8. Appendix I
The following pages are excerpts from interviews conducted for this thesis during October 2010. The interviewees represent span form professionals of game and interaction design to academic scholars and theoreticians. The connecting element among them is their interest in the concept of gamification; the interviewees not always agree with each other and indeed one can read both very optimistic and cynical responses in the following lines. We hope that his will give the reader a and wider perspective on gamification.
8.1 Aki Järvinen
Transcript, Skype interview with Aki Järvinen, Lead Social Designer at Digital Chocolate Copenhagen, October 5th 2010
CI: What‟s your explanation, how we‟ve come to this? How have we reached this point where the discussion, even the actual practicing of game design in non-game services and products has become so widespread?
AJ: That is a good question. I think that basically, it has to go hand in hand with the fact that peoples‘ attention span is diminishing in online environments, because pretty much all the applications that you are referring to are online applications right?
CI: Yes, that‟s what we have been seeing so far.
AJ: So for the people that are doing business online and are trying to capture the attention of users/customers/players, evangelists of gamification seem to believe that a playful way to engage attention and retain those people to come back to your application site or service is the way to go. I think that there is where gamification found fertile ground.
That is my initial answer; we are reaching a point where people have the attention span of five seconds when they are online and there seems to be a school of thought that believes that game mechanics is the way to grab and prolong that attention beyond these five seconds. I
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haven‘t really thought about that sort of broader history of how we have come to this, but this would be my spontaneous answer.
CI: Alright, so what do you think gamification is about, the players/users or the game/service?
AJ: I do think it‘s not about the game. It‘s really about finding any means possible to keep people attached to a product or service and actually make them pay for it. In principle they start paying for it if they find some utility, some use, some sort of added value to it and of course these gamification processes are trying to add value by entertaining the user, making the use of the product or service entertaining, social and so on.
I think that‘s why mostly the people driving gamification, at least to my knowledge, don‘t have necessarily a game development background. They are more likely to employ game designers for these ideas. Thus I would say it‘s more about marketing, rather that game development if you think about it in the context of what kinds of professionals have started this movement.
CI: I would like to stay on that; apparently these people are arguing as you said that gamification is adding value to a product or service. But is that process is also taking something out of it? Can gamification backlash?
AJ: Sure, I do believe that there is some kind of naïve thinking when you have a suboptimal product or service and then just by adding some badges and achievements to it, you can say that ―we gamified our service and its rocking!‖ I think it‘s well articulated by Sebastian Deterding, in his ―Just add points?‖ presentation, where he is arguing that this copy-pasting game mechanics on top of an existing activity works best when there is not that much at stake.
For instance, if you are doing something that is voluntary, something that is intrinsically motivated, then you can enhance this experience by adding game mechanics, or game reward structures on top of that service. Flickr could be a good example of this, where people tend to like sharing photos because it‘s so convenient and easy; and then you can accelerate and enhance, or enrich, this experience by rewarding these people with game-like goal structures.
But if you are developing a productivity-based tool or just something that has serious consequences for a company or a business, for instance, then it might be that gamification is a very risky approach. Of course, I don‘t have any hard proof that those principles work, but intuitively I do think that there is some wisdom there.
CI: I have recently read that you are also arguing that gamification is not really a layer you can just out on top of anything.
AJ: Yeah, I agree
CI: So could you explain to me what gamification is for you, in relation to how much space is there for innovation within gamification?
AJ: I do think that there is room for innovation; I always like to think so. About the thing argument, it was last week that this back and forth between Facebook and Google where Eric Schmidt announced that Google is going to take their services to the next level by adding a social layer to them and then Mark Zuckerberg replied that you can‘t just add a layer of social services, it needs to be inherently social to start with.
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So I think that gamification is somewhere on the same line, regardless who‘s going to with this.
I don‘t have any good practical examples, but if I was facing a task of gamifying a service or an application, then I would try to align game mechanics and game design techniques with the origin of the use case, or form of use that the service, or application, or site is meant for. And that means that you will most likely explore many more game mechanics and game design techniques rather than those that we see all around and in that case it would lay some ground for innovation in the area.
CI: I know that you have written about “game mechanics”. How do you feel about the use of the term?
AJ: Well, the older I get, the less passionate I become. I just can‘t bother nitpicking about it.
I still believe, deep in my heart, that it is a lazy use which is in line with this sort of marketing bullshit, you know. I recently saw a tweet that wrote that there are twenty startups suggesting that they are going to gamify the world and I think that most of those are playing on that ―game mechanics‖ discourse that‘s turned the term into a buzz word. «So how do you gamify services and applications? You put ―game mechanics‖ in them». Of course that doesn‘t mean anything, is such a broad concept.
I think that in order for the term to be useful you need to understand how ―game mechanics‖
relate to what the player does and the goals that you set as well as what kind of mechanics are more probable to produce an experience, in terms of emotions and feelings, and then what are the motivations of the players and what kind of game mechanics feed and motivate users and players towards certain tasks.
I mean that any self-respecting professional working on this area will have their much more refined division of game mechanics. Thus, then it‘s a matter who do you talk to. If I would be a consultant for gamification, I would probably have to use the term in this kind of ―sales talk‖
way, but when it comes to organizing my thinking, I would have a much more fine-grained division. So I think it is really a matter of context in that case.
CI: So then in your view, who should be practicing gamification design? And then how do you explain this mosaic of non game-related entrepreneurs that now make up the gamification industry?
AJ: Even with the danger of falling into using stereotypes, I do not think that a game designer, who has been working on a certain AAA console titles, has a very clear understanding of what works and what doesn‘t; I don‘t think that this [game designer] is the optimal description for someone practicing gamification. I do think that the optimal person would be somebody familiar with interaction design and knowledgeable about game design because, in my opinion, these two intertwine here. Usually the context of use or play in this case, to some extent, is very different than the circumscribed video game play experience.
I do not know where these people that evangelize gamification come from. It seems that it is a mix of technology startups and marketing people, probably something like opportunists looking for a ―buzz word‖, or ―hot sauce‖ that they suppose will transform their clients‘
products.
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Again, if I was given the opportunity to make a startup offering gamification services and consulting, I would probably try to recruit people that have interaction design background but also some knowledge of game design.
CI: I like that you are mentioning interaction design here, because in interaction design in general and in specific branches of it like Critical Design, there are more extensive, older and established traditions of design for ludic interaction. But if you juxtapose them with the practical dogmas of gamification, as it is evangelized today, you see that there are many contradictions.
What is your take on these contradictions?
AJ: I do have the take that we haven‘t really seen a sophisticated approach on gamification from a business perspective yet. At the moment, there is no top-class design company like IDEO who is pushing that way of gamification. However, in some sense they [IDEO] have been doing that for years and years in a way; they have employed different design disciplines and they have put design and user experience first. In such a way you are ―forced‖ to think about different ways to motivate people and different ways to create experiences. Also, another example is toys; if you design toys then you gamify objects in a way.
So I do think that this gamification we are discussing today is, if not a bubble, an opportunistic concept that is used without understanding of the whole toolset and probably without understanding much about design anyway. But that of course does not mean that they couldn‘t create something interesting; the pace in online business is fast and if you just manage to produce solutions something interesting might come up and in the process we might have a much clearer definition of gamification. Those are basically my thoughts.
CI: Alright, one last question. So far we have been witnessing gamification solution very closely tied to social media; so can we gamify anything?
AJ: Formally I think yes. Of course it relates to what I said earlier, that gamification techniques and design solutions should ideally align with the more utilitarian use of a service or a product. If you don‘t start from an origin or intent and motivation of use then you are not really practicing gamification, you are designing games. You must have some existing thing that you want to gamify in order to be consistent with this thinking. I do think that in theory you can gamify pretty much anything, but I don‘t know if it will work, if it will be socially acceptable, or ethical? All these questions arise. You could for example gamify something atrocious like an undertaker‘s job, but I think that would be socially and ethically suspicious.
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