The folly of superficial gamification, and other coercive strategies

The industry of gamification has been steadily growing within the span of the last decade. And it’s become uncommon for any of us to escape the news of this burgeoning market.

From dystopian applications of this technology such as China’s infamous “Social Credit”, to lauded language learning app “Duolingo”. These applications have taken the world by storm.

But after years of these technologies existing, and with the massification of the mobile device, I believe it is more relevant than ever to tackle the issues with many of these strategies that aim to induce behavioural changes.

Even if you, as a developer, have the best of intentions, I reckon it is best you’re made aware of the potential harm you could be bringing upon the world with these practices, so that you can safely navigate such waters, and achieve whichever noble goal you’ve set your sights upon.

I shall begin my case by taking a look at the success of the language learning app “Duolingo”.

Duolingo is a language learning app with the noble goal of making accessible to masses the process of learning a new language, with the added prospect of enhancing your career by giving you access to the international job market that exists locked behind the language barrier.

While a noble goal indeed, the way they went about it, through the pointsification of learning, I believe is inefficient at best, counterproductive at worst.

At its inception, Duolingo had a serious retention rate problem. Out of every 8 new users that downloaded the app, 7 users never returned, says this article by Bloomberg.

It is not surprising that, in order to solve that issue, they hired Farmville and Candy Crush developers to harness the power of dopamine and addiction for the good of the world. Or so they would say.

To this day, their retention rates have risen up to 55%, from their meagre 13% in 2012. A story of success to inspire newcomers into the industry of games and/or gamification, right?

But that’s not the whole story, an informal study on completion rates for the app revealed that less than 0.3% of the users (for each respective course) have finished all of their available course material. Which paints a grim picture about the actual effectiveness of the app, since it is said that upon completion of the material, Duolingo at best allows you to reach an A2-B1 level of mastery in the CEFR index (the levels are A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, and C2), which represents a basic practical understanding of the language.

While that number does not distinguish between the users that exclusively use the app, and those that use it in a supplemental manner, it still paints a picture of scarce success in its mission of massification of language learning.

Yet I wouldn’t dare to fault the app exclusively for these results. I believe the issue lies with the manipulative strategies that it employs. And I’ll now explain why.

An Issue of Self-Determination

It is no mystery that “nobody likes being told what to do”, unless instruction is properly asked for. That goes doubly-so for any insidious tactic of coercion, no matter how subtle.

And you better believe that many gamification techniques and addiction-harnessing strategies hold a kernel of coercion.

How so?, you ask.

Well, at its core, many gamification techniques what actually do is subvert the valuation system ingrained into the psyche of every person, by masking the perceived undesirability of a task with the prospect of a seemingly desirable reward (be it a point score, perks system, or any other devious scheme).

The purpose is to supplement an intrinsically unrewarding task with some extrinsic value, and in doing so, motivate the subject person to do said task.

And that is only when the task is uninteresting in itself; for we shall see that when the task would actually be interesting for the person, adding the prospect of a reward on top of that, fundamentally kills almost any intrinsic value that the person could possibly perceive in the task at hand, doing more harm than good in the process.

We shall also see, that many gamification strategies additionally end up hindering performance and possibly the future development of the person in the domain at hand. For there is nothing worse than to make something potentially enjoyable into something unpalatable.

In our Duolingo example, we take the task of learning a new language, and sap the adventure out of the journey, by replacing its intrinsic value with the superfluous prospect of a score, or a leaderboard.

Alfie Kohn in his book ‘Punished by Rewards’ states the following:

“(…) people who are offered rewards tend to choose easier tasks, are less efficient in using the information available to solve novel problems, and tend to be answer-oriented and more illogical in their problem-solving strategies. They seem to work harder and produce more activity, but the activity is of a lower quality, contains more errors, and is more stereotyped and less creative than the work of comparable nonrewarded subjects working on the same problem.”

But not only that! They also tend to deviate less from suggested paths, experiment less, and therefore, have lesser quality learning experiences.

Add to that the fact that our modern life is plagued with incentive structures since we’re children, and it is a wonder that anyone finds it in them to enjoy anything at all.

Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivation

There’s an interesting case that happened during the development of Klei Entertainment’s “Don’t Starve”, that succinctly illustrates how sometimes the misuse of some game-y mechanics can have catastrophic results for the designer that employs them.

Here goes the story:

When Klei Entertainment initially came up with their first prototypes for “Don’t Starve”, the game was designed to include quests. This decision stemmed from the fact that, upon initial playtesting, their players had trouble figuring out what they could to do in the game; and it was not really due to a lack of activities, or otherwise. But rather, Klei discovered that there was a lack of guidance within their game, so the first solution that came to mind was simply to implement quests.

They created a guy in a pinstripe suit that at the start of the game would hand the player a list of things to do, as a sort of tutorial, in order to teach the basics of their game.

However, what they soon came to realize was that those same quests that they implemented to sort out the issue, had drastically changed the way their players interacted with the game and its world:

• They would heavily optimize towards those goals.
• They were less given to take risks.
• Less likely to experiment with the mechanics.
• And most gravely, once the quests ran out: they would stop playing entirely!

In other words, they stopped being creative people, and became simple automatons.

These results went completely against what they intended when they designed the game. What they actually wanted to create was an experience that inspired a sense of wonder, and incentivized exploration and creativity.

The quest system promoted none of that. It was simply a checklist of things to do, that when it ran out, left the game devoid of meaning. Which ran counter to the vision they had.

So they decided to go back to the drawing board, ditching the quest system entirely, and solving the issue in another way.

They ultimately solved it by tweaking the UI in such a way as to gently nudge the player towards certain actions that subtly taught them how to play the game.

[Source: Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic rewards in Klei’s latest game: Don’t Starve ]

Closing Words…

So yeah… Rewards… They’re sort of bad.

Not always. But there’s a fair amount of instances where a reward system is simply the wrong tool to employ.

There’s an old joke that I had the pleasure to read in Kohn’s book, that drenches us with some deep insight in a very comical way.

It is the story of an elderly man who endured the insults of a crowd of ten-year-olds each day as they passed his house on the way home from school.

One afternoon, after listening to another round of jeers about how stupid and ugly and bald he was, the man came up with a plan.

He met the children in his lawn the following Monday and announced that anyone who came back the next day and yelled rude comments about him would receive a dollar.

Amazed and excited, they showed up even earlier on Tuesday, hollering epithets for all they were worth. True to his word, the old man ambled out and paid everyone.

“Do the same tomorrow”, he told them, “and you’ll get twenty-five cents for your trouble.” The kids thought that was still pretty good and turned out again on Wednesday to taunt him. At the first catcall, he walked over with a roll of quarters and again paid off his hecklers.

“From now on,” he announced, “I can give you only a penny for doing this.” The kids looked at each other in disbelief. “A penny?” they repeated scornfully. “Forget it!” And they never came back again.

I’m sure this joke needs no explanation.

I sincerely believe that it’s not all lost for the field of gamification. I believe that there’s still hope for a new wave of non-manipulative gamification to arise.

Because I do dread the age we live in, in which the coercive gamification runs rampant in our mobile lives, coupled with the aggressive advertisement schemes that we see in the market today. In which the “reward” for achieving something in a mobile game is “to pay 25% less for a premium pass”…

The gall of some of these guys…

I haven’t even decided that I want to waste my money in your exploitative game, so it’s real rich of you to assume that I consider the prospect of paying you any amount of money for this piece, a reward at all. But I digress…

What I really want to say is… If you truly are a purpose-driven designer, then I’m sure you’ll see the sharp contradiction that is implementing the kinds of gamification strategies that, instead of aiming to make palatable something un-fun, what they actually do is link a sensation akin to heroin-induced pleasure to a task, that when the rewards is no longer there, will end up behind as unpalatable, or even more, than before the user came upon your product at all.

And then, we would have done no good at all, in a world that is already harmed enough.

The road to benign gamification is to actually design interesting tasks that are purposeful, rather than slap an uninteresting task with superfluous rewards, if we are to live in a society in which people are people, instead of simply consumer data-points.