Thinking

Game Design Thinking

In her book, Game Thinking, Amy Jo Kim outlines how applying the principles of Game Design to product development can help achieve engagement. Game Design Thinking applies best practices in designing games to design any interactive experience whether it is for education, entertainment, or more functional products. Games have the ability to connect to users in a deeply engaging and rewarding way and designing any interactive experience can benefit from the lessons learned from game design.

I believe in the power of games to not only entertain, but to teach, train, and inspire. Games can provide beneficial and even transformational experiences that help us hone skills, become better creative problem solvers, and feel a sense of purposeful connectedness and community. Games and gameplay can help us maximize our potential individually and collectively.

More than simply "gamifying" products with points and badges, game design thinking applies an understanding of intrinsic motivation factors to create deeply engaging, immersive and emotionally connected experiences. At our core, we seek to develop and perfect skills, solve challenges, and make choices that have a meaningful impact. Games provide these experiences.

What is a game?

To understand the power of games, it is good to have a basic definition of a game. Many have tried to define a game, but one I like is: a simulated experience where a participant freely performs in a role to overcome challenges in pursuit of a goal. If we use this definition of a games, we can think about how to design a game as well as any experience that can benefit from the power of gameplay.

For example, we can think about an app to help raise money for charity as an adventure charitable givers can participate in where they are helping discover treasures needed to unleash magical powers. Exploring interaction mechanics and even light gameplay can uncover engaging experiences that reframe the act of charitable giving as a fun and repeatable adventure. If we think about the goal of the app as a way to establish a deep relationship with givers instead of a way to handle transactions, we can reimagine how users perceive and interact with the app and the charity itself. The key is to create an experience where the player or user feels like they are the hero in a story with actions and activities that appeal to our intrinsic motivations.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

Great games tap into our intrinsic desire to perform actions competently as we strive for mastery, seek novelty, and make creative choices that have purposeful and meaningful outcomes. These motivations can be translated to Acting, Thinking, and Feeling. When we strive for mastery, we are taking Action performing tasks and applying skills. When we seek Novelty, we are Thinking about how things work, speculating what's ahead, and strategizing about what actions to take. When we seek meaningful outcomes, we are Feeling our emotions and how our actions and thoughts affect ourselves and our world.

We are hard wired to trigger positive emotions through these types of actions. Actions like playing games gives us something to focus on and engage our mental and physical abilities in stimulating ways while giving us a sense of purpose and accomplishment. The key is the tasks need to be done willingly and freely, include meaningful goals and have clear tangible results. Games can enable a "flow state" where tasks and actions that require our skills and understanding of the goals are matched with the presented challenges resulting in a deeply engaged mental state.

While intrinsic motivation is the engine that keeps us engaged, we need guides and inputs that provide context and structure to push us forward. That's where extrinsic rewards like points, badges and leaderboards come in. Extrinsic motivational elements alone provide ephemeral rewards that excite us for a brief amount of time, but true long term engagement comes from combining intrinsic and extrinsic motivational elements.

Engagement Loop

Key to developing the concept is understanding the core audience, the type of experience you want to create, and what intrinsic motivations you want to tap into. Engagement Loops are the repeatable experiences in games and interactive experiences that taps into intrinsic motivations to keep people engaged and wanting more. Applying our Acting, Thinking, Feeling motivational elements outlined here as Mastery, Autonomy, and Relatedness based on self determination theory, we can see how to construct an engagement loop. Mastery is our desire to learn new skills and become proficient at using them. Autonomy is our desire to discover, explore and create new unique experiences. Relatedness is our desire for social interactions as well as to be part of something important and to have meaningful impacts on our world and others.

Deeply engaging experiences deliver a mix of mastery, autonomy and relatedness in varying degrees as they work together to create deeply satisfying experiences. In deeply engaging experiences, players are given high level, overarching goals and the flexibility to use the systems to achieve the goals. Their choices in the tactics they use to leverage the mechanics of the experience lead to outcomes. If these outcomes have meaningful impacts on the narrative, allow them to realize and achieve personal and social performance bests while working toward the larger goals, these will be deeply satisfying experiences.

Each motivation is built on a foundation of immersion that combines spatial, narrative, and mechanical elements in a way that creates a plausible and compelling world based on its internal logic and consistency. These elements include lots of layered details with their own stories, diegetic UI, intuitive and easy to learn controls, game mechanics that align with the world (e.g. need to reload weapons), and social elements that lets the players share their experiences.

Conversely, behavior psychological experiments have shown that some extrinsic motivational elements like progression bars and explicit goals that dictate what players should do have been shown to minimize engagement and made the experiences less satisfying as players get on an endless treadmill of focusing explicitly on goal attainment.

Pulling all together

Games provide the structures and elements to enable an engagement loop. The world design is the game play mechanics, levels, obstacles and challenges the player will play in and progression are the established goals, missions, quests, and rewards that provide context and methods for players to progress.

Games provide game play mechanics in levels and a narrative to provide context to those mechanics. Provided alone, these elements are the sandbox for play. Minecraft is a good example of sandbox play where users can explore, test and try different ways to play and engage.

Most games provide a structure to guide and push users to keep playing. These structures are in the form of Quests / Missions and Progression. Quest and Missions provide an incentive to keep playing by helping tell a story and immerse the user in the narrative. Progression incentivizes the user to play with the mechanics and levels in new ways, or provide new mechanics and levels to explore and learn.

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