Game designers have been designing for digital behavior change for longer than just about anyoneGame designers have been designing for digital behavior change for longer than just about anyone
Games have long recognized the truth that comes from The Kurt Lewin Equation:
The player is interacting with the in-game world in order to get what they want and further their goals.
Game thoughtfully designs rules and interactions to influence how you get what you want
As such, they The goal of game design is to influence user behavior to create an intended experience. People need to play games in certain ways to make the game fun for themselves, so games are designed for behavior ch.... They design the environment that the users interact with and the rules through which all of the user's actions are interpreted. The goal of game design is to influence user behavior to create an intended experienceThe goal of game design is to influence user behavior to create an intended experience
See Mark Brown's brilliant video on protecting the player from themselves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L8vAGGitr8::rmn Game designers recognize that they can't just design a game and expect the player to enjoy it. If you play Xcom in a risk-averse way, then you won't have as much fun as if you lean into risk and play aggressively. However, the rules of the game and its feedback systems shape the most likely playstyles.
See: Progress monitoring and feedback systems
See MDA: A Formal A.... They are doing Behavioral Product StrategyBehavioral Product Strategy
The way a product is designed shapes the way that people use it. Every app is designed for behavior change, intentionally or unintentionally, so the questions that drive behavioral product strategy must be addressed. User Involvement is a set of metrics whose success is defined by the combination of user behaviors that contribute towards creating a desirable outcome. Behavioral product strategy is making product decisions to influence user behavior and improve user involvement.
It doesn't ma....
As such, game designers are asking many of the same questions as applied behavioral scientists.
How do we design meaningful choices? A friend of mine named Javier Velasquez once told me: “Behavioral economics sets up a choice architecture so that people are most likely to pick one specific option. Game designers aim to give users meaningful choices where all of the options are equally valuable, they just represent different play styles that suit each player. There’s a balance there if you want to create engagement in product design.”How do we design the choices that people make so they are more likely to make choices that are in their best interests? How can we design their choices so people reveal their true preferences?
How do we recognize the goals that users have and design the product so they are likely to succeed? How do we recognize users when they are successful, track their progress, and return this information to them in ways that shape their behavior? How can we intelligently deliver feedback to the user in the form of data visualization to motivate the user to aim higher?
- Use a badging system as a method of actionable user researchUse a badging system as a method of actionable user research
If you have a high quality badging/achievements system, then that means you know what the user goals are, you can recognize when those goals are accomplished, and your app notices when the user behavior is bringing the user closer to accomplishing their goal.
The three most important questions to ask of a badging system:
What are the user's goals?
What signals progress to the user/company?
What signals failure along the process of goal achievement?
What signals success to the user/c...
People are often going to fail when they attempt to achieve their goals. How do we Intentionally design for failure statesIntentionally design for failure states
A failure state is when users fail to reach their goal in some way. In goal striving, it is inevitable that the user will experience failure states, because a goal is by definition a discrepancy between your desired state of reality and your present state. If we didn't have failure states, the Intention-Behavior Gap There tends to be a gap between what people intend to do and what they actually do, Sheeran & Webb 2016::rmn would be a non-issue (rather than one of the hardest problems in t... so people try again instead of giving up? How do we increase the likelihood that they are successful when they try again?
How do we design for Difficulty MatchingDifficulty Matching
The emotional experience of Flow
A flow state is often characterized as optimal human experience. It’s an experience where you are fully focused and energized in what you’re doing, often experiencing a high level of creativity and losing track of time.
The general emotional experience that is being described here is that when a task is too challenging for a user’s current level of ability, they’ll get frustrated and give up. Alternatively, when the task is far too easy, they are likely t... so the users don't get bored or frustrated from the tasks they are being asked to do? How do we build people's capabilities so they are able to overcome challenges they inevitably face, over the course of their whole experience?
- Continuous onboardingContinuous onboarding
Horizontal products like Notion, Airtable, Excel, and Obsidian are all powerful/flexible and require learning and expansion of use cases over time to wrap your head around them. Given that, why do they only teach people how to use the app for the first few minutes?
It's not just horizontal products though. Continuous Onboarding applies to most apps that aren't just "open, press a button, and close." Are you continuing to add features over time that would benefit users that are more than a mo...
How do we account for individual differences between users in skill level, goals, and playstyles so our target users gain value?
Questions can be answered through methods beyond experimentation. If millions of good games exist that are attempting to answer similar questions to behavioral scientists through their design decisions, then that just means they are using different methods to learn about people than behavioral scientists.