Competency and complacency; where do we draw the line?
Designing games, and more specifically gamified experiences, requires considerations about the type of reinforcement and feedback that the player is given, as well as how and when. Too much or too little and they may lose interest. Ideally, it is about balancing the two to keep the player challenged and happy. To begin, let us think about how people are motivated and engaged.
So, you've created a game and you have your first player. At this point, you hope that you will be able to keep them, that they will continue to come back; and if you're lucky, they will share news of their wonderful experience to their friends, and other inhabitants of the Internet. If you extend this to your commercial gamified application, this will be your pass to success. However, for now, let's take a few steps back and think about how we can achieve that.
Let us consider the types of reinforcement and feedback that exist. For example, some focus on the negatives and others on the positives of an experience. Either way has proven successful, but ultimately it comes down to how you want your player to feel. Having a player avoid something because it results in a negative outcome, or avoid something to optimize the positive outcomes, can lead down different paths in terms of a player's experience.
Examples of feedback and reinforcement
Motivation can be thought of as why we do what we do. Our motivation for engaging with anything is associated with some sort of stimuli that might include a general desire to do so or the need to obtain a reward such as food or money. For instance, let us consider why you are motivated (if at all) to read this book. In some cases, it can determine whether we are short or long-term adopters of anything, from playing a game to buying a new phone.
It does not necessarily imply that we are motivated to do something because we want to; it may be because we are rewarded for doing something and as a result this is our source for motivation. Both are important in understanding how to develop meaningful interactions. For example, if an individual is motivated to learn mathematics by external rewards such as a gold star for doing well on a test, their internal desire is less stimulated with the task and more by the reward. Therefore, how much they understand and retain might not be so great as if they were to be genuinely interested.
Understanding how motivation is triggered and stimulated not only provides a necessary grasp of how it occurs, but it also provides insights into how to design in order to trigger and maintain it in a more personal way. Motivation is an important area because it's assumed that identifying triggers and sources of intrinsic motivation will help to identify more meaningful game elements and game mechanics to implement as part of a gamified system. This is with the aim of reducing reliance on extrinsic motivation.
The internal flame for doing...anything
Intrinsic motivation is where an individual's motivation comes from; it's their internal desire to do something for a personal and meaningful reason. If an individual is intrinsically motivated they tend to have a sense of agency in reaching and obtaining their desired goals and as a result are more likely to persist with a task. To understand the different layers that can ultimately affect the level of which intrinsic motivation is likely to occur, we can explore the concept of self-determination theory. It suggests that individuals have three innate needs and that when these three needs are satisfies their intrinsic motivation increases. In the context of games, these three innate needs are:
- Competency: How much the game and its associated tasks allow for a sense of accomplishment or mastery?
- Relatedness: How much does the game allow for being connected or related with others?
- Autonomy: How much the game provide choice over tasks and goals, and sustain the ability to feel a sense of control, as opposed to being controlled by feedback?
If rewards are not used appropriately within the context and value, it can affect their overall motivation to engage with an application or game. If the reward is perceived as praise (such as indicating a level of competency), the reward is likely to increase their intrinsic motivation. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if they perceive that the reward is a form of bribery (for example, to avoid a certain consequence), then it is more likely that an individual will perceive this as compromising their self-determination. The essence of the self-determination theory is built on the notion of meaningful rewards and encouraging intrinsic motivation.
Read this and you'll get candies
In contrast to intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation occurs when there are external factors present that influence an individual's behavior. The use of external rewards is what stimulates an individual's extrinsic motivation. If individuals, who are primarily extrinsically motivated, do not receive external rewards for their participation, their interest will eventually decline. Intrinsic motivation individuals appeal more to meaningful feedback, whereas extrinsic motivation individuals are more enticed by the offer of external rewards.
The implementation of external rewards is effective in facilitating extrinsic motivation, but at the expense of intrinsic motivation. To facilitate and promote intrinsic motivation within individuals, there must be less of a focus on extrinsic rewards. While they can be effective at motivating individuals initially, their use cannot be the main trigger of motivations within individuals as this ultimately affects their intrinsic motivation and personal connection to the task, or application that they are interacting with. In this case, the focus needs to be on the intrinsic motivation with the aim of reducing reliance on external rewards that promote extrinsic motivation, in order to encourage intrinsic motivation within individuals. This will not extend the longevity of a gamified application, but it will also reduce negative effects on the individual's self-determination and intrinsic motivation. Unfortunately, there are no candies here, but hopefully you learnt something!
A little bit of conditioning to control user behavior
We cannot understand feedback and reward schedules in games until we have a better grasp on the idea of conditioning. Long ago, psychologists examined how we could develop conditioned responses based on various stimuli. It is important to know these things when our aim is to increase particular behavior or even decrease it.
Classical conditioning
In classical conditioning, a Conditional Stimulus (CS) is initially a neutral stimulus. Think of something like church bells. However, when it is repeatedly paired with an Unconditioned Stimulus (UCS), the CS will come to elicit a Conditioned Response (CR). So, every time that you hear the bells you might remember that it's time to go to lunch at your grandparent's house, and as a result, you begin to salivate because you know you're about to eat. In a standard conditioning procedure, the UCS always follows the CS and the UCS never occurs without the CS.
Repeating the new pairings of the CS and UCS, the CS prohibits the CR from occurring. Thus the CS can be understood to control the CR. Much like our own example, in a well-known experiment, Ivan Pavlov sounded a bell (CS) just before he gave a dog some food (UCS), and after several pairings the bell caused the dog to salivate (CR).
Operant conditioning
The operant conditioning differs from the classical conditioning because it involves applying reinforcement (either positive or negative) or punishment (either positive or negative) after a behavior/response. For example, take the B.F Skinner's infamous rat example, rats really had no reason to pull the lever, except for the fact that when they did, they got some food. Therefore, the rats were rewarded for pulling the lever. However, if the food is removed the rats would still continue to pull the lever with the expectation that the food would come again; however if this behavior would become extinct if no food comes out for a long period of time. The other main difference with the operant and classic conditioning is that operant conditioning requires a participant to be actively involved in the process rather than passive. For example, if a child in a classroom behaves appropriately, they will get class points, if they don't, they get punished (for example, detention or time out). Of course this concept is more more deeper than we have time for, but I encourage you to research this topic in more detail on your own, as it relates closely to how players are rewarded when it comes to gamified applications.
Avoid spoiling the player
If we have learnt anything from the previous sections, research (and sometimes common sense) has demonstrated that rewarding the player too much can have side effects such as creating a dependency or reliance on being rewarded. For a moment, let's imagine that you do not want to eat your vegetables. So, as a reward your mother will give you a piece of chocolate if you finish them. This happens continuously until you realize that you want more chocolate. One piece of chocolate is not enough for eating these disgusting vegetables. Therefore, your mother gives you two pieces of chocolate...and so the cycle continues. At what point on this reward merry-go-round do we stop? Until we reach a block of chocolate? Two blocks? It begins to create a dependency, which begins to reduce in satisfaction unless somehow its novelty is renewed with greater rewards. In this way, rewarding a player can be futile in that it provides only a momentary distraction from the issue - like not eating your vegetables.
Let's consider the opposite, such as when you really enjoy eating vegetables. In this case, your mother continues to give you a piece of chocolate every time that you eat them all. This happens again, and again. Ultimately, your mother is rewarding you for something that you already enjoy doing and as a result, you may actually begin to lose interest in it. A big deal was made over something that was unnecessary. This is called overjustifcation and can be just as damaging as providing too many rewards.
Finding a balance in providing rewards to a player can be achieved by implementing a reward schedule. A reward schedule can be thought of as an interval timer for when rewards are given to a player. Perhaps early on, the player receives a reward each time they learn a new concept, or achieve something note-worthy. Then, as the player becomes more competent, the time between rewards is increased. By doing this, we are reducing the chances that the player becomes reliant on obtaining rewards.
