Gamification? We Need More Ghost Cars

Posted on | October 23, 2010 | 2 Comments

Gamification is a hot topic. It seems like every new start-up suggests bolting on video game-style awards and achievements to transform any activity into pure fun. I think game design techniques can make the world a better place, but points and badges are not the be all and end all. I’m going to explain why they’re not the answer, and why another feature of games – the ghost car – offers so much more potential for game inspired design.

Awards, badges and other acknowledgements of achievements are the low hanging fruit of game design and therefore an easy target for other industries to ape. After all, it’s easy to dish out goodies at pre-set trigger points, such as scoring >90% in an exam, or buying a latte every day for a month. But that’s not the most intelligent use of game mechanics.
Earlier this year Jessie Schell presented his vision of the gamification of the future. I still haven’t figured out if Jesse was trying to show us a terrible future, or laying his stall out as a consultant in how to use games to sell brands. It certainly grabbed a lot people’s attention, but for me, the points=prizes mechanic isn’t (usually) the most sophisticated part of a game’s design. There are more interesting things to take out of our industry.

Let’s take the first example that Jesse gives; ‘a future toothbrush that checks that you brush your teeth regularly and issues points that reward you with money off your toothpaste’.

Will it encourage kids to brush regularly? Well, if kids paid for their own toothpaste, maybe.

And adults? Well the money off toothpaste is only a real incentive if dental hygiene is important to them. In which case, wouldn’t they already be brushing their teeth just the right amount anyway? If you consider that over-brushing is a problem, and dental care companies would damage their reputation by encouraging overuse of their products, there’s no opportunity to up sell here. All these companies can do is discount their products to the people that would already be buying them.

‘How about badges? People love badges. Let’s give people badges for everything!’ is the cry from a new wave of designers trying to apply the stickiness of games to their otherwise dull products. They’re just forgetting one thing…

People were playing games before badges became common features. In fact they were playing punishing games, without built-in save features, often for little reward other than…the joy of playing. You see, badges aren’t the reason that people play games, they’re just a method of measuring, indicating, and acknowledging skill and perseverance. They’re like wedding cake, nice to have – almost obligatory – but not the real reason anyone is there. Basically, if badges are your only motivator, you’re screwed.

Having said that, I think that game mechanics, when applied intelligently, CAN help people make the most of life, and one of the game mechanics I’d like to see explored more outside of games is GHOST CARS (see, they even sound like a more awesome feature than badges).

For the uninitiated, ghost cars often appear in racing games. Your best lap time is saved as a semi-transparent car, and as you try to better that time you essentially race against your ghost car’s performance. It’s like a running mate that helps you see where to cut corners, and how to find a better driving line.

Typically ghost cars only show you your own previous efforts, but something very powerful happens if they are shared. Suddenly the seemingly impossible becomes very possible. Not only can you see what can be achieved, you also see how to achieve it.

So, how could adding ghost cars change your gamification plans? How might that make for a better experience? Well here are some quick and dirty ideas for “ghostcarification“:

Kate is 14 and she wants to be a nuclear physicist. Right now her grades aren’t great, and her dream seems out of reach. You could offer her badges to reward her for improving her grades, but if a life-long ambition isn’t motivation enough, is a badge seriously going to change things?

What if -using data collected from previous students – she could see how an actual nuclear physicist was doing when they were just a year older than she is now? It would give her a year to try and meet their standards, and then she could use their journeys\stories as her ghost car. She could plot her career path based on those that have previously taken that journey. She might even be able to find a journey that starts at exactly the same point that she is at now – maybe a current scientist previously had exactly the same grades as her. How motivating is that? Knowing that it IS possible to get to your goal from where you are now, because someone has done it, and left a trail of digital breadcrumbs for you to track your own progress turns the seemingly impossible into the possible.

Pete has really struggled to lose weight. He goes onto a new dieting site and discovers that one of their members, Steven, was in almost exactly the same situation as him six months ago. He’s the same height and weight, he even had the same waist size. They share pretty much the same culinary likes and dislikes, and even the types of exercises and activities they like are the same.

It took Steven a while to find a regime that helped him to lose weight, but now that he has, all that info is stored so that people like Pete can use his journey as a ghost car. No doubt Pete’s journey won’t be exactly the same. Maybe he’ll exercise a little harder and lose more weight, leaving behind another, alternative ghost car for a future dieter.

Wouldn’t knowing that something can be done, by someone very much like you, help to conquer the doubt that tends to de-motivate people? People already have goals in life, and pinning a badge on it isn’t going to make that goal any more attractive or achievable.

While we’re all different, perhaps in a (future) sea of data, we’ll all find someone to act as our ghost car to help us reach our goals, and at the same time, maybe our own journeys will become ghost cars that inspire others.

Category: Design, Games, Opinion

Comments

2 Responses to “Gamification? We Need More Ghost Cars”

  1. Mike
    October 26th, 2010 @ 12:49 pm

    I think this idea is interesting– but note it has two sides. There is a lot to be said for feeling incentivised to be the ghost-car. For some it will be the abstract desire to do the “First!” thing, for others, proving that something that isn’t recorded as being done can be done (guiness book of records is a game?) and yet others, to distinguish themselves from peers and demonstrably over-achieve (If they did it in 1 year, I’ll do it in 6 months). It’s an interesting materialisation of a mechanic that’s already out there in life.

  2. Andrew
    October 29th, 2010 @ 6:58 am

    Thanks Mike, of course you’re absolutely right; as soon as you start racking metrics there will be some people that aim to beat other peoples’ efforts.

    For me this would require a ‘ghost car’ system to understand ‘softer’ metrics, like ‘most suitable plan’, or ‘most likely to be achieved by you’, and guide the user towards those ghost cars. Without this guidance I fear that user would gravitate towards ‘harder’ metrics like ‘quickest ever’, ‘most gained, and ‘most lost’.

    A data rich system could offer dynamic ghost car journeys. A user might start following an extreme plan (‘quickest journey to drop two dress sizes’), but if they struggle to keep up, their plan could switch to that of another user that also lost sight of the extreme plan, but successfully recovered by taking a more reasonable route.

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