There are people who pay thirty euros for the privilege of carrying virtual blocks from one place to another in Minecraft, for hours, voluntarily, and with a devotion that would bring tears to the eyes of any HR department, and they are frequently the same people whose employer offers them money, bonuses and lately digital badges for filling in their timesheet, which they still do not do. Once you have seen that contradiction you cannot unsee it, because it permits only two explanations: either these people are irrational, or we have fundamentally misunderstood what human beings actually need to be paid for and what they do not.
An economist's reflex at this point is reliably the same, and it sounds entirely reasonable too: if a behavior fails to appear, the incentive is too small, so raise the incentive, make it more visible, hang a leaderboard next to it and run a prize draw. That reflex acquired a name about fifteen years ago, and the name was gamification.
The icing that became the product
I say this as someone who was there from the beginning: Engaginglab was Europe's first gamification agency in 2009, and the original idea was a different thing from what it became. The question back then was why people voluntarily do things inside games that are harder, more frustrating and more demanding to learn than most jobs, why they will chew for hours on a single passage where they fail forty times, and why that failure does not drive them away but holds them there. The answer lies in the architecture of the activity itself, in the calibration of challenge against ability, in feedback that arrives in seconds rather than in quarterly reviews, in the experience of visibly getting better.
What actually arrived in companies was something else, and one has to say it plainly: something far more convenient. What arrived was the notion that you could leave the activity exactly as it is, along with everything about it that does not work, and simply lay a layer on top, points, badges, a leaderboard, a rewards shop, like icing over a cake nobody wants to eat. In April 2011 Gartner enthusiastically forecast mass adoption, predicting that by 2015 more than 50 per cent of organisations managing innovation processes would gamify those processes, and on 27 November 2012 the same firm warned that by 2014 roughly 80 per cent of those applications would fail because of poor design, which is rather like a weather service announcing the summer and then the hail, and being right about both.
Why did the convenient version win? Because it delivers the oldest promise in management: that a problem can be solved without being touched. A method that requires you to rebuild the work itself is selling surgery, and a layer of points on top of it is selling a pill, and between those two offers the market has never hesitated for long.
The switch-off test
It is time to give this convenient version its proper name, because it has about as much to do with games as a tip has to do with a friendship: bribery design.
Bribery design is what you have when an activity remains unchanged and unattractive and its execution is bought instead with an external reward, whether that reward is made of paper, of pixels or of prestige. And because a term without a touchstone is merely an insult, this one comes with a test anyone can run in a minute: remove the reward, in thought or in practice, and watch what happens to the behavior. If the activity stays interesting, it was designed, and if the behavior collapses in on itself, it was bought.
Bribery design is what was sold to you, not what you are guilty of.
The word is deliberately uncomfortable, but it describes a mechanic rather than an intention, which is why the accusation does not land on whoever bought such a system. Anyone who fell for it is in the company of some very large corporations with some very large budgets, all of whom succumbed to the same, genuinely well-made promise.
What psychology has known since 1971
The unpleasant part is that the bill does not end at zero, it ends in the negative. Edward Deci had students work on puzzles in 1971 that they enjoyed solving of their own accord, then paid one group for doing so and observed what happened once the money disappeared again: those who had been paid spent less of their free time on the puzzle than those who had never received anything. Two years later Mark Lepper, with David Greene and Richard Nisbett, showed the same effect in nursery-school children who loved to draw, right up until they were promised a certificate for drawing, after which voluntary drawing declined, as though the reward had taken something away from the pleasure, which in a sense it had.
Research calls this the undermining effect, and the mechanism behind it is less mystical than it sounds: the brain is an interpretation machine, and when it finds a payment sitting next to an activity, it draws the obvious conclusion that the activity evidently needs the payment. A reward is therefore always also a statement about the worth of what is being rewarded, rather in the way a restaurant advertising free drinks is involuntarily telling you something about its food. Anyone who hangs points on a task is officially declaring it unattractive, complete with seal, signature and progress bar.
A bribery system cannot simply be switched off again, because afterwards the behavior does not fall back to its old level, it falls below it.
You have then not merely spent money on a platform, you have additionally bought up the residual motivation that was previously available for free, which is presumably the only form of purchase that leaves you owning less than you did before you ordered.
In a game points are an instrument of measurement, in bribery design they are a currency
And here it gets interesting, because games are of course full of points, levels and leaderboards, which is what made the confusion possible in the first place. The difference lies not in whether something is counted but in what the number stands for. In a game the score measures an activity that already carries itself, the way a stopwatch measures a runner who would be running with or without it, and nobody would suggest that the runner runs because of the stopwatch. In bribery design, by contrast, the number is not a measurement but a payment, and the whole system tips over the moment the currency loses its value.
People buy Dark Souls, a game whose central selling point is that you fail in it incessantly, and they buy it precisely because every failure there is information rather than humiliation, because the next attempt is immediately available, and because the progress happens inside the player rather than in an account. Nobody has ever demanded a badge for solving a Zelda puzzle, because the solution itself was the payout, and a game does not reward the behavior, it is the behavior.
What to build instead
If the diagnosis is that the activity itself is the problem, then there is no route around the activity, and that sounds at first like the bad news, like effort, like exactly the surgery nobody wanted. The error of reasoning sits in the assumption that the output of this work is yet another system to be maintained, animated and continuously fed with fresh motivation. The opposite is the case, and the best image for it comes from the dullest metaphor in all of business administration: infrastructure. Nobody expects to be motivated by their electricity grid, nobody has to believe in their plumbing for it to work, and precisely that property, bearing load without consuming attention, is the promise gamification always made and never kept.
We call the output of this work action infrastructure, and the route to it is not magic but a procedure, the Drive Method: first you audit which behavior the job actually requires and what the existing system in truth produces, because most organizations reward precisely the behavior they subsequently complain about. Then you check which motivational mechanism fits the context, because the right answer is by no means always a game principle, sometimes it is a nudge, sometimes simply the removal of an obstacle. Only then is the activity itself rebuilt, challenge calibrated, feedback accelerated, growth in competence made visible, and the whole thing embedded into the existing structures so that it carries without daily entertainment. The sequence is the point: first the diagnosis, then the procedure, then the infrastructure, and nowhere in that chain does the question arise of what colour the badges should be.
The real price of the shortcut
You can pay people to do something unattractive, or you can stop building unattractive things, and the reason these two options have been confused for fifteen years is that the first feels like a shortcut and the second like a detour. The experiments from Deci onwards tell the punchline of this story rather drily: the shortcut leads back to a point below where you started, and the detour is the only route that actually arrives anywhere. The switch-off test costs you a minute, and I do not promise you will like the result, only that it will be true.