Build the next generation of digital services experiences
Unleash an enduring product roadmap of customer centric innovations by harnessing the oldest and most proven engagement architecture, we all love.
The Elements of Game
01
Design
The purpose, look and feel
02
Dynamics
How the game flows through rules and events
03
Mechanics
The game elements that are triggered through events
Why Game
Everywhere we look there are challenges: challenges with the planet, challenges with poverty, challenges with wellness, physical and mental. We have tried using logic and reason to help people take action, build habits and overcome these challenges and none of them are working fast or full enough.
Meanwhile the answer is hiding in plain sight. While most user journeys are over indexed on failure, the way we all respond best to challenges are when they are placed in the context of game. Game allows us to understand the rules, build skills, go on conquests and win in ways that ease of use as a design paradigm does not.
As it becomes increasingly more difficult to get above the noise, attract and engage customers, we are compelled to harness the power of game and data to build digital experiences that deepen customer relationships, provide value and are digitally relevant by supporting customers to build strong habits.
Building emotionally intelligent digital experiences with an architecture of game requires an understanding of the core elements of that architecture. By embedding these elements within a defined and proven methodology creates experiences with a game like feel and deliver attraction, engagement and retention.
Applying game methodologies requires us to dissect its core elements: game design, game dynamics, and game mechanics, their interplay, and their impact on creating engaging digital experiences. Allof these have been incorporated in Moroku’s enterprise game engine, Odyssey, and its companion design process On-Ramp.
Game Design
Game design encompasses the creative process of conceptualizing and structuring the user journey with a game like feel whilst creating a look and feel that blends corporate brand and fun. The process begins with a discovery of objectives, for both the organisation creatingthe experience and the player for whom the experience is being designed and resolving any conflicts between them.
As with most human centred design approaches the process involves building empathy with the user, their muliple personas, what they are trying to achieve, their motivation, beliefs, values and what’s holding them back. Brand values are explored along with brand assets such as logos, palettes and other design elements such as typography, iconography, pictures and video.
The concept of flow is researched to begin mapping out the journey, realsing that whilst the journeys are never ending, constantly developing, initial milestones and stages are useful in balancing challenge and skill.
Technology systems are audited, including user, third party, enterprise and data systems.
From these an initial design is formulated including an initial hypothesis, incorporating win states and a design pattern.
Game Dynamics
The dynamics of a game, or gamified application, are the elements that move the player through the game, encouraging them to keep going, fail and succeed. They involve the key concepts of games as outlined by Johan Huizinga in his 1938 masterpiece, Homo Ludens. The player is encouraged to enter the magic circle, understand and accept the rules, take on challenges and get better.
Whilst game mechanics receive a lot of attention, it is their placement within the game design and dynamics that make them meaningful. Getting the dynamics right, enables intrinsic rewards, such as levels, to become more valuable and cheaper to deploy than extrinsic rewards such as prizes. When this concept is understood, the reader understands why the loyalty and engagement built through game is much more powerful than anything achieved by credit card reward schemes.
Game dynamics are established by going through a process of discovery into the key skills to be developed by the player, the habits to be built and actions to be taken. With these established, inside of the flow established during game design, the initial rules engine can then be set up within the event engine.
Whilst many classic games, such as backgammon and chess have a finite set of rules, the potential of game theory, in its application to digital experience design, is in their infinite development. As rules become hyper-personalised using LLM techologies and customers become better known, the dynamics constantly evolve as the system becomes better at their core objective of helping customers overcome failure and build stronger, better habits.
In defining the game dynamics, designers seek to leverage human desires, such as knowledge, status, reward, self-expression, avoiding failure, ownership, meaning, influence, achievement, competition and altruism. Leveraging these desires builds empathy and encourages players to make progress. Connecting motivations to a set of rules for the game we add dynamism to the customer journey, helping players understand what winning is , how to get there and what they achieve by engaging.
When we examine the great challenges of our time, such as climate change and sustainability, financial, mental and physical wellness, through the lens of fun and game, existing ease of use designed experiences immediately look dull and inadequate. Showing a customer how little money and how much debt they have does little for their confidence, understanding or motivation. The same is true for climate change when the numbers seem so improbable. However, when we start to present individual and collective effort within the context of a dynamic game that leverages human desires we dramatically increase our chance of successful engagement, loyalty and results. A robust game engine, that sits between the transactional events and the user interface, codifies the game dynamics.
Game Mechanics
Once the game design and dynamics have been defined, there are a host of game mechanics that can be deployed to turn the heat up and reveal the dynamics. There are many to choose from:
Rewards and Awards: Incentives that motivate users. These awards can be intrinsic to the context of the mission such as better product terms, or extrinsic rewards such as prizes.
Points: A great way to track progress or achievement. Points can be redeemed for awards and prizes.
Levels: A key way of representing and recognising progress is to level players up to new missions once they have demonstrated skill at a particularl level.
Badges: Visual markers of accomplishment allow players to be recognised for their habits and skills as well as enabling them to look back on their achievements for posterity and share these with others for social influence.
Leaderboards: Encouraging competition by stack ranking players and communites.
Challenges: Tasks to overcome. These are key to creating flow when mapped to skill,
Avatars: Give players identity and can very usefully be applied to understand risk profiles and motivations
Competition: Leaderboards and rankings.
Collaboration: Working in teams.
Feedback: Immediate responses to actions can be as simple as a notification , SMS or email and are critical in building the guard rails to the journey and bringing players back into the experience.
Scarcity: Happy hours and egg timers are great ways to drive energy and get players to work.
Customization: Personalizing avatars or profiles creates buy-in by getting players and users to invest time in setting up their systems.
Content: Building audiences through content is a fundamental pillar of engagement. This content must be delivered in snackable format for consumption within a mobile first world, to create and reinforce the brand promise. There is ample opportunity within digital experiences to serve this up within the channel when the player map is data driven
Tools and Weapons: Enterprises, like banks and energy companies have a trove of tools and systems that users can avail themselves of. But like content, the trick is to get customers to earn the right to these, unlocking them as they make progress through the various missions, baking in engagement and loyalty.
Conclusion
Gamification came and went as points and badges were burnt through a lack of game method discipline. Through the strategic application of game design, dynamics and mechanics, game method reveals transformative user experiences and product roadmaps that will endure. Game designed experiences go beyond short term, next best offers prevalent in CRM thinking, to the creation of customer success platforms that have no end. To do so requires a disciplined design methodology such as On-Ramp, and be backed up with a robust enterprise game engine that sits between the transaction sources and the user experience.