Building YOUR castle or defense strategy
Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback is the Third Core Drive in Octalysis, and is the Core Drive that really emphasizes on “Play.”
Some of my fondest memories growing up are of when I got to play with Legos and engage in forming, destroying, and re-building basic building blocks in an infinite amount of combinations.
It gave me and millions of others around the world great joy and fulfillment simply because it allowed me to be creative, immediately see the outcome of my hard work, and re-calibrate my efforts over and over again to bring my imagination to life.
I believe that people are by nature creative beings, and we yearn to learn, imagine, invent, and partake in creative processes where the journey in of itself brings happiness.
The beauty of this Core Drive lies in its evergreen ability to continually engage us at all moments in our lives.
If you recall the structure of Octalysis, with the top-down Core Drives being White/Black Hat, and Left/Right Core Drives being Extrinsic/Intrinsic, you will notice that Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback is the “golden top right,” where it is White Hat – meaning long-term positive emotions, as well as Right Brain – meaning an emphasis on Intrinsic Motivation. Unfortunately, this Core Drive is also the hardest to implement correctly.
The Endgame Evergreen Core Drive
Every once in a while, an attendee at my speaker events would ask, “Yu-kai, I want to add gamification to my company, but aren’t most games short-lived? Don’t people get bored of a game after playing for a while? If so, wouldn’t that be bad for my business?”
It’s true, many great games are played for two to eight months, and then they move on to new games. However, it’s because the game did not design for motivation for the Endgame, which is the fourth and final phase of a Player’s Journey. And remember, since you never HAVE to play a game, if it is not engaging in the endgame, you move on to other games.
Many well-designed games, like Starcraft, managed to engage the mind of players for over a decade, until the sequel was released. Other games like Poker, Golf, Chess, Mahjong, all have stood the test of time, and is still popular after centuries of trial.
Now there are many ways to design an engaging Endgame, but the reason why so many of these games stand the test of time, is largely because they utilize Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback.
In a study done by Queen Mary University of London and University College London in 2013 comparing the effects of different games on the brain. After six to eight weeks, the study showed that students who played Starcraft roughly an hour a day improved their memory, visual search, informational filtering, and other cognitive skills.
When a user can continuously use her creativity and infinitely come up with new ways to do things, the game designer no longer needs to constantly create new content to make things engaging, as her mind is the evergreen content that absorbs her attention continuously. That’s the power of Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback in retaining users for the long haul.
Some Game Techniques to implement Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback
Below is a list of Game Techniques that utilize Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback within games and also in gamification projects.
Boosters (Game Technique #31)
Have you ever played the game Super Mario and felt blissfully excited when you picked up a mushroom or flower that made you stronger (such as breaking blocks with your head or throwing fireballs)? These are considered Boosters in a game, where a player obtains something to, in a limited capacity, help them achieve the win-state easier.
Different from simply leveling up or acquiring new skills, Boosters are usually limited under certain conditions. You can enjoy the brick-breaking and fire-throwing as long as you stay out of harms way. Once you get hit by an enemy, you return back to your “natural state” prior to boosters.
Boosters such as getting a jumping star in Super Mario is limited by time, and for the next dozen seconds (I actually went on Youtube and counted the seconds just to write this), a player would rush as quickly as he can (sometimes falling into pits) as he enjoys the adrenaline rush of using his limited invincibility (with a touch of Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience).
That feeling of being empowered with new but limited power-ups is exhilarating and is an extremely strong motivator towards the desired action. Very few people are willing to stop the game while the Star Invincibility effect is still.
In games like Candy Crush, Boosters are also very powerful mechanics, especially towards its monetization. A player can earn (or buy) limited amounts of boosters that help overcome some of the most difficult challenges in the stage, such as getting a Bubblegum Troll to defeat the menacing chocolates, or a Disco-Ball like Color Bomb to remove all candies of a certain color. Without different boosters and power-ups, the game would not nearly be as engaging as it is today.
One key concept to note is that, when users are paying for boosters, even though it could make winning incredibly easy, they are not purchasing a victory. If a person pays money, and all she sees is a screen that says, “You won the game!” she would not be very excited per se. Rather, she would prefer to buy a powerful sword that kills all enemies quicker and faster. In reality, users are purchasing the feeling of being very powerful and accomplished (Core Drive 2), and being empowered with new capabilities.
Milestone Unlock (Game Technique #19)
One of the most successful gaming mechanics within games is something I call the Milestone Unlock. When people play games, they often set an internal stop time in the form of a milestone – “Let me beat this boss and then I’m done.” “I’m close to leveling up, let me level up and I’ll stop.”
What the Milestone Unlock does, is that it unlocks an exciting possibility that wasn’t there before once that milestone is hit.
In some RPGs (Role Playing Games), whenever you level up, you learn a new set of skills. These skills are awesome and generally help you kill monsters faster, with more style, or it would have made your earlier gameplay a lot easier.
Once players level up (their “stop time milestone”), they naturally want to see what these new skills are, test them out a bit, test them out on stronger enemies, enjoy how powerful they are, and then realize they are so close to the next milestone that they might as well get there first.
This is when people plan to stop at 11PM but end up playing till 5AM in the morning.
Milestone Unlocks in Plants vs Zombies
Plants vs. Zombies is a dynamic “tower-defense” game geared towards forming a strategy to utilize resources and “plants” to solve puzzles of zombie attacks. In the spirit of Core Drive 3, the game embodies an aspect of allowing people to incorporate their creativity to come up with various solutions towards solving the same problem. Interestingly, this is the only “fighting” game and the only “zombies” game that both my mother and my wife got very into.
In terms of Game Techniques, Plants vs Zombies utilizes Milestone Unlocks to the extreme. When you complete each level, you will usually unlock a new Plant to help you defend against Zombies.
Not by coincidence, that new plant is often the exact plant that directly counters the toughest zombie on the stage you just beat and it would have made your life a lot easier if you had it earlier!