Gamificashit

This week, I'm trying something a little different: an essay on my thoughts around the missed opportunities of gamification, featuring the most provocative name I could think of.

The first time I encountered gamification was in college, where I tried Duolingo and Tinder for the first time. Both apps employ some type of gamification to make their products more engaging (and addicting). Duolingo uses badges, streaks, pathways, points, and progress bars to make you feel like you're "leveling up". Tinder uses more of a social game approach, keeping users engaged by boosting their egos with "It's a Match!" notifications, not to mention the heart-shaped block of cheese promised at the end of the maze.

I hate both of these approaches. They reduce games to their most surface-level representations. The goal of gamification in these apps is pure engagement, not to make the product better at delivering on what they promise. They also keep things isolated within the app itself. If you're obsessing over your Duolingo streak, you're not necessarily learning a new language, you're just getting really good at doing Duolingo lessons.

That isn't to say that I hate gamification in general, I just think that both of these approaches fail to capitalize on what truly makes games engaging. The majority of people I know who play games don't do so to rack up a bunch of badges or even to stroke their own egos, they play because the process of achieving mastery over a system is incredibly satisfying. That mastery can then be brought over into other games in the genre, as games are an ever-evolving art form. Developers are constantly taking design decisions from other games and trying to riff on them, making skills in one game applicable in future ones. The time you spend mastering one game can likely be applied to other games in the future.

Successful games find ways of taking simple concepts and layering them to create deep systems which are easy to pick up and difficult to master.

Attempts at gamification often substitute surface-level dopamine drips for actual growth and mastery over a domain. They're more concerned with making a system which is easy to use and keep things "within the system". This is antithetical to game mastery, where players are encouraged to bring skills across games. In fact, much of game marketing relies on "if you liked that game, you'll love ours!"

How can we improve? Let's take a look at a couple of game design techniques which help keep players engaged and see how we might use these same techniques in product development.

Strava is a workout logging app, where you can track and post your workouts for the world to see. Its main goal is to turn workouts which make you harder, better, faster, and stronger into a competition for the more competitive among its users. It does this in a few ways:

• Your workout history is visible, allowing you (and others) to see your ups and downs over time as a cohesive whole and applying pressure to individuals in a friend group to one-up each other or just hold you accountable if you're in training.
• A global record board for workouts and sections of workouts which can be challenged by other users. If you run a particular stretch of a run faster than everyone else, you're the king of that stretch...until someone else comes and takes the crown (called "Strava segment sniping").
• A notification system which alerts friends and followers of your exploits and achievements, prompting them to get up and respond in kind.
• Strava can track lots of different kinds of workouts, so when you get really into swimming for a few months, that sticks around as part of your overall story.

These features are more than just a surface-level competition. They encourage social engagement with the system and focus more on the individual and their overall fitness. Critically, they also force engagement with the world outside of the app. You can't actually do your workout in the app, you're just logging what you've done out there in the real world.

Now let's look at how games employ these same techniques.

• Mario Odyssey's "Luigi's Balloon World" allows players to hide balloons in the world. The "placing" player starts at a given location and then, under the pressure of a timer, has to place a balloon in a spot which is as difficult to reach as possible. Other players are then given the chance to start at that same location with that same time limit and try and reach the balloon. The name of the game is to placea balloon where no other player can find/reach it, proving the placer's mastery over 3D platforming mechanics.
• Neon White hides its final challenge, the coveted Red Medals until the player has beaten the course in a time limit set by the developers. Most players wouldn't even know these exist if they didn't read about them online or take achieving the fastest possible time as a personal challenge. As Mark Brown explains in his video on the game, this kind of system can serve as a gentle introduction to the much larger world of speedrunning.

Both examples here rely on the player's desire to improve and display their own mastery over the games' systems. Take a look at VideoGameDunkey's video on Luigi's Balloon World to get a sense of how ridiculous this kind of competitive play can get and this TikTok on Strava Sniping to see how it's translated into real-world competition.

Dunkey's been honing his platforming skills his entire life, bringing his experience playing the previous Mario games into that competition. Likewise, each Strava workout doesn't exist in a vacuum, that strength feeds into an athlete's overall health and fitness.

The pressure of competing on a global (or even small community-theatre-sized) stage is not going to be motivational for all players, though. Players with little-to-no experience within the genre may feel discouraged by leaderboards which they have no hope of placing on in the near-future.

One solution is to roll over leaderboards at a set cadence. For example, Kaggle keeps a global leaderboard for their machine learning challenges, but the board is cleared every so often, so no one stays on top forever.

Another is to keep things between friends. Competing within the safer confines of a friend group can be more motivating than competing with strangers. It can become a topic of conversation and a running social activity within your friend group, as proved by the massive popularity of fantasy sports leagues.

But for those who aren't driven by extrinsic rewards, a leaderboard can feel more daunting than motivating. What can we do about that?

"Cozy" games, which prioritize low-stakes exploration, experimentation, routines, and personal system development are becoming a huge part of the industry without so much as a whiff of player vs. player (PvP) competition involved. Lets look at games like Animal Crossing, The Sims, and Dwarf Fortress and see how their systems keep players engaged without a single leaderboard among them.

In each of the games above, the focus is on letting players experiment and set their own goals. Once a player has a basic grasp of the game's underlying systems, they're encouraged to ask themselves "I wonder if I can do X". The point is not for the player to prove their mastery to other players or to the game itself, but to build stuff and then share that stuff with other players.

In his Masterclass course, game designer Will Wright discusses how his philosophy of making "toys" for players translates into gameplay. He explores a concept with prototypes and lots of user testing, then combines the successful concepts into a larger system. The results of this approach can be seen in games like Sim City, The Sims, and Spore. People who play these games love to tinker with the games' systems, often recreating their own cities or themselves and exploring possible futures.

Likewise, games like Dwarf Fortress offer an emergent gameplay space, where the staggering complexity of the underlying simulation can lead to disastrous and comical results.

They encourage sharing the results too. In that Masterclass course, Wright discusses how, during the early days of The Sims, the team found that players would take screenshots of their sims and combine them into short-form comics, telling stories with their creations and posting them online. They ended up implementing this as a full feature in the game in a move not dissimilar to paving a desire path.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons includes a similar built-in "sharing" feature where players can invite others to their island so they can show off their designs. Some have even found themselves picking fruit with Elijah Wood.

The point is, these types of games let players experiment, be creative, and achieve the millennial dream of home ownership without the pressures of the real-world weighing down their decisions. They provide low-stakes laboratories for players to run simulations, then share what they build and the lessons they learn with others.

We can pull some of these concepts into our products. "Paper Trading" systems let users practice trading without the risks of real investment and LLMs have opened the doors to better preparation for debate or improving bedside manner. VR technology has made its way into vocational training schools and pilots regularly train on massive simulators. These aren't just for professionals, though. Even a layman can get their hands on a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator and experience a bit of what it's like to sit in the cockpit of an AirBus.

You may disagree that these are examples of gamification, since they're more concerned with lowering risk than the usual goal of driving engagement...and you'd have a point. These are more like pure simulations and you may not want to build a simulator, but let's take a quick look at how one might take this concept and push it a little further.

When we play any game, we participate in a loop of planning and acting. If you're locked in a chess battle, you're not just making the move you think is best in the moment, you plan out several moves in advance. You have a goal and you strategize around it.

In more open-ended games, there might not be an explicit goal handed to you, but you likely still create a goal for yourself, like finally affording that golden toilet that your sim-self so rightly deserves. Products can support this kind of planning/doing loop by letting users set their own goals within the product, then providing a place to plan potential pathways for realizing results. There's an opportunity here to give users access to low-stakes experimentation that makes these types of games so enjoyable to spend time with, before committing to a plan of action. Unlike pure simulation products, the user can have more agency over their goals, as long as the product supports it.

The social aspects of these games have potential too. Players love to pull stories out of their experiences. They want to show off the things they've built and the goals they've achieved along the way. An app might make rolling that story up from a user's actions easy, as long as the user is in control of the story they want to tell.

So, that's my spiel. Games have so much they can teach us about how to build engaging experiences. We can plunder the chests of game design and, hopefully, find a few malleable golden nuggets to repurpose into helpful product features for ourselves and the people around us.

This was quite a departure from my regular posts, but I've been doing some planning for larger projects and this fit in nicely with those, so I hope it was at least somewhat interesting.

See you next week!