Good Gamification Starts With Our Core Drives | Yu-kai Chou

Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me here. Again, I'm Yu-Kai Chou. Today I'm going to talk about a gamification framework called Octalysis, which takes you beyond what they call points, badges, and leaderboards. So, again, I am— let's see if the clicker works. Turning it on might be a good way to make it work. Yeah, it does. So that's me. You probably know I'm the guild leader for today. Just a quick explanation of myself. I've been in this space now known as gamification since 2003. which made me one of the earlier pioneers in the industry. At the beginning, it was a very lonely passion. People didn't understand or believe in it. They thought I was creating more excuses to play games. But I believe in the power of utilizing game design to motivate desired behavior. So I stuck to it throughout the years. I started a few different technology startups all in the gamification space. I raised or helped raise a few, about probably around $5 million on it. Nowadays, I'm the founder of the Octalysis Group and last year became an author with the book Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. I've been very lucky to talk about this topic throughout the world, in India, in Denmark, Germany, in Switzerland. I did my TEDx talk there. And I help companies like— 2 weeks ago I was in Denmark helping Lego, and sometimes at Stanford University. And a few organizations rated me the Gamification Guru of the Year 2014-2015, which I always make disclaimer, Doesn't necessarily mean I'm the best at anything, but it's always nice to be on a bio, which is why it sits there. Cool. So, oh, and this is my book, Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. If you're interested in the talk, you want to learn more, you can go to yukaitchow.com/books. It kind of just takes you to Amazon, but you can check it out. So, to start off, I want you guys to do a little exercise. Just think about one game that you enjoyed in the past. You know, just think of one. And it could be social mobile games, FarmVille, Candy Crush, Angry Birds. It could be a more hardcore game, League of Legends, StarCraft, Diablo, or, you know, Halo. It could be traditional games. If you don't like to play digital games, it could be poker or crossword puzzles, Sudoku, whatnot. And think about what made that game enjoyable. Like, out of all the games out there you could play, why do you like that one and not the others? So we're going to think— we're going to learn about a framework soon about why things are fun, and then we'll come back to this. Cool. So, at the core of gamification, which again is applying fun things like games into things that are boring and monotonous, is what I call human-focused design as opposed to function-focused design. So most things are function-focused. It assumes that people in the system will want to take the desired behavior, and you optimize for usability, for efficiency, for ergonomics. And so it's kind of like a factory where you assume that people will do the work because you kind You kind of pay them to do it. And then you kind of figure out how to maximize your production efficiency. Now, human-focused design remembers that people in a system have feelings, have motivations, have insecurities, have reasons why they want to or don't want to do something. And it optimizes for that. So that's kind of like a theme park, where you design it to be really, really fun. And then you can predict that people will automatically want to line up for hours and hours just to enjoy the experience. Now, the reason why we call it gamification is because I believe the gaming industry is the first to master human-focused design. Because there's really no purpose to playing a game, right? You never have to play a game. You have to, you know, go to school, do your taxes, go to work. Even if you don't like it, you just have to suck it up and do it. I call it contaminated motivation. But for a game, again, you never have to play a game. The moment a game is no longer fun, You'd leave the game, right? You'd play another game, you'd go to YouTube, you'd check your email. So because games have spent decades or even centuries, depending on how you qualify a game, to get people to come back every single day for 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 hours a day doing basically monotonous things like throwing at the bird, throwing at the bird, throwing at the bird, or matching through a gym, matching through a gym, matching through a gym, all day long. We're now learning from that discipline, and that's what we call gamification. And this is important for any startup project you're launching because Almost by definition, your customers don't need your product, right? It's because they're— before you existed, their lives were relatively okay. So they're not just going to use your product because it's useful. They need to be motivated. They need to enjoy. I've had a lot of entrepreneurs come to me and say, hey, Yukai, there's no reason why our users wouldn't use our product. We save them time. We save them money. We make their lives better. Sometimes if they're lucky, even the customer will say, oh yeah, there's no reason why I wouldn't use your product. You know, you save me time, you save me money, you make my life better. So I'll definitely register tomorrow. And if you have some experience in launching startups, you'll know that oftentimes 6 months later, you see this guy. He's like, hey, how did you— did you try my product? What did you— how did it go? What— how do you like it? It's like, oh yeah, man. I still haven't got yet. It sounds really cool. I still, I still want to, you know, I definitely will, you know, I'll do it when I go home. Right. And it's just that, again, there's no reason not to, but there's no motivation. There's no excitement. That person who's too busy to try your product, they're probably playing games 2 hours a day. So now I was very lucky because, again, in 2003 when I was passionate about gamification, no one really cared about it. And throughout the years go by, suddenly all these companies realized, hey, gamification is something important. We have all these important things, these products we want people to use, and they don't use it. They're using games. So suddenly all these professions came out with gamification, applying game design, game-based learning. But there's still a huge problem in the industry, which is everyone's focused on the fancy things we call game mechanics or game elements. You have lists of, oh, these are 60 game elements or game mechanics, and if you put them into your product, it's gonna become fun, exciting. And I think it's doing it backwards. So the game mechanics are things like the points, the badges, the leaderboards, the quest narrative. People's like, ah, just put points in it and it's gonna be fun. And I think it's really doing it backwards because Those things aren't really what makes a game fun. So if you think about game design from a bad game designer standpoint, you'll think, oh, the bad game designer is like, oh, well, what do I need? Well, we need swords. Where can they go? Let's put them here. Monsters too, let's put them here. Oh, cows are popular. Let's put them somewhere. And we need friends that can fertilize crops. Those are cool. Well, let's add some birds with attitude, plants that shoot peas. Oh, puzzle games. People love puzzle games. Let's add that in too. And you can see here that A game can have all the right quote-unquote game elements, but still be incredibly stupid or boring. In fact, every single game in the market has game elements in them, right? But most games are still boring. Most games are not successful, and most games don't fail— or fail to attract people. So it's not realistic to think that, hey, if I just take these game elements that are even found in boring games and put it into my product, it automatically becomes fun and successful. That just doesn't happen. Only a few well-designed games achieve mass success. So if you think about a good game designer's standpoint, a good game designer, instead of thinking about what game elements should I use, they often start off thinking about how do I want my users to feel? Do I want them to feel inspired? Do I want them to feel proud? Even scared in terms of some horror games. And then once they understand how they want the users to feel, That's when they think, OK, well, what are the game elements I need to create that feeling? Maybe it's swords. Maybe it's monsters. Maybe it's cows. Maybe it's friends. The key here is that good gamification does not start with our game— with the game elements, but start with our core drives. Thank you.