Happiness and Game Design
From the “blog entries that should have been written months ago” category…
In hindsight, probably the single most valuable session (among the many valuable sessions) from SXSWi this past March was Jane McGonigal’s keynote (SXSWi Podcast, Slides). I say that simply because I am still thinking about it and how it applies to the experience design work that I do at IBM Interactive on a regular basis.
One of the underpinnings of Jane’s keynote was the application of happiness research (or positive psychology) to understanding the engagement created by games (specifically, mmorpgs) - or alternatively, how we can use game design techniques to create happiness whether it through online user experience design or in general life.
In the Center, we’ve actually been talking about game-like user interfaces and interaction models for quite some time with our clients, but Jane’s linkage of happiness (and engagement) to game design provides a wonderful (and better) framework to think and talk about the value of game design in a way that is more complex that I had been previously thinking about it.
Two specific elements of her keynote which I found particularly interesting were her Economics of Engagement (also referred to as the “Four Key Principles of Happiness”) and her “10 Super Hero Powers” or new types of happiness that people are getting from playing multiplayer games (which she refers to as the “ultimate happiness engine”).
The four key principles of happiness (as identified by Jane McGonigal) are:
- Satisfying work to do.
- Experience of being good at something.
- Time spent with people we like.
- The chance to be a part of something bigger.
The experience of any of these or the combination of the four facilitates the creation of happiness or of engagement (in a fashion which directly relates to all of the conversation happening online right now about user engagement or creating community, etc.) The imperative implied (if it isn’t clear) is that to create social engagement (through social media or some other engagement channel) you need to be thinking about how you create an environment that facilitates the above principles for your users, customers, etc.
Additionally, she identifies a set of more specific “Super Powers” related to the key principles above that “amplify” the creation (or delivery) of happiness. These super powers are created (or provided) as part of the experience of massively multiplayer online games. Specifically, these super powers are:
Mobbability - The ability to do real-time work in very large groups a talent for coordinating with many people simultaneously—“scalable collaboration.”
Cooperation Radar - The ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task.
Ping Quotient -measures your responsiveness to other people’s requests for engagement and your propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network.
Influency - The ability to be persuasive in diverse social contexts and media spaces. Understanding that each work environment and collaboration space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique.
Multi-Capitalism - Fluency in working with different capitals, e.g., natural, intellectual, social, and financial.
Protovation - Fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles ability to lower the costs and increase the speed of failure.
Open Authorship - Eating content for public consumption and modification; creating content for public consumption and modification.
Longbroading - Thinking in terms of higher level systems, cycles, the big picture.
Emergensight - The ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity.
Signal / Noise Management - Filtering meaningful info, patterns, and commonalities from massively multiple streams of data.
From a design perspective, creating experiences that allow people to experience or develop these skills amplify happiness (or user satisfaction).