Gamification and Human psychology

Mario Bros, GTA Vice City, Need for Speed, Call of Duty, PUBG, Angry Birds, Cricket, Football, Weightlifting, KBC and more are games. All of these have millions of fans and require different skillsets to climb on top.

Games make us feel happy and in the end, they are fun. Fun can change behavior for the better, that makes fun a serious business.

According to Forbes, gaming is a $155B industry in 2020 which can be $200B in 2023.

Things got really serious when some smart people started creating a game-like experience in a non-game context and called it Gamification.

Gamification:

https://dilbert.com/strip/2013-05-19

Gamification takes the core elements of games that we love and apply that outside of the traditional gaming environment. It increases motivation, engagement and retention of activity.

The objective of gamification is to boose sales, increase profit, collect customer data, increase engagement, boost company brand, and promote repeat business.

So, we can summarize this as:-

Use of game elements in your product or campaign to affect specific user behavior which will positively impact business metrics.

The order of applying gamification in your product/campaign should be -

Business Matics -> User Behavior(Desired action) -> Core human drives/motivations -> Game Mechanics

So, instead of thinking about user behavior or desired action, you should first think about business metrics because those are your primary goals. Then you think about desired actions, which will lead you toward the business matrix.

Let’s say if you gamified adding items to the cart it’ll positively impact your business matrix, which is a sale. Now you can think about what motivates users to add items to the cart, you think about which game mechanics to use in your product.

Games like elements are used to entertain, educate and engage users. Some old-school game elements are points, badges and a leaderboard. It’s not just these 3 but can be anything that triggers our core human drives. It can be anything that brings joy and engagement.

Business metrics and desired actions are product or campaign-specific but we can talk about core human drives/motivation and game mechanics.

Core Human Drives:

There are a total of 8 core human drives.

1. Meaning — To feel our actions have a purpose
2. Accomplishment — Drive to achieve something
3. Empowerment — Choose our own direction and types of solution for a problem
4. Ownership — A desire to win things and have possessions
5. Social Influence — Desire to interact, help and compete with others
6. Scarcity — Wish to own things which you don’t have or limited availability
7. Unpredictability — Curiosity to know what will happen next
8. Avoidance: To avoid negative elements of the journey

The more we understand the psychology of our core drives the better we’ll be at creating games and game-like elements in our product and campaigns to make it more fun, engaging and high likelihood of adoption.

Game mechanics:

There are few types of game mechanics that directly or indirectly affect core human drives.

1. Score — It tells you where you are in the game. Who is doing good and who is not so good. IT gives you a sense of progression. It gives you feedback on your action.
2. Rules — It creates boundaries and gives you a chance to strategize your actions.
3. Skill — Some games require fewer skills and some require lots of skills. Skills help you take better actions.
4. Luck — Yes, to win a game or climb higher in a leaderboard luck plays a big role because there are so many unpredictable elements are involved. You can have luck in your favor if you are highly skilled, but it’s not certain that you’ll win.
5. Rewards — Once you score high, you receive a reward. That’s the main purpose of playing a game. If there is no reward or incentive, no one will put effort to play a game.

Adding a game to your product is not gamification. Using Mario or PUBG in the classroom is not gamification.

Game mechanics is not gamification.

Gamification is essentially human-focused design.

You can find keywords like applied psychology, behavioral science and more but in the end, gamification is something that connects user behaviors to business matrics through game mechanics.