>>
ZICHERMAN: Thanks, Chris. That's a--it's a--it's always funny to hear your bio read out loud
because you realize you're very sensitive to every like word--I wrote that bio so I--it's
my writing, yes. So, you're very sensitive to every word. And then also, no matter what
my accomplishments are, I'm humbled by the quality of your kitchens. I think it's like
one day I aspire to have a company that has kitchens like that, where today I made my
own espresso, which I'll enjoy for a second. So, as you heard my name is Gabe Zicherman.
I do a bunch of stuff around gamification. And today I wanted to talk with you guys about--it's
a little bit presumptuous to use the phrase "mastering" with something as new and as slippery
as gamification, but we'll do our best. I'm going to share some of the top insights gleaned
from researching the book, Game-Based Marketing, which came out in April, work that we do with
brands big and small everyday. I work on the Summit and the research that goes into the
new book, Gamification by Design, which is, as Chris mentioned, a techbook that will come
out at the beginning of the year. So, when biting off a topic like gamification, or any
topic for example, I like metaphors. So I thought a pretty good metaphor--I realized
that pretty good metaphors can be found in the movie Mary Poppins. And if you're too
young or too straight to know this basic story of Mary Poppins, I'm going to recount it for
you. It's the story of a hard-hearted but turns out fundamentally nice guy with two
really, really, super sweet children, really, really darling children. And they need a nanny
so they write up an ad and this woman on an umbrella comes flying into their lives. She
has magic powers like being able to levitate or jump into a chalk drawing and at the end
all is well, which is an important part of the story. All ends well in the story of Mary
Poppins. So think of me as your "Mary Poppins," down the sort of rabbit hole of gamification.
I mixed literary metaphors there. Well, if you would like to talk about Alice in Wonderland
later, we can talk about that. So, as Chris mentioned, I'm the author of these books,
Game-Based Marketing, which you can get now. I blog at gamification.co. It's a gamification
blog. We talk all about the subject. I advise startups. I talk about interesting things.
And then, as Chris also mentioned, we have some upcoming events related to gamification.
If you are currently working on a gamification project, either from a product, or marketing,
or design side, you might be interested in November 12th's San Francisco Bay's Gamification
Workshp. Amy, Joe, Kim and I will give a hands-on full day, come in with your problems and we
solve them working together workshop. It's actually almost sold out but if you're interested
in going, let me know. There's really like one seat left at it. And then in January,
we're running here in San Francisco again the Gamification Summit which is a full day
of--a full day event focused on the subject. Bringing together some of the most interesting
thought leaders like Jane McGonagall, who'll be revealing her new book. I'll be giving
a keynote on metrics which I know you guys love. We'll talk about all that kind of stuff.
Okay, so let's begin with a simple word definition. Gamification is the use of game thinking and
game mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. Four square. Not the product, but
the four squares there. So, it's game thinking and game mechanics. And this is really super
important, game thinking is the product of three generations of game players. I'm 36
years old. I'm the old--hi, my name is Gabe. I'm 36 years old and I'm the oldest cohort
of people who grew up with games as a core type of entertainment in their lives. Today's
youngest children, you know, kids were--well, the youngest children will be like just born.
But kids who are, you know, maybe five years old today are growing up with games as their
principal form of entertainment and that multi-generational exposure has simply affected the way that
we think. You know, if Shakespeare was a real person--this is the best analogy--if Shakespeare
was a real person, he wrote--he or she wrote, "All the world is a stage," famously, right?
But if Shakespeare were alive today, wouldn't he have written, "All the world is a game,"
because isn't it just a better metaphor for how we think about interactivity in the world.
And that really gets to the heart of what game thinking is. It's solving problems and
engaging audiences using a rubric that comes from games. Okay, so let's talk about some
of the main things that we've learned from it. How many of you in the audience recognize
some of the things up on the board right now? Any of them? Okay. These are some of the top
selling games of the last five years. And they include--I'm not kidding--being a male
technician, diapering a baby, being a waitress, running a farm, being an air traffic controller,
which as many of you know is the highest suicide, highest stress position in the entire world.
I mean, if you would come into a game publisher five years ago and said, "I've got a great
idea. We're going to make a game where you play an air traffic controller, planes could
crash, what do you think? Sound good," right? You'll be laughed out of the room. That doesn't
sound like fun. That doesn't sound like fun at all. It highlights a really important conclusion
which is fun and the theme of the thing which are fun are actually not connected. If you've
been in a casino before and you've seen the Oprah Winfrey branded slot machine and the
Harley Davidson branded slot machine and the neutral slot machine, you all as science-oriented
people are aware, the slot machine acts on your brain the exact same way. Once you choose
to sit down in front of that slot machine, same behavior in your brain, same engagement
loop, same reaction. "Ding, ding, ding, oh, yeah, ding, ding, ding," right? It's the same
thing. It doesn't matter which brand is on the front of the slot machine. Theme is a
lure to bring people in to an engaging experience. It's a lure. And that has important implications.
That means, if air traffic control can be fun my friends, anything can be fun, right?
It's an opportunity. It means we can turn government. we can make government fun. We
can make getting fit fun. We can make searching fun or more fun. All right, so it, of course,
begs the question, you know, "What is fun?" So, I put some words in a word generator.
And I put them up on the board. Some--the words on the top are things which normally
people associate with fun and the words on the bottom are words that normally people
associate with work. And what's interesting is, you know, there's a big bright line drawn
between the two of them in my childhood. You know, I grew up in a house in which my mom
said, "Eat your vegetables and then you can have dessert," right? "Eat your vegetables
and then you can go out to play." There is a theme around vegetables. So, these things
though are arbitrary distinctions. They're arbitrary. These are lines drawn by people
in the air that say, "This is fun and this is not." If you're a parent in the room, if
I could deliver for you a piece of cake that had the same nutritive value as broccoli,
the exact same nutritive value as broccoli, can you honestly tell me that you would never
cave and give your kids broccoli cake, right? The point is these lines are arbitrary. They--them--they're
meaningless. We can make anything fun or anything work depending on its design. And that's a
very important kind of like switch that's being flipped in people's heads and they're
going, "Oh, okay." So, I can make anything engaging--and you really can--which brings
you a question my favorite allegory in this whole story. So I played a game that many
of you might recognize called, "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" If you played it,
put your hand up. If you played it on the Apple II, keep your hand up. Okay, so now
I know how old you are, so. Okay, so it's the '80s and I'm playing "Where in the World
is Carmen Sandiego?" on my Apple II, green screen, lots of fun. Would it surprise you
to know that that was the last really successful educational game in history? Would it surprise
you to know that since then 1,200 startups, $4 billion have been spent on "edutainment"
software and not a single hit like, "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" And that's
it's a completely captive market. There are 60 million children. It is a captive market.
What's happened? Here's what went wrong. Parents and teachers got involved in the design of
the games. And as soon as they did, kids could smell that shit a mile away. That's not fun,
that's work, right? In parallel, incidentally, Civilization and Sim City have taught hundreds
of millions of people basic, basic tenants of the human historical arch and how cities
function in civics, basics, completely unintentionally. Sid nor--neither Sid nor Will will tell you
they were on a pedantic pedestal trying to teach people with those games. They simply
chose that as the framework for a game, a setting for a game that they thought compelling.
They thought the real world would be more compelling than a fantasy world. And it turns
out that that's true. Non-fiction has a big advantage over fiction and gamification is,
think of it as, non-fiction gaming. It's gaming with your real friends and your real money
and your real stuff in the real world. It's non-fiction gaming. So, it, of course, going
back to Mary Poppins, there's a famous song in Mary Poppins called "The Spoonful of Sugar,"
and the premise of that song is, "If I make the medicine sweet enough, you won't know
that its medicine and you'll take it," right? Creating the objective, which is, of course,
is a good analogy. If any of you are marker--marketers in the room, a word that marketers sometimes
use to describe that phenomenon is loyalty program, right? Loyalty programs, let's just
do a simple working definition, are intended to get a user to take an action in your favor
when all competing options are mostly equal, right? Mostly equal. When things are really
unequal, loyalty programs are not that effective. But when their mostly equal, loyalty programs
have the effect of getting people to take a choice in your favor. Okay, so here's a
brief history of loyalty programs throughout history, 19th century, you go down to a local
mercantile in Boston and you're wearing heavy woolens and you haven't showered in a while
and you're like, "I need 10 pounds of sugar." And the merchant is like, "Aarr, you get a
pound for free." I don't know why it's a pirate merchant. I'm just--okay, because all the
people in the 19th century to me are pirates. It's like, "Aarr, pound of sugar." Okay, so
buy 10 get 1 free. That turns out to be a really sticky mean, right? We're still doing
buy 10 get 1 free as this sort of dominant model for loyalty programs. I don't know why.
I've asked lots of researchers, if any of you are interested in doing a PhD on buy 10
get 1 free, let me know. I think I can find you funding. It's like we got figure this
out, we don't know why. Okay, that stays about the same until the 1930s, when a company called
S&H launches their Green Stamps program. It was very simple. Instead of buying 10 and
get 1 free, you went to participating merchants, they gave you these little green stamps which
you licked and stuck into a book and you save them up and when you had enough, you went
to the S&H store or to the catalogue and you redeem them for stuff. The brilliant thing
about the S&H Green Stamps program was it completely, by creating a virtual currency,
it completely broke the users ability to keep track of a redemption rate, right? It used
to be 10 to 1. I buy 10 pounds of sugar, I get one for free. Now, I have no idea how
much I'm earning in virtual currency as expressed in redemption, right, because it was actually
totally variable. S&H knew what every green stamp was "worth" to them but the end user
couldn't keep track of it. They had no idea. Is 10 green stamps the same, you know, is
10 green stamps for a T-shirt the same as 60 green stamps for a transistor radio? It's
almost impossible to figure that. It turns out virtual currency is very powerful that
way. Okay, that's today's dominant model until 1981 when American Airlines launches AAdvantage
and a week later TWA and the United launched their programs, which turns out to be a good
metaphor for that whole industry. And what American figured out, and what TWA and United
aped, is that actually, it's not about rewards at all. It's about status. Status is what
drives loyalty. And if any of you tried to redeem your frequent flier program points
this summer for a trip to Europe, you'll know that redemption is not the core value proposition
of a frequent flier program, or for that matter, a loyalty program. And that's today's dominant
model until just a few years ago in which loyalty programs emerged like Foursquare in
which you cannot redeem for anything in the real world. There's not even the notional
concept of redemption, right? They just dispensed with it altogether. Let's be super clear.
I want us to be super clear on this. You cannot extract one dollar from FarmVille. There is
not a T-shirt, a hat, a badge in the real world you can get for your FarmVille credits.
Not a goddamn thing. In fact, it's all money in and no money out in FarmVille to the point
that when Zynga did that super successful campaign with 7-Eleven for the slushies, you
know, the "Get a Slurpee, get FarmVille credits?" It wasn't, "Get FarmVille credits for every
Slurpee," it wasn't, "Redeem your FarmVille credits for every Slurpee," right? It was
"Buy a Slurpee and get FarmVille credits." Let's be clear, no real world redemptions.
Money in, nothing comes out. It's brilliant, right? So, the corillary, which is probably
even more powerful, is that while the cost of an incremental unit of loyalty--let's think
of a customer making a choice of your product, a choice in favor of your product when all
things are being equal--the cost of delivering that incremental unit of loyalty is dropping
precipitously. It used to be 10 cents. It was 10 to 1. It was 10 cents. That number
is now closing in to zero as completely virtual loyalty programs start cropping up out of
the weeds. The other thing which has become very important is that the loyalty choices
now become public. Loyalty used to be a private decision, right? How did I convey to you that
I preferred KitchenAid mixers over Cuisinart mixers in the past? You had to be in my house
for starters, right? We had to go through this ridiculous dance where I somehow bring
up the subject of, you know, mixers to you. It's like, "Hey, do you like my mixer?" And
then we sit down and we have a whole conversation. I mean, books were written about word of mouth
marketing, conferences were held about word of mouth marketing. It was all bullshit. There
was no process to word of mouth marketing. No one ever understood how it worked. No one
still understands how it works. Zynga knows how it works, right? Now, there's a process
for word of mouth marketing. It's on the social graph. It's processized. It used to be random.
Now, it's structured. This is a humongous change in behavior. And it means that every
decision is public and whenever decision is public it means decisions that are not taken
aren't potentially negative. So if your product is not the one being specified or chosen in
the public sphere, that maybe a sort of lightweight demerit against your product. So it begs the
question my friends, what is status worth? How many of you know or recognize either of
the two people up on the board? Okay, we got a couple of people. So anyone want to call
out one of them? >> Christian Siriano and Tomorrow Rodriguez.
>> ZICHERMAN: Right. Okay, so these two people are both winners of fourth seasons of major
game shows on television, right? The gentleman on my left is Christian Siriano. He won the
fourth season of Project Runway. The woman on the right is the first winner of Deal or
No Deal ever. She won in the fourth season and she won $1 million. Okay, is $100,000
enough to launch a fashion line in New York City? It is not. Is $125,000, the price on
Top Chef enough to pull permits in the city of New York to start a restaurant? It is not.
What do these people played those games for? >> For public fame.
>> ZICHERMAN: They play for attention. They play for power. They play for status. They
don't play for cash. It turns out cash is a great incentive if you have a bunch of it
to throw around, right? It's also this weird 10 to 1 relationship comes up here, but let's
set that aside and that continues to be 10 to 1. The bottom line is if you don't have
a good status system to offer users in exchange for their behavior, you need to give them
cash. And the worse your status system is, the more cash you have to give them. That's
basically the relationship of these things. And so at the heart of all this, we talk about
this in Game-Based Marketing, the book. We talk about this a lot. This is called the
gamification loop and at the heart of it is a point system. And around that point system
are a whole bunch of what we call game mechanics. Points, badges, levels, rewards, challenges,
leader boards, things that can be used to engage users based on a point system. Points
systems are super important, right? We use them in real life. Money is an example of
a good point system. But these things around the point system are incredibly important
because often, it's hard to communicate to somebody exactly how many points you have.
Like, it's really hard for me in conversation to tell you, or how much money I have in the
bank. "I have $N in the bank," right? So instead of doing that, I buy a whole bunch of stuff
which tells you how much money I have in the bank, right? It signals to you through a series
of ab--through a series of status choices, I signal to you how big my point balance is.
Signaling is an important part of this kind of interaction, right? It's not always about
the points, sometimes it's about the signals for the points. So some other examples of
things that you may have seen called meta-games, things like structured exchanges, gifting,
poking or flirting, questing and raids, these are groups of game mechanics put together
into one sort of unified experiences. These are other things that we use to create user
engagement, to create desired behavior with users in games. And they, you know, some of
them are fairly familiar. I want to share with you a little quote. If you don't know
Kiva, Kiva is one of the leading non-profit, you know, social service startups in the world.
They do micro-lending for important causes. So we interviewed last weekend in TechCrunch,
the founder of Kiva, Premal Shah, said, "Our biggest competitor is actually Zynga." Consider
the implication of that, right? He runs a non-profit. He runs a large scale non-profit.
He views his competition as Zynga. What is he saying? He's saying that increasingly,
users are forced--increasingly, users are faced with a set of choices that are basically
distinguished between--we used to think of them as work and leisure choices, but increasingly
they are compulsory and optional choices. Compulsory and optional replaced fun and work
in the language. Once we get into optional time, disposable time, discretionary time,
users are naturally going to gravitate to the experience that they find the most rewarding.
Notice my choice of words. They will naturally gravitate to the experience that is most rewarding.
And by definition, games have a big advantage over just about anything that you might be
creating in your own spare time, right? Which is there designed explicitly to maximize reward.
So, if I can freely choose like, do kids not read books today because they don't understand
why books are important? No, it's because they have the choice of stuff that's way more
interesting than books so they are choosing something more engaging than books. It's a
jingoistic response to market choice. It also highlights something really important about
the power of games. Games are the only force in the known universe that can get people
to take actions which are against their self-interest in a predictable way without the use of force.
And this is an important distinction. Sex is extremely powerful at getting people to
take actions against their self--people self-interest. It's very unpredictable. And you can pull
a gun out and make people do just about anything you want, but they tend not to like that.
Games are the only force that can get people to act like they're sex-crazed maniacs but
in a predictable way without having to pull a gun on them. I know. I know. I know. That's
a bit--that's a bit dark. But no, I'm just kidding. But you get my point. My point is
it's a powerful force and it's what being expressed now in this like, you know, relentless
pursuit of engagement that's coming from the likes of companies like Zynga. And behind
this is important work. There is important academic work that underpins some of these
things. There's a guy named Richard Bartle who in the 1980s was one of the first researchers
to look at why people play games and he identified in--these were MUDs at the time not MMOGs
but they are precursor to MMOGs, text-based multi-user dungeon games. And Bartle discovered--identified
four different types of players. He identified the achiever, the socializer, the explorer,
and the killer. And I'll tell you about them all a little bit. What's interesting is the
four had since turned into 16, which include things like a judge, a politician, a lawyer.
But the four turned out to be very enduring. And Bartle never intended them to be a personality
type like an MBTI-type inventory but now that we have three generations of game-thinking
I bet you can start slotting some of the people you know into one of these four categories,
thinking of that as a personality type. So, the achiever. The achiever likes to achieve,
right? Simple. The only problem with a community full of achievers is not everyone can win.
And it's a big design problem, right? It's not a little design problem, it's a big design
problem. The second biggest problem, probably what I face the most in talking to audiences
about gamification all the time, is that you here in this room are not normal. You are
way more achievement-oriented than the average population, right? Way more. If I gave you
an achievement inventory, you'd score off the charts by comparison to the normal--the
norm population. The norm population, 80% of the population, are socializers and they're
after lightweight, non-confrontational, easy to reciprocate social interactions with other
people. They are in other words as other, you know, sort of social science researchers
have said, they are lonely. And they are looking for social engagement with other people. Lightweight,
non-confrontational, easy to reciprocate; sounds a lot like poke, right? Poke is a good
expression of that idea. Farmville is, without taking anything away from Zynga, poke with
cows, right? It leverages that sociliazer instinct, that socializer demand, that socializer
insight, to its extreme. Ten percent of the population are achievers, 80% are socializers.
Explorers, if any of you played Super Mario Brothers, right, on the SNES or the NES, you
might remember having friends who knew where every single like hidden level was, every
Easter egg was, which pipes to go down, which blocks to push, to get an access to the secrete
levels. In the days before the Internet, those people where classic explorers in the Bartle
typology. They had to play those games for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours
to find which pipe was the right one to go down. They'd have to like, you know, go to
the pipe, push down. Oh, that's not it, go to the pipe, push down. The explorer is playing
for the social credit for having discovered something. That's what they are after. They
want to be the one who discovered this thing. They're the explorer. And killers were the
most controversial segment of the market. They make up probably less than one percent
in the average group. They're very, very similar to achievers, except, "It's not just okay
for me to win, I win and you lose. And not only do I win and you lose but all of you
need to watch me kick your butt. And then I want as much credit from the community as
possible for having done that. I want you to say, 'I respect you. I love you. You killed
me.'" Okay, killers are--killers sound bad but actually in many cases they're really
good. I'll give you an example. I frequently talk to big company executive management team
so I'm in at very, very well-known publisher. A company you'd all recognize. It was a big
busy online community of commenters. And so one of the best examples of killers is comment
killers are really, really super common and obvious, right? You post an article and these
guys are in there like, "Bam," right? Right away. And then someone will post a comment
and they'll be like, "You're an idiot," and then someone else will post a comment and
they'd be like, "You're stupid," right? And so you see these people and some of you might
be those people. If so, I highly recommend keeping your hands down for now, so your friends
won't know. So, you know, I'm talking with these guys, I'm talking with these publishers
about comment killers and, you know, in the canonical web view or publisher view of what
to do about a comment killer would be to temp down that behavior, right? You're going to
write a script that listens to the tone of the post and if the tone of the post is too
extreme, the post goes to moderation, right? Or if the person posts too quickly, multiple
posts, tad-tadah-tadah, too fast, put them into moderation, right, or ban them from the
website because they're disrupting. That's terrible. That's not at all how a game designer
thinks about that, right? Killers are the most active, most engaged members of your
community. They're just expressing their behavior in a bad way. So the right design, from a
game design standpoint, is to put them on rails. Not Ruby on Rails, rails, right, which
is shape their behavior by creating a pathway that they go down. So in the case of comment
killers, we unpack their motivation. What drives a comment killer? They're after recognition,
right? They want to be recognized as smart by the outlet or the writer. So you set up
a reward system that says, "Okay. You can earn dinner with Walt Mossberg. You can earn
an op-ed in the Washington Post. In order to do so, however, you need to be the commenter
who's most frequently given a positive review for the quality of commentary," right? You
set up an incentive system that's more carrot, less stick, right? Consider, I can't guarantee
you that we'll get 100% adherence to that, we may still need moderation cues, but we
will turn some of those people and some is better than none. Another good example, the
U.S. tax system, it's 100% stick and no carrot. You get nothing for filing early unless you're
owed money and you get your money a little sooner, right? But if you owe money, there's
no end zero incentive for you to file early, there's a lot of disincentive for you to file
late. Why? Empirical evidence tells you that it would be better if there was an incentive
scheme. Why not offer some kind of benefit to users, preferably a status benefit, but
why not offer them some kind of benefit for filing early and on time? I--this is the kind
of thing that game designers think about, "Reward early, reward often, try not go negative."
Good axioms. So for you--we'll do Q&A in just a little bit. I'd write it down, think about
it, text it to yourself if you have to. Okay, that's so meta. So it brings me, you know,
it brings me to this important point for you guys, you know, which is from--I believe that
there is a seismic shift underway. And if we believe that consumers understand metrics
but in more abstract way, like the metrics that drive themselves but in an abstract way,
increasingly consumers care about fun as an actual metric. It is a value. Pleasure, enjoyment,
fun is a value that consumers increasingly expect to be in their products and services.
Consider this, right" Sorry. I know many of you are carrying Android phones. Consider,
we--I could be using an Android for this example, it's the same thing. Consider this device.
This is not a good phone people, right? We all acknowledge this is not a good phone.
But we can never go back to a Motorola StarTAC, can we? We can never ever go back. Our expectations
have been changed irrevocably. Our devices must be Internet connected. They must be beautiful.
They must like be able to play games and do applications and make calculations for us.
We can never go back. And so consumer expectation is rapidly shifting. What was once an advantage,
meaning clarity, simplicity of purpose, may actually turnout to be a disadvantage in a
world in which consumers are engaged looking for more deep--more engagement. We've been
trying--following this Web design Holy Grail of finding you know the most straightforward,
cleanest way of presenting information or data. I actually think the tide is turning
from a consumer standpoint. I don't think that's the main metric that consumers are
looking for at all. I think the main metric they're looking for now is fun and engagement.
And increasingly that will become their number one choice factor in deciding what wins. And
it means for you there's a new metric on the horizon. And we haven't defined it yet. I'm
going to--I'm working with some researchers between now and January to define this in
time for the summit. If you guys want to work on it let me know and I'm happy to have you
involved. We need a new metric to describe engagement, consumer engagement, because the
old metrics don't actually work anymore. Page use doesn't describe engagement. Daily active
users does not describe engagement, right? Return--time spent on site, return visits,
these things do not individually define engagement. There is a new metric for engagement that
needs to come out of the miasma and it will become all important. There will be a metric
just like it has happened before. Of course you guys, you know, you're in a good position
to define what that metric should look like just like Facebook defined the daily active
user-monthly active user metric, but, you know, we need to have that engagement metric.
So I want to share with you a couple of examples and then we'll have time for Q&A. So the first
example of a pretty good gamefide system overall that I like to use is Nike+. How many of you
use Nike+? Anybody? Oh, this is--this is awesome. This is awesome. I'm never in a room without
a Nike+ user so this is fantastic. Okay, so Nike+ is a gamefide system where you typically
you buy a little piece of hardware and you wear that on you and it records your score
and then you upload that score or you can do it manually on the Web with sort of is
social experience. It's got points, badges, levels, leaderboards, challenges, rewards,
all around how you exercise and how you perform in exercise context almost exclusively about
running. And it's cool. It's well designed considering that, you know, not many game
designers actually worked on the problem. But it has some issues. That up top is my
actual score at Nike+ today. Today. And I will tell you that while this is body by butterfat
I am not antithetical to exercise. I don't wake up in the morning going, "Exercising,
I hate it." I'd like to be fitter, you know? But Nike+ apparently doesn't care about me
as it's evidenced from their--the very first minute of their design, right? I am not already
fit enough to play Nike+ and there's no incentive for me to progress. Even the way this progress
bar is designed is a humongous disincentive. Remember the olden days of walking up to a
video arcade machine in the old brown cabinets, and you walk up and the first thing that you
would see is a leaderboard of 10 people with astronomically high scores, right? Like, Jeff,
10,487,642, right? And then the next person would be like one point below that and then
the next person will be like two points below that, and you'd be like, you know? And it
was actually--one thing that we learned from those leaderboard days was how humongous of
a disincentive a poorly designed leaderboard can be. Bad leaderboards are terrible, terrible
disincentives. Bad scoring systems are terrible disincentives. You walk up, you see that,
and you're like, "I'm never getting on that leaderboard." And if you're in any way competitive
in any way, or achievement oriented, and the game isn't inherently achievement oriented,
you're like, "Well, I'm not even going to play this game. I'm going to go look for a
machine where I can maybe get on the board," right? And look for a game where I can get
on board. So, we've revamped leaderboard design in the context of social games. Here's how
leaderboard should be designed now. It's actually like that prescriptive. Okay, so in the new
design of leaderboards, you put the user right in the middle, and you put their next two
best friends above them and the next two best friends below that, right, so no matter where
they are in the actual rankings, they are in the middle. Two friends above, two friends
below, with a little dialog bubble that says, "In order to beat Sue, do this," right? It's
so much better of a design. It turns out to be so much more engaging than the old leaderboard
design. And the only exception to that, and this is important as well because I think
this is--this kind of goes against some of the core Web design hegemony, which is that
you actually think through different used cases and explicitly redesign experiences
for different users, so the exception to that design is if the user's actually in the top
20, literally in the top 20, you show literally the top 20, right? Because that user probably
then really cares that they're in the top 20 and wants to see the top 20, right? So
anyway, so we've rethought some of those things we rethought about motivation. Another example
of a game that I think highlights some of the challenges is Chase Picks Up The Tab.
How many of you know that? I think it's an east coast thing. Basically, the premise was
during this promotional period Chase has run a couple of years in a row, if you use your
Chase debit card and you swipe it during the promo, sometimes you'll get an SMS from Chase
saying, "Oh, we picked up the tab," and they'll reverse the charge, right? So, setting aside
the fact that that is clearly a casino game, that is absolutely positively--absolutely
positively a slot machine, and there's no question about it, and they should be regulated
under like gambling law, and I don't know why they're not but I can't figure this out,
but they should be. Okay, so setting aside the fact that that is a casino game, the problem
with Chase Picks Up The Tab is I have to be a fucking Chase customer to play. Do you know
how much time it takes to set up a bank account? I have to go into the bank now, I have to
bring two forms of I.D., sign my Patriot Act paperwork, wait for them to run the background
check on me, send me a--give me a temporary ATM card, send me the regular one in the mail,
activate the one in the mail, sign up for the promotion, and then play. That is a mistake
my friends Zynga would never have made, right? Why can't anybody play Chase Picks Up The
Tab? Why can't you play the game just by connecting on Yodelay, right, anybody comes in signs
of Yodelay, sign up for text alerts? It's an opportunity for them to convert a customer
later. But they think like a big, old, kind of, dumb bank. "You have to be a customer
of ours first." The bar is way too high. And the market will no longer support those kinds
of ideas at infinitum. Every opportunity--I'm going to tell you this right now social gaming
designers, every single touch point is an opportunity to convert a user. There is no
such thing as a moment that exists in a world where we can't draw another user into our
experience. We have to start thinking about the world in that way. I mean, we don't have
to but things will work out better for you if they do. Okay, so here's one that more
of you will know than Nike+. How many of you do not know what the Lunar X Prize was? Oh,
awesome. I just used geek pressure. Okay, there was--there's one person. I'll just recount
it for you. A $10 million prize given by the Ansari family to the X Prize--through the
X Prize Foundation, to the first team to launch a reusable spacecraft into space twice in
three weeks with a human payload coming back alive, okay? The premise was we're going to
unstick the stuck space program because NASA keeps launching crappy space shuttles into
space that don't make any sense, okay? That's the premise. So, here's what happened. My
amateur sleuthing, here's what happened. Twenty seven teams entered the Ansari X Prize. Of
the 27 teams, a third of them are now out of business, two-thirds of them minus one
are doing government and principally university contracts which begs the question about why
they didn't just do that in the first place, and the winner, the winner was going to win
this contest anyway, Burt Rutan backed by Paul Allen. Burt had 20 years of experience
building private spaceships. He was so far ahead of everybody else in the rest of the
world, and backed by a billionaire who's prepared to fund it to the tune of at least $25 million
to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize, which is, as we know, a fundamentally irrational
choice to make. So, tell me this, who won the Ansari X Prize? I'll take opinions, anyone?
The X Prize Foundation won the X Prize, right? It formed an actual thing. It's good that
they got a $150 million worth of free press from it and it highlights probably the most
important point I can make for you, which is the game always favors its creator. No
matter what game you're playing, the house always wins. The deck is absolutely stacked
together. I'm using metaphors, they're all point--they all point back to a fundamental
truism. There is no way to beat the house long term. No, no way. So you have the choice
in a more gamefied world of either being the house or being played. Those are your choices.
But there's no ambiguity here. The sooner you build gamefied experiences, the sooner
you get to, you know, taking your cut, because it's ultimately the best business in the world
to be in. Two people or multiple people battle it out and you get a cut of everything that
happens. You might at Google be familiar with that as a premise. So, let me summarize some
of the--I'll summarize some of the main things that we talked about today then we can do
some Q&A. So, the first important takeaway; fun and theme are not correlated. We can merge
fun and work, you know, with games by using gamefication and game thinking, that line
is not so bright in red. Status is probably the most important motivator that you can
deliver to users. Cash is really--should be far down on your list of things to give away
unless you really love to give away your cash. The gamefication loop is a great guide, points
in the middle, game mechanics surround the outside; badges, level, challenges, awards,
leaderboards. Fun is a new metric. Engagement is a new metric. And games fundamentally favor
their creators. So, I'm really, really interested in hearing your questions and I will lay out
for you in advance that there are three questions I get asked at almost single talk that I give
and so I am keeping a leaderboard in my head of how well Team Goggle correctly anticipates
those questions. Yes? >> How did Griefers fit into this picture?
For instance... >> ZICHERMAN: Griefers. Yes, go ahead.
>> ...a lot of the corporate stuff you talked about was straight with the corporation so
you think the next step might be more social. But then, when you look at Xbox Live, you
know, you see the obvious problems with the little design social systems.
>> ZICHERMAN: So, I'm going to rephrase your question because there were a couple of questions
in there. So, I think the biggest question that you're asking is, can you create a social
experience that's like fundamentally corporate but also social? And are there--what are some
of the pitfalls of building an experience like that? So, one of the things that happens
anytime you build a social interaction platform of any kind is you get unintended user behavior.
Users do things that you don't want them to do. Users do things that are not necessarily
on your pathway of, you know, design concept so you want your users to be there happily
talking about, you know, Google Checkout. And they come, and some of them happily talk
about Google Checkout, and some of them like start talking about neo-Nazis, right? And
you're like, "Okay, it's unexpected thing but, you know, what are we supposed to do
about it?" Or, you know, they're like obstructionists that make the experience negative or obstructionists
that make the experience negative for other people. So, there is no substitute for good
moderation. You know, in a--I gave a keynote shortly after the world financial meltdown
that was actually on the subject of how if a game designer had been in charge of the
Federal Reserve how the outcome would have been different for the meltdown. And one of
the most fundamental things that game designers do not do is they do not ever think that people
will not try to game the system. They begin with a fundamental assumption that, "If what
I build is valuable," and there's always that "if," but, "If what I build is valuable, people
will attempt to get whatever they can out of it by doing as little as possible," right?
That's the basic tension that game designers believe exist in all these systems so we're
never naive about that. We often make mistakes but we're never naive about that. So the right
answer to that, it's a broad omnibus answer but it basically means expect the worst, expect
the unexpected, and think about things like a game designer would. So, any game design
community has CisOps, right, who are often promoted users who demonstrated some clarity
and then some system of command that allows most importantly the game to turn transactions
back at will that--which is really super important. So in the real world outside of games, normally
like when somebody defraud somebody else you got to go to court, you have to seek some
third party remedy for that. In the world inside of games, with the right terms of service,
the remedy is tell this, you know, the CisOp notices either it's algorithmic or human or
a complaint. Somebody says, "Oh, that's not the right kind of interaction, that person's
misbehaving. They've stolen something. Something's weird. They are able to pause/play, read the
log, decide what to do in, like, a couple of minutes. Pause/play, read the log, decide
what to do, take money out of someone's pocket, put money back into somebody else's pocket,
ban a person, change their status, and the game continues, right? It's autocratic. It's
somewhat dictatorial. But it is necessary for the, in this context, necessary for the
effective functioning of most of all to user experiences so you need to consider that in
your design, if it gets big enough anyway. More questions? There can't only be--oh, yes.
Please use the microphone. >> So we just went through our annual performance
review cycle a few weeks ago. And when you were talking about that system where you're
in the middle and then you see the two people above and below, what would it take to move
up? I'm just thinking, "Wow," you know, "This would be really useful during performance
review." Because... >> ZICHERMAN: Oh, yeah.
>> ...it's really unclear, you know, what it takes, you know, to move up or whatever
and I was wondering, you know, how would you run performance reviews as a game?
>> ZICHERMAN: It's a great question. I love the put on the spot game design questions
and I'm going to be like, "All right, so here's what I do." No. So, actually, HR is a huge
piece of the--I think the next big frontier of gamification. Sales teams have been using
basic game concepts since the beginning, right? They've often--if any of you who have worked
with a sales team, you've seen the leaderboard up on the wall. They've been doing that forever.
Or, like, non-profits for their donation thing, you know, like where they show a thermometer
like with the number filling up? That's a kind of like sort of status meter score health
meter, that you might use. So some of these mechanics have been imported with sales teams
for a long time but they haven't really seen distribution beyond sales teams but there's
an increasing chorus of people playing with ideas. So one idea that wasn't implemented
super well but people kind of liked on the HR side was a game that the guys called Seriosity
Build which was a--it was an email game and basically the premise was you had to put a
certain amount of virtual currency behind every email you sent and the amount of virtual
currency you put behind it demonstrated how important the email was. So the recipient--the
recipient could sort of score their inbox based on how intently you really wanted them
to read their email, right? Now, it was overly convoluted. It didn't work quite the right
way. The design wasn't perfect. But there's a germ of a really interesting idea in there,
right, which is using a virtual economy to signal like intent one way or the other and
I think probably for HR, and certainly for performance reviews, the biggest thing that
I would do is I would expose the XP system of reviews. So, do you all know what I mean
by XP? XP is experience points. It's a point system that generally is revealed as going
up continuously. It never goes down. It can be reset periodically according to calendars
but it pretty much always goes up and you get XP for all kinds of activities in the
world. But XP is not redeemable. You can't turn XP into stuff. It's like experience points.
And you've seen it in Xbox if you play Xbox Live. You've seen it in LinkedIn, that bar
that fills in that says your profile is 33% complete is a type of XP, okay? So what I
would do as a test is I would expose the actual process for getting a raise and making an
XP bar that everybody could just see on your, like, personal homepage. "Here's your XP,
here's your distance to next race," right, "and you got to keep doing the things." You
know, "Here are the challenges and quests you need to follow. You got to keep doing
these things to get to your next level," right, and at least demarcate the next level. So,
you know, and the other cool part about XP is usually those bars never actually fully
fill up, like you could never--right? You never get to--it's sort of--it's a logarithmic
project, you know, projection so it keeps getting, you know, closer and closer to, you
know, vertical but it never quite gets there so you can kind of do a lot with that. But
that would be my main--my first main hack would be the test that in performance reviews.
And what effect would an XP bar have on people's behavior just if it was on their homepage
everyday? Maybe, you know, you logged into your homepage and that was the first thing
you saw is how far away you are from your next race. Do you have a question? Yeah?
>> Yeah, I'm just going to ask about the engagement power metric you mentioned.
>> ZICHERMAN: Yeah. >> And if you thought about what it might
look like. Then maybe you can just repeat the question since I didn't go up there.
>> ZICHERMAN: Sure. What does the engagement power metric look like that I've described?
>> Yeah, and it's because there are so many different websites.
>> ZICHERMAN: Right, there are so many different ways to think about it. So I've been doing
some preliminary thinking on it. And, you know, I would love to have a dialogue with
people who are involved in that kind of metrics around it. And again, you know, we'll talk
about that at the summit in more detail but basically I think we need to amalgamate a
few different metrics and look at some new ones that track user behavior against some
norm because I think we've been missing some of that normative tracking components which
are kind of important and then there's some elements on the--I know these two things are
already kind of fleshed out of my head. We needed a baseline and we need an amalgamated
metric. And then the other thing that I've been thinking a lot about is we need to start
measuring certain behaviors in core analytics like referrals. Friend invitation should be
a core analytic. It should be in Google Analytics, actually. Like friend invitations, right,
it should be tracked by Google. It's like obviously missing there, right, because it's
important to everybody, right? Okay, just so I wanted--I'm just waiting to see if I'm,
like, the only person. Okay, so friend referrals is a simple example of something, you know,
that tells you. So I think if we pull together some of these things, you know, we can, you
know, we can kind of create some interesting hybridized metric. But we frequently, when
we talk about metrics in gamification frame or point systems we, you know, we frequently
make things opaque for a reason, you know? So I'm not--I think the secondary level to
that is whether it should be transparent or opaque. And, you know, there's lots of justification
for some kind of semi-opaque metric, you know? A good example of that is--another good example
of semi-opaque metric is if I was a building a game to help you lose weight at your local
gym or getting people fit actually. So, broadly speaking, I'm building a game for engagement
in a local gym, right? If I created a linear point system like the old school point system
thinking, I'd have kind of a problem, right, because for me losing 10 pounds or for you
losing 10 pounds are two completely different values, right? Is that--for me, it's a rounding
error, right? For you, it's like a serious weight loss goal. And two--yeah, I actually
do lose like six to seven pounds in water weight TMI. So, you know, so these two things
would mean something different and we may also even be walking into the game with completely
different motivations. I may want to lose weight, you maybe want to bulk up. How can
we all be on the--playing the same--how can we all be in the same experience, right, under
those circumstances? If we use a simple point system that's like measure the number of pounds
you lose. And then on top of all of that is the privacy question, right, which is how
would people feel if their actual weight loss was on a like publicly viewable board in a
gym, right? So, these things all point to, if I give you a lot of evidence to support
this idea, you don't actually need all of this evidence to support the idea of an opaque
point system in which the game designer takes care of all that and just produces one magic
number. And the one magic number is, you know, where you're at against your goal and that's
all you need to know. And if you believe that the system is honest, if you believe that
the game designer knows what they're doing and you see some proof of that early on, you
buy into that point system and you just say, "Oh that makes sense." More questions? Yeah?
>> I have another question. >> ZICHERMAN: Go ahead.
>> I have a question. So when I go to play a game, I am not a member of the game, so
how would I be in the leaderboard or how would that work?
>> ZICHERMAN: So, the early days of any game are supper, super important. The term that
we use in games to describe the first minute or so that a user plays with us is called
"on-boarding," which is a term you may have heard before, and the game view of on-boarding
is totally different from the Web view of on-boarding. So on the Web view of on-boarding,
a user might be coming from anywhere and we don't really know what they want to do so
we're going to drop them on a page which gives them 8 or 10 standards, 8 or 10 options, right?
Google.com is in a notable exception to this rule, but most websites, when you land on
them, there are 8 to 10 options of what you could do, right, log in, register now, tell
a friend, follow us on Twitter, find out more, read about us, like, press section. So, a
game designer would never, ever, ever, ever, ever do that ever. There is one experience.
It is the on-boarding experience for the game. It's what we used to call a tutorial level
but now we just call it level one. And the user is dropped into the game experience,
and I'll give you the basic rhythm of it right now, the user is dropped into a game experience
knowing--and the designer knows full well that they're going to lose a whole bunch of
people in the funnel, right, but that's not the point, so usually this is what the rhythm
looks--the pattern looks like now. "Welcome, do this simple challenge," like any idiot
can do, right? "Do this simple challenge. Yey. Okay, here's another one. Can you do
it? Cool. Here's one more. Can you do it? Yey. Register now," right? And then, most
importantly, invite friends, right? That's the rhythm that's if you deconstruct the,
you know, if you deconstruct the first minute of most successful games they look like that.
So, in the olden days we dropped you on an option that said, "Start, play a tutorial
level," now we just make that level one. You're tightly boxed in as a user. You don't even
know that you're tightly boxed in but you're really tightly boxed in in that first minute
of the game. And some of the core things that we've unpacked is you first get a reward,
"Yey," before you're asked to register, and the registration step is the one that you
use to claim the reward, right? So the site is advancing value to the user before the
registration occurs and it uses that value to get the registration to occur which is
really backwards, right, from the way most Web design is done. So, that's become--that's
been very, very powerful. And that also in those two, or three, or four steps that we
do in the first couple of minutes, we unveil like we reveal the complexity of the game
in slow steps, right, slowly. "Let me show you a little bit more, oh, a little bit more,
oh, a little bit more, okay, now you're in." One of the--and then there's still some revealing
that goes on, right, leveling up and so on. >> So, we were in conversations recently about
some--about gamification of some areas that aren't necessarily, you know, that are obviously
games. And one of the objections was that this would take away from the value proposition
of what's already there and sort of create this distracting layer of game on top of this
other thing that already had--gives value to users. And...
>> ZICHERMAN: Yes. >> ...it would sort of shift the value to,
"I've got this behavior that I'm--I feel compelled to engage in because I have these innate human
characteristics and all these things." >> ZICHERMAN: Yes.
>> And the argument was that, now I've taken--you've taken away from the original value that we
had. >> ZICHERMAN: Yes.
>> Is there--how do you--what do you say to that objection?
>> ZICHERMAN: That's a great question. So, the question is--I'll rephrase it and...
>> Yeah. >> ZICHERMAN: There's two questions. So, one
of them is, you know, how do you gamify an experience that has intrinsic value already
so you know one thing, and then two, what are the risks of gamifying something that
has intrinsic value, you know, and what happens? So, there's a two part answer for you. My
favorite allegory around this is Jet Blue. You know, when Jet Blue Airlines launched,
it did not have a frequent flyer program. They said, "We don't need one. We are a new
kind of airline. Our planes are new and clean. Our employees are happy. We fly where you
want to. We give you free TV and snacks. We do not need a frequent flyer program. That's
what crappy old airlines use as a crutch. Our core product, our intrinsic product is
good, enough." How long did that last? One year, approximately, right? And they are super,
super not invented here like, that's why they were able to go for a whole year, you know?
The reality is sometimes, and I think it happens in almost every commoditized market, the game
subsumes the intrinsic action--activity. It just eats it because it's more important.
It's more compelling. As everything becomes more of a commodity, the loyalty becomes the
actual end user product. It's what the user is engaging with, this loyalty program, not
the underlying product. We used to have brand marketing to do that, right, that was the
other lever that companies could use. But today, it's really hard to get that message
through the users so increasingly, loyalty becomes important. So that's one aspect of
it. The other aspect of it is a little bit scarier, which is what's called replacement.
So, I did a weird undergrad. My undergraduate was the psychology of gifted children and
their social-emotional affect. And so, one of the things that's been in the literature
of gifted kids for a long time is replacement and here's replacement in a nutshell. You,
intrinsically, are a great piano player, Chris. You play piano. You just start playing piano.
There's just one around, you start playing. You love it. You're playing music. You're
playing all the time. And your parent's decide that you're going to do competitive piano.
So, now they introduce competitive piano playing to you. You start going to competitions. You're
winning. It's cool. You're getting prizes. You're getting rewards. You're winning and
then if we withdraw the reward, right, we withdraw the prizes and withdraw the reward,
Chris will stop playing piano, full stop. He stops playing the underlying intrinsic
behavior that he's doing before we ever came along with our fruit cocktail reward program,
right, he just did it because he loved it. What replacement is, it's a very, very clear
and it happens almost 100% of the time, if you replace intrinsic motivation with extrinsic
rewards and you extinguish the extrinsic reward then the underlying behavior is also extinguished.
Once replaced, intrinsic motivation rarely comes back, that's the basic thing. So, it
leaves you in a bit of a dilemma, which is you're facing markets that are basically going
to extrinsic rewards everywhere, that's effectively what's happening. And I don't think and I
know it's controversial. I just gave a talk on gamification for non-profits like last
week in New York at this great meet up for non-profits and I was like, "I hate to be
a harbinger of doom for you here but let me break it down, this is an opportunity rather
than a threat, but intrinsic motivation is over. It's over. Depending on consumer's intrinsic
motivation to take actions for you as a brand is over. The sooner you accept that, the better
you will be. We can no longer depend on it." In fact, it begs the question of whether or
not there is an intrinsic versus extrinsic rewards system anymore at all, right? Our
private lives are now public. Our social media presence is omnipresent. It follows us around
all the time. Is there an internal life for people? I don't even know anymore. But here's
what I do know, every vertical will become--the rewards will become externalized and you'll
need to find a good external rewards system to compensate. Yeah?
>> How do you apply that to a business context? So, I've got a deal with a material that's
listed as A, B, C and D and I can't get a partner to commit so I introduce extrinsic
value E. I mean at what point are you crafting an unsustainable relationship? Like you have
six months of exclusivity but six months, you know, in month seven, are you still going
to be happy with the deal? >> ZICHERMAN: Right. So the question is, how
do you make that sustainable? >> Yes.
>> ZICHERMAN: So, I'll tell you kind of a--I don't know your personal situation but I'll
share a story. So, from the time that--and maybe it's a very personal situation, but
we can talk about it later. So, from the time when United first unveiled Mileage Plus in
1981 a week after American, until 2007, the top level you could achieve in mileage plus
was one million mile flyer, that was the max level you could achieve. And of course, that
seemed insane in 1981. "A million miles. Oh, my god. How many people would ever get to
a million miles? That's crazy." So the designers didn't design passed a million miles. What
happened when users reached to a million miles? They stopped playing because it stopped being
fun. There was no more reward to win. They got lifetime gold status, right? There was
just nothing to get out of the level past a million. Using game term, strict game terminology,
that was the boss level of the game. They beat the boss level. Once they beat the boss
level, the game's not that much fun anymore, right? So, three, four years ago, United added
additional tiers beyond a million; two million, three million. They're not necessarily thoughtful
but they are interesting because they point to a--the fact that you have to constantly
be thinking about the game system and constantly extending and redesigning it. I don't think
that there is a--there is definitely not a magic like sprinkle game sauce on something
to make it taste good. There is no like, you know, there is no like quick answer where
you can like just drop in one game mechanic and all of a sudden, "Man, this thing that
wasn't working before now really hums," you know? That isn't the case. These are long
term engagement systems that we're building and they will require care and nurturing.
One of my big predictions, and then I think we got to wrap up, but one of my big predictions
is that I think every company will have a chief engagement officer working on their
staff, whose a different kind of discipline. It's not quite marketing. It's about engagement,
whose responsibilities, you know, encompass all the different things that we've talked
about. So, that could be you, for you personal problem. Thank you all very much. If you want
to continue the dialogue with me, I'm on Twitter. I'm @gzicherm. The blog is Gamification.Co
and, you know, feel free to chat with me anytime. Thank you.