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

The Story of the Good Designer vs. Bad Designer

To understand the core of good gamification design, let’s start with an example of how a bad game designer might design a game.

In designing a game, a bad designer might start off thinking, “Okay, what popular game mechanics and game elements should I use? Well, of course we need monsters in the game. We also need swords so where should I place those? How about crops that friends can fertilize? What about some birds that show a lot of attitude? I’m sure people will love it!”

As you can see from the exaggerated depiction above, a game might have all the “right game elements” but still be incredibly boring or stupid if they do not focus on their users’ motivations first. It is worth remembering that every single game in the market has what we call game mechanics and game elements. However, most are still boring and are financial losers. Only a few well-designed games become engaging and even...