Intro

What's the goal of adding leaderboards, achievements, and intricate progression systems to products drowning in tech debt? Why would anyone enroll in a loyalty program? How do you bridge the gap between push notifications and meaningful engagement?

Gamification, or "applying game mechanics to non-game contexts" can be an answer to these questions, but it can also lead to slow-moving, poisonous disasters that take users off a product and plunge them into the hands of a competitor's leaner, sleeker, less "gamified" app. How do you know when gamification will accomplish the former, or the latter?

A short bio

I am a product design consultant working on fintech apps, and had the opportunity to work on loyalty programs, compliance quizzes, card games integrated in PFM features, achievements, and rewards. I believe that gamification is not a band-aid for the problem of getting users to stick around, but an opportunity to gain meaningful, medium-term engagement with people who are keen on learning new systems.

Besides that, I am a former gamer. Former, because I took a break, not because I gave up. Game design is, to this day, intriguing and a source of continuous improvement. To create this report, I delved into a myriad of useful resources, which I'll provide in the last chapter, and analyzed 30+ different mobile products that employ gamification tactics. To complement my research, I have a wealth of experience with dozens of single-player video games, with the most notable examples being: Skyrim, Hades, Dishonored, Prey, Fallout, Disco Elysium, Thief, Dark Souls 3, Witcher 3, Sekiro, and many, many more.

If you want to chat about games, or are interested in a more detailed discussion on the topics of this report, email me. Write me on LinkedIn. Schedule a call. We can't have the non-gamers, the WoW addicts, and the patient gamers, waste their time away with half-baked game mechanics in their digital products.

What is a game mechanic?

A mechanic is a rule that defines how a game is meant to be played. A player can break the rules, either by intentional design or by programming mishaps.

Players learn early to take advantage of inconsistencies to maximize a specific pay-off. This "exploit-first" mindset is helpful for designers looking to iterate on their systems, but can be catastrophic when dealing with real-life currency, like when designing a cashback program. Keeping the rules simple is paramount, but it doesn't get us any closer to putting a face to the concept of gamification.

The problem of copy-and-pasting ideas from other apps and games is conflating a mechanic with the visual interface that makes the mechanic accessible and easy to understand. A leaderboard is not a game mechanic; mechanics are:

• if player A earns more XP points than player B, they'll move up in the ranking, simulating the emotions of triumph and domination.
• the first three players move up to the next rank, or earn a badge, simulating social status.
• the last three players are relegated to a worse status, simulating fear of looking bad.

In the same vein, LinkedIn's progress bar, for completing a profile, is not a game mechanic, but a UI element that takes advantage of the Endowment Effect. In the context of a "professional" platform, completing your profile is not even a game because there's no emotion to be experienced; you're completing your profile because you think it will help you land a gig.

The reason interface elements get mistaken for mechanics is simple: "gamification" doesn't have a good enough definition. Saying that gamification is the use of "game mechanics in non-game contexts" is useful for taxonomy, but gets us no closer to a practical definition that explains what can be accomplished with game mechanics, how to know if what the designer created is, in fact, gamification, or how to measure its impact.

What is gamification?

Digital products aim to be pain-killing problem solvers, but most end up as convenient (and sometimes, inconvenient) nice-to-haves. In both cases, products are front-loaded with their value proposition; how can this product solve a problem, a nag, or amplify (or reduce) the impact of an experience. Pragmatism leads the way. The goal of a game is to create a system of interesting decisions; the goal of a pragmatic, digital product is usually the opposite: to funnel the user towards one, or maybe two, ideal decisions.

It's rare that regular non-gamers recognize video game mechanics; the relationship between the idea of a game and what gets borrowed from other "gamified" apps is a cultural one. Streaks, leaderboards, and badges--the unfortunate sons of "borrowed" gamification--are rare in the same video game, and sparse in single-player titles.

The emotional pay-off is the core of the definition. This is: promising a transition from one human value state (rags, zero, stranger, danger) to another (riches, hero, buddy, relief). The goal of this transition is to simulate human emotion.

The danger of front-loading what's meant to be a pragmatic experience with an emotional pay-off is that savvy players will sniff out the greatest opportunities for pay-offs, and, eventually, exploit your system.

Levers of emotional pay-offs

Emotions can be simulated through levers that humans understand subconsciously:

• social status. Tinder and Bumble exist to make their users feel desirable. Because the "game" of swiping is poorly balanced, one can exploit it by re-activating their accounts to boost visibility, and liking indiscriminately to increase the chances of a match.
• empathy through character arcs. This is the core drive behind novels and movies, but it's rarely used to full potential in UX. Duolingo, which we'll talk about more later, is a prime example of inverting the human need to feel close to a fictional character by making Duo (the mascot) easy to hate and annoying.
• learning insights. This is harder to pull off, and easy to ruin, because there's no leaderboard that measures what's going on in the player's mind. Brilliant, in its attempt to gamify access to learning, uses a punitive key system that allows its players 2 lessons a day. In one of the most baffling UX decisions I've ever seen, Brilliant's free-user homepage features a "training" session, which is shorter than an average lesson, useless as far as knowledge goes, and costs 1 key.
• ambient. Music, sounds, visual beauty, and spectacle can all simulate profound human emotion, but have the potential to swing into uncanny territory, become cringe, shallow, or cookie-cutter. A wide range of apps promise cosmetic upgrades that don't go anywhere, leaving the player feeling empty.

These levers can be used to make a promise to the new user; that on the other side of the rainbow there's a feeling unlike anything they've experienced, or, if we're realistic, that's nice enough to nudge them towards higher usage.

While experts will claim gamification can increase a product's retention, what it does in 90% of situations is increase the average session length. This can be desirable and socially conscious in plenty of situations. But poorly applied gamification will backfire.