The Octalysis 8 Core Drives Pt 1 | Yu-kai Chou

So this is where I introduce my Octalysis framework. Basically, I spent many years studying exactly what makes a game fun and exciting. So I studied a lot of games that are very similar to each other. Sometimes one is just a clone. One just copied the other. And I realized a few things. The first one is that this game is not success— the successful game is not successful because it has game elements, right? Because both games have game elements. Either they both have quests or both have points, both have badges. So that's not the thing. Also, I noticed that it's not also— not because of the graphics either. Sometimes a visually stunning game is a huge failure. But the relatively ugly game, you know, not great graphics games like Minecraft or RuneScape, they become a big success. So I realized after a while that all the successful games have now what I call the 8 core drives of motivation. So I published this octalysis firm. It's called octalysis because it's an analysis based on octagon shape. And I threw it on my blog, and it was instantly picked up. So it was translated organically into, I think, 18 different languages. And that's where I got all my opportunities to start speaking at different places and consulting for many companies. And so this is a busy chart. You know, in the center, there's the 8 core drives that motivate us. And outside, there's the game design elements and techniques that bring out those core drives. But at the beginning, we just want to focus on the center. So the key about these 8 core drives is that every single thing we do, is based on one or more of these 8 core drives. Which means that if there's none of those 8 core drives there, there's zero motivation. No behavior happens. You know, you are all here because of some of those core drives. Some people are here because of epic meaning and calling. You know, it's like, oh, I feel like this could help me change the world. Some people are here because social influence. Oh, a friend invited me. And some— sometimes when I do my talk, people are there because they're employees and it's loss and avoidance. Oh, I don't want to get fired, so I'm here. You know, everyone has their different reasons, but without these reasons, you wouldn't be here. And we're going to go through them one by one and go through a few examples about how they're utilized. The first core drive is epic meaning and calling. So this is a drive that says we're motivated because we feel like we're part of something bigger than ourselves. And I believe that this is why people contribute to things like Wikipedia. You know, we all know that people don't make money when they contribute to Wikipedia, but they don't even, you know, update their resumes, right? They don't increase their status. People contribute to Wikipedia because they feel like they're protecting humanity's knowledge, something bigger than themselves. And when I was writing my book, I had a hunch that these people probably who spend 2, 3, 4 hours a day contributing and updating Wikipedia, they're probably not only not getting paid, they're probably also the biggest donors. So I looked it up, and sure enough, the majority of the donations come from people who dedicate their time to help Wikipedia. So these people aren't doing it for free. They're actually paying Wikipedia to do this relatively mundane grunt work, right? If you give someone like an intern, you know, a stack of pages, 1,000 pages, and says, hey, you know, there's like— look through all of them. There's a lot of inaccuracies in it. I want you to flag all of them. I want you to review the flags of another intern and then correct that. Now most people feel like, oh, that's sucky grunt work, right? That's entry-level stuff. I don't— you know, that's paying my dues. I don't want to do that. But in Wikipedia, people voluntarily do that, and they pay Wikipedia to do that. And again, it's because they feel like they're protecting humanity's knowledge. And you often see this theme inside a game. In a game, oftentimes you have this thing where it's like, oh, the world's about to end, but somehow you're the only person qualified to save the world. It's really motivating. It's like, oh, I must go do it. It's epic. And some people say, well, my product is just a tool. It's functional. How do I actually bring epic meaning and calling to my product? Now, there's a lot of different ways to use it. But I was most impressed with Waze. And Waze is a navigation/GPS app that was started in, I think, '09 or 2010. And when they came out, they were, they entered a market with a lot of competitors, right. All these hugely funded, wealthy GPS companies that have a lot of market share. Waze was a startup coming out of Israel. So they had to innovate. So they applied a lot of gamification solutions to it. Some of them were fluffy, some of them were great, because they had to innovate, they had to experiment with different things. But what I was most impressed is they were able to bring Epic Meaning and Calling into the experience. You know, at the beginning of— in the early days when you first download Waze, they show you an image, and on the left side of the image, they show you a big snake monster. And the snake monster is made out of a road with cars stuck on it. And the name of the snake monster is called Traffic. They didn't really name it, but that's implicitly the name of it. On the right side, you see a lot of little cute Waze characters with, you know, knight helmets and swords and shields working together, struggling to fight this huge monster called traffic. And below it has one tagline: Beat traffic together. So when you're driving with Waze, you're not just turning left, turning right, getting to your destination. You're helping a whole community of brave knights fight this huge monster called traffic. And of course, no one likes traffic, right? Everyone hates traffic. So of course, the way to do it is to drive with Waze on, because Waze is a user-generated GPS. As you drive, it absorbs all the data and it shares it. Oh, you know, where's the traffic at? Where's the policeman? Where's the car stuck on the side? And so you feel like you're actively helping humanity. Even though if you know how to go to your office, you still want to drive with Waze on, because you're contributing. And the powerful thing about epic meaning and calling Is that because, you know, because Waze is user-generated, in the early days it's sometimes not very accurate. Like, some— it— for me in the early days, it took me to the wrong place 3 times, and I was 20 minutes late to my meetings. And you would think that the only purpose of a navigation app is to get you to the right destination, right? And usually if you fail at the only thing you're promised to be good at, most people will be like, well, this is a piece of crap, I'm gonna delete it. But the thing with Waze is that a lot of times when it takes people to the wrong location, Instead of getting angry and deleting it, people panic and they say, oh no, the map is broken. I need to go fix it. You know, how powerful is that? When you fail at your one core competency, your users don't get pissed. They actually want to help you. And again, it's because this epic meaning and calling is not about what I want, what I benefit, what I can get out of it, and how I feel. It's more about how I can give myself up to that bigger vision, how to sacrifice myself for the bigger picture. Now, some companies build epic meaning-calling into their own brand. So sometimes I have friends who show up, especially in the old days, they're like, Yukai, I'm saving up to buy my next— to buy the next iPhone. And I'm like, well, you don't even know what's the next iPhone. It could suck. I don't care, Yukai. I'm buying the next iPhone. And what you see here is that this person first self-identifies as an Apple person, and then he needs to do what Apple people need to do, which is buy iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, and walk around and say, Well, I don't have that problem because I use a Mac, you know, which I am personally guilty of. And this is kind of funny because it's like, oh, you think Macs are so cool? Can you do the super Windows trick, huh? But this is not accidental. So Apple has purposely been building epic meaning and calling to your brand. In fact, the 2 most successful commercials Apple has ever done, one is called 1984 and the other is called Think Different. And the key thing about those 2 commercials is that None of them talk about products. They don't talk about color screen, we have more RAM, we have more space. That's what all their competitors do, right? Apple just talks about a vision, a belief. They said, oh, because of Apple computers, 1984 won't be like George Orwell's dystopian society, 1984. We're liberating human beings from Big Brother IBM. And so people at the time were like, whoa, I want to be part of this. I want to be part of this liberation plan. And of course, the way to liberate human beings is to buy a Macintosh. And in 1999, around that time, you know, there's the Think Different, right? Oh, here's to the crazy ones, because those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. And then people are like, oh, that's amazing. I want to be the crazy ones who change the world. And of course, the way to do that is to have 1,000 songs in your pocket through buying an iPod. So, Apple has been very intently focused on selling a vision. You know, it's like Nike, they say, just do it. They don't talk about the product. So when people look at Apple, they don't think about, oh, look at the specs, look at the pricing, is it the feature set? It's more like, oh, it's Apple, and I believe in Apple, and they buy it. So that's another example of epic meaning calling into an experience. Now, core drive 2 is development accomplishment. This is the drive that says we're motivated because we feel like we're leveling up, we're improving ourselves, we're achieving mastery. And this is where most of the points, badges, and leaderboards in the industry fall into. So points are just counters. It shows you a sense of development. So even though you're doing the exact same things over and over and over again, you're seeing this number grow or this progress bar moving. So you feel like, hey, I'm actually getting somewhere. Badges are what we call achievement symbols. So— and achievement symbols can be in many different forms, right? It could be, you know, trophies, white belt, black belts. It could be your uniform. Your avatar changes. But the key is that it must symbolize accomplishment. If you give people a badge for every little silly thing, then it's not an accomplishment, it's actually very insulting. So when people say, you know, oh, I don't necessarily believe in gamification, I don't think it works, and I ask them, well, do you know that eBay is actually one of the most successful gamified e-commerce sites? They're like, oh, never thought about that. So if you just think of a generic e-commerce website, it's not necessarily intuitive to have this, you know, competitive bidding system, this mutual feedback system, this path to level up from a yellow star seller to your Purple Star to your Blue Star to your Power Rated Seller. And I remember when I was first selling on eBay as a, uh, in 2004, uh, after I got, I got 10 positive feedbacks, I got a certificate that says, oh, you're a Yellow Star Achievement Award, and signed supposedly by the CEO. And I was so excited about it, I printed it out and I put it on my wall. It's probably still with my parents somewhere. But that's on the seller's side, you know, that development accomplishment. Also on the buyer's side, there's also this core drive. When you buy things on eBay, you didn't just buy things on buy things, right? Because anyone with money can buy things. That's kind of boring. But on eBay, when you bought something, you didn't just buy it. You you won. Of course, you maybe you paid for you know ten twenty percent over what you would otherwise pay. But at least you beat those ten other bastards that were bidding against you. You know, it's like ah suckers! I got I got it. You know, because because before like oh you outbid me. No, I gotta bid you back, right? And so that's why. That people say, oh, eBay is a very addictive experience. You're constantly logging back to see if people outbid you, if you got more bids, and all that stuff. Now, Twitter also uses Core Drive. Most people remember that Twitter's innovation is they limit your messages to 140 characters. But a lot of people forget another one of Twitter's innovations is they pioneered the one-way follow. So back in the day, social networks were two-way follows. You invite me to be a friend, I accept, now we're both friends. And sometimes, you know, I feel bad to reject you, so sure, let's just be friends, because I don't want to explain why I didn't accept that in real life. But on Twitter, Twitter says, no, no, no, you can follow me, but I don't have to follow you back. Which means if a million people follow me and I follow zero people back, then I'm super awesome. I'm like a rock star, right? And so that caused A-list celebrities like Ashton Kutcher at the time to challenge CNN to see who can reach a million followers first. And this is very important because most of these technologies at the time were always stuck in, you know, Silicon Valley and people who read TechCrunch and just a small community. Never— it doesn't reach the mainstream. But because of this accomplishment, you know, Ashton Kutcher, who is an A-list celebrity, he goes out and he's like, hey, please follow me on Twitter. And you have all these girls making videos, hey, you know, please vote for Ashton on this thing called Twitter. And then CNN takes the challenge, so they're on their news like, please follow us on CNN. You know, they have to be more professional, which means just have a lower voice. And so, again, and what afterwards Ashton Kutcher won, right? So he says, "Victory is ours!" With ten exclamation marks. He was really, really excited. But again, he's an A-list celebrity. He has hundreds of millions of followers or fans. Why does he care about the one million on Twitter? And it's because the design of Twitter makes it really hard to gain followers. So to him, it's an actual accomplishment. You can see CNN below says, "Oh, they're very you know they have to be." So they said, Ashton Kutcher is first to reach 1 million followers on Twitter, contest with CNN. Congratulations. You can see over there that CNN has 999,652 followers. So they were only about 350 followers away from winning. So again, that sense of accomplishment is important. Thank you.