Engagement

Lets begin by defining the term and anchoring on the metrics used to measure it. The term indicates a connection between the business and the customer. No single metric I found sufficiently measures engagement. Website hits per second, page views per day or unique visitors per day fall short of identifying who is engaging with our products and ideas: our business as a whole. For informational purposes, the series of interrelated metrics devised by Zichermann, Cunningham (2011) are: Recency, Frequency, Duration, Virality and Ratings.

It is vital to remember that before we can begin designing games for engagement, we need to know what we want players to do- that is, what social actions we want to encourage. These are called “social verbs” that are verb forms (other than ‘buy’ or ‘consume’) and must be exhaustively listed, and then ranked according to your preference. The top 5 might be chosen for implementation. Also remember, that the reward-loop must be running infinitely because once you start rewarding the players, you cannot take it away from them. Use this constraint to compute the total cost of ownership of the gamification system.

Orthodoxy #1: Intrinsic motivation is better than extrinsic rewards

We need to accept the motivational states of the players as they are, and not try to change them at all. When we make the motivation extrinsic, we could potentially shift the locus of responsibility from hoping change happens, to a structure and process designed for making it happen.

Orthodoxy #2: Intrinsic motivators create greatness, while extrinsic motivators do not

Extrinsic motivators can be noble too. We, as game designers, are helping people (customers, sales force, managers) reach a higher potential, to discover ways of getting better job results.

Orthodoxy #3: The best gamification designs are intrinsic

No, they are not always. A good extrinsic motivation can be developed into a good map to intrinsic motivation. Take the case of the airline industry. Fly-by check-in and Priority boarding now seems normal- in fact it feels intrinsic, like it’s always been there. But it hasn’t. It is a reward that was created out of nothing when the airline decided to implement it for the business class passengers. As a demonstrative example, the airline then made Fly-by check-in available to the economy traveler who logged in say, 10 flights a month! Even though there was no reward previously for economy travelers , with just 10 flights a month, now there is! It has become intrinsic in nature.

The better a game designer knows the players, the better will be “engagement”. The players will want to feel over time that the game was their idea to begin with- their actions will no longer feel alien to them, but more natural and aligned to their personalities.

We have successfully gamed the players.