During the recent Big Data panel at SXSW, a member of the audience asked this simple question: “When would you not use Gamification?” It turned out to be far more difficult than expected, however, as none of the panelists had a good reply…The best I could come up with on the spot was something to the effect of “Don’t use it if there’s nothing you expect in return.”
Then, on my flight home, I was reading the recent bestseller Fat Chance by Robert Lustig, which outlines his theory of how our obsession with sugar is slowly killing the human race, and came across the perfect response. It just stared back at me from the page:
Our brains are wired for reward — it is the primary force behind human survival. Reward is the reason to get up in the morning. If you take away reward, you take away the reason to live.
There’s the 2nd part to it, at the end of the same paragraph, which may be even more potent:
Kill the reward system, and you just might want to kill yourself.
While the book centers around the obesity pandemic, the biochemistry of reward is an essential part of the argument. It’s so fundamental to human nature that even the question of whether gamification is all about manipulation (incidentally also asked by someone during this panel session) becomes trivial. Of course it can be about manipulation, but it’s so much more basic than that. Why would you do anything that gives you no reward? Of course the reward may not be as simple as having a pleasant sensation. For example, I’ll wash my hands, because if I don’t, I risk getting sick. So my reward in this case is not getting an unpleasant sensation later on. But every action needs a reward to make it worth repeating. Too much reward could lead to addiction, but too little to inaction.
So in effect, gamification adds a compelling reason to repeating activities that otherwise lack a fundamental motivation for replication. Let’s say your job requires you to log your client hours for proper compensation. Ideally, you get off the phone, open some application, and enter a number in the right field. Save, close, done. But that activity in itself has no readily observable reward that would motivate you to repeat it diligently every time. Yes, there’s the motivation of getting paid, or not getting scolded by your boss for not doing it. But those are not very fundamental, not very certain, and very far removed from the immediate desire to just be done with this call. But add this activity to a list of other things you need to complete before you leave the office, and perhaps introduce a reward for completing the list a certain number of days in a row, and you’ve got a simple, immediate motivator. If we recognize the basic need for a clear, relevant, and timely reward system in pretty much everything we do, we have the answer to the final question posed to the panel: “What will we be saying about gamification in 3 years?” Naturally, nothing — the same way we don’t need to say anything about the presence of color on our TV screens.
So to return to the original question of when not to use gamification, I suppose the answer to take from Robert Lustig’s book might be: Don’t use it, if there’s a chance that your target audience will be harmed. We should probably think twice before gamifying the consumption of sugar in our everyday diet, just like we wouldn’t gamify the consumption of cocaine, although Dr. Lustig may tell you that the former has already happened…
