SisterMatch is the first matchmaking social game of its kind. By blending a comprehensive matchmaking algorithm with the fun and engagement of social games, SisterMatch aims to bring like-minded women together for support, mentorship and knowledge exchange in a state-of-the-art fashion.

“We know that strong, positive emotional relationships contribute to people’s health,” said Michael Fergusson, Founder and CEO of Ayogo Games, Inc. “Our goal is to provide an environment where women can meet, bond and cultivate solid relationships through storytelling.”

SisterMatch centers around women earning quilt blocks by participating in knowledge tests and personality quizzes – each woman’s unique quilt is then woven into the intricate Community Quilt.  SisterMatch’s innovation lies in its matchmaking algorithm, which gathers information about members’ attitudes, personalities and preferences, and then delivers each Sister her best “SisterMatches”. Using this matchmaking process, women with diabetes will be able to build a list of compatible peer support friends, and begin new friendships while also learning helpful information about healthy living in a fun, interactive way.

“We are excited about the innovative programming that has been created for the DiabetesSisters website through our partnership with Ayogo Games,” said Brandy Barnes, Founder and CEO of DiabetesSisters. “I know the SisterMatch Program will help many women find the peer support and education that has been missing from their lives for so long.”

Ayogo reimagined SisterMatch in partnership with Diabetes Sisters with the objective of helping women with diabetes find well-matched allies as they make their journey toward thriving with diabetes.

For more information, please visit: SisterMatch

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.

In the video below, Joe Torres on Tiempo (WABC, NYC) interviews Manny Hernandez, President of Diabetes Hands Foundation, and Andreina Millan Ferro, a Dietitian at the Joslin Diabetes Center, about Healthseeker.

To play HealthSeeker:
-In English: http://HealthSeekerGame.org
-In Spanish: http://ExplorandoTuSalud.org

Image by Ruth Suehle for opensource.com

On the surface, the uproar about Facebook’s privacy controls appears simple: when we signed up, Facebook operated a particular way, and then it was changed in ways that made many of us uncomfortable. For example, many have objected to the News Feed feature, where users’ actions are automatically posted on friends’ pages, because many believe this makes it too easy for “unknown people” to track down individual activities. “It’s not very private”, goes the complaint. But isn’t being able to see other people’s information the main point and inherent nature, the “It Factor” of Facebook? You can’t tell me you don’t like checking out your friend’s Hawaiian holiday photos at your leisure – we all do. Otherwise, why are we even using Facebook? Besides, what did we really think we were signing up for when we joined an open, information-intensive platform and community of 4 million, 40 million, 400 million people? The business model of social networks and online communities is dependent upon millions of users being able to view, very easily, all sorts of personal information. In order to have that feature, (and it sounds strangely obvious to say) this information needs to be… viewable. Socialization of information, or a system designed to maximize the easy sharing of this information has always been the goal of these kinds of sites. It’s what we have been asking for, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that we are herded towards making our privacy settings as open as possible.

This notion then leads me to my second point, that we should perhaps be less concerned about exposing our personal information to each other, and a little more concerned about who is brokering that exchange. It’s important to keep in mind that while individual privacy settings can be made more private and you can hide things from other site members, all this information is still available to the owner of the network. Nothing is private from them. The point we should be concerned about is that we simply don’t know and might never have clear visibility into what these organizations are actually doing with all of our information. And I’m not just picking on Facebook here – that’s just too easy. We are constantly being asked to share our private information with companies and organizations of all types, and we have very little transparency, let alone control, over what is done with it (clickthrough privacy policies that can be changed at any time by the vendor are hardly a safeguard).

This point makes for a great segue into what I think is the more pressing issue here: data mining. Michael Zimmer, PhD, who is an assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, perhaps best illustrates this idea in an essay. Zimmer points out, it’s not Facebook privacy alone, or privacy on social networks in general, we need to be concerned with; what we really need to be concerned about is the data mining going on every time we give out bits of our personal information. Behavioural targeting or what Oscar Gandy, a famous political economist, first identified in the early 90′s as “panoptic sorting,” (a system wherein individuals are continually identified, assessed and classified for the purpose of coordinating and controlling their access to consumer goods and services) is the real worry.

Once this information is obtained, behavioural targeting becomes an issue and this raises not only privacy concerns, but also concerns about discrimination. For example, imagine, if you will, a man calls a large company’s technical support line for assistance. Since he has bought his product and registered it with the company, it’s fair to assume that he will get service without discrimination. It’s also fair to assume that the company has a lot of his personal information, and a strong profit motive. For instance, the company either knows or can infer information such as race and income (based on his residence), has access to a great deal more through public or semi-public searches and yet more, potentially, through information-sharing business relationships (you do read all the small print about information sharing on every privacy policy you consent to, don’t you?). It’s not hard to imagine that if the company feels that our man (based on his profile) is likely to exhibit behaviour that’s not profitable to the company, that there would be an incentive to preserve the company’s resources by, say, putting him at the bottom of the support service queue. Given a company’s mandate is generally to produce as much profit as possible for its shareholders, you couldn’t blame the executives there for feeling they had an obligation to do so. A case in point was the common discriminatory practice of redlining, which was used by banks to deny credit to those who lived in low-income neighbourhoods, until legislation like the CRA was brought in to reduce this type of discrimination in the credit market. The risk is we’ve made redlining easy, cheap, precise and available, and we’ve got no good mechanism for discovering when it’s being used.

Looking at it from this point of view, it starts to feel (to me, at least) like it doesn’t really matter that someone has to wade through 50 settings and 170 options on Facebook to safeguard themselves from other individual viewers of their profile data. On the other hand, it appears as if the genie is out of the bottle. We can’t just delete our profiles from public spaces, and it wouldn’t make much difference now even if we did. What we need is a way to watch the watchmen. What do you think? Email me at michael [at] ayogo [dot] com.

References:

http://michaelzimmer.org/2007/09/18/panoptic-sorting-on-the-rise-as-myspace-enters-behavioral-targeting-foray/

https://fiq.ischool.utoronto.ca/index.php/fiq/article/view/89/230

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/23/AR2010052303828.html

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/personal-tech/lisan-jutras/the-freak-out-over-facebook/article1570877/

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/12/business/facebook-privacy.html

http://www.pcworld.com/article/196410/facebook_privacy_secrets_unveiled.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/technology/personaltech/13basics.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-jay-hoofnagle/how-to-win-friends-and-ma_b_598572.html

http://www.seppukoo.com/

http://www.theonion.com/articles/entire-facebook-staff-laughs-as-man-tightens-priva,17508/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_gandy

Judging by the emotionally-charged comments to Brandon Sheffield’s write-up on game designers intentionally exploiting human weakness to succeed in free-to-play game models (monetizing them, in particular), it seems that there is room to continue the discussion about the ethical dilemmas facing game designers when it comes to building social games — or games of any kind, for that matter.

Brandon recapped the ideas of Teut Weidemann, lead designer of Settlers Online for Ubisoft’s Blue Byte studio, about how game designers can tap into our Capital Vices and then try to use these weak moments to monetize the game.

Yes, social games can be used to do that. They manipulate us. I think that Teut, Brandon, and I would all agree that social games are a volatile cocktail of sleek technology, dopamine-rich environments and brilliant game design. This is precisely why players get hooked. This is why these games are so popular. But this is not news.

We’re talking now about something that has been well-understood and broadly applied ­in our industry (and many others) for many years. Our goals as game designers are to build engaging and fun games that people want to play. We use our tools — the knowledge about evolutionary behavioral patterns for example — to accomplish those goals.

This is our job, and our obligation to our craft. These ancient patterns are deeply-rooted in evolution and already present within us. So my point is that it seems to me the ethical dilemma isn’t whether game designers should or shouldn’t use their knowledge of unconscious human behavior to tailor their games to be more engaging.

Rather, my feeling is that the ethical questions to be asked are about why we’re building our games, and whether we’re being transparent about those motivations. My point of view is that, in general, technology is morally neutral. It is the application of that technology that carries with it moral and ethical implications.

Let’s Recap the Research

I think at this point, it’s beneficial to demonstrate what I think are two of the strongest biological processes at work during gameplay; things that can turn a chore into a hobby. The most scientific answer is dopamine release. According to Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at the Falk Center for Molecular Therapeutics at Northwestern University, dopamine has been found to play a crucial role in choice, learning, and belief formation.

You may recall B.F. Skinner‘s experiments with how the brain responds to rewards. If a behavior is rewarded, it is more likely to be repeated. If it is punished, it becomes suppressed. Rewards are at the heart of changing behavior thanks to how our brains respond to dopamine.

For Gamasutra readers, the concept of reward schedules should sound familiar. Most games are built around this system, because they allow for maximum player engagement and function as a motivation tool. The player is prompted to complete an action, and gets a reward if they do the task. The player always has a chance to recover from their mistakes, so the loop to stay engaged is reinforced.

Play and playtime is also important because it’s an opportunity for the mind to learn about how to deal with risky situations, without actually taking the risk. This strong association of playtime with learning skills that could ensure survival has shaped our brains and how it recognizes and processes new knowledge and information.

Neuroplasticity is the changing of neurons in our brains and their functions by learning or participating in new experiences. This is how the brain integrates new knowledge and skills developed through play.Research indicates that our brain rewires itself in response to what we do with it. As a behavior becomes learned, practiced and refined, the brain appears to recognize this behaviour as important, having purpose and meaning. The “hardwiring” begins. Actions players take in gameplay “feel” more important, and more satisfying when done well.

Healthseeker and Socially Responsible Games

Each game designer must decide how to use these neurological tools. They can either be used purely for the enrichment of the game developer or to mutually benefit the game player.

One of our games, called Healthseeker, can also fit into this “games for good” category. The game’s intent is to help people living with diabetes make better lifestyle choices by doing small incremental actions and then getting rewards for them. The design idea is that instead of making the primary goal getting one person to do a thousand healthy things, we would focus instead on getting a thousand people to do one healthy thing. To do this, we focused on two things:

• Instant gratification rewards for healthy activity, in contrast to the usual approach of making long-term health your reward for doing healthy things.
• Making those instant gratification rewards something that you can use — to reward the healthy behavior of other players.

The game design is simple, yet fun. There are Lifestyle Goals, Missions, and Actions that players can select. The lifestyle goals are represented by colored bars that appear as a player starts making progress in the game.

This helps players measure their progress. Missions help reach each Lifestyle Goal. Missions are made up of healthy Actions that a player can take in their day-to-day life.

As a player completes Actions and Missions, they level up in the game and get access to new, cooler Actions and other virtual goods. Experience Points are collected when sponsoring a friend to play a game, inviting friends to join Missions, by completing actions, sending messages and writing on the public wall within the game.

Points and badges accumulate over time and help the player advance to different levels. Players can also record their progress and thoughts about their day on their Fridge Door, a wall that displays supportive and inspirational messages from anyone playing the game.

The game utilizes the player’s own social graph and uses their friends as sources of inspiration and support as they push beyond intention to live their actions. The gameplay mechanics are familiar to players of popular casual social games. Using achievements, virtual prizes, and gifting to create instant rewards for healthy behavior, this allows for bridging the gap between a player’s intentions and actions.

Our design reflects our (we think, safe) assumption that incremental actions, no matter how small, are more effective in trying to achieve a goal, than doing nothing at all, and that neuroplasticity will help habituate these new behaviors as you play. By using game mechanics, we are directly triggering psychological reactions in the brain and in this case, the side effects are beneficial to the player.

Let’s look at another game called Evoke. The game is a ten-week crash course in changing the world. The goal is to help empower young people all over the world to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems through gameplay. Earning online mentorships, scholarships and seed fund investments — even having the opportunity to become Certified Evoke Social Innovators — the game is relevant to our discussion because in this case, the game designer’s motivations about what they’re asking the players to do are transparent, it’s to try to save the world. Why not use technology to do something good in the world? Overall though, the same game mechanics that help people habituate and modify behaviors in Healthseeker are also at work here.

The Filters of “Good Enough”

We spend 3 billion hours a week playing computer and video games. That’s a lot of time. So, isn’t it important, then, to make sure the technology is being applied for the right purpose? Shouldn’t it benefit the player? Here are a set of questions I like to ask myself when building a game and a take away exercise you might find useful before conceptualizing your next project.

1. How clear is your game about rules?

Recently, the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) Problem Gambling Research department conducted a study where the effects of “unclear” rules were addressed in slot machine play.

As an example, Ontario approves multiple versions of the same game with payback percentages varying from 85 to 98 percent. The different versions look identical to the player. How does it influence gameplay when the player isn’t aware of these rules?

2. Is your game beneficial to players?

As I discussed in a previous section, there are many good games that promote positive personal and even collectively beneficial behavior. Healthseeker hopes to modify the lifestyle of players, encouraging the habituation of healthier practices over time.

Some would argue that FarmVille, for example, while not the most fun or productive game to play, does encourage social interactions by looping the player into social gifting cycle. The player somehow feels good by giving gifts and vice versa. This also adds more social relevance to the game.

3. What are the consequences if the game turns into an addiction?

A CNET article looking at FarmVille used an example of a player who confessed that since beginning to play the game last August, she’s reached an unusually high level 111 in the game — 40 levels beyond where the game offers incentives in the form of newly unlocked features.

She spends most — entire — days playing the game. She’s spent about $2,000 on in-game currency expenses — roughly $100 a month. By definition of the word addiction — the recurring compulsion of someone to partake in an activity — this lady is addicted to the game.

But here it is a question of degree. Sure, she is spending a lot of time and a considerable amount of money to entertain herself. But the consequence of her addiction isn’t as extreme, for example, as someone who might lose their home because he or she couldn’t stop pulling the slot machine handle.

You may think that it’s too much to pay under any circumstances; perhaps you believe it should be entirely up to our player to decide if she has the financial resources to spend this money without harm. In any case, as the game designer we need to be aware of the potential consequences of our work, and feel comfortable with what we’ve built.

Ethical and Personal Considerations

Game and play are a basic survival adaptation. Using game mechanics that tap into our deeply-rooted hunter-gatherer urges, game designers can trigger and manipulate powerful neurological processes, like dopamine release and neuroplasticity, which motivate players to action and perhaps even modify longer-term patterns of behavior. This is why the ethics of applying this technology have been at the centre of many debates.

I’d like to make the argument that the technology is morally neutral. However, it’s the obligation of game designers to be transparent about our motivations and more intentional about the effects that our games have on end user behavior; to know what the games are promoting and to ensure the end user is aware of this process. In the end, the more we can ensure this powerful technology is used for good — or at least for good, healthy fun — the better for everyone, from designers to publishers to end users.

This article has focused on the responsibilities of game designers, as key players in this ecosystem, but I’d like to end with a final thought about our responsibility as end-users and citizens: As author A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz said, “Citizens must educate themselves in the use of sociable applications, such as Facebook, and learn how they can better use them to forward their best interests.”

Ultimately, no matter the responsibilities of game designers, publishers and distributors, the person most responsible for the player’s well being is the player. Nevertheless as a community of game developers, we need to hold each other accountable for our mistakes and transgressions, applaud where appropriate for our triumphs, and contribute positively to the discussion of what we believe to be acceptable, helpful, and worthwhile. What do you think?

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.

Webtreats Free Tileable Tropical Abstract Patterns Part 1-5

Despite their predictability, patterns as a game mechanic can be an exciting way to spice up gameplay. I know I’ve mentioned the importance of understanding how the brain processes patterns (hot hands phenomenon) in previous posts, and then using this knowledge to design better games, but this idea goes a step further. We know that our brains look for patterns in random events. That’s why we offer advice to fellow players about what “strategy” to use, for example, when picking lotto numbers. One of the really interesting things we can do as game designers is establish and then subvert patterns in our games to grab our player’s attention and keep them focussed.

I recently came across an talk by Jonah Lehrer, (Rhodes Scholar, Contributing Editor at Wired and author of How We Decide and Why Proust was a Neuroscientist) and he makes the following compelling argument. (I’d highly recommend watching Lehrer’spresentation.) Lehrer shows how we can learn from observing patterns in music and art, –even Escoffier’s cooking–and through this learn how to create meaningful and engaging experiences.

Lehrer explains, for example, how we can employ this theory by looking at music. In a nutshell, (and I am leaving out a bit of backgrounder info. for the sake of brevity) contrary to belief, music wasn’t about the pattern of finding the right sound waves and then playing them in sequence. (It was believed that music was just a bunch of pretty sound waves.) He uses, amongst other examples, Beethoven’s Symphony in E Minor to show us something interesting. That in fact, Beethoven introduces a pattern, a tonic chord and that our brains recognize and come to like this pattern a lot. Only then what Beethoven does is actually avoids the pattern for nearly 20 minutes. He almost brings the pattern back, but not really. He teases a bit. He makes our brains think about the pattern over and over again because he doesn’t establish it again… until the very end of the piece. When he finally re-establishes the initial pattern again at the end of the piece, that is when our brains relax (we now really come to love the music) and we have what Lehrer calls,  a “Hollywood happy ending”:

“He’s literally making your brain search for this pattern he gave you in the beginning, and that’s what makes the music so interesting…and at the end, the Hollywood happy ending comes when the tonic (pattern) is replayed and the pattern returns. In a sense, music is this cat-and-mouse game.”

In nature, we learn to repeat behaviors that lead to maximizing rewards. The implications for game designers who can use patterns in this manner are HUGE: why not learn how to establish a pattern, subvert it–in order to introduce a rewards prediction error (a hypothesis that dopamine encodes the difference between the experienced and predicted “reward” of an event)–and then introduce patterns again to give that ultimate reward. Neural currency.

P.S. On a related topic, I’d also suggest this interesting read. As always you can always send me an email michael [at] ayogo [dot] com or leave a comment.

Just like our Facebook game Healthseeker, this new game also aims to help players control their own behaviour and get them to think about doing chores in a different, more playful way. What’s immediately evident is how both games aim to motivate behaviour with rewards. As for Healthseeker, the idea is that we can turn what has typically been a long-term investment into an activity driven by instant gratification. Encouraging one tiny steps at a time, we hope to see a larger overall improvement in their behaviour. Our rewards are socialized, so that seeking that achievement becomes more meaningful because you’re sharing it with your social graph. We also use the emotional trigger of rewarding players with very special and scarce goods called Kudos to incent players to act. Kudos are achievements that a player earns over time as they level up and they can only be given away. This would act as a reward intensifier, something that once again is very effective at motivating behaviour.

Implications

What was once a boring, time-consuming and non-engaging “action,” chores in this instance, or skipping post-dinner dessert for others, now becomes an accomplishment. The game mechanics of achievements and compulsion loops positively reinforce the players’ actions, so whether it’s a chore or a lifestyle habit that someone needs to modify, re-framing them as positive achievements is a great way to incent players. The progressive series of rewards for their accomplishments, building the anticipation of future rewards, creates a positive emotional loop, drawing them through the game.

Conclusion

Achievements and rewards are a big part of how games motivate activity. While some do argue that it’s the delivery of rewards and not the quality of the game mechanics that keeps players engaged in gameplay, I like to think that it’s a combination of both. In any case, the fact that game play is increasingly appearing in unexpected places should trigger a EUREKA moment for businesses trying to drive consumer engagement with their brand. What do you think? Email me at michael [at] ayogo [dot] com or leave a comment.

Courtesy of Flickr's davepatten

Based on some of your comments that I received to my last post, I feel like it would be beneficial to unpackage this idea of gamification a bit further. So, I thought I’d devote the next few paragraphs to just that and to introduce you to the concept of neuroplasticity (gasp!) and how it relates to gamification.

What if I told you that if you want to use gamification to make your marketing more effective, you actually need to make your marketing more difficult to engage with?

The fact is that if you want your customer to do something only once, then it makes the most sense to make it brain-dead easy. But, if you want your customers to really care and return to take action multiple times, then you need to make it challenging. You need to make it something for which they can develop a skill in doing and therefore derive satisfaction from it. You see it may seem somewhat counter-intuitive, but for humans, we’re hardwired to get satisfaction from doing things that we can get good at.

Let me give you a simple example that may be illustrative: a kazoo is very easy to pick up and learn. After about 10 minutes of playing with it, you can assume that you pretty well know everything there is to know about playing the kazoo. Then you will put it down and probably never pick it up again. With a guitar, on the other hand, competency is slowly and progressively gained over weeks and months of practice. …and you will take precious room for your guitar in your car on a camping trip. Each has it’s place of course, but if you’re developing a brand around camping equipment, do you want to be the kazoo (in the basement) or the guitar (in the back seat)?

So, how does neuroplasticity come into this equation? Neuroplasticity is the changing of neurons in our brains (and their functions) by learning or participating in new experiences. It’s also something that can demonstrate how gamification works as a game mechanic. As a behavior becomes learned, practiced and refined, the brain appears to recognize this behaviour as somehow important to survival and begins to “hardwire” it in (so it becomes “second nature” as they say) by making it “feel” more important, and more satisfying when you do well. The repetitive nature of social games, intertwined with achievements and other representations of in-game merit then become powerful tools for triggering this effect. After enough time and enough rounds of play, the brain will put a “flashing MUST-RETAIN sign on all information,” as Vancouver-based marketer Taylan Kay points out in his blog, The Selling Game. Taylan makes the point very well that social games represent perfectly how neuroplasticity creates a cycle of relevance and therefore drives player engagement, reach and stickiness.

Conclusion

Perhaps this is the year of marketers adopting “gamification” as a technique to drive consumer participation. With any luck, this will mean that we as customers get to have more fun, while businesses can build more loyal brand following and brand affinity. What are your thoughts? Send me an email at michael [at] ayogo [dot] com or leave a comment.