The Octalysis 8 Core Drives Pt 3 | Yu-kai Chou

Core Drive 6 is scarcity and impatience. So this is the drive that says we want something simply because we can't have it. So if grapes are on the table, we don't really care about those grapes. We might eat a few of them, you know, because they're convenient, but we don't value them. But if they're locked behind a glass shelf just beyond your reach, you're always thinking about those grapes. You know, can I have them? When can I have them? Are they even sweet? And this is a core drive that Facebook used to, to launch at the beginning. So at the beginning, Facebook said, hey, Facebook is only for Harvard students. If you're not in Harvard, too bad, can't use Facebook. And then a little bit after, they said, oh, well, Facebook is for Harvard, some Ivy League schools, and a few other schools that your high school buddies got in, but you weren't smart enough to get in. Too bad. And then eventually it says, oh, Facebook's open to more schools. So when Facebook opened up to UCLA, where I was attending in 2004, everyone rushed in. And it wasn't because they already knew how amazing Facebook was, because no one has tried it before, but it was because they couldn't get in before. That exclusivity alone made everyone want to try out and go use Facebook. Now this is also a core drive where a lot of social mobile games use to monetize on. So a lot of people will say, well, they'll play a game like FarmVille and they'll say, oh, this game is kind of fun, but I'll never spend real money on a stupid game like this. And then eventually Farmville starts to dangle this mansion in front of your face. And you're like, hey, this mansion is kind of cool. Let me see what I need to do to get it. Oh man, I need to do 40 more hours of farming to be able to afford this mansion. That's a lot of farming, right? But oh wait, I just have to spend $5 and I can get the mansion immediately. $5 to save 20 or 40 hours of my time. That's a no-brainer, right? And so suddenly I'm no longer spending $5. Buying some worthless pixels on a screen, I'm spending $5 to save a lot of my time, which becomes a very worthy transaction. Now the funny thing is that technically these games are all free to play, right? So we're playing the game for free, but then we're paying money to play less of the game. So is the game fun or not, right? If it's so fun, why are we paying money just to skip gameplay, right? And this we'll learn later about the intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. But yeah, so a lot of the mobile games out there, you'll see if they monetize, it's because of the scarcity and impatience. About half a year ago, I interviewed this engineer in Silicon Valley who spent $40,000 on one mobile game called We Hero within a year. And it's not like he's this millionaire guy. He's just working as an engineer, and his other interest is motorcycles. So he said because he played this game called We Heroes, he's going to be buying one less motorcycle in his life. And so it's like a lot of that, how games really drive your purchase behavior. In Geoman, remember Geoman? There is this thing called Mozzie, which is a burning Firefox. And the only way to capture a Mozzie is you have to be next to a Mozilla Firefox headquarters, which means that in the whole world, only a few people got to capture Mozzies. Everyone wanted one. At the time, I was living in Mountain View, and so I had many Mozis, and people thought I was a hacker. But everyone wanted this Mozi. And I took a random screenshot of their little chat screen. And over here, this Vincent7512 says, I wish I had a single Mozi. Then at this point in my life, I could die happy. And you think that in this public chat board, chat room, right, most people are like, come on, get a life. It's just a game. But no. In line number 3, you see ValerieFox18 says, Me too, Vincent. Me too. So you see a bunch of like really sad gamers just like, oh, I wish I had a Mozzie. My life is so meaningless because I don't have a Mozzie. But that is nothing compared to the Lorelei, the burning fire phoenix. And the only way to capture a Lorelei is you have to be at a place that's really, really, really hot, like, you know, 45 degrees Celsius or, you know, 110, you know, Fahrenheit. Just something that's really, really hot. And which meant that at one point in the whole world, only 3 people owned Lorelixes. And needless to say, you know, everyone wanted one too. So the game company once got called by a parent that's a mom, and she says, oh, you know, my son has been sick. He's been sick for 2 weeks, can't get out of bed. And he says nothing can cheer him up unless he has a Lorelix. And he, you know, I don't know what it is, but he says you guys have it. I'm willing to, you know, pay $20 if you could give him a Lorelix. And so, you know, that scarcity alone is what drives the value. Now, the scarcity is really sticky too. So I was advisor for the company. I helped them balance their ability tree and all that stuff for a while. And then I quit the game. And for a whole year, I didn't think about the game. At most, I met with their CEO about business strategy, monetization, stuff like that. But one day, I was traveling abroad to a client place, and it was just really, really hot that day. It was just so hot, and I just felt like under the sun, my skin was burning. And the first thing that came to my mind was, I wonder if I can capture a Lorelei here. And, yeah, it was weird because I don't even play the game anymore. I don't care about the game. I haven't thought about it for a whole year. But because a Lorelei is so rare, your brain just thinks, well, when I can capture one, maybe I should. You know? So, so that's the power of scarcity. Core Drive 7 is unpredictability and curiosity. So this is the drive that says, You know, because we don't know what's going to happen next, we're always thinking about it. So this is kind of heavily utilized in the gambling industry. But whenever you have a sweepstakes program, a lottery system, or a raffle ticket, you utilize this core drive. It's the drive that makes us want to finish a book or a movie, which is why we hate spoilers. And there's a lot of scientific research behind this core drive. The, the most famous one is called the Skinner box. So scientists, B.F. Skinner, put an animal in the box. And inside the box there's a lever. So the first experiment is that whenever the animal presses the lever, food comes out. And what you'll see there is that the animal will press the lever until it's no longer hungry because it doesn't need food anymore. Makes sense. But when they change the mechanics to the point where whenever the animal presses the lever, food may or may not come out and sometimes 2 come out, what you'll see is that the animal will constantly be pressing the lever regardless if it's hungry or not because it's just messing with its head. Will it come out? Will it come out? Will it come out? It's like gambling addiction right there in the little Skinner box. Now, a lot of times when you have this timeless game, you have this randomness too. So in games like Diablo— Diablo was also a game where people played— Diablo 2 was a game people played for over 10 years. And they had this little randomness engine where every time you play the same game, same stage, same map, they have a random generator that changes all the things. The walls change, the monsters change, and so people feel like they can play the same stage over and over and over again, but there's still that variability. You also see a lot of this core drive in what they call the Easter eggs, which is basically things that— rewards that pop out of a sudden. You don't even expect it. And because you don't expect it, it makes you so really happy. It makes you want to go back and do the desired actions more to see if you can replicate it. And it makes you want to tell your friends about it. So Foursquare has an example in that. So back in the day, 2011, when Steve Jobs passed away, I had a friend named Mario Harger. He went to Cupertino Square because a lot of people were there to mourn and give flowers at the Apple Store. And he was a casual Foursquare user, but he just took it out and randomly checked in. And then, you know, again, this is the day Steve Jobs passed away. And then unexpectedly he unlocked a new badge called Jobs: Here's to the Crazy Ones. Thank you, Steve. And as far as he knows, this is a badge that can only be earned on that day and on that occasion. And so it was so unexpected that besides the sadness of Steve Jobs' death, he was, he was really delighted and he makes— it made him want to go into more places to check in on Foursquare because he wants to see if they can get more Easter eggs. It makes him tell his friends and now he's, you know, now he wrote in his book and I'm talking about it. There's also this one thing called the obvious wonder, which is things that are just different from what— it's just, it's just things that are just so unexpected that you see it but you don't see it and when you actually see it, then it makes you— Happy. So if you take, you know, 5 seconds to try to understand what this comic is trying to say. Okay. So sometimes after a while there's like little, little hee-hees. But if you look at this, it's kind of weird, right? It's like, oh, well, you know, the boy is just in his bathtub and, oh, some kind of bug, fly or mosquito lands on his head. Oh, like what happened? He's turned into some raisin-like alien thing. Oh, what happened? There's a weird alien duck that appears. Why are this— why is the alien duck making out with the raisin alien? And oh, everything's back to normal. You know, what's going on? And so the key here is to understand that, you know, the boy is the toy. So most of the time we assume that the human is the boy and the duck is the toy, right? But in this case, it's the reverse. The little ducky is the little child, and the ducky's like, yeah, I'm just playing with my boy toy in the bathtub. And suddenly this mosquito goes onto this boy toy and punctures a hole on it. And the little ducky is like, oh, Daddy, Daddy, my toy's broken. And Daddy is like, okay, let me go fix it for you. So blows it up, puts a little Band-Aid on it, and everything's back to normal. So again, it's so different from what we expect. We expect the human to be the child and the duck to be the toy. When it's reversed, it's like, ah, that's kind of interesting. So it brings more— some delight to our brains. Core Drive 8 is loss and avoidance. So this is straightforward. It's everything you do because you don't want something bad to happen. You know, you want— you're avoiding change in your behavior. You're on the status quo slot. You're lazy. You don't want to change. And FarmVille was a brilliant executor of this. So in FarmVille, very early on, it made you see that, hey, if you don't come back 8 hours later, it's going to show you very uninspiring images of your crops dying, and they're all yellowed, and you have to click on them one at a time, and it's so sad. And your brain says, oh, I don't want this to ever happen again. I'm going to make sure I come back next time. And so I remember at the time my mom was addicted to this game, FarmVille. And sometimes she had to wake up 5:00 AM in the morning to harvest her crops. And when she had to leave town, she had to call my cousin and say, oh, you know, I have to leave town. Can you help me take care of my farm? Here's my Facebook login and password. And at the time it was confusing to me because at the time I was like, whoa, I thought people played games Because they had too many responsibilities in their real lives. So they want to be in a world where they can be free, they can do whatever they want, they can be whatever they want. But no, now you have a new set of responsibilities, a new set of chores, a new set of things you have to do that stresses you out. So it was like, whoa, why do they do this? And now I understand it's that core drive 8, loss and avoidance design. So again, it's worth mentioning. So those are the 8 core drives of Octalysis. And it's worth mentioning again that Everything you do is based on one or more of these 8 core drives that I just mentioned. So if none of those 8 core drives are there, there's zero motivation. No behavior happens. So your users, if they don't have those 8 core drives, no behavior happens. But once you understand how you want your users to feel and you understand how they're feeling right now, that's when you branch out and you— then you start thinking about, okay, what are the game design elements that I can use to bring out those core drives? It could be points or badges. It could be a torture break, magnetic cap. It could be a FOMO punch. The key here, again, is that good game mechanic design does not start with the game mechanics, but it starts with the core drives.