Ask YC: Where to find practical guide on gamifying?

[pepeto]

Do you have insights on where i can find tutorials, step by step, formulas, applicable concepts?

I want to gamify my startup, but i can't find good resources. Most of the How to" are vague and at concept-level, rather than specific steps. I googled this question I have been on the wikipedia for gamification I have most of the famous books on gamification

Nowhere in those i can find how many levels to have, on what does it depend. How many points between each level couple, formulas for knowing which task brings how much points etc

[vitovito]

You can't find those answers because there aren't any.

There aren't any answers because it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter how many levels you have, nor how many points things are assigned. There aren't any formulas for how they add up, either, because either they add up, or they don't.

Gamification isn't something you install, add some hooks in at appropriate points, and magically have user engagement. It's not logging.

It's applied psychology.

There aren't answers to how many levels you have because levels are shorthand for recognition of accomplishment. Points are proxies for the player's sense of self-worth. How do you define accomplishment in your system? What are reasonable, logical, or emotionally meaningful ways to break that up? How do you break that down into learnable tasks and efforts within those systems?

Those aren't rhetorical questions. I'm asking you those questions. The first two establish your levels, the third establishes things that are worth points. Maybe you earn points and those let you progress through levels. Maybe they're independent. It's whatever makes sense for incentivizing your system.

I ran some design workshops a while back, and one of them was on applied gamification. Out of five or six groups of 2-3 designer/developers, only one really "got" it, and applied game mechanics in a way that might actually be meaningful to users.

The rest applied it superficially and if they had been real products, they would have failed.

http://vi.to/workshop/20100426/ has my write-up of the workshop and the exercise they did, and http://vi.to/gmnotes has my notes, including the handouts and my references. I'd start with those.

Oh, and if one of the "famous books on gamification" is the O'Reilly one, I'd forget everything you read there. That book is atrocious. http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/a-quick-buck-by-cop... is a good example of some of the negative coverage it received, and I never recommend it. Read books by psychologists, by people who have designed and launched video games, and by academics who do actual research and testing of their theories.

[pepeto]

Nice answer. I have things to say: - there are situations that number of levels matter - dependecies is one reason. There must be others, why is 51 the highest in WOW? I am looking for a source that can point all the reasons. - how many points do you award each task? Surely this matters, but what do i benchmark those to? Time it takes to complete? Mix of time, complexitity, scarcity, x y z? What are possible x y z, and in what proportions do i mix them? - books are "Gamification by Design" by Gabe Zichermann (biggest proponent), "Reality is Broken" by Jane McGonigal, Also "Flow", "Drive" and a couple more. All of those seem too theoretical, and when i sit to create something, i cant put numbers to the theories.

[vitovito]

The number of levels doesn't matter, because players don't generally play (or decide to not play) games because one has more or fewer levels than another. Levels are shorthand for accomplishment. Level 51 is the highest in WoW because that's how much content and accomplishment they could determine. It's entirely arbitrary based on your application.

All of the reasons are entirely arbitrary based on your application. It doesn't matter because they are manifestations of psychological principles. You could have levels, or you could have ducks. You could have points, or you could have dogs. Every time you hit Submit in your app you get a dog, and every six dogs you get a parrot, and every three parrots you get a duck, and you need to email that duck to support@yourapp to unlock a new feature, or you can paint that duck a particular color and save it in your right sidebar, but you can't do both.

It doesn't matter, because it's not a recipe or a formula. They are representations of attributes to poke a person's psychology to tell them they are making progress (dogs to parrots), to reassure them (ducks being emailed), to give them investment (ducks being painted), etc.

You need to understand the psychological principles involved before any of it will make sense. The questions you're asking have no answers because they're ultimately nonsensical questions.

Gabe Zichermann's book is crap, and maybe that's why this doesn't make sense to you. None of those books you listed are by psychologists, mainstream video game designers, or research academics.

[kranner]

I've found 'Game Frame' (http://www.amazon.com/Game-Frame-Using-Strategy-Success/dp/1...) to be a nice book, but as you say it's pretty high-level and goes only as far as providing food for thought.

[brudgers]

Cousera in August from Penn:

https://www.coursera.org/#course/gamification

[hmsimha]

This is about halfway through right now and I'm actually getting much more enjoyment out of this course than I originally expected. Really makes you think about how elements from gamification can improve design and customer engagement.

[pepeto]

God idea for courses! Thanks

[27182818284]

I'd also recommend this course. I didn't take it too seriously, but I did learn a few things from it and it was worth the amount of effort I put into it. For sure.

[kellros]

My opinion is that gamification is like cooking - you don't just to cook - you learn to cook specific things.

I'd suggest you follow the Lean path in applying gamification:

1. Determine what behavior you want to enforce (Measure)

2. Determine how you will enforce this behavior (Plan)

3. Build the functionality required for the above (Build)

You should also decide where to draw the line; i.e. are you building a game or are you gamifying features to enforce certain behaviors.

You should definitely read Jeff Atwood's post on gamification here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/10/the-gamification.ht...

Here are some good examples of gamification:

http://www.stackoverflow.com/

http://www.codeschool.com/

http://tryruby.org/levels/1/challenges/0

[pepeto]

Thanks, i still can not answer the very first practical question: How many player-levels should there be?

[mapt]

How on earth is that the very first practical question?

You should be asking yourself questions like 'What do I want to influence the user to do more of', and 'What's in it for them', and 'Is it worth the added complexity' and 'What ways are the most fun for them to start thinking of the things we want them to do as accomplishments'.

Talk of levels is like asking how many seats there should be on an airplane in 1900. Yeah, it might be a trivial consideration at some point in the distant future that will color people's impressions, but the practical questions are how the hell you push something through the air in a controlled, sustained fashion. Seats are irrelevant to the big questions, and they don't even have to be relevant in an actual implementation of cargo planes - the 'levels' abstraction isn't always a useful one in making things more fun.

Based on what I've seen, 'gamification' as business topic appears to be rife with cargo-cultism. Even the best implementations don't add a ton to the experience, because there's no big incentives to work towards, no story to unlock or benefit to be had.

On StackExchange I have an indication of how prominent I am that I can show off to other people and potential employers, in addition to the small-scale competition to help people solve their problems. On Steam, badges from most games are little more than a funny phrase shoved in my face for five seconds unexpectedly. As Foursquare Mayor of my local chinese Restaurant, I get nothing.

To discuss this more, we would need more specifics of your startup.

[kkoppenhaver]

Found this that you might be interested in: http://blog.mojotech.com/post/49179410311/eight-ways-to-gami...