Book Image

Actionable Gamification

By : Yu-kai Chou
Book Image

Actionable Gamification

By: Yu-kai Chou

Overview of this book

Effective gamification is a combination of game design, game dynamics, user experience, and ROI-driving business implementations. This book explores the interplay between these disciplines and captures the core principles that contribute to a good gamification design. The book starts with an overview of the Octalysis Framework and the 8 Core Drives that can be used to build strategies around the various systems that make games engaging. As the book progresses, each chapter delves deep into a Core Drive, explaining its design and how it should be used. Finally, to apply all the concepts and techniques that you learn throughout, the book contains a brief showcase of using the Octalysis Framework to design a project experience from scratch. After reading this book, you’ll have the knowledge and skills to enable the widespread adoption of good gamification and human-focused design in all types of industries.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Introduction
19
Chapter 18: The Journey Goes On
21
Notes

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Theory

I think it is a good time to move on to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Theory. Csikszentmihalyi is a world-renowned scholar in the fields of psychology and management science, and is best known for creating the Flow Theory which combines the factors of a user’s skill level to the difficulty of the challenge.

The Flow theory illustrates that when the difficulty of a challenge is too high compared to a user’s skill level, the result is a sense of anxiety which may compel the user to drop out quickly. Similarly, if the user’s skill level is dramatically higher than the difficulty of the challenge, the user will feel bored and may also drop out.

Only when the user’s skill level is balanced with the difficulty of the challenge, do they enter the state known as Flow. During Flow, users become completely focused. They “zone in” on their activities, loosing their sense of self...