The Science of FUN for L&D

by Jonathan Peters, PhD - Chief Motivation Officer, Sententia Gamification

https://www.vecteezy.com/members/twilightmoon

I overhead this question during the July 4th holiday, and I've been thinking about it, “Why do we, as adults, still take a break from learning in the summer?”

That thought germinated as I read the book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga. (I don’t recommend the book; it’s old, not written in English, and very academic.) 

Corporate Training is Broken

Let’s face it … getting people actively involved and interested in training isn’t easy!

The world of business is undergoing a profound shift. Workers are making more of their own decisions. They don’t want to be told what to do. They want to learn … BUT … they don’t want to sit through another boring SME lecture.

As the struggle for talent intensifies, organizations face a continual challenge to build and grow their leadership capacity. The pace of progress is faster than ever before and workers must learn all the time to remain productive and relevant. Organizations that fail to learn will die.

It’s not that training departments have missed the mark; it’s that the world around them has changed. Learning is shifting from top-down to bottom-up and to a great degree … sideways.

Keep in mind that unless your organization's collective, intuitive expertise is transferred by collaborative means:

Player Centric Gamification Design

There are fundamental questions that encourage a creative gamification design. You should ask yourself these questions before you begin the gamification process as well as throughout your design and roll out stages.

For example... "What causes some employees or customers to engage in a gamified process, while others disengage in frustration? Why is it that some gamification mechanics appeal to some people, but have no effect on others?"

Others have tried to simplify the human tendency to play, but our willingness to invest time and energy into a process or experience ultimately comes from our core motivators. 

Gamification and Player Centric Design

In gamification design, it is important to realize that you, as a developer and/or player, have different motivations for playing than most of the people you encounter. The problem for the designer is without identifying the motivation profile of you, the designer, and anticipating different motivation profiles of potential players, the designer will not be able to identify why some people engage and others disengage.

In other words, if a gamification designer is highly motivated by one Motivator, say, Social Contact, and a player is low motivated in the same area, the designer won’t understand why the player doesn’t want to share their experience or knowledge with team members. The designer will view the player as obstinate and cantankerous, when all they really are is low motivated by Social Contact. The player doesn’t want to “play games” with other people. They’d much rather work on their own and have their own experience with the gamified process.

Here is a short video of a presentation by Jonathan Peters, PhD on the power of understanding the 16 Motivators - or Identifying the Why? in player-centric gamification design.

As you can see, a great gamification designer must identify their own motivation profile so they can anticipate what elements will be missing from their design, where disengagement is likely to happen, and where the strategy is likely to fall apart.

For instance, a designer who is average or low motivated in Expediency won’t anticipate that high motivated Expediency people will game the system. Those players will find ways to “cheat.” However, anticipating this blind spot, a designer can build “cheating” routines into the gamified processes, even reward the behavior as long as the players achieve the end goal for the activity.

The best gamification designers begin by understanding their own Motivation Profiles so that they can anticipate weaknesses in their design.

For more information on Sententia and Gamification Design please contact us at guru@sententiagames.com

About the Author: 
Monica Cornetti
Founder and CEO, Sententia www.SententiaGames.com www.monicacornetti.com

A gamification speaker and designer, Monica Cornetti is rated as a #1 Gamification Guru in the World by UK-Based Leaderboarded. She is the author of the book Totally Awesome Training Activity Guide: Put Gamification to Work for You, writes The Gamification Report blog, and hosts the weekly Gamification Talk Radio program.