AN INTRODUCTION to the GAMEFUL WORLD Prelude
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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE GAMEFUL WORLD Steffen P. Walz and Sebastian Deterding Prelude A gigantic conference table made of a single, thickly 2006 ). Practically the entire agency played Ultima cut slice of wood (or so it seemed). Around it sat a Online — during office hours. We hopped on and off client in a suit who represented a loyalty card game sessions between meetings and used the game ’ s program about to enter the market and the design - text chat to talk about game challenges and work ers and developers of a web agency that had grown projects alike. For most of us, Ultima Online had from four to more than one hundred employees in become part of our work culture. And to some extent, less than two years — all wearing T-shirts. Among what looked and felt like a game had in fact turned them was one of the editors of this volume, then an into labor: the game extended into the office space, aspiring interaction designer. provided a crucial communication channel for job It was 1999, in the midst of the dot-com bubble. tasks, helped to bring aboard new employees, and NASDAQ had not yet peaked. Many of us were specu- kept us even busier than we were already. The direc- lating (intellectually and financially) what the Inter- tors of the agency had taken notice: the agency offi- net could become and how we would be interacting cially subscribed to several Ultima Online accounts, with people, products, and environments through and certainly not just to keep the staff entertained. networked computers in the near future. We dreamed At that table back in 1999, it had just been decided that most of us would soon be carrying some form of that the agency would design scenarios of how to handheld, networked device similar to a Star Trek engage online customers in the client ’ s planned Tricorder or IBM ’ s proto-smartphone, the Simon Per- service using certain elements. Game elements. In sonal Communicator, which was released in 1991 the months prior, our agency had built a reputation ( Sager 2012 ). And something else captivated the for what was then called “ advergaming ” — little Flash- imagination of most of us designers around that based web games that carried advertising messages. Copyright © 2015. MIT Press. All rights reserved. © 2015. MIT Press. Copyright table: in 1997, Ultima Online had been launched — the And we believed that in the suit sitting across the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game table was the ideal client with the ideal service to use (MMORPG) to reach a subscriber base of 100,000 gaming on a much grander scale: Loyalty Partner ’ s players within a mere six months ( Electronic Arts Payback, which later not only survived the dot-com Walz, Steffen P., and Sebastian Deterding. Gameful World : Approaches, Issues, Applications, MIT Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=3339935. Created from washington on 2017-11-11 15:19:10. 2 STEFFEN P. WALZ AND SEBASTIAN DETERDING crash but also went on to become Germany ’ s largest price issued by the privacy and digital rights organi- loyalty card scheme, ultimately to be acquired by zation FoeBuD to raise public awareness about the American Express in 2010 (Loyalty Partner 2010 ). most egregious violations of privacy rights. FoeBuD ’ s Everyone around the tree slice was excited about rationale: Payback, albeit looking like a discount the new project: “ So if customers collect discounts in card, served the sole purpose of obtaining and com- the form of ‘ Payback bonus points, ’ and you market mercially using personalized data related to the pur- the service as ‘ life brings points, ’ clearly, you need a chasing behaviors of consumers without properly leaderboard, ” called out said coeditor. Added an informing the consumers about this fact (Big Brother agency colleague, “ And we need badges, like we had Awards 2000). Soon after, and likely in response to them in church scouting. If Payback knows exactly the negative press stirred by the award, Payback what people shop, when and where, and in which became more transparent about its data collection; sequence, couldn ’ t we reward shopping patterns at the same time, federal privacy regulations pre- with badges, while collecting and mining that vented those leaderboards and badges we had con- data? A ‘ toddler ’ badge if people consistently shop ceived while chatting in Ultima Online, steering our baby products. … People will be super motivated! ” avatars. And we went on to create and show a prototype of Payback worked with the agency for a while, but these ideas. said coeditor left the agency soon after the BBA disas- Yet in the end, nothing of that transpired. A couple ter to pursue an academic career, shocked into of weeks after the initial launch of the Payback card awareness of what could happen if game elements as in 2000, Loyalty Partner and its Payback card “ won ” simple as points were applied for non-entertainment the first German Big Brother Award (BBA), a negative purposes, even if conceived in a playful spirit. Space Invaders: The Rise of Gamification A few years ago, speaking about a gameful world would into everyday life. On one side are utopian visions of likely have conjured images of MMORPGs such as re-engineering a supposedly “ broken reality ” ( McGo- Ultima Online or World of Warcraft, not systems like nigal 2011 ) into happiness engines: game design Payback. The popular imagination of the time was will allow us to maximize our individual potential, (and still is) filled with utopian hopes and dystopian organize our “ cognitive surplus ” (Clay Shirky), and fears of an Exodus to the Virtual World ( Castronova energize society to solve humankind ’ s collective 2008 ): at best, we would escape the drudgery of twen- challenges. On the other side are dystopian reveries tieth-century schools and business training via of Frankensteinian daemons and Skinnerian dicta- serious games. At worst, people would regress from torships: as algorithms increasingly rule the world reality into the Otherland ( Williams 1996 ) of games. (Slavin, this volume), we will wake up one day to find Copyright © 2015. MIT Press. All rights reserved. © 2015. MIT Press. Copyright Today, the direction is reversed: not people escaping that our computers have become the game masters into the virtual world of games, but games escaping and we the pawns in one big Dream Park that isn ’ t Walz, Steffen P., and Sebastian Deterding. Gameful World : Approaches, Issues, Applications, MIT Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washington/detail.action?docID=3339935. Created from washington on 2017-11-11 15:19:10. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE GAMEFUL WORLD 3 just a game anymore (Suarez, this volume). Neuro- • Leaderboards Points are compared with members psychological knowledge about the claviature of our of one ’ s social graph on a weekly point leader- pleasures will enable our future (robot) overlords to board, aiming to spur competition between users. control our every step and action with a seamless, • Mayorships Those users who have checked in the fine-tuned, pervasive mesh of incentive systems most often at a location in the past sixty days are (Pesce, this volume). acknowledged as its “ mayor, ” which again can Close observers could get a glimpse of the impend- spur competition between users. ing ludic reality invasion in the early 2000s, when live • Rewards Business owners of a location may offer action role-playing, location-based, augmented location-specific rewards (e.g., a free drink when reality, persistent alternate reality, and similar per- a user checks in at a certain time). vasive games began to extend the magic circle of play Today, five years after foursquare ’ s launch, a whole spatially, temporally, and socially ( Montola 2005 ). cottage industry of gamification consultants, agen- But most of them remained too avant-garde and cies, and software providers has emerged, spanning experimental to gain acceptance beyond the niches from “ white label ” platform providers such as Bunch- of academic laboratories, art exhibits, and game ball, Badgeville, or Lithium to more specialized plat- design festivals. It was only in the late 2000s that the forms such as (now defunct) Greengoose, a sensor reach of games and game design into everyday life and software package for self-tracking everyday appeared in the public consciousness, with “ gamifi- activities. Business consultancies publish rosy pre- cation ” emerging around mid-2010 to overtake dictions, all arrows predictably pointing up and to “ serious games ” in global web search interest in mid- the right: according to one forecast, the gamification 2011. 1 The arguable blueprint for the gamification market will grow from US$100 million in 2011 to movement has been foursquare, a social, mobile, US$2.6 billion by 2016 ( Meloni & Gruener 2012 ). The location-based service launched in 2009: foursquare tone is nothing if not evangelical: business books allows users to “ check in ” at venues, see check-ins of promise a Gamification Revolution ( Zichermann & members of their social graph, and browse venue Linder 2013 ), explaining How to Revolutionize Customer suggestions based on check-in data. To motivate and Employee Engagement with Big Data and Gamification check-ins, foursquare implemented a series of game- ( Paharia 2013 ). like design elements: Implementations abound across all domains of • Points Every time a user checks in, she earns a life, the overwhelming majority using some variation variable amount of points depending on factors of the points-badges-leaderboards model of four- such as novelty (first check-in to a location of this square ( Hamari, Koivisto & Sarsa 2014 ). In marketing, type) or distance (check-in far away from last one finds digital loyalty programs and sweepstakes check-in). built around “ customer engagement ” : checking into • Badges Certain types or combinations of check-ins a store; sharing or liking posts and product pages of Copyright © 2015.