

Ask YC: Where to find practical guide on gamifying? - pepeto

Do you have insights on where i can find tutorials, step by step, formulas, applicable concepts?<p>I want to gamify my startup, but i can't find good resources. Most of the How to" are vague and at concept-level, rather than specific steps.
I googled this question
I have been on the wikipedia for gamification
I have most of the famous books on gamification<p>Nowhere in those i can find how many levels to have, on what does it depend. How many points between each level couple, formulas for knowing which task brings how much points etc
======
vitovito
You can't find those answers because there aren't any.

There aren't any answers because it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter how many levels you have, nor how many points things are
assigned. There aren't any formulas for how they add up, either, because
either they add up, or they don't.

Gamification isn't something you install, add some hooks in at appropriate
points, and magically have user engagement. It's not logging.

It's applied psychology.

There aren't answers to how many levels you have because levels are shorthand
for recognition of accomplishment. Points are proxies for the player's sense
of self-worth. How do you define accomplishment in your system? What are
reasonable, logical, or emotionally meaningful ways to break that up? How do
you break that down into learnable tasks and efforts within those systems?

Those aren't rhetorical questions. I'm asking you those questions. The first
two establish your levels, the third establishes things that are worth points.
Maybe you earn points and those let you progress through levels. Maybe they're
independent. It's whatever makes sense for incentivizing your system.

I ran some design workshops a while back, and one of them was on applied
gamification. Out of five or six groups of 2-3 designer/developers, only one
really "got" it, and applied game mechanics in a way that might actually be
meaningful to users.

The rest applied it superficially and if they had been real products, they
would have failed.

<http://vi.to/workshop/20100426/> has my write-up of the workshop and the
exercise they did, and <http://vi.to/gmnotes> has my notes, including the
handouts and my references. I'd start with those.

Oh, and if one of the "famous books on gamification" is the O'Reilly one, I'd
forget everything you read there. That book is atrocious.
[http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/a-quick-buck-by-
cop...](http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/a-quick-buck-by-copy-and-
paste/) is a good example of some of the negative coverage it received, and I
never recommend it. Read books by psychologists, by people who have designed
and launched video games, and by academics who do actual research and testing
of their theories.

~~~
pepeto
Nice answer. I have things to say: \- there are situations that number of
levels matter - dependecies is one reason. There must be others, why is 51 the
highest in WOW? I am looking for a source that can point all the reasons. \-
how many points do you award each task? Surely this matters, but what do i
benchmark those to? Time it takes to complete? Mix of time, complexitity,
scarcity, x y z? What are possible x y z, and in what proportions do i mix
them? \- books are "Gamification by Design" by Gabe Zichermann (biggest
proponent), "Reality is Broken" by Jane McGonigal, Also "Flow", "Drive" and a
couple more. All of those seem too theoretical, and when i sit to create
something, i cant put numbers to the theories.

~~~
vitovito
The number of levels doesn't matter, because players don't generally play (or
decide to not play) games because one has more or fewer levels than another.
Levels are shorthand for accomplishment. Level 51 is the highest in WoW
because that's how much content and accomplishment they could determine. It's
entirely arbitrary based on your application.

 _All_ of the reasons are entirely arbitrary based on your application. It
doesn't matter because _they are manifestations of psychological principles._
You could have levels, or you could have ducks. You could have points, or you
could have dogs. Every time you hit Submit in your app you get a dog, and
every six dogs you get a parrot, and every three parrots you get a duck, and
you need to email that duck to support@yourapp to unlock a new feature, or you
can paint that duck a particular color and save it in your right sidebar, but
you can't do both.

It doesn't matter, because it's not a recipe or a formula. They are
representations of attributes to poke a person's psychology to tell them they
are making progress (dogs to parrots), to reassure them (ducks being emailed),
to give them investment (ducks being painted), etc.

You need to understand the psychological principles involved before any of it
will make sense. The questions you're asking have no answers because they're
ultimately nonsensical questions.

Gabe Zichermann's book is crap, and maybe that's why this doesn't make sense
to you. None of those books you listed are by psychologists, mainstream video
game designers, or research academics.

------
brudgers
Cousera in August from Penn:

<https://www.coursera.org/#course/gamification>

~~~
hmsimha
This is about halfway through right now and I'm actually getting much more
enjoyment out of this course than I originally expected. Really makes you
think about how elements from gamification can improve design and customer
engagement.

~~~
pepeto
God idea for courses! Thanks

------
kellros
My opinion is that gamification is like cooking - you don't just to cook - you
learn to cook specific things.

I'd suggest you follow the Lean path in applying gamification:

1\. Determine what behavior you want to enforce (Measure)

2\. Determine how you will enforce this behavior (Plan)

3\. Build the functionality required for the above (Build)

You should also decide where to draw the line; i.e. are you building a game or
are you gamifying features to enforce certain behaviors.

You should definitely read Jeff Atwood's post on gamification here:
[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/10/the-
gamification.ht...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/10/the-
gamification.html)

Here are some good examples of gamification:

<http://www.stackoverflow.com/>

<http://www.codeschool.com/>

<http://tryruby.org/levels/1/challenges/0>

~~~
pepeto
Thanks, i still can not answer the very first practical question: How many
player-levels should there be?

~~~
mapt
How on _earth_ is that the very first practical question?

You should be asking yourself questions like 'What do I want to influence the
user to do more of', and 'What's in it for them', and 'Is it worth the added
complexity' and 'What ways are the most fun for them to start thinking of the
things we want them to do as accomplishments'.

Talk of levels is like asking how many seats there should be on an airplane in
1900. Yeah, it might be a trivial consideration at some point in the distant
future that will color people's impressions, but the practical questions are
how the hell you push something through the air in a controlled, sustained
fashion. Seats are irrelevant to the big questions, and they don't even have
to be relevant in an actual implementation of cargo planes - the 'levels'
abstraction isn't always a useful one in making things more fun.

Based on what I've seen, 'gamification' as business topic appears to be rife
with cargo-cultism. Even the best implementations don't add a _ton_ to the
experience, because there's no big incentives to work towards, no story to
unlock or benefit to be had.

On StackExchange I have an indication of how prominent I am that I can show
off to other people and potential employers, in addition to the small-scale
competition to help people solve their problems. On Steam, badges from most
games are little more than a funny phrase shoved in my face for five seconds
unexpectedly. As Foursquare Mayor of my local chinese Restaurant, I get
nothing.

To discuss this more, we would need more specifics of your startup.

------
kkoppenhaver
Found this that you might be interested in:
[http://blog.mojotech.com/post/49179410311/eight-ways-to-
gami...](http://blog.mojotech.com/post/49179410311/eight-ways-to-gamify-your-
app)

