Human Action vs Repetition Compulsion @ 47:47: "The truth is, players change the rules [of a game or society or community] as they go. So there's this reflexive action... And the kinds of problems that players attempt to solve are, frankly, intractable and impossible to solve. The brain loves intractable and impossible-to-solve problems; these then become [*laughs*] high-retention devices." -- Monkey doh!

'I'll reiterate this in plainer language, just in case the quote wasn't clear: Detsaridis said that one of the most compelling parts of playing Zynga's games is deciding when and how to spam your friends with reminders to play Zynga's games.'

'...intrinsic and extrinsic are tangled in complicated ways. So, for example, I may set up a system of giving out points, right, that's totally extrinsic. And you would say, "Well, therefore, in the long run, it won't work." Well, but what if me and my friends all kind of get into it, and like we start this kind of social thing about one-upping each other, and we're now doing it not because we care about the points for the sake of the points, but it now becomes like a little social ritual with us, which is intrinsically rewarding? So, these extrinsic systems can sometimes become an anchor for something that has intrinsic power, and that part is where I think our brains get a little tangled up, because it's difficult to predict and it's difficult to plan for.'

"Glorified report cards."

'Sometimes we could all use a little extra motivation to exercise. While you’d think that the allures of better health and a leaner body would be enough to kick us into action, the reality of the matter is that they’re not. Hyperbolic discounting means that humans discount the value of a reward that occurs far into the future, preferring instead a more immediate reward even if its absolute value is less. For example, if I gave Harry the option to receive $10 today or $20 in a month, he’d probably choose $10 today even though it’s financially wiser for him to get $20 in a month. Hyperbolic discounting is the reason why better health and a leaner body down the road are not compelling enough to make us exercise today. So we’ve created a system that gives you more immediate rewards for your exercise. Our hope is to foster a more active lifestyle in each of us, and in turn play a small role in improving the health of our users.' -- Rewards for gym checkins via foursquare, Nike+ activity..

'#At its core, Gamification is all about statistics. If we play a game of Monopoly and then leave and come back tomorrow and do it again, and then again, it’s going to get boring pretty quickly. But if we start capturing stats – about who won and who lost, how many dollars each of us ended each game with, who ended the game with Boardwalk and Park Place, then we can use Reward, Status, Achievement and Competition to make the experience more interesting and incent and motivate people to play more. Can I be the #1 ranked Monopoly player in my house, in the state, in the country? Can I own Boardwalk and Park Place five games in a row, because if I do, I’ll win a special trophy that everyone can see. Can I earn Monopoly Points for every dollar I end the game with, so that even if I'm losing, I have a reason to keep on trying? Just by capturing statistics about these individual experiences and persisting them, we now have the ability to drive participation.' -- (Good psychographics chart)

'At an abstract level, one of the reasons for the success of points, badges, etc is that they guide our efforts. They place a clear valuation on our time and say "You can do A or B or C, but B is worth 2x as much as A and C doesn't get you anywhere." They are an effective way in our mentally-exhausting media saturated lifestyles to cut through the noise to a clear quantitative signal and feel rewarded for our efforts with tangible results. Once they are everywhere, however, their apparent value is going to decrease as the noise increases. -- We call these things game mechanics but they aren't really. They are meta-game mechanics. Mechanics that operate on a level outside the game. FourSquare is more about the meta than the game. (As an aside has anyone come across a meta-meta game mechanics website? A site that gives you points for other points that you get on other sites - I'm sure there's at least one out there already)' -- Ha!

Oh, the meta. (inb4 Game Mechanic Unlocked) '#1 Achievement #2 Appointment Dynamic #3 Avoidance #4 Behavioral Contrast #5 Behavioral Momentum #6 Blissful Productivity #7 Cascading Information Theory #8 Chain Schedules #9 Communal Discovery #10 Companion Gaming #11 Contingency #12 Countdown #13 Cross Situational Leader-boards #14 Disincentives #15 Endless Games #16 Envy #17 Epic Meaning #18 Extinction 20 Fixed Ratio Reward Schedule #21 Free Lunch #22 Fun Once, Fun Always #23 Interval Reward Schedules #24 Lottery #25 Loyalty #26 Meta Game #27 Micro Leader-boards #28 Modifiers 29 Moral Hazard of Game Play #30 Ownership #31 Pride #32 Privacy #33 Progression Dynamic #34 Ratio Reward Schedules #35 Real-time v Delayed Mechanics #36 Reinforcer #37 Response #38 Reward Schedules #39 Rolling Physical Goods #40 Shell Game #41 Social Fabric of Games #42 Status #43 Urgent Optimism #44 Variable Interval Reward Schedules #45 Variable Ratio Reward Schedule #46 Viral Game Mechanics #47 Virtual Items'

'One of the most fought-over battlegrounds seems to be the workplace. It usually starts out innocently, with a handful of techie co-workers checking in to a location. Then two things may start to happen: more colleagues check in, and, before long, the Type A’s start competing to be mayor.'

'The various systems of government used in the ISDG masks a deeper conflict about whether teams are playing just to have fun, or to establish their supremacy of the game. Each team realises that the reputation of their entire website – in some cases, numbering in the tens of thousands – rests on their quality of playing, which requires a certain discipline that precludes any messing about. ‘Diplomacy on crack’ is one way to describe the ISDG... The combination of a highly complex strategy game with hundreds of players defies normal categorization into the normal genres of MMORPGs or simulation games like Everquest or SimCity. Even experienced Civilization players find the concept of the ISDG alien, since the delay between turns adds such a bewildering array of negotiation, debate and power politics that aren’t seen in normal games. To win the ISDG, a team will have to perfectly balance conflict and co-operation, not only with other teams but between its own members.'

'A democracy game is just like a normal single player game of Civilization, except with over a hundred people sitting beside you arguing about what to do. The Intersite Democracy Game takes the concept one step further by involving eight website teams scattered across the globe. Over three hundred players are spread among the teams, many of whom have played Civilization for over ten years and possess an enormous ... amount of knowledge about the game. Each team represents one civilization within the game. The ISDG revolves around savegames. It’s when a savegame arrives that teams can get down to the serious business of actually moving units around and issuing orders instead of just talking about it. Teams wait for savegames in the same way that children wait for Christmas ... Any delay in their arrival, usually caused by email problems, or (as is suspected occasionally) nefarious behind the scenes diplomacy, is a source of immense distress and rampant speculation for players.'

'In the contemporary entertainment business (and also, increasingly, in sports and in politics), it’s the business that’s the entertainment and the art of the deal that’s the art that draws most notice. We have become a society that is fixated on process and absorbed by the slippery, complex machinations of the middlemen, brokers and executives who conspire offstage to determine what takes place onstage. Call this outlook “procedural voyeurism” — a redirection of mass attention from the spectacle of the game itself to the circus of the game behind the game... the era of surplus sophistication, of ceaseless and largely needless background information about the figures surrounding the facts. Perhaps as a way of filling the infinite spaces created by the advent of cable TV and the metastasizing Internet... Procedural voyeurism grants us an illusion of control over realities that we secretly fear we have no power over...'

'"There is definitely potential for that, but it's something we're very aware of. After you've put all this steam into a great moment and then suddenly a trophy pops up, it can pull you out of the experience." Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford, a self-professed "Achievement Hunter," says meta-game addicted gamers often look to how a game's achievements or trophies are implemented to determine what games they buy. While achievement and trophy statistics are a great way for players to compare themselves to friends, developers are finding completion statistics an invaluable asset to discover how gamers are exploring their worlds. "Achievements and trophies are becoming one of the most easily accessible data mining techniques out there. Because we can pull and see what percentage of gamers is achieving any variety of things, we instantly get a huge amount of feedback about our community."'

'I'm always on the lookout for these incentive schemes gone wrong. There's a great book on the subject by Robert Austin -- Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations. The book's central thesis is fairly simple: When you try to measure people's performance, you have to take into account how they are going to react. Inevitably, people will figure out how to get the number you want at the expense of what you are not measuring, including things you can't measure, such as morale and customer goodwill. His point is that incentive plans based on measuring performance always backfire. Not sometimes. Always. What you measure is inevitably a proxy for the outcome you want... Because people have brains and are endlessly creative when it comes to improving their personal well-being at everyone else's expense. As some of your workers substitute making the most of an incentive program for serving customers the best way they know how, the customer experience will suffer.'

'I fre­quently rely on metagames in order to enter­tain myself. Achieve­ments — system-level awards for cer­tain game­play goals — are explicit metagames. Many play­ers find that they are sub­stan­tially less reward­ing than the metagames they cre­ate for themselves. After all, part of the fun of a meta-game is not know­ing if it’s even tech­ni­cally pos­si­ble to accom­plish your goal. It’s “Jump the van over the river: 30 points” vs. “Can I get this beat-up van with a popped tire to go fast enough to jump over that river? Let’s find out!” One is fol­low­ing instruc­tions, the other is inven­tion. -- There’s an awe­some sat­is­fac­tion derived from games with no extra­ne­ous ele­ments. The more lim­ited a product’s func­tion­al­ity, the eas­ier one can mas­ter it. And feel­ing like a mas­ter of your tools is a wonder­ful thing. A para­dox, then: the less you enable peo­ple to do, the more they will do.'