The San Francisco Games Revolution Is Over | Hacker News Reader

The San Francisco Games Revolution Is Over

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37 pointsssclafani23 comments

Honestly I'd say at least 95% of gamification companies were seemingly run by con artists to begin with. Extrinsic motivation completely kills intrinsic motivation, a fact that virtually none of the gamification companies take into account in their design even though presumably most of them know about this since it comes up right away in any decent book on the topic. This means that basically none of these companies had a chance in hell of working. Yet there are tons of investors who've probably never taken more than psych 101 who see these companies and throw tons of money at them without any due diligence, because they intuitively seem like great ideas if you don't understand that they're contraindicated by the academic research. So it just encourages more people to come along and do the same thing.

Note to investors: find someone who understands psychology and the other social sciences to help with your due diligence. And not just normal psychology, but also specifically Internet psych. (Which is actually a field.) For basically all businesses you should be looking at whether they're consistent or inconsistent with what the social sciences suggest will work, work great, or be completely non-viable.

(Also, it should be noted that there are startups that use gamification to good effect, like Squidoo and Ginzametrics, but these are very rare.)

"Extrinsic motivation completely kills intrinsic motivation"

Can you help me understand what this means?

Lets say you love reading. Then someone comes along and tells you they're going to give you 20 points for every book you read, and when you get 200 points you get a pizza party. What happens is that for a few days or weeks you'll read more books, but after that you'll completely lose interest in reading and likely won't read any more books for years, so in total you'll read much fewer books than if you had never been offered the extrinsic rewards. We see this in all areas of life, e.g. studies show that people who are paid to lose weight end up gaining weight, and people who are paid to drive safer are more likely to die in car crashes. So when you see literally dozens of startups offering prizes to kids for exercising or brushing their teeth, it's highly probletic to say the least.

The original book on this is Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes. Pretty much the most important book for any entrepreneur to read. Daniel Pink also has a much more recent book called Drive, but I haven't read it so I can't offer any comparisons.

(And speaking of reading, one of the most cited papers on early childhood literacy, by Scarborough & Dobrich, found that reading books to your kids does not actually help their reading skills at all. Why not? They say it's because the most important determinant of later ability is intinsic motivation, and for every parent who is building up their kid's love of reading by reading aloud to them, there is another one who is diminishing it. So if your three year old doesn't like being read to, let them do other stuff for a few months and it may actually benefit them in the long run.)

I think this is broadly true, but there are niche areas, such as frequent flier miles, where extrinsic motivation works for brand loyalty. Several years ago (before 9/11) United did a really terrible job of managing customer expectations during a job slowdown by pilots. I really, really hated United during that time. I probably would never have flown them again if I didn't already have over 200k miles on my account.

"There are niche areas, such as frequent flier miles, where extrinsic motivation works for brand loyalty"

While I agree with what you're saying, I think this is a bad example because frequent flier miles work more as a barrier to switching, rather than a classical extrinsic motivator. (You overpay every time you buy a ticket, and you don't get your money back if you switch airlines.)

I wonder if it works for customers, but not for employees?

Where broadly "customer" is "you're trying to persuade them to [X]", and "employee" is defined as "additionally, you're in a position of power over them".

That's an example of a case where you had no intrinsic motivation. It makes sense for extrinsic motivations like flyer miles to work there.

Extrinsic motivation takes the form of external incentives to do something, such as the promise of money. In actuality, though, it seems that these incentives actually demotivate people from performing the task, because it kills their intrinsic motivation, their innate desire to do that task (such as a true interest in the work).

So, instead of an innate desire to take on the task, the person now has an artificially incentivized desire, which results in lower motivation, since the motivation doesn't come from their own innate desire to do the work, but rather from the money.

"At least 70 studies have found that rewards tend to undermine interest in the task (or behavior) itself; this is one of the most thoroughly replicated findings in the field of social psychology." http://www.alfiekohn.org/managing/cbdmamam.htm — and see also Alfie Kohn's book Punished By Rewards.

Can gamification be considered a reward in the same context?

It's not money or physical reward, but a 'badge' or an 'achievement'. It's automatically having the system give attention and recognition to people who do something the system likes, instead of having that recognition parseled out by manually by moderators and admins.

"Can gamification be considered a reward in the same context?"

Yes, the psychology is the same whether you're talking about tangible rewards (money, physical products, digital downloads, movie tickets, etc.) or intangible rewards (grades, praise, points, stickers/badges, etc.)

This 2010 Game Developer's Conference lecture by Chris Hecker is a good introduction to the concerns imo: http://chrishecker.com/Achievements_Considered_Harmful%3F

I like the ambiguity in the title, is it Hipster speak or is it literal? Who knows.

This article is an excellent discourse on the corportification of the gaming experience. It really points out the notion that 'smart money doesn't innovate, it evaluates' which is so prevalent in the casual game space. So much data, the temptation to use it is impossible to resist, but then going against it becomes equally impossible.

I don't think the revolution is over though. There is a lot of money to be made in entertainment, but it is true that trying to make it mathematically or through statistical analysis is in peril. Actual game designers, folks who can conceive out of whole cloth a fun and entertaining gaming experience, will come out on top.

> I don't think the revolution is over though. There is a lot of money to be made in entertainment, but it is true that trying to make it mathematically or through statistical analysis is in peril. Actual game designers, folks who can conceive out of whole cloth a fun and entertaining gaming experience, will come out on top.

Like there are auteurs like Kevin Williamson and Aaron Sorkin in Hollywood, so there are true renaissance men and women in game creation.

Zach Gage.

"Gage is an indie game designer — the Bon Iver to Rovio’s Katy Perry, the artisanal free-range heirloom-turkey breeder to Zynga’s factory farm. He works out of his apartment and has long hair and a perpetually in-progress beard. He works on games mostly by himself, collaborating occasionally with friends, and sometimes he drops into immersive research sessions that can last for weeks. One recent session was intended to figure out why people like playing word games, a genre Gage has always hated. (He thinks it’s cheating to build a game on top of a system that already exists, like words or numbers.)

So he spent two weeks playing Bookworm, Words With Friends and Wurdle, during which he decided that the genre suffered from a serious lack of strategy — aside from Scrabble, he says, most of those games are just dressed-up word searches.

The result of this was SpellTower, Gage’s newest and most successful game, which allows users to create towers by building words from letters in adjacent boxes. In its first two months, he says, it earned him enough money to live off for two years." [1]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/magazine/angry-birds-farmv...

Sounds like a really interesting person, I expect you could hook him into a support network of developers, marketeers, and brand managers and his insights would start supporting an entire mini-industry, like Pierre Cardin, or Ives St Laurent.

On point #2 I think it's still too early to say whether the handheld market has been upended at all. Yes you see a ton of people on the subway playing with their phones, but that may well be an example of the gaming market growing to include more gamers, not that traditional console gamers abandoning their dedicated handhelds. Consider that for September software sales for the 3DS were up 89% YOY. It launched poorly, but it also launched at an unprecedented high price.

The market is changing but I'm not sure if traditional handhelds are being hurt by the new iOS market.

What do you think about point number five; graphics? Is graphics an important part in the next future game hit? Graphics is certainly not a priority in the social games that have been succesful so far. The beauty of many hit social games I feel is in that they're so easy to start to use and even my mom understands them, will AAA graphics add to that effectively (since it's so expensive)?

Disclaimer: I'm not a gamer or games programmer. But it seems to me that "good" graphics are not just about beauty, but style and personality. For example, South Park animation is crude but instantly recognizable as South Park. There would be no point in converting it to Pixar-level quality except as a joke.

The San Francisco Gaming "Revolution" never existed. If it did, we'd also have to talk about the Tamagotchi Revolution and the Furby Revolution.

It was a (very) short-lived phenomenon that was wildly profitable for a short time, and at no point did it appear to be sustainable. Everyone who thought this was the beginning of a long-term industry was delusional.

I like to think the "San Francisco Games Revolution" began over a century ago in 1895 with the invention of the slot machine:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slot_machine#History

Zynga is merely a continuation in that fine tradition... whether their pivot to real-money games works or not.

And once again techcrunch crashes the ipad ...

Complain to Apple.

Not with Chrome.

There is no bubble

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