting or well-aligned
like good video games? Are the possible actions spelled out clearly or
are they diffuse? Do they provide me interesting choices or is it just
the road, "Yes, I will check in?" Are the rules transparent and fair? And
so on. Once you start to understand something through that lens then you
can ask all the kind of different detail questions.
To make it even more concrete, Khan Academy -- In certain aspects Khan
Academy does offer this kind of systemic structure, a kind of actual
goal-action feedback loop that gives rise to interesting challenges
specifically in the practice section. But here in this case of video,
this is an example of an add-on, right, where you watch a video and if
you watch the video you get a bit of points for that. Right? That's
basically our progress [inaudible], our World of Warcraft "Drop all
loot." There's no interesting challenge here. There's nothing at which I
get better. There's nothing where I can get an experience of, "Yes, I
mastered this." It's just a piece of feedback added to the system.
Contrast that with something like Codecademy -- And Khan Academy has
recently added something very similar -- where, although it has points
and badges for teaching you how to program, the core gaming loop is there
precisely in the editor that you see already in the starting page. The
thing that Codecademy understood is that coding, programming in and of
itself already has structurally a kind of gaming loop in it in this
immediate feedback loop between me wanting to get a certain system to
work, putting something in the editor, having it run and getting the
feedback whether it actually works or not.
And that is what Codecademy actually does, right? You get the editor. It
just says, "Hey, type in your name and then press enter." And then you
immediate get the feedback, and it's either correct or incorrect. And in
the course you're actually learning how to program deeper and deeper and
deeper with the path being structured for you with different kinds of
levels in the next course.
So let's do a little reality check. Let's say we try to take these kind
of principles, this idea of restructuring something as a game and say we
want to make something being a cashier at a supermarket more fun and
engaging. What would we do? Well, first off obviously we would install a
feedback system. Right? We would give the person feedback on the accuracy
of checking stuff out, on the speed, on how friendly you were treating
your customers. Maybe we'd add some social comparison, how you are, you
know, keeping up with your colleagues, and systemic recommendations that
would guide you along the way. Right? "You're a bit slower than your
colleagues. Here's something you might do?" Then obviously we would have
a goal-setting system. We would set daily, weekly, monthly goals on maybe
accuracy and speed, and you would see your progress towards these goals.
And because checking out becomes a rote activity very fast, we would
understand that in order to create continued interesting challenges we
would have something like training, job rotation and job enrichment,
slowly expanding the kind of task in which you are learning, in which you
get goals and in which you get feedback.
And it turns out that these kinds of systems actually already exist.
Right? This is a Target electronic cashier where every time you check out
an item you get a G or an R and the G stands for green which basically
says you did it in time. The R stands for red, you didn't do it in time.
You get a total score of how many of your things you did in green time
and the total number of sales. And I don't know how you feel if you look
at this kind of system but my sense is if I were presented with a system
like this, more likely than not I would rather feel like this guy, like a
micromanaged lab rat rather than this guy, right, engaged player.
So what's the difference? What's the missing element? And that leads me
to my fifth thesis: gamification is thinking inside the box. And that's
actually something that's not only true for gamification but also for
serious games in general. Now what's the first thing that comes to your
mind if I say, "Playing a video game?" Just thinking about it. First
thing, "Playing a video game," what do you think of? Any suggestions?
>>:
A controller.
>> Sebastian Deterding: Controller. Okay, what else?
>>:
Immersive.
>> Sebastian Deterding: Immersive? Okay. I guess that kind of the first
image that comes to mind? Controller is very interesting, but the first
image that comes to mind usually is literally a box. It's usually the
screen, the interface that you're seeing. Right? It's the box and that
includes the controller. It's the game, the designed artifact that you
are engaging with. Right?
Now are we missing anything in this picture? I'd say we're missing a lot.
We're missing everything that is happening around the game. We're
basically missing that the people around this game are doing something
very specific with this game, namely they're playing it. They're engaging
with it in a very specific frame of engagement. Playing a video game very
literally requires both a game and playing it. Or in the words of the
immortal Bernie de Koven, "Even though we are involved in a game, we're
not always playing," and, "Even though we're playing, we're not always
involved in a game." Playing a game is a special condition of both.
Right? We can play with very many things. We can play with our hands,
with sticks and stones, with balls or with cardboard boxes at the office.
Right? We don't need a game for that. Likewise, we can do a lot of things
with video games apart from playing them. We can debug them. We can
playtest them. We can present them to other people. We can learn in them
as in the case of serious games. We can engage with them as a form of
sport, as in e-learning, or we can actually work in them, as in the case
of goldfarming. Right?
And in the course of my PhD research I actually interviewed a lot of
people who were engaging with video games not only in kind of playing
them but also in kind of these different things and found their
experience in what they did in the game was actually very different from
normally video games. So what is it? What makes up this frame, this
specific mode of engagement with a game that is playing it?
Well let me introduce that with a couple of quotes I culled from the
interviews I did. So here're a couple of quotes. "I need to be very
routinized. I mustn't let myself drift." "I hammer it through." "Often
you have to force yourself to do it." "It's extremely exhausting." "It
wears you out." "My friends usually cannot comprehend how stressful this
is." These are obviously video game players who talk about their
enjoyment in playing a video game. Namely it is video game journalists
who talk about their experience having to play a game in order to review
it for an article. And I find that their statements and their experiences
are best summed up in this statement of one of them, "Sometimes you have
to play, you have to get further and then, play is work." Right? "My
article is due tomorrow and I can't back this puzzle at ten p.m. and I
still have to play through." "It's one of the most experiences I ever
had," as one of them told me.
So what is missing here and what makes up this specific mode of
engagement which is play is simply this, right? It gets us back to Johan
Huizinga, one of the earliest people studying play, it is that it is a
voluntary activity. Or in the words of self-determination theory, it is
that it is an autonomous activity. It is an activity in which we
experience our own agency, autonomy, freedom, voluntariness in engaging
with this. And this is actually a very important insight because usually
we believe that video games or play is so fun that people engage with it
voluntarily. And therefore the reasoning goes, well if we only make
homework so fun like a video game then they will voluntarily do it. But
it's actually the opposite. You see playing a video game in contrast to
homework is a voluntary activity. I experience my own agency, my own
choice, my own freedom in choosing to play this game rather than that,
choosing how long I want to play, choosing with whom I want to play it
and, therefore, it is a fun activity.
So if you just restructure homework as a game but it's still mandatory
then very likely it will not give rise to the same kind of fun and
engagement. And voluntariness, autonomy is important but it's not the
only aspect of this specific frame of engagement that is play. The second
element that we find that characterizes this specific frame is that play
is a safe space. It's a space in which we can fail, a space in which
there are radically reduced serious consequences to what we do, again in
stark contrast to work or to homework.
If you look at when animals and kids play, it's if their parents are
around monitoring the environment and you know, "There's no imminent
threat out here and I can just do this, and whatever happens they will
watch out for me." And that again increases your autonomy experience
because it means that you're not doing this because of the serious
consequences attached to it but for its own sake.
The third element of play is attunement. It is the enjoyment of the
shared process of getting yourself onto the same emotional ground. If you
look into developmental psychology you find that the first form of play
is actually attunement play between a mother and its child. When the
mother picks up the child and the child starts to smile. The mother sees
that, reciprocates that smile and they keep themselves in this kind of
emotional loop of mutual attunement in a shared emotional state, in a
state in which they watch out for each other and try to keep each other
in this positive experience.
This is the same thing we find in every day play, this process of
attunement, of caring for each other. Right? In every day play this is a
shocking moment, right, "Oh my god," fully in the face. "Will he cry? Is
this too much? Have I breached play? Is this not play and fun any more?"
And then the moment of relief when you say, "Oh he's still laughing. It's
enjoyable. It's still play. I can continue to soak him."
Right? If that were not the case, if he were crying, what would people do
in order to repair the play situation? Very likely you would come over
and say, "I didn't mean it. Here, you can have the water gun. Please soak
me." So it's this mutual care about each other's fun and enjoying the
situation together. Or in the words of Bernie de Koven, "It is the nature
of a fun community," of the group of people that comes together to play,
"to care more about the players," about each other, about having fun and
caring for each other and being safe than winning the game. Right? That's
what we want. That's what we enjoy when we play together.
And out of this process of attunement comes a shared focus and attitude,
right, that we are focused on the same things and we care about the same
things temporarily while we're playing together. Shared focus and
attitude and exploring, trying out new, weird, wild things. That's okay.
That's actually encouraged while we play. As well as a shared focus and
attitude towards mastery. Right? If you're playing, you're actually
invested in trying to give your best. Right? If that boy would just make
rote movements to follow along, I'd say, "Yeah, okay, [inaudible]. I'll
just move that pawn here," right, he would visibly not focused on trying
to master, on trying to play a good game. And the girl would rightfully
say, "You're not really playing. Let's stop this. This is not play
anymore."
Play is also a situation where benign transgression is welcome, right,
where it is okay, it's actually interesting to overstep social norms as
long as everybody understands we're doing this benignly while caring for
each other and most importantly for fun. Right? Caring about shared fun.
As you'll see in a moment of play like this little prank, right? The
moment where the person who is pranked would say, "This is not fun
anymore. My emotions are actually hurt here," it would stop being play.
And the other persons would again try to repair the situation by saying,
"No, this was actually benign," and, "Don't you see the funny aspects of
this?" Which is all basically a longwinded way of saying that a third
experience that is created in the play situation is an experience of
strong relatedness, of mutual trust, of caring, of attunement. A well
played carries the unique experience of autonomously exercising your
competencies of trying to do a good job, supporting and being supported
by others in that process.
And the problem is that if you forget about play, if you forget about the
importance of the social context and just structure the situation first
off you run into what has been called the undermining effect. And it's,
again, very well documented across multiple situations that the moment
you make an activity mandatory or the moment you add some sort of
extrinsic incentive, some sort of extrinsic reward to an activity that
usually undermines people's autonomy experience. Right? "I get the
feeling I'm not doing this because I want to do this but because somebody
else wants me to do this." And then I feel controlled and coerced and
then it becomes paradoxically less motivating for me. Right? It becomes
de-motivating. It's the difference between a scorecard being presented as
a way of getting to know who kind of is a very smart seller and then, you
can just walk over to that person and ask them, "Well what are your
tricks that I can learn from?" or this being used as a tool of coercive
micromanagement. Right? That's the difference whether this is motivating
or de-motivating, whether it is used controlling and coercively or in a
way that supports your autonomy.
And secondly if you use these kinds of systems, if you use these
extrinsic incentives you make activities mandatory if you coerce people
instead of offering situations of autonomy. And it actually detrains
autonomous regulations. People actually become less prone and less able
to self-regulate.
The second big danger that you can run into I find is very well spelled
out by what the sociologist Erving Goffman has called the Rule of
Irrelevance. When people play a game, he observed, there is an implicit
social norm in place which says you have to focus on the game and
basically ignore everything that happens outside of the game. The only
thing that is important about a pawn when you're playing chess is where
the pawn stands and what that means within the game. It is irrelevant if
that pawn is made out of gold or out of wood. The only thing that is
important is the game in this situation. Right? But if that is the only
thing, if you set up a situation as only a structured game without this
kind of shared play around it then you're basically framing the whole
situation as strategic instrumental action, as a game in mathematical
game theoretical terms. And what then happens is that people basically
behave like strategic instrumental actors. They say, "Okay, if this is a
situation where the only point is to reach the goal and you've set out
certain KPIs for me to reach here then that's everything I'm going to
care about." And that's actually something we have a lot of evidence
about in the game play community themselves, so much so that we have a
term for these people; we call them munchkins. To quote Wikipedia, "A
munchkin seeks within the context of the game to amass the greatest
power, score the most kills and grab the most loot no matter how
deleterious their actions are to the other players' fun."
I'm sure in your person play you have come across some munchkins who were
that focused on winning that they forgot that this was basically about
having fun together. Or in Bernie de Koven's terms they forget that
they're part of the fun community that is here to have fun together. They
become myopically focused on min-maxing towards their own goals. And this
is something that again is pervasive not only in games but everywhere we
set up these game-like systems without having play around it.
As the management consultant James Riley has observed in studying
organizations, you find this [inaudible] wherever people spell out hard
goals and hard KPIs people are very prone to focus on following the
procedure and meeting the KPIs rather than asking or questioning what
these are actually good for and whether meeting your KPIs actually hurts
or helps the company in which you're in. And again I'm sure you run into
these kinds of situations yourself. You also find with a lot of gamified
applications where people, again, become kind of myopically focused on
what they do and ignore the larger question of what it is good for, what
kind of side effects it might create. When BMV tested out this kind of
ecoefficiency challenge among their drivers, they found it was very
efficient. People used way less fuel. But they also did like not braking
at red headlights because that would basically be in the way of them minmaxing their own fuel efficiency score.
And finally and again that is something that we have observed over and
over again, it encourages gaming the system. Right? That's something we
find in the healthcare system. That's something you find in the
educational system. If the purpose of the activity is not the enjoyment
of mastering it, the enjoyment of doing a good job because you value but
something outside of that activity and you set out clear goals and rules
and quantitative indicators how to achieve that goal then gaming the
system is logical behavior. It's what the system wants you to do
essentially, min-maxing your way through.
And let me see. So if that is the problem, if the problem is you set up
these kind of game systems without thinking about a playful framing of
the situation then obviously the interesting question as designers
becomes, well, can we not only design a system so that it is structurally
game-like but also that is framed by people in a playful manner? And how
can we do that? And how we can do that, well, for that I would like to
show you a little practical experiment by a couple of colleagues in
Amsterdam.
[video begins]
>> Sebastian Deterding: So how did they manage to do that? How did they
manage to get a set of random pedestrians in business suits to start
soaking themselves with water guns and say, "Yeah, this is a good
opportunity to have some fun and to play around?" Right? And I submit if
they just has placed the water guns in a crate next to the bridge,
nothing would've have happened. That's the important design insight,
right? It's not just the object, the game or the whatever that you
present people and that's usually what we do as designers, but it's
rather what the people around there do with that object and whether they
design that what they want to do with this is play and whether playing in
this situation is allowed and okay or not.
So how can you design for the people around it rather than just the
object itself? Well the first design principle is if the core of a play
activity is that it is autonomous and voluntary then obviously you have
to support autonomy, you have to make the system optional. I don't know
whether you notice it during the video but when this girl handed over the
water gun to this guy here with the [inaudible] and mobile phone, he
pushed it down and said, "No, no. I'm busy. I'm on my phone. I have no
chance of engaging in this." Then she said, "Sure, fine. I'm not forcing
you to do this." She put the water gun down and asked the next person
whether they wanted to join. Right? So support autonomy. Give people a
choice in what they are doing.
The second principle is creating a safe space, right, a space where you
feel, "What I'm doing here in this space has nothing to do with any kind
of serious consequences or whether afterwards I look silly or am looked
down upon by other persons or not." Right? That's something that good
facilitators during brainstorming sessions, where they say, you know,
"Please no negative feedback while we have ideas because only then we
ensure that people don't get their egos involved here and feel this is a
safe space where you can do whatever you want. There will be no
consequence and we won't push you to come up with a good experience or
with a good idea." Only then do people have the license, the safe space
to play around.
The third principle is you have to metacommunicate to signal to other
people, "This is where play starts. This is where play ends. Here is the
play space in which we're operating." They did that in a very obvious
way, right? They smiled. They said, "This is benign. We're not here to
harm you. This is a benign situation." So metacommunication of play is
basically a first cooperative move in which you make yourself vulnerable,
in which you show that you mean well, that you can be trusted. You mean
no harm. You're actually making yourself vulnerable. The parallel to that
smile in an animal is the play bow where animals bow down and that way
show that they're making themselves vulnerable and that they're
interested in playing. The second part of that metacommunication means
that you have to get people out of the current frame, their current
understanding of the situation. You have to show them that there is
actually an opportunity to treat the situation that they're in, in a
different way. That's something that the Clown Army does when it walks in
between protestors and policemen. It says this is not just fight or
flight. You're not just enemies. Actually, there is a different way of
treating this situation. Right? You can change the way that you look at
this situation.
And thirdly, you can use cues and associations in order to speak to
people memories and make it easier for them to associate what they're
doing with a play situation. That's what Lego serious play does when it
goes into management meetings. And rather than having them do PowerPoint
presentations, they'll say, "Please build your business problem in Lego
pieces." People very easily then switch into a different mind set.
Fourthly, in order to encourage play you actually have to model the
attitudes and behaviors that you would like to see. Again, you have to
make yourself vulnerable, you have to make the first step. That's what
these guys did, right? The people who set up the situations, you can
recognize them in the videos, are the ones who are actually carrying the
shirts here in order to reinforce the two teams, red versus blue. And
they were the first to run forward to say, "We're doing this and maybe,
you know, we get first. We make ourselves a bit laughable and ridiculous.
You may follow along."
Fifthly, and that is something that we actually can design in terms of
software systems, you have to offer generative tools or toys, systems
that actually have a kind of autonomy, a freedom, an exploration space
that you can toy around with. Right? This is a very generative
interesting play space to be. You have the water gun, a lot of people. So
interesting questions are, "Where shall I hide? Whom shall I shoot? Where
shall I move to?" And if you try to decompose this, what does it mean to
be a generative toy or tool then I think the best example that you can
still run across is Lego.
Lego is really the definition of a generative toy. And what makes Lego a
generative toy? The first thing is that it is very literally, to use the
terms by David Weinberger "small pieces loosely joined." It's a lot of
different small pieces that you can easily put together, hand over to
somebody else half done or take somebody else's and reassemble what he's
going. Small pieces loosely joined.
The second principle, to use the term by Kars Alfrink, a friend designer
of mine, when you want to design for play you have to underspecify.
Instead of prescribing very precisely what the user can and cannot do in
our terms, you have to give them an open space which is not perfectly
prescribed for them. Right? It's the difference between Lego and Fisher
Price toys where it is very clearly spelled out in Fisher Price toys you
can push this button, you can turn this wheel and then after a very short
amount of time you notice, "This is not really playful. There're not a
lot of things to explore here." Right? The obvious motherload of small
pieces loosely joined and underspecification in the gaming space, and
there have been a lot of educational applications as well, is obviously
Minecraft, right, a full world that is constructed out of these little
pseudo-Lego pieces. But you also find that users actually discover these
spaces everywhere else like FarmVille for instance where people say, "Oh,
obviously." You can even toy around with your little farms and do pixel
art. Right? Or MySpace, the original MySpace, which was this drastically
underspecified space because people could hack their own HTML code into
it and thereby design the sites however they wanted them to look like. As
a designer you might say that's ugly, but the people had fun toying
around with it. Or actually PowerPoint. I think PowerPoint is one of the
examples where people in the office spend endless hours toying around
with it because of the joy of exploring the possibilities that the tool
offers them.
The final principle is that you should provide invitations for people.
That is, usually when you run into adults and when you want adults to
play they are frightened by the stage, they are frightened by the blank
page. So you have to give them openings, starting points, not finished
things but starting points for play. This play space by the Danish
playground designing group, Monstrum, I find a very good example. It's a
playground where you see some crates and a lighthouse and a half-sunken
boat with a hole in it. Right? It doesn't prescribe what you do but it
gives you an opening, some material where immediately you start to spin
your own story in which you can play. Right? "Why is the ship sunken? Has
the lighthouse something to do with it?" It's not fully prescribed but
there is an interesting opening for you.
So let's reapply these principles in yet another reality check. If we
would take these principles for a playful situation and apply them to the
situation, what would we do? Well, we would support autonomy, right? We
would give the person choice and the kind of goals and strategies that
the person would pursue, ensuring that they were concordant with their
own personal goals, values and needs. We would create a safe space, a
culture of trust, forgiveness, mutual care and zero blame where people
are actively encouraged to try out new things in order to reach their
goal and in order to master their job. It would have a shared, actual
lived attitude around exploration, mastery, benign transgression and
shared joy in the activity. And we would offer generative tools and toys.
That is, we would allow people to actively redesign their own space in
which they were working.
Now let's come and talk a bit about ethics. So I see a lot of potential
in using basically motivation design and playful reframing. But still
even in those instances I think we should be aware of kind of the ethical
dimensions of this, and this is what call up with the seventh thesis:
gamification is materializing morality. If you talk to a lot of people
about gamification, the first reaction that they get, "Isn't this evil
mind control?" Right, aren't you basically trying to trick people into
doing something that they don't really want to do and make it appear as
if they were even having fun doing it? And that's actually a very common
distinction that people like Jane McGonigal [inaudible] make. They say if
you use game and game elements in order to get people to do things that
you want them to do then it's kind of evil. And if you use it in order to
enable them to the things that they want to do then it's benign and
empowering.
In a certain sense what she's reiterating here is a distinction of
terminology called [inaudible] that Michel Foucault has already made back
in the 70's where he's talking on the one side about Technologies of
Power, technologies used by organizations and nation states in order to
control and steer and govern people. And you can think of gamification
examples like Lockerz where the whole site is basically set up for you to
earn points when you get friends to watch the kind of products that you
have on your site and to finally shop from you. And then you can actually
redeem the points. So in a sense the whole system is set up in order to
get you to spam your friends in order to shop more. And the converse of
that are systems which are so-called Technologies of the Self, which is
technologies that can be used by individuals in order to empower
themselves, in order to lift themselves out of the system that society
has devised for them. Right? Things like Buster Benson's Health Month
where you can set yourself health rules every month and then you get a
little e-mail every morning asking you whether you stuck to your rules or
not. And then, you can get a feedback system on how well you are doing
compared to that. And the challenge afterwards is [inaudible] to say,
"That was a bit too difficult for you. Maybe next month try a little
easier or a little harder." Right? That could be a technology of the
self.
But I think the kind of teeth here, the one twist that we add to Jane
McGonigal's distinction and to this simple distinction is that for
Foucault every technology of the self is at the same time a technology of
control. Because in modern liberal democracies not only are we unable to
be, you know, fully realized individuals who self-determine ourselves and
who self-govern and who self-manage and optimize, we are also required to
do it. Right? These [inaudible] are set up in that way because in a postindustrial economy you need people who self-manage, self-control, selforganize in order to maximize their own creative output. Which is another
way of saying that even in these things like Buster Benson's Health Month
there is a certain, as Richard Buchanan puts it, a certain argument about
how we should live our lives, a certain set of norms and values about
what is good and proper in a certain society baked into the products.
Now I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing. I'm just saying this
is something we should be aware of when we're building the system. What
is the kind of vision of the good life, the kind of idea, the kind of
norms and values that we embed in these systems? So even something as
innocuous as a leaderboard actually carries these implied norms, like it
is good and actually normal and proper to compare yourself, to compete
with others and to be on top. Right? That's a value set. And not only do
these systems come with implied values and norms, they also come with an
implied theory of how social problems, how problems in the education
system or in the health system arise and how to address these problems.
Right?
If you look at most of the gamified application, the basic idea
underlying this is basically extended willpower. They say the problem we
have in the education system or the problem we have with obesity and
other things is basically that individuals are not able to motivate
themselves enough, that individuals are not able to control and selfdetermine enough, so we're offering these kind of technological tools in
order to extend, in order to up their willpower. Right? And this is,
again, echoing a certain philosophy about social problems and social
change and about the kind of diffusion of responsibility in a society
that is very prevalent in very many cultures. Right? Here's advertising
echoing the exact same sentiment when I landed at Rochester Airport her
in the United States, "Fisher taught me that anything can be accomplished
if one has the desire and determination." Now is there is anything
problematic with that model?
Well interesting enough Rochester is not the only place where you find
this kind of idea. This is a Maoist propaganda poster from the 1970's and
the slogan reads, "When discipline is reinforced, revolution cannot
fail." It's the same idea. It's the same idea: the system in which you
are living is perfect. If the system fails it's because you haven't put
in enough effort or because some individual messed up. And the
problematic bit with that is the environmental psychologist, John
Thogersen, in a recent study put is that this basically puts the whole
[inaudible] of social problems and social change on the individual. It
says, "If problems arise it's because of the individual and, therefore,
we can only solve the problems if the individuals themselves step up."
And thereby he points out we're actually blackboxing. We're steering
attention and money and effort away from the larger systemic issues. He
says, "Instead of caring about things like everybody driving a bit more
fuel efficiently, we're actually blackboxing by that the more systemic
and the more important issue that we have sprawling city architectures
that force people to commute in the first place." Right?
In spite of these ethical issues or I think when addressing these ethical
issues, I think that there is still -- And that's my eighth thesis -something that is worth researching and exploring in gamification. That's
basically my little advertising blip and then we'll move into the end.
So in terms of the little advertising blip, the first thing that is
actually interesting is just to get a good overview of this whole system.
This is a little book. It's not the actually cover but we'll come up with
something like that that I'm editing currently with Stephen [inaudible]
that's going to be out with MIT in 2013. We tried to get a look at the
different application areas and the different kind of theoretical,
psychological approaches to gamification.
But the first research topic that I find very interesting in gamification
that is worth researching I think is this idea of motivational design or
motivational affordances. How does game design afford motivation,
moderated by social context? That term is something that I take basically
from Ping Zhang who has coined this idea of motivational affordances that
you can design software systems in order to speak, in order to give rise
to people's motivation.
The field where I'm currently focusing on is this idea, can we use game
design and playful reframing in order to design, not in order to deploy
individual serious games in classrooms but in order to restructure
classrooms and curricula as a whole in the image of a game, as a playful
space and see how that supports actual learning. That's something that,
for instance, Lee Sheldon tries to do with The Multiplayer Classroom.
That's what we ran a workshop on at the Games, Learning and Society
Conference where we currently just tried to get a idea of all the
different teachers who are currently doing precisely this and just get a
sense of the kind of best practices, shared practice and afterwards see
what are kind of the student outcomes there.
The second interesting topic for me, and that's a term that I take from
[inaudible] RMIT Melbourne, is this idea of frames. Right? That there are
specific different ways in which we can engage with a system -playfully, gamefully or otherwise -- and how these different modes of
engaging with systems shape our experience and our uses of these systems
and how we can actually design for that, right, the playful reframing
bit.
For instance, in the interviews that I did for my PhD research I found
that there was a stark difference between people that were engaging with
Foursquare. For some people engaging with Foursquare was playing, for
other people it was using. And the experiences they had with Foursquare
and the kinds of ways that they were using Foursquare was very different
on whether they framed this as a play activity or as usage, as a utility
activity. Right?
Similarly we can ask, okay, if we know that these contextual factors also
flowing from Self-Determination Theory are important for the experience,
also the motivation experience of people, then we can ask, well, what is
the effect of a leaderboard being framed in an office space as
controlling or informational, as this is used by a manager in order to
micromanage you versus this gives you information whom in your work space
to ask?
One actual research project that I'm right now involved again with people
from RMIT Melbourne is where they're trying to put these little exertion
games, exercise games into actually public trends in Melbourne. So the
idea of this game is that you see a little projection here of these rafts
flowing in water, and when there is the raft you can stand there and the
moment the raft disappears you have to pull yourself up until the raft
appears again. And the moment they told me about this project I said,
"Not only do you have certain safety issues here, but also you just have
social framing issues because this is not a space where play among adults
is expected and perceived as appropriate." So what kind of design cues
can we place here? What are the kind of existing social norms in frames
in a public trend and what kind of design cues might we use so that
people perceive play, just in the case of the water bridge, as something
that is appropriate, that is good, that is okay in this space.
And the third and final topic I'm interested in is rule design studies.
Right? We have a lot of different disciplines that look at how to use
rules and how to do things with rules, to use this wonderful term by
Twinings and Miers which is an introductory textbook to law. And if you
look across disciplines you find that computer science, economics, game
studies, law all of these different disciplines from different
perspectives look at the actual design of rule systems in society, from a
legal perspective, from an economic in terms of incentive systems
perspective. But there is not really a discipline that asks if we set up
a new law for registering CO2 emissions and how that is actually put into
place or craft a code in conduct and regulation mechanism in a company.
How do we design that? And how do we study the effects and the design of
that holistically, from all kinds of perspectives? And with a design
approach? And I think that is something again that we can learn from kind
of game studies and gamification.
So having talked that much about gamification, I'd like to close with my
final thesis which is gamification is a terrible word to use. And I'd
like to stop using the word afterwards. It's a terrible word to use
because first off as Ian Bogost so elegantly put it, "Gamification is
bullshit," which is of course a technical term. It's a philosophical
technical term coined by Harry G. Frankfurt where he said, "Bullshit is a
statement made by a person who doesn't care about whether the statement
is true or not, who only cares about furthering his own purposes by
making that statement."
That's exactly the point that Ian Bogost makes. The way that the word has
been coined and the way that the term has been constructed is precisely
first off to appeal to games and their cultural momentum and, "They're
cool and they're fun," and then add that -ification or -ify at the end to
make it appear as if this would be an easy add-on process. So that's the
first thing, right, the term itself gives rise to associations which are
essentially bullshitty.
The second issue is, is that if you look at things like game atoms, the
thing beyond which you cannot reduce something beyond which it stops
being a game, or in kind of all the classic definitions of what is a game
in game studies, you find that most definitions have multiple necessary
components. So then the question becomes, well, what is a game element
precisely? And if you look at the kind of different elements in
gamification that have been called out, right, rules, goals, quantitative
feedback or rewards or something, you find that they are either things
that are not game specific -- Right? Goals and the psychology of goalsetting is pervasive. You find that everywhere apart from games -- or
there are things like redeemable rewards or analytics that don't have
anything to do with games per se. So you end up with an empty Venn
diagram. Right?
And thirdly, obviously the talk about elements encourages this kind of
add-on thinking as if you can take certain elements and just place them
somewhere else. So what to do instead? Well, to go back to the beginning
if you remember the kind of HCI studies and user-experience studies that
have looked into what is playfulness, what gives rise to the experience
of something being playful, then you can say, "Huh, so there is
playfulness." If you think about ludus and paidia, if there is this
paidic experience then you can talk about the complement. You can talk
about something like gamefulness, having the experience or giving rise to
the experience that a game gives rise to. Right? That's a term that I and
colleagues take, again, from Jane McGonigal, gamefulness.
So whereas playfulness is about giving rise to the experience or paidia,
playful, toyful. With gamefulness you ask, "Well, can we give something
the experiential qualities of a game?" And then what you do basically is
say, "No, we're no longer talking about elements. What we're talking
about is affordances for a certain mode of engagement with something or a
certain quality of experience." Then we're not longer talking about
gamification but something like gameful design.
So these were 9.5 theses. It's nothing new. It's the use of game design
elements in non-game contexts and then, I sack that definition. It's an
inadvertent con because it tricks people into believing that there would
be an easy way of doing this. But there's actually something salvageable
which is trying to understand systems and looking at systems as a whole
as games and asking how can we restructure them. But if we only look at
the structure then we're thinking inside the box and we're not thinking
about play a specific context or frame of engagement in which people
engage with games as systems which is just as important and something we
can design for.
There are important ethical components in gamification that we have to
think about. It's definitely something in my opinion that is worth
researching. And it's a term that we should stop using.
Now you may ask yourself what's the 0.5? Well, I already alluded a couple
of times of it, my 0.5 thesis is that you all should go and read "The
Well-Played Game," by Bernie De Koven. It's a book that was coined as
part of the new games movement back in the 1970's where people were
thinking about, "Can we design games which are challenging and really
appeal to your mastery but are not competitive?" Right? And that is a
point where Bernie De Koven wrote this book "The Well-Played Game." It
will be soon re-issued by MIT Press and it's the best phenomenology still
of play experiences and how play and games are different sets of
experience. And it's from Bernie that I will take my final note,
"Inscribed in gold in our flag is the motto, 'If you can play it, change
it,' and woven into our banner are the words, 'If it helps, cheat.'"
Thank you.
[applause]
Now let's see whether the technology works. And we get audio. Yes. Are we
hearing audio? Can somebody online ask a question?
>> Donald Brinkman: Let me see.
>> Sebastian Deterding: Okay. Up until then we'll start with questions
here. Yes, please?
>>: As a system designer how do you go about assessing the different
design interventions that you might do? Like traditionally you will do
controlled experiments and so on.
>> Sebastian Deterding: Yeah.
>>: But are playfulness and gamefulness the appropriate match to these
kind of controlled science experiments? Or do you think of different
methodologies when assessing these design interventions?
>> Sebastian Deterding: Okay. So assessment is an interesting question in
terms of whether you do it in a formative phase or afterwards in a kind
of, you know -- So is it user research or is it usability testing
essentially? Generally what I prefer in the formative phase is actually,
as any good designer and game designer would do, is to go to a very rapid
prototyping process, where it's very much about building something that
is a system and that can be experienced as a system as quickly as
possible. And paper prototypes or role-playing it is perfectly fine.
Bringing in individuals and then you have basically in the kind of game
user research field a couple of developed be it easy questionnaires or so
that you can use to gauge things like enjoyment or so. Or in SelfDetermination Theory you have a very good developed model, the Player
Experience of Need Satisfaction or PENS model, which basically gives you
an easy way to assess, "Okay, how much does a person experience autonomy
here? How much does he experience competence? How much do they experience
relatedness?" So you can use these kinds of basically questionnaires. But
you would usually do, especially in a formative space, is just do play
testing do very deep, detailed debriefing interviews or just loud
thinking by people to get an insight more into where the design itself is
working out. But once you have this kind of game atom as a model and you
then zoom in into kind of the different aspects of that, you can have all
kinds of design principles for what makes good goals, or what makes good
feedback that you could use if you look into an existing system
essentially as a set of heuristics. And without user testing look at it
and say, "Well, I don't get any progress feedback in the system." Right?
"You set a goal that is far out, but I have no sense where I'm standing
in relation to that goal."
So you can basically use, I'd say, all the various methods or kind of
forms of assessment you would use in traditional user experience design.
You would only use kind of different, slightly different metrics that
would come rather out of kind of the game user experience field. Now if
you want to get full out then basically you here in Microsoft with the
Game Research Lab the kind of in-parallel capturing video game play plus
having people kind of report their enjoyment in-parallel which is
obviously kind of the gold standard. But usually if you're just designing
systems, you don't need to be instrumented that big. Yeah?
>>: So the whole in the classroom environment and the redesigning the
classroom to be [inaudible] concepts. And when you have a tiny situation
that is a fundamental. But how do you -- Can you give me an example of a
classroom setting where you're teaching math or whatever, you were able
to provide autonomy, you know, redesign it in gamefulness in that kind of
a classroom situation?
>> Sebastian Deterding: Two practical examples: the first is basically
connecting to the interest and goals and needs of the students which is
what good teachers do anyhow. That is that they come up with real world
problems that come out of the life world of the students and really -not just, you know, kind of token come out of their life world but
something that really catches their interest. And, therefore, suddenly
they are interested in figuring this out. And then you say, "Well, if you
learn this mathematical concept, you will actually be able to build this
thing that you want to build." So that's kind of the first very obvious
kind of way. Finding real ways in which to connect to the goals and
interests and values of people. Because then they feel, "I am doing this
because I want to achieve my goals," and then it's an autonomous
experience.
The second thing is basically what's the amount of meaningful choice that
you can create in a system which is not overwhelming for systems? What
the teachers usually do is what basically Montessori schools do, is that
you don't have one kind of curriculum that you force every one to but
that you say, "Well, I predefined a set of tasks, of challenges, as kind
of self-contained things that I place in the classroom or that I place in
binders." And the kids themselves when they come into the classroom have
a choice of what thing they want to work on. They know that they have to
work on something but they have a choice of what they want to work on
depending on where their current interests or their current needs are.
And you are then more the tutor. And connected to that you would then
offer the kids also kind of clear progress feedback in terms of instead
of a degrading grade, you would say, "Well, you all started with an F.
With every activity you do, you see how that activity slowly builds up
onto your actual grade. And you don't have to do these required
activities, but you can do kind of any combinations of the activity that
I offer you. As long as you get the final point score you will get an A
for that." Again that supports my feeling of actually having choice in
the matter. Which actually leads to the fact that certain students went,
"Ha, there's a simple activity that I can do over and over again and
generate points for that." And I actually had a math teacher saying,
"That's actually beautiful. That's wonderful. They believe they gamed the
system and they tricked me, but actually they get very good practice in
this kind of basic mathematics activity that I want them to have a lot of
practice in. So they feel autonomous because they believe they tricked
me, but actually they learned what they should learn." And after having
that experience, they can find ways to trick the class system then
they're in a state in the mindset in which is way easier to engage them
in the other activities as well. Especially if they then find that if I
then do this activity that's actually much more fun and enjoyable and
gives much more points than when I do this rote activity over and over
again. Other questions? Did we actually get questions from...
>> Donald Brinkman: No.
>> Sebastian Deterding: Okay.
>> Donald Brinkman: [inaudible].
>> Sebastian Deterding: Oh, okay.
>>:
[inaudible].
>> Sebastian Deterding: Yeah.
>>: So I was just wondering what are your thoughts on things that are
games with a purpose?
>> Sebastian Deterding: Yeah.
>>: Or things that -- like games that are trying to make things that are
obviously -- well, [inaudible] obviously, but that they're traditionally
considered really boring and really, you know, not --. Very small amount
of [inaudible] motivation.
>> Sebastian Deterding: Yeah.
>>: Yeah, just what are your opinions on whether that works or not and
what are the ethics of this?
>> Sebastian Deterding: Well the ethics of it, first that's a lot of
[inaudible]. And so you have to ask for, obviously, what are your
intentions as a designer? What are the actual effects that you are having
with this? To what extent is this transparent to the user? To what extent
do they have a choice in the matter of opting in or out? To what extent
are the kind of values and goals of that system that you set up
proposing? Right? So is this about, I don't know, engaging people in a
mass hacking exercise or this another activity that you're engaging them
in? So these are all kinds of ethical questions that you have to think
through when you look at the actual kind of system. Secondly in terms of
my thoughts is that the genius of [inaudible] is not only coming up with
the idea of games with a purpose but coming up with games that are
actually fun doing that. That's the game design genius that sits and
thinks like the mind reading game, like the ESP game, right, where it's
about tagging images but actually the way that he sets up it's about mind
reading.
And mind reading, if you think about poker and other games, is really a
core challenge that we enjoy in all kinds of social games immensely,
thinking about what the other person could think about. So I'd say they
work. They require a lot of design work and thinking and you might not
necessarily always come up with solutions that are as fun and engaging.
Secondly, it also comes down a lot to the framing. So is this frame to me
first and foremost as a game that I play or as a rote activity that I
engage in? If you look at the individual numbers, the performance numbers
that his original ESP game got and the Google Image Labeler which is
precisely that thing just, you know, bought and reissued by Google -Obviously that thing has way more scale because it's exposed to more
people but if you look at the individual people engagement metrics you'll
find that they are way less engaged in the image labeler than in the ESP
game because that is framed as a game that I play and not as, "Can you
tag some images for us, please?" Do you have a question? [inaudible].
Yes?
>>:
I have a question about Montessori. And what grade -- It feels
like they go through middle school and then...
>> Sebastian Deterding: You mean, at what grade Montessori school
start...
>>:
Yeah.
>> Sebastian Deterding: ...usually as a system?
>>:
Isn't middle school usually or --?
>> Sebastian Deterding: I don't...
>>: I've never heard of a Montessori method used beyond that -- yeah,
probably eighth grade, seventh or eighth grade. And it's just interesting
to think about that, that that would be a great challenge to try to
employ that method in a high school situation.
>> Sebastian Deterding: Well, if you read [inaudible] from University of
Madison, Wisconsin, he also in his design in the kind of more engageful
playing games that they did with people way, way older a lot of his
design thinking also comes from the fact that he was a Montessori teacher
and tried to apply this. And secondly the classrooms that we looked at
with these teachers were actually classrooms. So this went up to
undergrad Latin education, people using the same kind of principles for
that. So it seems to work as a design principal even in that age range.
And if you look at things like, say, Codecademy or so, what they also do
well is that they give you a choice where in the kind of level system of
road up to very challenging programming tasks you want to engage in. You
can start really high. You don't have to grind your way through if you
find that that's the bit that you find more interesting or you believe
that is catered to your current level or competency. Yeah, and that's
targeted at adults essentially. Mmm-hmm?
>>: Do you find is it acceptable for people to come to a gaming
situation for different reasons? So if you imagine playing chess in the
park, you might have one player that's focused on mastery, like they
spend a lot of time at it and they want to get good at it. And then you
have new player where, you know, they're trying to master it. They're
just sort of having an exploratory afternoon if you will. Do you find
that that's compatible or do you think that's best if people are coming
to a gaming situation for the same reason? Like they're both coming to it
for fun or they're both coming to it for mastery?
>> Sebastian Deterding: The good thing there is that with -- you pointed
out a social situation in where people from radically different
backgrounds may come together for a play situation is exactly
[inaudible]. You usually find people playing games, you find that they do
it with friends and family very usually or just people they know. This
kind of strangers coming together, you find that in those situations are
online games essentially. And that's a bit I didn't get into here but
again if you look into developmental psychology you find that the early
forms of play, pretend play, playing together with other kids are
essentially the learning grounds for social-emotional skills. That
process of attunement of caring for each other, of recognizing what is
going on, what is the goal of the other person, "What is my goal here? Is
he having fun? Am I having fun? How can we come to a shared ground where
both of us find something that we have fun together in doing so?" that is
the skill that you learn. That is one of the core social emotional skills
you learn in playing. So I would say in those situations it's an actual
negotiation process between the people where they exercise these kinds of
skills to find a shared ground together, where they say, "This works for
both of us." Like two people playing ping-pong and the one is radically
better. And then you say, "Okay, can I create a constraint by which I
play ping-pong just with one hand or behind my -- so that continues being
interesting and fun for both of us?" And that's an actual skill that is
exercised and trained in these kinds of situations. It is more difficult
if people come from different backgrounds, but it's also a learning
opportunity for precisely dealing with that.
>>: That's interesting you mention negotiation because obviously if I
think that I'm a skilled player, using the ping-pong example, my opponent
tries to play with his hand behind his back. I may not take that the
right way. That might not actually be a safe environment for me because I
don't feel like -- You're basically communicating to me in a hostile way
that I'm not a challenge to you.
>> Sebastian Deterding: Exactly. That's the communicative or
metacommunicative skills, "I'm not doing this in order to put you down,
but I'm doing this with a benign intent in order for both of us to enjoy
the situation." Yeah.
>> Donald Brinkman: Thank you, everybody.
>>:
Thank you.
[applause]