Ayogo Q&A is a video series that answers questions about gamification and health. If you have any questions, ask us! @ayogogames on Twitter or email us at info [at] ayogo [dot] com

While we’re on the subject of gamification, Ayogo is hosting The Great Gamification Debate on February 2nd. Part comedy competition, part performance and part informational, this debate will settle, once and for all, these burning questions: What is gamification? What is it good for? And why does it matter?

Ayogo’s CEO, Michael Fergusson, will go head to head with Pug Pharm CEO, Steve Bocska.  Joe Nickolls, a Microsoft/Big Park Exec and former EA Exec, will be moderating the debate. For more information, please visit The Great Gamification Debate event page.

In this panel, Demetri Detsaridis (General Manager, Zynga New York), Michael Fergusson (CEO, Ayogo) and Nicole Lazzaro (CEO, XEODesign) discussed the overlap between behavioral psychology and game design and development, as well as the possibilities of better employing psychological insights in the creation of games. As dramatic as the impact of statistical analysis and behavioral economics has been on gaming and the games industry, applied psychology has largely remained the province of player research departments at AAA console developers…or been overlooked entirely. Bringing this field to the fore could be another sea change for the industry, pushing gaming even further into the mass market or (depending on your perspective) pulling games one more step away from becoming art. What can we learn from psychology, how can we use it to understand what we’re already doing, and can it help us build better games in the future?

As always, if you have any questions or comments, you can contact Michael Fergusson at Michael[at]ayogo.com

We’ve got Adam Penenberg, an acclaimed investigative journalist who has had two films made from his books, Leslie Saxon, the Director of USC’s Center for Body Computing, which is a hub for wireless health and wearable/implantable devices, and Noreen Kamal, a PhD candidate who is researching design principles for an online social network that will motivate health behaviour change at UBC’s MAGIC Labs. It’s a thrill to have such fascinating people who are doing fascinating things agree to join Michael on his panel.

There are more than 3600 speaking proposals and only room for 500 sessions so every vote counts! The SXSW Panelpicker opens TODAY Monday, August 15th. Be sure to create an account or sign in and let the voting begin.

Michael’s panel is called “Let’s Play: Motivate Healthy Behaviour Using Games.” Please help spread the word. RT, Facebook and Google+ this post. Muster your social graph. Motivate others to join in the voting process. We’d really appreciate it! If you have any questions leave a comment or email me at shehani [at] ayogo.com

Image by Cláudia*~Assad

Sheep, pigs and flowers, we’ve all gotten these ‘gifts’ from our earnest Facebook friends at some point. Some of us have accepted these virtual gifts, installed and joined up, while others have instead become fans of Facebook groups like, “I don’t care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia.”

The “gifting” feature as implemented in many popular social games like Cityville and Farmville has been called an “evil spam engine” by some. But the fact is, this relatively simple game mechanic is a powerful way for players to interact around the game – “gifting” acts as a jumping point for players to engage in and around the game. It is also a great viral marketing tactic that has the capacity to enrich the game experience and boost player retention.

That many social games exploit innate social psychological principles of gifting and reciprocity is obvious. Does this necessarily create games that annoy some as they entertain others? I don’t think so (although being annoying doesn’t say that it’s not useful). It depends on the goals and intentions of the game designer, of course, and like any other element of game design these game mechanics can be wielded with more or less skill.

Let’s begin with the why we give gifts and how reciprocity works.

Why we give

Gift giving is a complex and important part of human interaction. It helps to define relationships and it strengthens bonds with family and friends. Psychologists, like Harvard psychology professor, Ellen J. Langer, say that it is often the giver rather than the receiver who reaps the biggest psychological rewards from a gift. Giving to others reinforces our feelings for them and makes us feel effective and caring. And attending to someone else’s needs leads also to affection for the person attended to.

There may also be deeply ingrained evolutionary forces at work. For example, evolutionarily speaking, males who were generous may have had more reproductive success than those who were stingy (perhaps they still do). Women who were skilled at giving, which would help sustain the provider and their offspring, may also be more likely to be reproductively successful.

Results of a recent meta-analysis of all grooming in primates published in Ecology Letters suggests that reciprocity plays a more profound role in contributing to fitness than previously thought. According to evolutionary biologist, Filippo Aureli, primates exchange grooming for things, such as food, protection and sex, and these cooperative exchanges may promote an individual’s fitness, or their chance of survival and reproductive success. Aureli of Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool, UK, and Gabriele Schino of the Italian National Research Council’s Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies in Rome, combed through dozens of previous studies to quantify how often primates groomed relatives and non-relatives, and how often the favour was returned. They found that, contrary to the prevailing view, primates were more likely to groom others that had groomed them, regardless of their relatedness. The researchers reported that reciprocity alone explained about 20% of the variability in grooming behaviour in 14 different species of primates, whereas kinship alone explained only 3%.

Reciprocity or getting back as good as we give

In social psychology, reciprocity refers to responding to a positive action with another positive action, and responding to a negative action with another negative one. It’s the Tit for Tat response, which differs from both altruism and social gift giving since there’s no expectation of future positive responses.

In cultural anthropology and sociology, reciprocity is a way of defining people’s informal exchange of goods and labour, establishing value and local exchange rates.

According to Marshall Sahlins, a well-known American cultural anthropologist and author of Stone Age Economics, there are three kinds of reciprocity:

1. Generalized reciprocity (most often seen with families, friends, neighbours and coworkers) is the exchange of goods and services without keeping track of their exact value, but often with the expectation that their value will balance out over time.
2. Balanced or Symmetrical reciprocity is an exchange that occurs when someone gives to someone else, expecting a fair and tangible return – at a specified amount, time, and place. Balanced reciprocity is a direct, less personal exchange with a precise reckoning. There is more likely to be a similarity in type and value of objects and defined expectations about giving and receiving.
3. Negative reciprocity is the exchange of goods and services where each party intends to profit from the exchange, often at the expense of the other. It also includes what economists call barter. Negative reciprocity can involve a minimum amount of trust and a maximum social distance; indeed, it can take place among strangers. Negative reciprocity was a prevalent form of exchange in establishing friendly relations in nonindustrial societies between different groups.

Criticism of social games

Gifting of virtual items is a way for a game to harness social norms in reciprocity – to take advantage of the expectation that people will respond to each other in similar ways – that gifts will beget gifts.

Tadhg Kelly, a Social Game Consultant, believes that the goal of the gift economy in games like Cityville is to make players appreciate just how much faster they can actually progress in the game if they, at no cost, give as many gifts to each other as possible. “An economy-of-favours emerges, and everyone wins.”

According to Kelly, the truth about social games like Cityville is that it’s selfishly social and all incentive-driven.

“One of the ironies around social games is that they aren’t particularly social. They don’t encourage deep social interaction because such interaction is useless to the developer. Social games are not trying to be connections or meaningful experiences for players. That is a wholly different kind of game, and not one that they can easily become given the environment in which these games are played.

Instead, they are built as amusements. Socialising in amusements is more akin to having spare Poker chips at the table that you give to someone else, and maybe they’ll give you some back later. It is reciprocal trade, assistance for incentive, not charity. While this does not preclude the possibility that some players will engage in acts of charity for personal reasons, the social dynamics are not created with that in mind. They are built to work with self-interest.”

This assessment resonates with what Marcel Mauss, French sociologist and author of The Gift called the behaviour of gift giving that is superficially presented as spontaneous generosity but is actually carefully staged, seen as an obligation and has a foundation in economic self-interest.

And it also ties in with what John Davis, a British anthropologist and Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Oxford saw as the market economy disguising itself as the gift economy to reap the benefits of the norms of having to give, not being able to refuse a gift and having to repay. Think Hallmark greeting cards.

Gifting virtual gifts, then, becomes not about giving so much as it is about getting needed items back. It’s about perpetuating game play for self- interest and not about caring for your friends.

Can gifting be redeemed?

These are some reasons why the “gifting” game mechanic, which exploits both our drive for self-interest and for reciprocity, is so potent. It taps into a part of us that’s primal, selfish and quite beyond reason.

Cityville cleverly pulls in and retains players through more than this one game mechanic, of course. Zynga, Cityville’s creators, are masters at using social gaming hooks to entertain the masses.

Still, I think gifting can also be used to similar effect for a different purpose – to change behaviour and promote health, for example.

HealthSeeker, uses ‘kudos’ as its gifting mechanic. Kudos differs from Cityville gifts in two crucial ways – it doesn’t function as a spam engine and the motivation for giving isn’t driven by self-interest. Kudos are given to other players of HealthSeeker to congratulate and encourage healthy behaviour. There’s a fostering of cooperation in this social exchange – you’re not in this alone – you have a community who are behind you every step of the way. At the end of the day, it’s not your farm or city you’re building but your health, which I think is rather more important.

So what’s all this gifting for? I think its roots lie in the poignantly human desire to connect and belong to a community. We yearn to interact, to be social. Casual Social Games allow us to stay connected however tenuously to others. Gifting in games mimics our real desire to solidify our bonds with others, our need to reach out and “poke” someone, our longing to give and to say, “I’m thinking of you”.

Harnessing this urge and channelling it for positive change is how games can become a force for good in this world. Serious Games that promote health and wellness can make gifting redeeming and not simply redeemable.

For more information about how games can be used to promote healthier behaviour, or about Ayogo’s GoodLife engine, please contact Michael Fergusson: michael (at) ayogo.com.

The panel will be held at the Austin Convention Center in Ballroom B on Friday March 11th at 3:30PM. Our Creative Director, Jesse Spink, will be tweeting from the event so even if you can’t be there, you can still get a taste of what’s going on. So please join us on twitter @ayogogames, @jessespink or @fergusson. It’s sure to be a fascinating talk!

We are very excited to be a part of SXSW Interactive, which features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology and an unbeatable lineup of special programs showcasing the best new digital works, video games and innovative ideas the international community has to offer.

Courtesy of Flickr's Caro's Lines

One being from James Mcwilliams, which gives compelling arguments for why we might not be able to assume that humans will make self-interested choices in the face of well-designed incentives when it comes to fighting obesity in America. In another article from Ramit Sethi, who is an expert on personal finance and entrepreneurship, a New York Times best selling author and also the founder of I Will Teach You to Be Rich, he makes the same argument about people not making rational decisions about their spending/saving habits, although it would benefit them in the long run. It’s fair to say that most of us know the benefits of saving money now for retirement later on, yet the goal is so far reaching that we end up not doing anything about it.

So how does this all relate to game design? I think that Mcwilliams’ and Sethi’s theories and recommendations for people to overcome these inherent hiccups in rational decision making are similar to those game mechanics that we believe can be used in social games. Things like removing the difficult barriers to success (no immediate rewards, long term goals instead of short-term ones) are some of the ways we ensure that players are achieving their optimal flow.

In our GoodLife™ games, we encourage players to start the game by setting smaller, short term goals rather than large ones and if they succeed, they get a reward. We think that by removing the subtle factors that may prevent someone from taking the initial action steps, like asking them to lose 20 pounds instead of just not to have that next cookie tomorrow, we remove these subtle barriers (too hard, too much commitment) and this helps modify their behaviours more easily. As Sethi comments, while willpower matters, we can help overcome its ill effects with certain psychological techniques.
Using ones social graph can be an powerful way to influence behaviour. Research has found that how much we eat, exercise, drink, smoke and even take vitamins are all socially contagious behaviors. According to a study from the University of California at San Diego, having a buddy who packs on pounds makes you 57 % more likely to do so yourself. It’s no surprise, then, that being accountable to one’s social circle has proven to be very effective as a game mechanic that encourages certain behaviours. Obviously, there are a complex set of issues at play, but one of the key principles in social games is that the very presence of your friends and community helps reinforce your engagement with the game.

In Healthseeker for example, when you pledge to take a healthy Action (to go for a jog, for example, or to eat a salad with your next meal), you can Challenge one of your friends to take that Action with you. It turns out that a person who has received (but not accepted!) at least one Challenge has, on average, twice the number of completed healthy actions as the average player. So even if you don’t explicitly accept the challenge, simply knowing that there is someone in your social graph that cares enough about your health to encourage your progress in the game is enough to spur significant action. Among those that have accepted a friend’s challenge the numbers of healthy actions are even higher.

Using a virtual game economy to provide a context for the user’s goals is a great technique for behaviour modification. Ultimately, it’s still the player who is responsible for changing their behaviour, but a well-designed game can provide context in the form of a narrative and environment to help the process along. Fun following function. What do you think? What psychological techniques have you deployed to change your own behavior? Drop me a line at michael[at]ayogo[dot]com if you have any questions or leave a comment.

We know that people are open to discovering new forms of content publishing. Take books for example. In Japan, people are devouring books in the form of cell phone novels: novels that are created on cell phones simply by stringing together text messages. Looking in the App store, one can find 23,000 e-books. The projected market by 2018 for e-books is estimated to be $9.6 billion. Interactivity with books and e-books is also on the upward trend.  For example, the iPad version of Lewis Carroll’s classic, Alice for the iPad, allows users to tilt the device and watch Alice shrink or grow. Other titles allow parents to record their voices reading to their children, while digi-novels feature video clips that supplement or replace bits of text. Textbooks, too, are becoming interactive, with 3-D clips of a DNA molecule. Book apps are also making strides, especially in the children’s book and the comic book genre.

Courtesy of Flickr's Thyago – SORG|FX

Why does this interest me as a game designer (and might interest you as well)? I’ve recently come across articles or have had lengthy discussion with other game developers about whether or not books will cease to be just books in the future.

To cite an article by Alix Christie and Ludwig Siegle for the Economist, they say that while 2010 was the year of e-readers and tablet computers, 2011 will be the year that books will just become apps. They argue that technology is making the shift inevitable. While I would agree with them, I’d like to add to their argument and go a step further to say that books will become games; games that are played by like-minded people, some of who are the reader’s/player’s real world friends. I see the instructional, motivational and self-help genre of books making the leap to becoming book-games (we’ll have to coin a term for it soon) first.  I think that books that may help readers modify behaviours, teach something or serve as motivational materials lend themselves to socialization.

Ayogo has already made a game that straddles the boundary between book and game. Our HealthSeeker Facebook game takes content that would normally be presented in a booklet handed to patients and re-imagines it as an interactive, social program for individual achievement. All of the content was written by professional authors and nutritionists from the Joslin Diabetes Center at the Harvard Medical School. Ayogo was approached specifically to take information that had been presented in many documentary forms and turn it into a fun, social, interactive format: a game. Since the launch of HealthSeeker, we have been working to generalize this practice to any informational resource or program. We call this customizable, generalized game engine the “Goodlife Engine.”

To show how this engine could be further applied, we could take an example of a book that helps to run a small business. It could be played with others all over the world who are also running small businesses and the game could connect those on social networks and smartphones, in essence, to an interactive workbook that players could access online at any time. Business owners could compete to be on top of leaderboards within the game, they could get rewards for achieving certain sales and grow their business by creating new revenue channels through adding their products as part of a virtual gifts marketplace.

As game designers, we’re in the business of socialization. It’s easy to imagine the act of recommending a book and having the idea stick and spread much more effectively in a socialized environment. This notion of socialization is also aligned with Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg’s most recent messages. He seems to be convinced that every industry is going to be rethought in a social way. Why should content creators care?  First and foremost, because interactivity and social play are powerful pedagogic tools. Consider how business schools teach through case studies. Consider how the military instructs soldiers through war games. In addition, having a social layer allows authors and rights holders to build a bi-drectional relationship with their readers. They can obtain important player/reader data, they can monetize the book through in-game advertisements, offers and virtual goods and get the message out to massive audiences.

Based on our expertise in the psychology of game design, we know that games and play can help motivate the engagement of the reader, spread ideas both broadly and quickly (the so-called “viral meme”). Great game designers understand why a player would invite a friend to participate or recommend an idea to a friend. We believe this points the way to a new energy (and new revenue) for book authors and distributors – after all, few technologies are as information-rich, and as familiar across all demographics, as the book. What do you think? As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. You can email me at michael [at] ayogo [dot] com.

Courtesy of Flickr's NontrivialMatt

Early last week, Zynga announced the release of their newest social game called Cityville. It’s one of a growing number of city-building games on Facebook. Others include Tiny Town, My Town, Towner, Social City, YoVille, Bubble Island and Tiki Resort.

Cityville resembles the classic city building game SimCity, at first glance anyway. However doesn’t require you to build and connect power lines. It lets you create and manage a city from scratch by building roads, homes, schools, parks, restaurants and other businesses. There are no taxes in the game, but you’ll make money by trading goods with other cities and collecting rent.

For almost a year, Ayogo has been kicking around the idea of a city building game that took the whole genre more seriously. We think that a collaborative, social, city simulation is the perfect environment in which to stimulate and educate about the relationship between urban living and ecology, between density and energy and, most of all, between responsibility and hedonism. We know that Zynga won’t be interested in having that conversation, but we sure are.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we have many exciting news to tell you about. The first bit of news had to do with us going (hopefully) to SXSW. Our panel topic was selected for the community voting process and the voting opens tomorrow! Make sure to visit the SXSW Panelpicker to sign up so you can vote.  In other news…

Courtesy of Flickr's Theresa Thompson

Like us, you’re probably having a busy summer. Still, we really appreciate the fact that some of you have found time to leave comments, RT our tweets and suggest future blog post ideas for Michael’s social game design blog. Thanks for that! We’ve been working on a number of exciting new publishing and speaking projects, and we’re also working on developing new games, so I thought I would give you a little update.