Can we use games to change behaviour?

Whether you are an avid "gamer" or someone who enjoys the odd round of Mario Kart, here and there, you have been exposed to various gaming elements: such as badges, leader boards, points, levels, and competition. Gamification is a method of increasing people's motivation - to engage in and complete a particular activity - by harnessing gaming elements to drive certain behaviours.

So how has this been used in policy and practice so far? Have theses techniques been successful?

Watch the full episode of Pocket Change, Using gamification in behaviour change interventions:

Pocket Change is a series of pocket-size videos about a key aspect of behaviour change.  Each episode features a BehaviourWorks Australia Researcher explaining their area of expertise in a clear and simple manner.  

Grab a coffee, press play, and enjoy Pocket Change.

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Transcript:

00:00:00:06 - 00:00:22:16

Geoff

Hi, I'm Geoff Paine and I'm part of the communications team here at BehaviourWorks Australia, we are a research institute and part of the Monash Sustainable Development Institute looking at behaviour change. PocketChange is a series of short videos. We produce one each month looking at the work of our researchers and their research and how they can change the world for the better.

00:00:27:04 - 00:00:55:23

Geoff

Hi everyone. Geoff Paine here. This time I'm talking to Dr. Peter Slattery about gamification. And Peter, what exactly is gamification?

Peter

So gamification is the use of game elements. So badges, leaderboards, points, all of these sort of things in non-game environments with the aim of trying to improve various types of behavioural outcomes.

Geoff

So why does it work?

00:00:56:03 - 00:01:16:07

Peter

So what gamification does is it increases people's motivation to engage with the particular activity, because now it's been presented as a game that seems more fun, it seems more attractive. And then also to successfully complete the activity because you've got all these elements added to it now, like it's been gamified in such a way that makes it more fun.

00:01:16:10 - 00:01:46:11

Peter

There’s been points or there's been rewards added so that now as you're going through the process, you're enjoying it more, you're less likely to drop out of it or feel like this isn't worth doing.

Geoff

So what's a mundane task that's been gamified successfully?

Peter

Well, one that comes to mind is this app called Run ZombiesRun, which has gamified the process of running by creating this narrative that you're running away from zombies.

00:01:46:11 - 00:02:12:24

Peter

So you're running and you can hear the zombies coming behind you, and there's all of these various goals that you're aiming for. So it's trying to make the whole experience more rewarding.

There's also this website called Code Academy, which is gamified the process of learning to code. So as you're learning to code, you have all of these small tasks that are organized kind of a bit like quests or things that you're trying to achieve and you get points for each and you have badges for doing different things and a sense of progression through the points that you get and badges that you collect.

00:02:13:19 - 00:02:34:23

Geoff

And in a way, we have trained a generation believing that it is rewards, badges and progression through information that you've learned. Once you've mastered something, you get a reward for that.

Peter

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, this is an interesting debate. Maybe our generation is different. Yes, I suppose maybe our generation has been exposed to more of this from a younger age. Those of us who've grown up with games have grown up with levels and bosses and different sorts of things. And progress bars as you move through the levels. So perhaps.

Geoff

Yes. It's a sign of the times it's also a way of saying that there is a way of presenting interaction and information that does not have to be text based. There are other ways of engaging people's attention.

00:02:58:19 - 00:03:22:12

Peter

Yeah. I mean, definitely. There was this idea way back of like Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and so on, and Web 2.0 was all of this immersive, rich text images, videos and so on. And definitely, I think as we've progressed in art, design and technology, we've started to realize that what we're really doing here is we're kind of making an offering.

00:03:22:12 - 00:03:41:11

Peter

We're saying we're going to give you this sort of experience and in turn you're going to give us your attention and we're going to give you information and try and get you to buy things or do things, etc.. And gamification is, I suppose, part of the evolution of that process. Previously it was like, oh, now we can add nice images or we can make this page nicer. Now it's like we can also make this app or make this service have more fun involved and have more game elements involved.

Geoff

People's expectations of what they see on their devices increasing as the technology improves. For instance, are we expecting gamification and are we expecting a much more interactive deal when it comes to our devices and screens?

Peter

Yeah, I don't know what the research says, but I do imagine that expectations are increasing. I remember when I was younger, going out to my cousins and playing the Sega and I remember being really impressed by the graphics and enjoying playing all these games. And then I remember I got a PlayStation. I remember going back to my cousins to play the Sega and just being horrified by the graphics, finding it almost unplayable.

00:04:33:18 - 00:04:58:17

Peter

So I think there has been a similar progression in terms of user experience where people are getting more and more of it and having higher and higher expectations because they're having better and better experiences. So yes, I think that probably in time, certainly in educational context we will be expecting nearly everything to be gamified.

00:04:58:19 - 00:05:21:08

Peter

Another memory I have is of reading my parents old textbooks and seeing what textbooks were like 60 years ago. The amount of text the ratio of text, the pictures was very different. The formatting and summarizing was like much lower quality. So yeah, I expect that expectations will change. And this will become the norm in a way.

Geoff

It's like looking at newspapers from 150 years ago and seeing them now. Yeah, back in the day it was just text and headlines.

00:05:21:15 - 00:05:48:11

Peter

That's right. So there was a sense in which I suppose probably that was rewarding to people where there was a lower threshold for things to be interesting. So yeah, there probably is this rising baseline level of quality that's needed even just to engage people. A lot of people now, yeah, if they went to a web page and a web page was written like an old newspaper, they would immediately click off it.

00:05:49:01 - 00:06:10:10

Geoff

How would government enterprises, for instance, use gamification if they wanted to increase uptake of a particular product? How does it work in the real world?

Peter

Yeah, so where my engagement with the gamification came from when we were doing a project for a government agency, where we were trying to understand if they could apply gamification to train small businesses to reduce their energy usage.

00:06:10:19 - 00:06:31:14

Peter

And as part of that, we did this review. We were trying to sort of understand the use of gamification in four different settings. So gamification for government, gamification for small businesses, gamification for learning in education and gamification for energy reduction. There hasn't been a huge amount of research on any of these areas.

00:06:31:21 - 00:06:55:09

Peter

But what we found was that broadly the research was quite promising. It can be kind of difficult with research like this because there's quite a variety of different ways that you can do gamification. But most of the research that we found suggested that it was it had been effective in the particular context, and that was enough that overall we felt that it was a useful thing to try out for this particular organization.

00:06:56:01 - 00:07:24:18

Geoff

So did you have any recommendations from that report?

Peter

Yeah. So like I said, we thought that broadly the evidence was promising, even though there wasn't a lot of it. So we suggested really using what you might call sort of a lean start-up approach. So we were suggesting that in advance of developing a learning management system, they should go and read work from other similar initiatives we suggested that they try it with a small audience, talk to a few people in the target audience.

00:07:24:20 - 00:07:43:05

Peter

Figure out, I suppose, what they're doing, what sort of devices they use, their sort of general level of receptiveness to this. So in this case it was small businesses. You want to be talking with small business owners and then you start to just test this with a small group, come up with something really basic, come up with some sort of key assumptions, will people use this?

00:07:43:05 - 00:08:06:04

Peter

Will they find it enjoyable? Well, we see these kind of outcomes tested with a small audience. If that's effective, scale it up. We were most, I suppose, confident about the idea of using feedback as the first gamification approach. There had been a decent amount of research suggesting that giving audiences feedback on their energy usage had convinced them to reduce their energy usage.

00:08:06:04 - 00:08:34:11

Peter

So we thought that would be promising. So we suggested maybe starting with that and then maybe seeing if they could add other things on top of that, as well as testing that work. If that worked, then maybe adding more of it or shall we say scaling up to reach a larger audience. And then maybe if you find further positive feedback, adding in other techniques, one of the things that we thought it was very important for the panel to talk about with this particular project, sorry, I should say, to think about was the cost effectiveness of gamification.

00:08:34:11 - 00:08:57:00

Peter

Because the thing is that, sometimes the when we're putting the juice isn't worth the squeeze. You might put in all of this effort to add all of these elements and then you might find out that you're not actually going to get enough a return. So we were really encouraging, if you think carefully about if you're trying to reduce energy usage for small businesses.

00:08:57:00 - 00:09:22:20

Peter

Well, how much are they using now? How much do we think they'll use if we add gamification? Because, of course, when you do that, there's going to be all of these costs. You have to figure out which game element you're going to design. You're going to have to figure out how they're going to fit into the existing flows and user experience. You are are going to have to then develop and implement the technology and all of the related things, the narratives and all of that and the communication around those particular things.

00:09:22:21 - 00:09:38:15

Peter

We thought that was really important to think about.

Geoff

So gamification is a lot more complex than putting electronic bells and whistles on information. There's a lot to think about.

Peter

Yes. And I think that's was a crucial thing that came out of the review as well as that. Like if you do this badly it's embarrassing and it's counterproductive.

00:09:38:17 - 00:09:50:21

Geoff

Right.

Peter

Thanks, Geoff.

Geoff

Thank you.

Geoff

Thanks for watching. If you'd like to know more about our research projects and the courses we do, you can visit the website at BehaviorWorksAustralia.org

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