Gamification: Motivation Psychology & The Art of Engagement

It's really important to understand how cognitive dissonance turns what we assume will be good motivational techniques into bad ones. Once we have dispelled this myth we can start to learn about real engagement techniques.

Why do we get motivated to do anything at all? Well it's natures way of keeping us alive. The first step is to understand how our brains work.

Human behaviour is no different to animal behaviour. What motivates the dogs and the rats will motivate us. This is the first step to understanding human behaviour.

Once we understand what people really need, we can see what motivates them.

What's the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation? and why is it so important to make the distinction?

Status is low down the hierarchy of needs and an extrinsic motivator but it's cheap to provide so is often used as a motivational technique and although it works better than money, it still has it's problems.

We use up mental energy every time we make a decision. We'll only exert ourselves mentally so many times a day. If we can make decisions by copying others or doing what we did last time. We will.

There are many kinds of feedback and they are all important to engage people

Without rules people can't be motivated. We don't know what we are trying to achieve. We need rules to motivate.

No one want's an easy life. For people to be truly engaged they need a challenge.

People need a finishing line to stay motivated and by having smaller more regular goals then we are never that far from a finishing line.

How can we stop people just walking out once they complete their the last goal. We need a way to keep them to have something else to work towards at the same time.

The most important ingredient to mastery engagement. People can't master something they don't believe in.

Why is meaning one of the four big intrinsic motivators?

Recent studies have shown that we are wrong about the things that we think will make us happy. When are the activitities that people really enjoy?

So meaning is huge for engagement, but how do we create meaning?

Some lessons from the pros about telling engaging stories

Autonomy is all about authenticity. About people respecting who we are as people and accepting our contributions. This is vital for engagement.

The ability to choose is as good as been listened to. When we get to put part of ourselves into something then we believe in it more.

If we never fail. It's not a challenge. If it's not a challange we aren't engaged.

Do we actually love to fail?

Another reason why status doesn't work. But also why it's important to fail and let other around us fail, so we can be on the same level.

Ego is peoples biggest barriers to been themselves and without been themselves they don't have authentic autonomy.

Community is one of the four main intrinsic motivators and posibly the most engaging.

Could community be the biggest of all the motivators?

Why help helps us build communities and drop our ego at the same time.

What are the barriers to connecting as authentic people.

Let's collect together all the ideas we have come up with thought the course and start to brainstorm for our engagement plan

Which aspect of the person is each point motivating. Let's make sure we engage all the aspects.

Finally let's reduce all our ideas down so we have at least one for each intrinsic motivator and each aspect the person.

This section will give a series of real word examples of gamification, motivation and engagement psychology. I'll show you real apps and which techniques they use to give you some inspiration for your own projects.

We'll look at some real games and what makes them different from none games. There is one very specific difference.

The importance of feedback to keep people motivated. But also exactly when and how to give it to them.

If you have a long progress bar it may demotivate people. You'll need another strategy to keep them going!

Progress bars are more than a way to provide feedback they let us know we have completed a task and can stop thinking about it. There can be a negative side to this! 

What if your progress bar is too long? You don't want people loosing motivation half way! 

You can see your progress without there been a completion state. I'm also going to show you one app that ticks all the boxes.

One dark art of gamification is to make them feel they'll miss something if they stop using your app! These are some examples of apps that have done just that.

Currency and in app autonomy is a fantastic extra you can add to any app. Here are some examples of real world gamification in app examples.

Status is another dark art in gamification, here are a few examples and why you shouldn't use them!

We know random events are very powerful but can we just add them anywhere to make anything instantly more engaging. Here is one example that does just that!

The evil like button. Why you should never add a like button to your app. but why it would be very powerful if you were evil.

Engagement and Motivation don't all do hand in hand. sometimes we sacrifice one for the other. We need to take what we learned in the course and find our own balance!