Ecosystem infrastructure for smart and personalised inclusion and PROSPERITY for ALL stakeholders
Gamification Guidelines and Prototypes
Project Acronym Prosperity4All Grant Agreement number FP7-610510
Deliverable number D201.3 Work package number WP201 Work package title System Architecture and Unified- Listing/Marketplace Authors Andreas Stiegler Status Final Dissemination Level Public Delivery Date 27/01/2016 Number of Pages 53
Keyword List
Gamification, Accessibility, Game Design, Usability
Version History
Revision Date Author Organisation Description
1 25/01/2016 Andreas Stiegler HdM Init from GoogleDoc after internal review and 2 revisions: Reviewer 1: Till Riedel, KIT Reviewer 2: Christian Knecht, Uni Stuttgart
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Table of Contents
1 Abstract - What this document is about ...... 2
1.1 Scope ...... 2
2 State of the Art: Gamification ...... 3
3 Key Principles of Gamification ...... 4
3.1 Gamification should always be optional ...... 5
3.2 Gamification aims to build intrinsic motivation ...... 7
3.3 Gamification requires goals ...... 8
4 The Problem: Gamification and Accessibility ...... 10
5 Gamification in Prosperity4All ...... 13
5.1 Bubbles ...... 13
5.1.1 Gamifying the development process ...... 15
5.2 Developer Space ...... 17
6 Game Design Patterns ...... 19
6.1 Action Space ...... 20
6.2 Reward ...... 21
6.3 Challenge ...... 22
6.4 Development ...... 23
6.5 Discovery ...... 24
7 Tutorials and Coaching ...... 25
7.1 Games Examples ...... 25
7.1.1 Tetris ...... 25
7.1.2 Starcraft II ...... 26
7.1.3 Diablo III...... 27
7.1.4 Counter-Strike ...... 28
7.1.5 Portal 2 ...... 29
7.1.6 World of Warcraft ...... 30
7.1.7 Guildwars 2 ...... 31
7.1.8 Elite: Dangerous ...... 32
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7.1.9 World of Warships...... 33
7.1.10 Super Mario Bros ...... 34
7.1.11 Super Metroid ...... 35
7.1.12 Axiom Verge ...... 36
7.1.13 Civilization V ...... 37
7.1.14 Dota 2 ...... 38
7.1.15 Heroes of the Storm ...... 39
7.2 Coaching by example ...... 40
7.2.1 Stack Overflow ...... 40
7.2.2 Visual Studio Achievements ...... 42
7.2.3 Coderwall...... 43
7.2.4 GitHub ...... 44
7.3 Video Tutorials ...... 45
7.3.1 Video 1: Introduction to Gamification and Accessibility ...... 45
7.3.2 Other Videos ...... 46
7.4 Presentations ...... 47
7.4.1 Accessibility and Games ...... 47
7.4.2 Usability in Games ...... 48
7.4.3 Gamification in the Development of accessible software ...... 50
7.4.4 Gamification and Accessibility ...... 51
8 Appendix: Scientific Publications ...... 52
8.1 HCII 2014 Paper ...... 52
8.2 HCII 2015 Paper ...... 52
9 References ...... 53
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List of Figures
Figure 1: Simple business process ...... 4
Figure 2: Screenshot of Stack Overflow ...... 6
Figure 3: Screenshot of YouTube ...... 11
Figure 4: Screenshot of Bubbles ...... 14
Figure 5: Screenshot of Bubbles with enabled config buttons ...... 15
Figure 6: Quests in Bubbles ...... 16
Figure 7: Screenshot of the Developer Space ...... 18
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1 Abstract - What this document is about
This document covers two important aspects: it serves as an introduction to gamification combined with accessibility and it documents the Prosperity4All gamification approach by listing the relevant contributions, tutorials and examples of digital games. As such, the document can serve as a little handbook on how to take aspects of gamification into account during the development of applications for the GPII - or for any other project. Note that this is a living document that will be extended throughout the project, in particular the “Games Examples” section. Starting 2016, we will send out updates to the project team on a regular basis.
1.1 Scope In Prosperity4All, there are two primary use cases of gamification:
• Developing accessible gamification methods • Gamifying the development process of accessible software The fundamental task to bring gamification into application for accessible software development is obviously to derive gamification methods which actually combine with accessibility constraints. We developed a novel approach to this problem by analyzing digital games. This was one of the key tasks and is described in the chapters The Problem: Gamification and Accessibility and Game Design Patterns. This document also contains a collection of the tutorial and coaching material produced in order to apply such gamification methods within the Prosperity4All project itself. Therefore, Gamification links with most of the development activities within the project, most notably the DeveloperSpace. Gamifying the development process of accessible software, however, cannot be covered through learning material alone. We are therefore developing an online platform which will serve the purpose of connecting developers and applying our discovered gamification methods to the development process of accessible applications. More details can be found in the chapter Bubbles, where we are introducing the Bubbles online platform. Bubbles, an online portfolio and community building platform, is being built from scratch using web technologies, without building on a particular content management system, to make integration into existing projects easier. In our particular case, we will build an interface between Bubbles and the DeveloperSpace (both described into more detail below). The current plans are to build a Bubble interface allowing users to link to their DeveloperSpace Building Blocks through a special Bubbles resource type tailored for the DeveloperSpace developed in Prosperity4All.
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2 State of the Art: Gamification
Gamification has been described as using elements of game design in non-game contexts [1]. The core idea is to identify the mechanics that make people enjoy a certain process [2]. Gamification leads to a better user experience because it satisfies some basic user needs, for example competition or popularity, through rating systems such as reward points or badges [3]. It has been shown that people enjoying a process are either more productive in executing said process, or more careful in maintaining external constraints [4]. As such, gamification is not a single, precisely defined method, but rather a methodology to transfer knowledge from the games industry and utilize it to optimize and enrich non-game processes [1]. Both physical and computer games offer patterns that are supposed to make player actions hooking [5]. Some patterns, such as clearly defined rules, are often shared between both categories of games. Some are unique to either environment. As our research is focused on creating a purely virtual platform for software developers and combining this virtual platform with accessibility for virtual devices, we will focus on computer games and the metaphors used for gamification in virtual worlds. Since the first research in the 1980s, such as [6], gamification has become a powerful and popular tool for both academia and industry. Nowadays, gamification is often introduced as a method to add additional benefit to a business process without actually altering the business process itself [7]. Following this logic, it is important to note that gamification should always be optional [8]. As soon as a user is forced to participate in a gamification system, the gamification system becomes part of the actual process that gamification is trying to improve. For most applications, however, the business process should remain as fast and efficient as possible, without taking gamification elements into account. Gamification aims at the user, not at the underlying process. Yet, deploying gamification to a business process can lead to the discovery of shortcomings and ineffective sections of the respective business process and should then lead to alterations and improvements. In the context of accessibility or accessible web development, there are already applied approaches, typically building on top of gamification research, such as reward in the form of badges. One such example are compliance badges1. There is also a good collection of lessons learnd at the NC State University2.
1 http://incl.ca/compliance-badges/ 2 https://accessibility.oit.ncsu.edu/blog/2013/05/17/the-gamification-of-accessibility-round-1-lessons-learned/
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3 Key Principles of Gamification
Following the notion of having a business process to which we add gamification, as described above, we can derive a few fundamental principles that gamification approaches should follow. In this picture, a business process is a workflow that yields a productive outcome - from an economical point of view that is often value for the company, like a service or product that can be sold. In the information technology sector, a business process typically consists of a chain of actions, carried out by either algorithms or humans. We can often expect that the algorithmic tasks within a business process are already sufficiently optimized. There is always room for further optimizations and algorithmic tasks also undergo downtimes such as maintenance, but in general, they have a predictable performance. Human tasks, being carried out directly or indirectly by a human, are the focus of gamification. An example of a business process is shown in Figure 1: Simple business process.
Business Process: Checking images in a webpage for accessibility Step 1 - Algorithm: Automated WCAG checks. ● For diagrams: Contrast, Size ● Alt-attribute present? Step 2 - Human: Alt-attribute semantic checks. ● Is the alternative description correct? ● Are the essential elements for the document’s context described? ● Simple Language?
Figure 1: Simple business process
Example of a simple business process split into algorithmic and human tasks.
Gamification is a broad field and varies greatly in its goals and methods. The term is often used to describe the methodology of utilizing knowledge from games or game development to enrich a business process, rather than defining a concrete method applied to such a business process. As such, there are several goals which gamification could aim for. The most obvious goal is to improve the performance of the business process. This builds on the concept that motivated employees who enjoy their daily work perform such tasks faster, leading to an increased performance of the overall business task. Yet, for many tasks, quality is more relevant than speed. Taking the example of checking alt texts for images from above, the quality of the alt text is probably more relevant than the speed at which the task is Ecosystem infrastructure for smart and personalised inclusion and PROSPERITY for ALL stakeholders 4 www.prosperity4all.eu
completed. This is particularly true for very repetitive tasks, at which humans quickly get bored and exhausted, thereby decreasing the quality of the outcome. Goals for gamification in such a scenario are to keep employees entertained and motivated. Another typical application of gamification within a business task is creating knowledge, either by encouraging employees to acquire further information, such as current security guidelines for example, or transferring knowledge from one section of a company to another, which is often a challenge when having multiple development teams on a larger project. Finally, there are further popular applications of gamification, such as binding customers, building awareness for a product or concept, or exposing a user to advertisement, but these are aimed at customers, whereas our work aims at using gamification within the development process, with our ‘customers’ being the developers of accessible software. In this chapter we will formulate three fundamental guidelines for applying gamification to our context. Note that these rules are not the ultimate and only way to apply gamification. Gamification tries to entertain and be fun, but there is no universal objective, scientific measurement of fun or reward. There are many models and concepts, but no objective measurement, as fun is, by definition, personal and subjective. Therefore, there is also no objective method on how to design an activity to be fun. The golden rules we collected here are general rules that proved to work in various scenarios can serve as rules of thumb. However, one should not see them as a definitive cooking recipe. Alter or change them whenever you see fit. At the end of the day, the only way to measure if your gamification achieved the goal you desire is to measure the change in your goal-metric (such as performance for example) once it has been deployed - if even possible.
3.1 Gamification should always be optional One of the core requirements of gamification is to be optional and not too distracting from the gamified core task [8]. Starting from a business process, gamification adds additional steps to this task, in which it aims to achieve one of the gamification goals, such as making a repetitive task more enjoyable. However, in order not to decrease the overall performance, the additional gamification tasks should be optional. Otherwise, they become part of the actual underlying business process one tried to gamify. Optional gamification is also consistent with the finding that there is no objective measurement for fun or joy: what might be an effective form of gamification for one person, might just be another repetitive task for another. This is actually one of the core misconceptions regarding gamification: gamification is not for everyone. There is no universal pattern that one could deploy onto a business task that works for everybody. In order not to hinder the performance of a business task, gamification should always be optional. The degree of integration between a business task and the respective gamification method varies, however, depending on the goal metric chosen. In some cases, a tight integration can actually increase the performance, for example when gamification is used to bring awareness to an aspect that would otherwise ne Ecosystem infrastructure for smart and personalised inclusion and PROSPERITY for ALL stakeholders 5 www.prosperity4all.eu
neglected, such as time-management. One such example is the Pomodoro Technique3, measuring time in tomatoes and deliberatly adding personal and non-business-process- goals. Typical examples of optional gamification involve splitting them visually, such as placing them on side bars. When visual information is correctly formatted, our brain is very effective at segmenting and focusing on the parts relevant for our current task or interest. You can see this behaviour well on YouTube, where you often not even notice the video recommendations in the right side bar while still watching the movie you just clicked. Typical gamification examples are badges or karma ratings often found in forums, where users can vote for good answers, increasing the rating of the contributor. Reading the main text of the thread is easy without even caring about the user and badge information which is typically found at the side of each post. A popular example is the site Stack Overflow, which uses a very minimalistic yet effective approach to gamification, as shown in Figure 2: Screenshot of Stack Overflow.
Figure 2: Screenshot of Stack Overflow
Screenshot of Stack Overflow, showing a user’s response to a question. To the right of each post, one can see the number of positive votes, as well as a check-icon to mark that it was accepted as an
3 http://pomodorotechnique.com/
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answer by the author of the question. Below an accepted answer, one can find information to the author of the post, including the number of positive votes.
Some methods of optional gamification rely on visual representation, which can lead to problems when combining with accessibility, as described in chapter “The Problem: Gamification and Accessibility”. Gamification can also be made optional by creating its own set of menus or moving it into an external application. The popular online shop Steam, for example, adds a trading-card mini game to purchases, allowing players to earn and trade digital “stickers” by playing purchased games. These “stickers” can then be used to advance in player levels within the store. While popular among many players, to a degree where people buy games primarily to advance in levels, many players just ignore the feature altogether. In order to check the levels of players and participate in the trade, users have to open specific menus from their profile page.
3.2 Gamification aims to build intrinsic motivation There are two fundamental forms of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is being motivated by external factors, such as an external reward tied to it, whereas intrinsic motivation is being motivated to do a certain action just for the action itself, because it is fun or it seems to be a good thing to do. Many conventional metaphors of our business world build on extrinsic motivation, such as the salary we get at the end of the month. Intrinsic motivation, however, is a far stronger form of motivation, greatly outweighing extrinsic rewards. Gamification aims to make tasks carried out by a person more interesting, fun or rewarding, building up intrinsic motivation, in a way similar to how persons are intrinsically motivated when working on something meaningful, such as working on accessibility solutions from which other people benefit, in contrast to just personal profit. The border between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, however, is blurry. Especially when deploying reward mechanisms, such as badges, experience points, or karma levels, gamification metaphors can come very close to typical extrinsic motivators. There is a debate whether there actually is a difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation: Psychologist Steven Reiss, for example, claims that intrinsic motivation doesn’t even exist4. In the context of gamification, even when utilizing reward, even numeric rewads such as experience points – which bare a great similarty to a salery which woud beconsidered extrinsic - are still considered as intrinsic rewards as long as gaining and spending the reward happens solely within the gamification process and has no impact on other systems or the real world. Gaining experience for a character to develop within a gamification approach would be aiming for intrinsic motivation, whether earning bonus miles which one can use to replace money in purchases wouldn’t.
4 http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/inmotiv.htm
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Reward in particular, however, is a very interesting aspect of motivation. When using typical gamification patterns, such as awarding experience points, one introduces an obviously extrinsic reward. Yet, an interesting change takes place: if a user enjoys gathering experience along with the persistent development associated with it, they start participating in a meta task: the development of their gamification character level. Now, the otherwise stand-alone business task that awards experience becomes a subtask of the gamification meta task, and the respective users may start enjoying performing the task as their part of an ongoing, persistent development. Similar to how building a house has no direct extrinsic rewards - it actually costs quite a bit of money and might consist of many repetitive and boring tasks if you build the house on your own - a person can still be incredibly motivated as they are working on their own, persistent and ongoing development: their new home. Find more information on reward and ongoing development in the chapter Game Design Patterns. When developing a gamification strategy, we always aim to build up intrinsic motivation, although this can involve embedding the task to gamify in a greater meta-task, so that potential extrinsic rewards associated with the gamified task become an intrinsic element of the meta-task.
3.3 Gamification requires goals In order to come up with a gamification strategy, we have to define what goal we want to pursue. As discussed earlier, there are three typical goals for gamification: reducing time, increasing quality and transferring knowledge. Yet, these are just the three final goals from a busines process perspective. Many gamification approaches aim at increasing a user’s engagement and interest in a task. From a business task’s perspective, however, increased user engagement manifests in either reduced time to solve the task, an increased quality in the task’s outcome or transferring knowledge. Each of these goals comes with certain restrictions regarding what kind of game design patterns are applicable. While introducing a persistent development can greatly increase the quality, it will probably increase the time it takes to complete the task, as users will want to check the outcomes they just achieved between tasks. One example would be having a character sheet to develop, for which users are awarded experience by completing optional criterions in a task. This might engage users to perform such tasks, for example writing documentation for their programming APIs, but on the contrary, they will spend more time on tinkering with their character sheet. Beyond the development of a gamification strategy, the goals to be achieved are also fundamental when it comes to validating and tuning the deployed gamification model. Gamification became a big buzzword throughout the years and it was often introduced as a kind of miraculous tool that will make everything better at low costs. Setting clear goals on what to achieve, measuring these parameters after deployment and adjusting the Ecosystem infrastructure for smart and personalised inclusion and PROSPERITY for ALL stakeholders 8 www.prosperity4all.eu
gamification model are essential to maintain a realistic vision on what gamification can achieve. In our scenarios - aiding developers in utilizing accessibility in their application development - our primary goals are to increase the quality of user interface representations in regard to accessibility, as well as some learning effects, as we expect that there are deficits in knowledge regarding modern accessibility and usability approaches.
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4 The Problem: Gamification and Accessibility
Many existing approaches to gamification rely on the representation of the gamification elements, such as badges, high-score lists, explorable worlds with tickets etc. Accessibility, on the other hand, comes with constraints on representation. Visual assistive technologies immediately come to mind, such as using a magnifier or a screen reader. From a gamification perspective, changing output from visual to screen reader has a tremendous impact. A previously two-dimensional plane for representing information - such as a web page - is changed into a one-dimensional representation - the text the screen reader reads. If we remember one of our golden rules that gamification should always be optional, this can cause severe problems. In graphical user interfaces, this is often achieved by placing the visual representation of reward in a sidebar where it is not visually distracting. Further visual techniques can be used, such as colour coding or visual styles to clearly mark the gamification part of the user interface. This can work well for two-dimensional user interfaces. Yet, it is obviously tied to a specific form of representation. Even simple modifications, such as zooming, can cause the sidebars to consume a more significant portion of the screen space, or otherwise alters the segmentation pattern. Typical CSS techniques, for example, would allow moving the sidebar below the main content once the spacing gets too narrow, but this takes away the benefit of a sidebar being present and relying on visual segmentation to focus human attention. Instead, a user would have to actively scroll to reach the sidebar content. Another example would be altering the color settings, such as contrast, which can render color coding ineffective (which is why information should never be conveyed through colour alone, see WCAG5, yet it still often is, particularly in a game or gamification environment); icons and symbol graphics can be meaningless to some audiences. For more complex modifications, such as using a screen reader, the drawbacks of gamification relying on visual representation become obvious. A screen reader uses a one-dimensional representation of a document, such as a web page, to read it to the user. In contrast to a two-dimensional user interface, there is no simple way of arranging a user interface element in a way so that it is present, but not distracting. A gamification interface previously placed on a sidebar will end up at the beginning, the end, or somewhere else in the one-dimensional stream of representation. This will force a user to either actively skip those parts when reading a document, clearly violating the prerequisite of optional gamification, as they now have to perform an additional “skip action”. One solution aproach to this problem are the HTML5 semantic elements6. If a page is proberly formated, elements such as a sidebar or the main article are
5 http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-WCAG20-20081211/#visual-audio-contrast-without-color 6 http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_semantic_elements.asp
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semanticly marked in the page, making direct navigation or even preprocessing by the respective representation – such as a screenreader – possible.
Figure 3: Screenshot of YouTube
An example of the YouTube web page layout using segmentation to separate the sidebar from the main content.
Say our gamification approach was using a high-score list. On a visual representation, we put the high scores in a sidebar to the right, exploiting the latent feature of the human brain to focus on relevant content. A good example of such a sidebar can be seen on YouTube (see Figure 3: Screenshot of YouTube). While watching a video, you don’t even recognize that there is a bar with similar videos to the right, you have to focus your attention on the sidebar to check them out, thus perfectly fulfilling the goal of making the high-score list optional. While the user works on the actual business task in the main window, they can ignore (or perhaps even collapse) the sidebar entirely. Now, when moving over to a one-dimensional representation such as a screen reader, we no longer have a straightforward optional place on where to put the gamification elements. If we put the high-score list to the top of the document, a user would always have to skip it to get to the business-task content, clearly violating the golden rule to be optional. On the other hand, if we placed the high-score list
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somewhere within the document or at the bottom, it would become hard to reach, greatly limiting its impact. A typical approach to solve this for screen readers is the introduction of skip links7 and landmarks8 to quickly access different sections within a one-dimensional representation. Other forms of representations - consider upcoming virtual worlds - will require different techniques. Combining gamification and accessibility requires gamification patterns that do not rely on their visual representation.
7 https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/NOTE-WCAG20-TECHS-20140916/G1 8 https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/NOTE-WCAG20-TECHS-20140916/ARIA11
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5 Gamification in Prosperity4All
Our gamification approaches are applied within Prosperity4All and we are producing several online platforms to support gamified community building mechanisms.
5.1 Bubbles Bubbles is a gamified community server we are building for Prosperity4All. The game design patterns were used in the Bubbles development process, such as trying to minimize action space and utilizing different forms of reward. As the development of Bubbles continue, we will extend this section with more application examples. Bubbles serves as a kind of portfolio page to bring together developers who work on accessibility problems. In particular, it serves the purpose to apply gamification patterns, such as the game design patterns we derived, to the development process of accessible applications. The goal is to help developers in splitting up the big task of developing an application and integrating gamifications into small packages, increasing development speed and quality of the accessibility implementations. As such, the target audience for Bubbles is software developers. A user can link typical software development sources, such as GitHub repositories or Stack Overflow discussions to their account, and Bubbles will automatically generate a portfolio page, grouping the different resources of a user by its type, as seen in Figure 4: Screenshot of Bubbles. Please note that the visual design of Bubbles is still in a prototype phase.
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Figure 4: Screenshot of Bubbles
A users profile page in Bubbles showing several projects, resources and quests.
The interface is kept very minimalistic, using as few user inputs as possible. Adding a GitHub repository only requires pasting an URL, and Bubbles crawls all the necessary information from the GitHub repository. Many web services ask too many questions for users to be enjoyable. This is particularly true for software such as task management or error reporting, where clicking an error opens a page with several dozens of text boxes to fill out. This can discourage users and even stop them from using the service, a fatal development for something like a error reporting page. We therefore try minimize every interaction with the user to a small action space, with ideally only one option to select. User interactions with no options to chose from, such as notifications, are skipped entirely, and we try to find different, more embedded representation metaphors to represent the respective information. One method used to minimize the action space is only presenting options in the context relevant for a specific action. For bubbles, for example, each profile entry can be deleted or edited (such as changing the link of a repository or closing a quest). Always displaying all these options would greatly pollute the action space, so they were changed to be visually hidden while not being hovered: delete and config buttons are only displayed for the currently hovered item - please note that for other means of representation, such as screen readers, these options are still present. Figure 5: Screenshot of Bubbles with enabled config buttons shows a Bubbles screen with all the config and delete buttons visible for
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comparison. One can clearly see that it both unnecessarily extends the action space and even visually clutters the user interface.
Figure 5: Screenshot of Bubbles with enabled config buttons
A profile page in Bubbles with all edit and delete buttons visible for comparison.
Besides just adding resources, a user can optionally group them into projects, such as having all GPII GitHub repositories and Stack Overflow discussions together. The next iteration of Bubbles will offer services to quickly find other people working on similar projects which might be good contacts for a talk. Further, the projects create automated newsfeeds of changes.
5.1.1 Gamifying the development process One of the key aspects of Bubbles is to work towards approaches to gamify the development process of accessible software. One of the key principles is to split work into smaller tasks. The gamification goals here are to make the development of accessible software more effective in terms of quality - such as having better abstract interface descriptions or a more complex GPII integration through GPII preference terms. Furthermore, we want to achieve additional learning goals, by raising the awareness of accessibility and helping fostering best practices. For these tasks, it is often important to establish good communication channels reaching outside of a project, to build on accessibility experience from other developers. Our first approach to integrate into the software development process and split larger projects into smaller pieces is the Questifier, an add-on component to Bubbles integrated
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through an extension system built in Bubbles. The Questifier is a tool that runs over a given GitHub repository, parsing comments in source files. These comments are scanned for typical keywords, like “ToDo”, and generates a list of open issues from them. This approach is designed to be used in conjunction with issue trackers or bug reporters: In many cases, evenin projects with an existing issue tracker, developers thend to leave their ToDos as inline comments. A user can then publish these issues as quests on bubbles, asking for support or contributions. Figure 6: Quests in Bubbles shows a preliminary Questifier integration in Bubbles.
Figure 6: Quests in Bubbles
The Bubbles Questifier offering issues and ToDos found in a github repository to publish as quests.
If a user contributed to a quest, they can just paste their respective GitHub commit , claiming the quest as completed. Quests award experience, which causes a user’s Bubbles level to increase. The precise form of Bubbles levels is still an open design question. We are currently playing with several different features, just as offering moderation options for very encouraging users, further supporting the crowdsourced and self-organizing structure of the platform. Offering a semi-automated (or fully automated, depending on whether a user wants to review the found quests) mechanism to publish issues helps other developers to see the status of a project and how they may contribute. The Questifier and quest feature build a simple and straightforward mechanism to collect feedback and contributions from other
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developers and fosters connections beyond the project a developer is currently working on. An upcoming reward system can serve as further incite to participate in such efforts.
5.2 Developer Space The Developer Space of Prosperity4All is an online platform that makes it easier, faster and less expensive to conceive, create, test and market new solutions internationally. The developer space serves as a repository for Building Blocks: components or applications that developers can use to accelerate, extend or polish their applications. The Developer Space, being a component-sharing platform at heart, greatly benefits from having many contributors. This is where gamification comes into play. Further down the road, the Bubbles platform described above will integrate with the GPII’s DeveloperSpace to serve as a community platform. Plans are to add a DeveloperSpace bubble type, which could allows users to share their Building Blocks or contributions via Bubbles. The Developer Space also minimizes action space in user interface and makes many metrics measurable and comparable, to build the foundation for a reward system. Figure 7: Screenshot of the Developer Space, for example, shows a user’s activity feed, which could be the source for badges or achievements.
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Figure 7: Screenshot of the Developer Space
The activity feed of a user in the GPII Developer Space.
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6 Game Design Patterns
Determining representation-agnostic patterns for gamification is a key challenge. For our approach, we went one step back and, instead of applying game mechanics patterns to a business process, we started with analyzing pieces of software that utilize many aspects of representation-agnostic “gamification”: computer games. Game development is typically structured into three layers: game design, game mechanics and the game engine. The game design is the high-level concept of the game, containing key aspects of the way the game is supposed to be played or the goals to be achieved or messages to be transferred. This typically contains the genre of the game (such as “first- person shooter” or “strategy game”), the story and setting that build the foundation of a believable game world (similar to an author, such as J.R.R. Tolkien building a complex world, including events, elvish language and characters that don’t even appear in “Lord of the Rings”, but are important to build a consistent and believable world), the way time is represented (turn-based or real-time) and similar high-level decisions. An important part of game design is analyzing the player base, and dealing with topics like motivation, replayability and reward. The game mechanics are the set of rules by which the decisions of the game design are implemented. If we take chess as an example, the game design could be described as a turn- based simulation of a battle between two kingdoms, where individual moves of a game component play an important role. The game mechanics would now be that the game takes place on a 8x8 square field, with 16 figures per player and the precise rules on how these figures move and how victory can be achieved. Note that the game mechanics are still just considerations and plans, not implemented in code. The game engine, finally, is the implementation of the game mechanics - and therefore the game design - in actual code. This includes many aspects, such as rendering visual images, producing believable audio output, keeping the world persistent (if required), dealing with artificial intelligence or physics simulations and much more. Parts of the implementation are often covered through third-party tools. Nowadays, there are powerful solutions to solve most of the aspects of implementation, such as the Unreal Engine or Unity. Some game engines feature a game mechanics module, which usually serves to implement elements of the actual game mechanics into code which are not covered by a middleware, such as mana points for casting spells. These should not be confused with the actual game mechanics as described above. In this categorization, the visual representation of game elements is typically considered in either the game mechanics or the game engine development step, whereas game design focuses on the more abstract aspects of a game concept. As such, we focused on game design to find game design Patterns that can work outside of an actual game and be utilized Ecosystem infrastructure for smart and personalised inclusion and PROSPERITY for ALL stakeholders 19 www.prosperity4all.eu
for gamification. The patterns we found are grouped into five categories: action space, reward, challenge, development and discovery. This chapter describes the patterns we found and their meaning in game development.
6.1 Action Space The notion of action space originates from artificial intelligence research and describes the number of options one can choose from at a given point in time. There are multiple aspects regarding the action space that are important for gamification. When selecting an option from a pool of alternatives, it is important that we are presented with a fully observable action space. This describes that each possible option is presented to a user. Game GUIs typically design their usability around this concept, whereas office applications often neglect it. Consider an application like Microsoft Excel, where a single action - such as altering the formating of a cell - is spread over dozens of buttons and menus, which are not visible at the same point in time. Obviously, games can do that as, unlike many office applications, games can tailor their underlying business task to have a limited number of options to choose from, whereas an office application has to deal with the full complexity of text formatting. Having a limited action space, however, is one of the key ingredients to make decisions enjoyable for humans. Unlike a game, office applications can’t tailor their action space entirely, so there will always be situations which require dozens of options to be available. However, one should carefully design which options a player actually has to decide upon at a given point in time. Many office applications “pollute” the action space and shift programmatic problems into the action space of the user instead of solving them correctly. A typical example can be found in Photoshop, where everybody probably encountered the message box “You are about to apply an effect that you cannot undo. Are you sure?”. Instead of implementing an undo function capable of dealing with all situations that could occur, complexity was shifted into the hands of the user. This draws sad similarities to law cases, with an application shifting responsibility to the user, instead of dealing with it correctly: “hey, you clicked yes! your fault.”. An effective method to design action space in games is to keep lists of possible actions for each point in time. As most applications, unlike games, are not real-time simulations but message-response systems, it is sufficient to keep lists of possible actions for each interaction scenario. These scenarios can often be inherited from use cases, such as “format text”. This yields listings of possible actions and it clearly becomes visible if the action-space of a decision becomes too large. Games typically limit their action space to ten simultaneously available actions or less. Another important aspect for human decision making is the observability of the action space. While it should be obvious that humans require a fully observable action space to make meaningful decisions, it is also important to assure users that they actually observe the full action space. Games rely heavily on the observability of the action space and slowly introduce new options to a player as they advance in the game, always assuring them that Ecosystem infrastructure for smart and personalised inclusion and PROSPERITY for ALL stakeholders 20 www.prosperity4all.eu
they are picking from all available options. This is almost always violated for non-game applications, where there are often multiple ways to achieve the same goal through different paths in the GUI. A good example can be found in Microsoft Word, when one tries to add references to a document. Should you just maintain them by hand? Through an automated listing? Or use the reference feature, but this comes with a lot of additional problems to deal with, like creating a reference library first? This drives the user to a situation where they are never sure whether they are actually selecting from the full list of options. Humans seem to require to have a fully observable action space - and know that it is fully observable - in order to find joy in decisions. Otherwise, we start in a “choose the least worst of all options” mode, where we start tinkering about the disadvantages of the options, rather than the advantages. A good real-world example for such a mental behavior is shopping for something, like buying a new laptop. You can ponder shops and start informing yourself on the internet which model fits your needs best, but the more you explore, the less confident you will become. In the end, you can only be disappointed by the product you bought as, while exploring the options, you ensure yourself, that you can never fully observe the action space. This might also be one of the success criteria for companies such as Apple that used to sell the iPhone as is, without any choices and variations. When buying, people were confident that they had the best - and only - option, leading to greater joy in their purchase. (Note the use of past tense here, as that has changed.)
6.2 Reward Reward is one of the key principles that gamification research is focusing on. It is also the most obvious difference between conventional office applications and games: games almost always design a reward mechanism. This insight led to the countless high-score lists, customer points and bonus programs one can encounter ranging from supermarkets to airlines. Yet, the precise mechanisms on what we identify as a reward and what triggers respective reactions in the brain are not fully understood. There are, however, some aspects of reward that seem to be important for human decision making. First of all, reward in games is often comparable, and in most cases even measurable. Comparable here means that one can identify that one reward is smaller or larger than another, whereas measurable means that reward can be mapped on a numeric scale, allowing the user to identify by how much the two rewards are different. The notion of comparable and measurable rewards is derived from information theory: Two elements are called comparable, if there are meaningful equality, less-than and greater-than relations. On the contrary, two elements are called measurable, if a distance measure between the elements can be formulated. Colours, for example, are neither comparable nor measurable: red is not the same as yellow, so we can identify that they are not identical, but red is neither greater or less than yellow. Badges, on the other hand, are comparable: A user can compare it’s collection of badges to the collection of other users. Badges also often come in Ecosystem infrastructure for smart and personalised inclusion and PROSPERITY for ALL stakeholders 21 www.prosperity4all.eu
different grades, like having an expert badge and a regular badge for different levels of contribution. A user can clearly see that an expert badge is greater than the regular version, but they don’t really know what the difference is. Experience points, finally, are comparable and measurable. If a user gets 100 XP for one task and 50 XP for another, they clearly see that one of them was rewarded by twice as many experience points. In games, this is often used in conjunction with persistent development (see below) to model the progress of a player’s in-game avatar. Yet, even when deploying simplified versions of reward for gamification, it is important to make them at least comparable. Badges, for example, are comparable, but usually not measurable. More important than measurable reward, however, is for reward to be immediate. Similar to fundamentals in usability, where one aims to produce immediate feedback upon interacting with an interface element, reward should always be immediately awarded for an action, without delay. When slaying a dragon in a game, players get their respective loot immediately. This is important for our brain to link the reward stimulus with the respective action that caused it. Similar rewards in real life, such as your monthly salary, just appear in regular intervals and are not directly linked to actions a user did, therefore greatly reducing the effect of this reward system. There is also a special form of “negative reward”: penalties for negative actions. The design of penalties is an open topic in game design and there are many open issues associated with it. Some games avoid penalties altogether, rather using multiple levels of rewards, where underperforming players still get a slight reward, and well performing players get larger rewards (note that this only works with comparable or - typically - measurable rewards). The popular MMORPG World of Warcraft is such an example. In the gamification context, penalties are avoided, as they can cause negative emotions towards a task. Yet, if deployed, they should follow the same fundamental rules as reward: be immediate and be comparable or measurable. Many games, however, have one very important penalty: Players lose if they aren’t fast enough. Such or similar penalties will often be found in games to tailor the Challenge of the game (see next chapter). Another important aspect of reward is how predictable the reward is. In order for a user to forge long-term plans, often in conjunction with persistent development, they need to have expectations on how reward is awarded and which actions would award which reward. Similarly, if reward is just distributed randomly, this can greatly reduce its impact. It is good practice to give users a forecast on what reward they can expect for each action-space item.
6.3 Challenge The design and dramaturgy of designing a game’s challenges is an essential part in game design. A common approach is game flow [9]. Game flow is a concept of keeping challenges offered by the game in balance with the skill progression of the player. From a more abstract Ecosystem infrastructure for smart and personalised inclusion and PROSPERITY for ALL stakeholders 22 www.prosperity4all.eu
perspective, game flow is dealing with learning effects of the user. One example of applying flow to gamification for elderly was demonstrated by Korn [10]. Yet, typically, challenge is not a design parameter of gamification. This is obvious, as the challenge in a business application does not originate from gamification, but from the underlying business task. While games design their game world and therefore have control over their challenges, business applications cannot alter the complexity and challenge of a given task significantly - at least if we consider that the application is already as effective as it could be. As such, challenge is usually not considered in gamification. Yet, there are some scenarios in which challenge becomes interesting for a gamification purpose: parallel games. One could think of a gamification scenario, in which the gamification of an application awards a currency which can then be used in a separate game. An example would be awarding puzzle pieces, which can be combined in a separate game. Such a game is played in parallel to the gamification task and is only loosely coupled. If deploying such a game, especially if multiple users are involved, another important aspect of challenge becomes relevant: cooperative and competitive scenarios. The simplest form of a parallel game is a high-score list. Users are awarded with an abstract currency - points - which are used in a parallel game which just consists of accumulating as many points as possible. This is often a competitive scenario, where players can compare themselves with each other and try to outperform colleagues. Competitive game settings should not be underestimated in regard to the emotional influence they can have. If successful - and one aims for successful gamification - competitive scenarios can even generate aggression. Therefore, competitive scenarios are the simplest, but typically not the most desired form of parallel games in gamification. Cooperative scenarios are more favourable. A simple change to a high-score list could transform it into a cooperative scenario: Instead of each player accumulating points on their own, the whole company accumulates points together, trying to reach certain milestones. Such an approach is well known in game development, called “community goals”, as found in numerous titles, such as Battlefield 4.
6.4 Development Persistent development is the key ingredient in one of the most successful genres of games: MMORPGs. In such games, there is a persistent character of a game world, which is developed over the course of many game sessions. This is actually very similar to real-life scenarios, as all actions we perform in our daily life have persistent effects. As such, our brain is well trained in predicting such development, which is a feature that games exploit in designing their game mechanics. For gamification scenarios, persistent development can also be used, typically in conjunction with reward. Reward mechanisms deployed in a gamification scenario, such as rewarding points for certain actions, can become a lot more rewarding if they are coupled with persistent development, such as a high-score list or an actual avatar or game world that a user can develop over time. When working with Ecosystem infrastructure for smart and personalised inclusion and PROSPERITY for ALL stakeholders 23 www.prosperity4all.eu
development, however, the borderline with a parallel game is blurry/vague. Persistent development requires a player to have some choices, as otherwise the development becomes meaningless. These choices, however, form an action space and should probably have a reward, both linking to the concepts as described above. In general, persistent development for gamification is often simple to deploy at first glance, but hard to use effectively.
6.5 Discovery Designing virtual worlds is a core aspect of game design. Curiosity is a driving force of mankind and many games offer opportunities for exploration, hidden treasures and secrets throughout their game world. Some games rely on it almost entirely, for example the many open-world games, including the popular Minecraft. Yet, in gamification, one does typically not build a complete game world, including a story, setting and environment. As such, discovery is a key element of game design, but not used in gamification, aside from parallel games.
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7 Tutorials and Coaching
7.1 Games Examples This section is a growing selection of games we analyzed, illustrating examples on how the five patterns are deployed in real game design. This list will be regularly updated throughout the project with new examples and titles. See our HCII2015 paper [11] for a compressed list of examples. Note that there are special patterns that only appear in games, such as the setting of the game world, its background story and often character development.
7.1.1 Tetris • Designers: Alexey Pajitnov, Vladimir Pokhilko • Release: 1984 • Genre: Puzzle
The Nintendo version of Tetris as it appeared on the GameBoy handheld console.
Tetris is one of the most successful games ever. It features many game design patterns as we described them above, but one which is particularly highlighted is the action space: Throughout any decision while playing Tetris, a player only has a hand full of actions to choose from: moving the active block left or right, rotating clockwise and counterclockwise, or accelerating the fall of the active block. This is the fundament to the game’s addictive success, as players are not only assured, that they observe the full action space - there are no hidden menus to mirror or block - but they are also selecting from a very small list of options, making decision making enjoyable for humans.
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7.1.2 Starcraft II • Developer: Blizzard Entertainment • Release: 2010 • Genre: Real-Time Strategy • http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/
Starcraft II is one of the most successful real-time strategy games and a popular eSport title. Its predecessor, Starcraft, was a giant influence on the digital culture, extending vocabulary by words such as “to zerg” originating from one of the alien races in the game, and becoming the national sport of South-Korea. As with many real-time strategy games, if analyzing them in regard for game design patterns, they seem to violate a fundamental constraint: action space. Real-time strategy games offer hundreds of possible actions, depending on the size of the army a player controls. Further, many parameters of these actions are continuous, such as the target positions to which units should move, scaling the action space to tremendous dimensions. These games forge challenge out of this vast action space, transforming the task of choosing the right action at the right time into the fundamental challenge of the game design. This goes up to a point that APMs (actions per minute) are a measurement often used in eSport to measure the skill of a player, with skilled players easily exceeding 200 APMs.
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7.1.3 Diablo III • Developer: Blizzard Entertainment • Release: 2012 • Genre: Hack and Slash • http://us.battle.net/d3/en/
Diablo III is a popular example of the hack-and-slash genre, in which a player controls a single character and fights through hordes of enemies. These games typically build around a key reward element: loot. Each defeated enemy can drop items, such as magical potions, powerful armor or legendary swords, which are used to empower the player’s own character. Therefore, the developers opted to deploy persistent development, as the items gathered become a defining element of the character played and persist through gamesessions. It is not uncommon for players to play for years in order to achieve the best possible item combination. With regard to action space, hack-and-slash games utilize small sets of abilities that a player can use at a given point in time, leading to a small and fully observable action space.
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7.1.4 Counter-Strike • Developer: Valve Corporation • Release: 1999 • Genre: First-Person Shooter • http://blog.counter-strike.net/
First-person shooters are a very popular genre of games, Counter-Strike in particular. As many first-person games, they feature a very large action space, as players can move more or less freely through a 3D environment. Similarly to real-time strategy games, fast reactions onto world changes, such as spotting an opponent, are a significant element of the challenge designed in these games. Counter-Strike, being a tactical team shooter, is particularly interesting regarding the way challenge is designed: it features both cooperative and competitive elements. Two teams fight each other, and each team has to cooperate on a large degree, regarding their positioning and weapon choice. Counter-Strike is a popular eSport title and teams invest a lot of time in training to optimize their timings.
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7.1.5 Portal 2 • Developer: Valve Corporation • Release: 2011 • Genre: First-Person Platformer • http://www.thinkwithportals.com/
At first glance, Portal 2 and Counter-Strike may look similar. While they both are first-person games, they are fundamentally different. Whereas Counter-Strike focuses on completing mission objectives as a team, neutralizing enemies, Portal 2 focuses on solving complex physics puzzles. As such, though both have vast action spaces due to their continuous nature, Portal 2 has only lose time constraints, compared to Counter-Strike, which requires to react rapidly on environmental changes. Therefore, tinkering with the puzzle and coming to a solution becomes the core of the challenge in Portal 2, and the complex action space is rather neglectable. Further, players usually only have a single “weapon”, a gravity gun, to manipulate the environment. The continuous nature of the game world, leading to a large action space, is not perceived as challenging by experienced first-person players. Yet, Portal 2 works with building complex, hard to perceive environments, to make puzzles even more challenging.
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7.1.6 World of Warcraft • Developer: Blizzard Entertainment • Release: 2004 • Genre: Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game • http://us.battle.net/wow/en/
World of Warcraft is one of the most influential games of all times and is often considered as opening up the market for MMORPGs in the US and Europe. It is a vast mix of game elements, but there are two important key features which most MMORGPs have in common: reward and development. World of Warcraft tailors its reward very well, up to a point where addiction to World of Warcraft becomes a medical symptom: In 2006, clinical psychologist Maressa Hecht Orzack even claimed that up to 40% of WOW players were addicted to the game9. Players almost never get any penalties and even the slightest actions in the game world yield rewards to a player, making any time spent in the World of Warcraft enjoyable. As any MMORPG, World of Warcraft allows a player to build up an avatar in the game world, of which they can choose abilities and develop skills, as well as equipping better items. As players often play a World of Warcraft character for years, their characters get/become more and more powerful, requiring the game developers to regularly add new challenges. This so-called “power creep” is a fundamental problem of persistent development and requires investment in a more complex maintenance phase.
9 http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/08/7459/
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7.1.7 Guildwars 2 • Developer: ArenaNet • Release: 2012 • Genre: Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing game • https://www.guildwars2.com/en/
Guild Wars 2 is an MMORPG with several unique aspects. Unlike many other examples of the genre, Guild Wars 2 tailors their persistent character development differently. While other games reward a player with more powerful items or abilities, Guild Wars 2 offers rather cosmetic items to personalize a character or further insights in the storyline. This almost completely avoids the “power creep” problem, where players become more and more powerful the longer they play, rending a lot of the content to be boring and requiring a studio to constantly develop new adventures. Guild Wars 2 still regularly adds new features and stories, but the core development of a character originates from giving it more personality, whereas many characters in other games become more a wardrobe of items.
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7.1.8 Elite: Dangerous • Developer: Frontier Developments • Release: 2014 • Genre: Space Simulation • https://www.elitedangerous.com/
A unique genre of games are simulations. These games focus on reproducing a certain experience (be it fictional or real) as precisely as possible, while still maintaining enough aspects to be fun to play. Elite: Dangerous is a space simulation, in which a player can fly space ships, engage in combat, perform interstellar trading, hunt pirates and the like. Elite: Dangerous is very interesting as it offers a giant amount of discovery: it comes with a complete, procedurally generated galaxy with the correct amount of stars, which each can be visited by players to find new planets and stellar phenomenons. The world of Elite: Dangerous gets frequently updated to include new findings of extrastellar star systems and uses the correct NASA/ESA nomenclatures. It is not uncommon for players to spend days in Elite: Dangerous to get to a popular, far off star that one can see at the night sky, such as the Pleiades. This strongly plays with human curiosity and the urge for discovery. As with most simulations, it has a rather vast action space, as it models the fictitious complexity of science-fiction space travels, which bears similarities to gamification, as there are certain complexities that Elite: Dangerous willingly preserves.
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7.1.9 World of Warships • Developer: Wargaming • Release: 2015 • Genre: Arcade Simulation • http://worldofwarships.com/
World of Warships is slow-paced arcade-like game, where players control World-War 2 ships and fight in teams to gain mission objectives. In many aspects, it behaves similar to MMORPGs, as it offers persistent development as players unlock new tiers of warships and specialize in different vessel categories, such as aircraft carriers or battleships. World of Warships is particularly fascinating as it builds on a popular, historic setting. Exploiting a certain historical episode, such as World War 2 in this case, can spark motivation to participate in the game without any further support by game design mechanisms. This builds on players having an interest in the respective historical period which was built outside the game, but can serve as a strong motivator. Yet, at the same time, some players will also dislike these historical similarities, the reasons for which should be obvious in the case of World War 2.
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7.1.10 Super Mario Bros • Developer: Nintendo • Release: 1985 • Genre: Platformer • http://mario.nintendo.com/
The original version of Super Mario Bros, as well as any other example of the franchise, is a typical example of a jump’n’run, more recently called “platformer”. It should be safe to say, that the Mario franchise shaped the way platformers look today. These games come with a clearly defined and simple action space, a simple world representation and jumping puzzles to solve. Mario in particular offers a good amount of discovery in its game world, as there are many hidden rooms, shortcuts and power ups hidden throughout the game world. Besides certain shortcuts, however, the game world is a linear chain of levels with limited replayability.
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7.1.11 Super Metroid • Developer: Nintendo • Release: 1994 • Genre: Platformer (Metroidvania) • http://www.metroid.com/
The Metroid franchise is a unique example of platformers, and even shaped it’s own sub genre: Metroidvania games. While these games share most of their basic aspects with jump’n’run platformers such as Mario, they have a continuous and freely explorable game world, unlike the chain of levels that classic platformers offer. They also often have a wider array of weapons and powerups to be discovered throughout the game world, adding persistent development. The transition from a platformer like Mario to a Metroidvania like Super Metroid is a good example to study how persistent development and discovery can be integrated into a game design - or gamification plan - by retailoring reward into persistent items or experience in a parallel game.
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7.1.12 Axiom Verge • Developer: Tom Happ • Release: 2015 • Genre: Platformer (Metroidvania) • http://www.axiomverge.com/
Axiom Verge is a recent child of the Metroidvania family of games, named after its greatest influence: Metroid. As such the game has many similarities to Metroid, as described above. The game overcomes the still limited replayability in this genre ,originates from the convention that a single fixed world to be discovered, by utilizing artificial intelligence to add randomized and procedurally generated content, such as generated levels and encounters. Ensuring the ongoing replayability and encouragement in a game design is also an important aspect of gamification and the field of artificial intelligence provides many interesting approaches towards such content generation.
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7.1.13 Civilization V • Developer: Firaxis Games • Release: 2010 • Genre: Turn-Based Strategy, 4X • http://www.civilization5.com/
Civilization is a popular example of turn-based strategy games. This is one of the few genres that did not transit to a real-time system and is still turn-based, making them good candidates for parallel games in gamification, as most business applications are message- response systems, similar to turn-based games. Civilization further builds on the historic setting, as one leads a tribe throughout the millennia, from the stone age to the information era. It has a vast, but discrete action space, as the whole game world is not a continuous 3D world, but a board of hexagonal tiles. In many aspects, these games share similarities with physical tabletop games. For gamification, they are most attractive as an application for a parallel game. One could think of having a miniature version of such a game, in which actions are paid with points a player earns through gamification tasks.
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7.1.14 Dota 2 • Developer: Valve Corporation • Release 2013 • Genre: Multiplayer Online Battle Arena • http://blog.dota2.com/
Multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBA) are one of the fundamental genres in eSport. These team games feature two teams of players, where each player controls a hero in a fashion similar to real-time strategy games, from which this genre originates. The goal of the MOBA is to destroy a hostile core building. Almost all of these games have a strong competitive element, sometimes even within the same team, as players try to buy expensive items early. These competitive aspects make it a good foundation for eSport, but can also build up frustration and other negative emotions for the casual player. Many MOBAs utilize a parallel game for persistent development. While each game session is stand-alone, and equipment and character points from previous matches are not carried over into the new session, players can typically unlock new cosmetic items or other features while playing. One could see this approach as gamification applied onto an actual game, serving as a good and successful pattern.
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7.1.15 Heroes of the Storm • Developer: Blizzard Entertainment • Release: 2015 • Genre: Multiplayer Online Battle Arena • http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/
Heroes of the Storm is an alternative to Dota 2 and shares many similarities with some unique differences. It tries to open up the genre for more casual players, trying to avoid competition within a team. Whereas a single player can dominate a match in Dota 2, Heroes of the Storm shares experience points gathered between all players of the team and removes player-specific rewards such as items altogether. This is a good example on how conflict sparked by a competitive scenario could be compensated. Where each player levels up their hero on their own in Dota 2, Heroes of the Storm only offers a team level to which each player’s contribution adds to, similar to community events as described above.
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7.2 Coaching by example In this section we provide a list of examples of how gamification was applied to applications. This list is expected to grow and get updated during the course of the project, with contributions by everybody.
7.2.1 Stack Overflow • Forum to answer coding related questions • http://stackoverflow.com/
Stack Overflow primarily utilizes gamification for a self-managing, crowdsourced discussion approach. Instead of relying on active moderators, users can accept answers to their questions and vote them, allowing Stack Overflow to present the best-voted solution on top of a thread, thereby greatly reducing the time and effort it takes for users to browse the forums. The typical workflow when using Stack Overflow becomes: Finding a question similar to the question you have, then read the first - and therefore most well accepted by the community - answer. However, in some cases, this can also lead to a typical setback of crowd-sourced approaches: sometimes users vote an answer up, because it is the accepted opinion, not necessarily the best answer. Besides these approaches, Stack Overflow deploys a very simple user interface overall, offering a very small and observable action space, only showing as much information as possible.
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Stack Exchange is a network of question and answer sites that use the same model as Stack Overflow. In addition to programming, there are communities or sites devoted to many other topics, such as theoretical computer science, “ask Ubuntu”, English language & usage, and philosophy10.
10 http://stackexchange.com/sites#
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7.2.2 Visual Studio Achievements • Adds unlockable reward batches to Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE • https://channel9.msdn.com/achievements/VisualStudio
Achievements are a well established concept in video games, giving reward for unique, typically challenging tasks besides the normal flow of the game. This often adds to replayability, as achievements might be to complete a certain level, but without using some of the weapons available, allowing old challenges to be solved again under new restrictions. Similarly, there are also achievements used just to document a player’s progress, such as reaching a certain character level. This family of achievements makes an otherwise incomparable progress comparable and gives little reward milestones on the path to a greater goal. The achievements added to Visual Studio are of the latter kind, rewarding good coding style, doing localizations and similar features, giving otherwise boring tasks a little reward. There is also a global ranking list, playing with the reward system by putting it into a competitive framework.
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7.2.3 Coderwall • Achievement system for open-source projects • https://coderwall.com/
Similar to the Visual Studio Achievements, Coderwall adds badges and user-designed challenges to open source projects. A user can earn badges and present them on their user page, typically associated with good coding practice, using a difficult but effective api, or learning new IDEs. This builds on a simple, yet effective, reward system, offering small milestones or addition motivation to solve typical open source business tasks.
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7.2.4 GitHub • Git versioning platform • https://github.com/
GitHub is a popular hosting service for the Git versioning system, which adds many additional collaborative features and a comfortable web frontend. A particularly interesting feature from a gamification perspective are the activity feeds of users and projects. These are graphs showing how many contributions were made to a project or by a specific person. This can indeed add a very subtle competitive component, engaging users to contribute a lot. There even are third party high-score lists for the most contributing users or most active projects1112.
11 https://gist.github.com/paulmillr/2657075 12 http://githubstats.lip.is/
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7.3 Video Tutorials This section serves as a collection of materials regarding our gamification approach. One such material are videos that, starting winter 2015, we will make available on a regular basis.
7.3.1 Video 1: Introduction to Gamification and Accessibility • From the AccessibilityDay at the HdM • Duration: 48 minutes • Speaker: Andreas Stiegler • Language: English • http://events.mi.hdm-stuttgart.de/2015-06-19-acessibility- day/Accessible%20Gamification
This tutorial talk was held at the Stuttgart Media University (HdM in its German abbreviation) and illustrates our approach. We discover the problems of typical gamification approaches and arrive at the method of taking one step back, to look at real computer games, deriving representation-agnostic game design patterns one can use for accessibility and gamification. To do so, we compare the stereotype office application Microsoft Excel to the real-time strategy game Supreme Commander. Later on, we illustrate some examples regarding action space, reward, challenge, development and discovery, using the games Tetris, Diablo 2, Portal 2, World of Warcraft, and Elite: Dangerous.
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7.3.2 Other Videos The collection of tutorial videos will be extended as the project continues. The next video is scheduled to be done in the first half of 2016 and will probably focus on the application of game design patterns as gamification strategies for some example applications.
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7.4 Presentations This section will collect and summarize videos or presentations held regarding gamification in Prosperity4All, which are not part of our tutorial series as found in the Video Tutorials section.
7.4.1 Accessibility and Games • From the Extended GamesDay at the HdM • Duration: 25 minutes • Speaker: Ian Hamilton • Language: English • http://events.mi.hdm-stuttgart.de/2015-11-23-extended-games-day- 2015/Accesibility%20%26%20Games
Ian Hamilton explains the difficulties of accessibility within games. This is a slightly different approach as ours, but illustrates very well that many of the game design patterns used in games do not rely on their actual representation. Many examples are given on how games could be altered to offer better opportunities for gamification and the audience is brought to attention of many fundamental usability and accessibility problems.
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7.4.2 Usability in Games • Talk held at the World Usability Day • Duration: ~45 minutes • Speaker: Andreas Stiegler • Language: German
In this talk we do not focus on accessibility and games, but more general on usability. Computer games have many interesting approaches towards usability, which are very close to the game design patterns we derived for gamification and accessibility problems. Yet, games also have some fundamental differences when it comes to usability and interaction in general: they willingly design challenge, whereas business programs classically tried to avoid it. A good example is the thought experiment of introducing a magical solve button: imagine you could add a button to an application or a game, which just magically solves whatever problem you are currently encountering. For an office application, such a button would be a huge business case and probably lead to market domination. Imagine having to write your monthly reports: click solve, all done. Imagine having to do a budget calculation: click solve, all done. Now think about the same button added to a game. Most interestingly, while being the holy grail of office applications, such a magical solve button ruins the game, taking away
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all the challenge and rapidly making a game just a useless series of solve-button clicking. This happens due to the key principle of having meaningful actions in games, similar to the action space pattern we discovered. If no challenge is involved in actions anymore, much of their meaning is taking away. Yet, some design patterns, such as discovery, can still work even with the introduction of a magical solve button.
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7.4.3 Gamification in the Development of accessible software • Talk held at the HCII 2014 conference • Duration: ~20 minutes • Speaker: Andreas Stiegler • Language: English
This presentation was the first introduction to our approach and gives some preliminary results of our game survey, focusing on the aspects of action space and reward. We also explained the process of how a game design pattern can be derived from the findings and further discussed their application in a non-game context.
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7.4.4 Gamification and Accessibility • Talk held at the HCII 2015 conference • Duration: ~20 minutes • Speaker: Andreas Stiegler • Language: English
In this talk, we picked examples of our game survey pool and illustrated the five core game design patterns reward, action space, challenge, discovery and development with numerous examples. We also explained how we dissected games and arrived at our patterns.
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8 Appendix: Scientific Publications
8.1 HCII 2014 Paper The first paper regarding our approach of analyzing real games in order to derive representation-agnostic game design patterns: Stiegler, Andreas, and Gottfried Zimmermann. "Gamification in the Development of Accessible Software." Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Design and Development Methods for Universal Access. Springer International Publishing, 2014. 171- 180.
8.2 HCII 2015 Paper A summary of our games survey including easy examples on how to apply game design patterns in real applications: Stiegler, Andreas, and Gottfried Zimmermann. "Gamification and Accessibility." Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. Design for Aging. Springer International Publishing, 2015. 145-154.
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9 References
1. Deterding, S., Dixon, D., Khaled, R., & Nacke, L. (2011, September). From game design elements to gamefulness: defining gamification. In Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments (pp. 9-15). ACM. 2. Hamari, Juho, Jonna Koivisto, and Harri Sarsa. "Does gamification work?--a literature review of empirical studies on gamification." System Sciences (HICSS), 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on. IEEE, 2014. 3. Fronemann, Nora, and Matthias Peissner. 2014. “User Experience Concept Exploration: User Needs as a Source for Innovation.” In , 727–36. ACM Press. doi:10.1145/2639189.2641203. 4. Mekler, Elisa D., et al. "Disassembling gamification: the effects of points and meaning on user motivation and performance." CHI'13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2013. 5. Balkin, Jack M., and Beth Simone Noveck. State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds (Ex Machina: Law, Technology, and Society). NYU Press, 2006. 6. Malone, T. W. (1982, March). Heuristics for designing enjoyable user interfaces: Lessons from computer games. In Proceedings of the 1982 conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 63-68). ACM. 7. Barata, Gabriel, et al. "Engaging engineering students with gamification." Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications (VS-GAMES), 2013 5th International Conference on. IEEE, 2013. 8. Glover, Ian. "Play as you learn: gamification as a technique for motivating learners." (2013): 1999-2008. 9. Jegers, Kalle. "Pervasive game flow: understanding player enjoyment in pervasive gaming." Computers in Entertainment (CIE) 5.1 (2007): 9. 10. Korn, Oliver. "Industrial playgrounds: how gamification helps to enrich work for elderly or impaired persons in production." Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering interactive computing systems. ACM, 2012. 11. Stiegler, Andreas, and Gottfried Zimmermann. "Gamification and Accessibility." Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. Design for Aging. Springer International Publishing, 2015. 145-154.
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