Positive goal oriented communication enhances performance?
This weekend I had two experiences with LFR (Looking for Raid) in WoW (World of Warcraft). LFR is an in-game tool that lets you sign up for a raid event with 24 other players facing some of the tougher challenges in the game. Both experiences relate to what happens once a raid is unable to handle the game challenges they encounter.
The first episode happened in a raid where there was were little communication going on between the players, and the little communication that was there was either casual or negative. The moment the raid started to have performance problems or wiping as it is often called, the negative comments in the raid chat channel increased and players were looking for someone to blame rather than looking for solutions. As the raid had no established leadership and no one trying to hold the team motivated, annoyed players left the raid rather than trying to collaborate and look for a solution. This is where episode two becomes interesting. Later during the same weekend in another raid the same level of chatter was going on, but this time there were also a few people trying to lead the group. The raid encountered the same performance problems as in the first episode, but due to the presence of leadership very few players decided to leave. The presence of leadership analyzing the problem and working on finding solutions kept most players focused and motivated, and having these solutions solving the problems kept the raid from loosing any more players as the raid progressed.
It seems that even the smallest presence of leadership or guidance is enough to motivate a team to continue working on overcoming problematic challenges that the game throws at them. For collaboration to work this part of the collaborative effort must be kept present and positive. For LFR in WoW this is a role that one or more players need to perform, but it should be possible to introduce mechanics in the game that would help motivate players into taking on these types of responsibilities. Motivational game mechanics that create a solid communication platform for positive social interactions is an interesting design challenge for MMORPGs today, but so far I have yet to see any attempts on solving this aspect of game play.
Why write a game diary?
When I started out working with my Master thesis it was largely inspired by my long history as a gamer. It was also part of my initial hypothesis that game design patterns can be identified and transferred into a gamified system, and part of my initial research was looking into games that contained some form of collaborative game experience. After having browsed through several different types of games I landed on using a combination of MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) and RTS (Real Time Strategy) to look for the earlier mentioned game design patterns. To get started I chose three games that each contained game design elements I believed could be relevant to my thesis; EVE, World of Warcraft and Civilization V.
Why did I choose these three? EVE was chosen due to its massive space battles that involves collaborative game play at an unprecedented scale. According to an article in Wired more than 7500 gamers participated in the event making it a very interesting game to analyze. I have tried the game, but have no recent game play to refer to and my documentation for my thesis here is based on interviews with active players. World of Warcraft was chosen both for its popularity as well as its collaborative PvE (Player versus Environment where the environment is the virtual reality of the game world and its game challenges) team game play with focus on raids (large teams of 10 or 25 players). An enormous number of gamers join up in guilds to spend several hours every week facing the raid challenges in highly efficient teams where collaboration is a key element to succeed. Finally I spent some time playing Civilization V for its turn based game play. I found this interesting since a turn based gamified solution for open innovation would allow for more flexible collaboration that would not require the players to be online at the same time to interact with each other.
I spent time from November 2013 and until the end of February 2014 to look for relevant game design patterns, and during march I found three game elements that I would work with to design a prototype to test later this year. These were user profiles, game activities and ranking, each representing core game elements that I believe to be important for an open innovation gamification application. Since then the design process has included both participatory design workshops as well a several hours of actual game play. Both have been important sources of inspiration for the design work and contributed with key findings to help improve and innovate the prototype. To document how the game play has contributed to the design process I have created this game diary that will contain entries referring to actual game play experiences that have yielded interesting findings or input to the design process. I am quite sure I will not be able to make use of the data from these entries, but hopefully that will be something I will be able to work on later.
Finding collaborative game mechanics
Having spent several hours working with an assortment of MMOs it has always been my assumption that it is possible to identify specific game mechanics that enable collaborative gaming. Gamification uses the term game mechanics very loosely about both simple and complex parts of a game, and for now I will adopt this practice until I can establish a better set of terms and definitions. At this point there are three game mechanics that I feel are critical for collaborative gaming to occur.
- 1. User profile
The user profile is the players base of operations in any kind of game experience today, and for most MMORPGs it includes one or more avatars and their virtual belongings. The players ownership of these avatars and virtual commodities gives them a reason to invest time in the game with the promise of increased value to the user profile. Value being individually different. - 2. Events
Collaborative play occurs when there are game mechanics that enable players to ‘play together’. An event here being a game experience where players participate together. - 3. Rating
For some winning is important, to others achievements is more important. No matter what motivates a player the game experience needs to be able to give the player some way to measure their successes or failures.
Moving these game mechanics into an open innovation process helps define critical requirements that a gamified application will need include. The player must be able to feel ownership to their participation, preferably through a user profile. There must be events that will let the player participate in a collaborative way, and there must be a way of letting the player see how their participation affects the game as well as how they are rewarded for their participation.
First attempt at a thesis abstract
From my initial idea I worked my way through some litterature and quite a few articles to come up with my first attempt at an abstract for my gamification thesis:
“User collaboration is a goal for many business applications today, but they are often faced with challenges motivating users to voluntarily engage in providing information and/or take part in collaborative activities [Ellis, Clarence A., Simon J. Gibbs, and Gail Rein, 1991].
Gamification as “a process of enhancing a service with affordances for gameful experiences in order to support user’s overall value creation.” [Huotari and Hamari, 2012, Defining Gamification] has been suggested as a possible approach to address these problems. Many computer games today can boast with extensive and elaborate activities and as such are a natural source of inspiration for such an endeavor.
The hypothesis is that the use of game mechanics from existing online computer games can be used to help design a solution that engages people to actively participate and collaborate in a ‘gamified application’.”
From here I started looking for a collaborative context that would be a suitable target for this endeavor and ended up with open innovation. Open innovation being a paradigm that to me represents a perfect environment for testing this hypothesis. It would introduce a unique platform for businesses and individuals to find and create new ideas, discover and develop solutions and work as toolbox to inspire and motivate for collaborative efforts to take on existing and future challenges. But the big questions remains; will it work?
Master thesis background
The background for my thesis is related to the use of gamification as a method to motivate and enable collaboration in an open innovation process. If I look at massive online games today there are two different concepts for collaborative gaming that seem to be able to motivate gamers beyond what one would expect. Within the general gaming community these two concepts are referred to as PvP (player versus player) and PvE (player versus environment – in this case the game world and its virtual content). My reason for bringing up these two topics can best be described by giving two examples:
- For PvP the game EVE had a massive battle involving around 4000 players that came together within a very short period of time to help out their teammates and fight other teams of players. To motivate players to be ready for such a battle as well as be willing and able to collaborate with their team members requires an enormous amount of planning as well as coordination during the actual battle. There are very few business activities that can muster this kind of manpower within such a time frame and enable them to collaborate that this level.
- For PvE it is natural to mention World of Warcraft (WoW) and its team activities. When launched the game had challenges that required its players to team up with 39 other players whom would spend several hours during a game session collaborating to overcome these challenges within the game. This form of collaboration is widely referred to as ‘raiding’ and is common in many MMORPGs today, but most games have cut down from the 40 player version into smaller teams (WoW today using 10- and 25-man teams for their ‘raid’ challenges). Having personally participated in multiple such raids they represent to me a very high level of player commitment and willingness to collaborate that I find rare elsewhere in society today.
Contained in both these games and other software used in conjunction with them are complex collaborative systems used both plan and execute such activities. They also utilize a wide range of social structures and communication techniques that together makes for an impressive toolbox. To me the combination of game mechanics, used in these games to create the environment for motivating its players to collaborate, felt like a pattern of sorts. Would it be possible to transfer such a pattern into a gamified solution? I could say that my initial hypothesis was that the use of these patterns from online games can be used to motivate and enable people to actively participate and collaborate also in a gamified application.
Digital academic tracking…
This is the main reason for creating this blog. Having started the my Master thesis during the fall of 2013 it has become clear that I need a channel to store thoughts, ideas and draft rants as well as a place to build my thesis. And it will also work as a portal for any other academic publications I produce as a result of focusing on the topic of gamification…
Gunnar Øyvin Fredrikson 