Most of us first encountered the gamification of everyday life at that tender age when mothers and grandmothers have to make significant efforts to move porridge into a person. We sat on a chair and looked with disgust at a plate containing an endless amount of an unattractive substance, and my mother (or grandmother) brought a spoonful of it to our mouths, cheerfully saying: "Here's another car driving into the garage!" - or something else in the same spirit.
Since then, a lot of water has flown under the bridge (and a lot of porridge has been eaten), but the problem that we regularly need to do uninteresting household operations remains relevant. Some people learn to get pleasure from everyday activities, others strictly say to themselves "must!", And still others try to avoid them by any means, trying not to notice the growing layer of dust and other cultural layers. It is for them, haters of routine, that most of the tools for gamification of everyday life exist.
1. Plots and meanings
Remember the famous story of the three workers?
Three people were carrying stones in carts.
One of them was asked:
- What are you doing here?
Stopping and wiping off his sweat, he replied wearily:
“I'm carrying stones.
The same question was asked to the second. He replied:
- I earn money. I have a big family and I have to feed it.
The third person, having heard the same question, answered:
- I am building a temple!
This is a story about our need for meaning. People who bring up small children are familiar with this need in the most intimate way, because a small child cannot yet decisively say "must!"
For example, we want the child to practice drawing sticks, because in the historical perspective he will need to learn how to write letters, and we need to prepare the hand (and brain) for this process. If we just ask him to draw sticks, then, out of politeness, he will draw a few pieces and throw them away. Because these sticks are about nothing. A completely different story, if we give him a green pencil and ask him to draw grass for a plush lamb - is it really hungry? The child will paint the whole sheet for us with the same sticks and ask for more. What changed? The meanings have changed.
The mother who turns eating porridge into a game about cars driving into the garage, and the kindergarten teacher who, leading the children down the hallway, plays with them at spies, sneaking very, very quietly so that no one will notice, use the method of introducing a plot. The activity here itself becomes the reward.
Can you do this with adults? And it can and is done. A worker who, performing routine operations, plays with himself every day, trying to break his own record for the number of parts made, for example, also essentially brings a plot to his work. In this case, it is a story about a sports competition. And even such a simple plot can be enough to enjoy the process and protect yourself from burnout.
In the application " Zombies, run!"an attempt was made (and quite successful) to gamify runs. The player does the same as usual (runs), and the game creates a context for this: the world is dying, horrible zombies are about to catch up with you, user, and eat your brain, hurry to the base! ”In context, as it turned out, running is much more fun than just turning circles around the area.
The limitations of the method are clear. Creating a plot for arbitrary uninteresting activities requires creative effort. Not every person is ready to invent a plot for himself, and not everyone will enthusiastically join the game that he invented for himself. That is, you need someone who will create this plot. For a child, the master of the game is usually a mother or a teacher, but, as a rule, their fervor is not enough to give meaning to everything that is of little interest. And then another favorite method comes into play - namely, token reinforcement.
2. And what will I get for it?
Story gami cation works on intrinsic motivation - after we bring meaning to an activity, it becomes immediately enjoyable and interesting, and there is no need to further reinforce it. But this, as we understood, is an intellectually costly method. You can do otherwise - leave the activity itself as uninteresting as it is, but start rewarding for it. And this will already be external motivation.
Reinforcements vary. You can reward money - this is how our labor relations work. You can use food reinforcement - this is how animals (and sometimes children) are trained. You can reinforce emotionally - this is all sorts of hugs, kisses and "you are my clever girl" with which we reward each other within the family. You can reinforce with attractive activities - this is what we do when we give the child a tablet for a while. And you can also use symbolic reinforcement, giving out tokens, medals, experience points, and the like.
Symbolic reinforcement is a rather strange thing. With food, for example, reinforcement, everything is natural - we have a natural interest in food. Especially in delicious food. Sweets, chocolates are an understandable motivator. It's harder to understand why tokens motivate us, which by themselves do not provide anything useful. We seem to interpret them as indicators of achievement and success (we like to feel successful). When we see how the number of tokens (points, medals, achievements) increases, we feel that we have progress and we are steadily moving ... and where we are moving is another, separate question.
An example of degenerate token reinforcement can be seen in the Superbetter app, which is designed to gamify activities that improve the quality of life. That is, for example, physical activity and maintaining contact with friends (yes, in some cases, additional efforts are needed to stay in contact, for example, with depression). I sent a picture with a cat to a friend and got points. I went for a walk and got points. I wrote out three reasons to be grateful for today - I also got points. Accumulated enough points - moved to a new level.
For some time, the player experiences happiness, watching how his characteristics grow and moving from level to level. After a while, there comes the realization that one level is no different from another, there is no ultimate goal, the points gained decisively do not affect anything, and you cannot even exchange them for anything. As soon as the player begins to guess that he was impaled, the motivation collapses. And, accordingly, we see characteristic messages in the game's community: “I understand that this is a very useful game, but I just can't bring myself to play it. Please advise what to do! "
3. Who is to blame and what to do
In general, it's not hard to guess that if a player has to force himself to play, something is wrong not with him, but with the design of the game. In particular, if the token system does not work due to the fact that the tokens are purely formal, they should probably be given some value.
This simple consideration was embodied in the game Chore wars . It, unlike Superbetter, is tailored for use by several members of the same family or work collective. Each player is an adventurer, the team of players is a company of adventurers, and one of the players also acts as a master of the game. That is, he decides what household chores are considered quests and how much gold and experience is due for completing each quest.
Gold in Chore wars is withdrawn from the game, and in much the same way as in the classic version of token reinforcement, tokens are cashed out. That is, the player (boy Vasya) comes up to the master of the game (mother) and says: "But I've heroically saved up a hundred gold pieces!" And here the game master (mother) must decide what they can be changed for. For a toy? To the cinema? For a walk together in the park? It's a difficult question. On the one hand, for a reinforcement token system to work well, reinforcement must be otherwise unreachable. That is, if we decided that gold can be exchanged for a walk in the park, this should be the only reason to take a walk in the park (imagine how the relationship needs to be earned). On the other hand, you need to choose some kind of reinforcement,which will be both attractive enough and not burdensome for the budget. That is, the master is faced with the non-trivial task of inventing reinforcements, and we again return to the problem that the user needs to invent something, to which, for one reason or another, he may not be disposed.
And even that is actually only half the problem. The second half of the problem is that the game forms a special space. Breaking the line between normal life and play makes us angry. Imagine: you are, say, six years old, you come to a New Year's party. You are overwhelmed with the feeling of a miracle, you go up to bearded Grandfather Frost and expect that now he will take something beautiful from his bag ... And he takes a bill out of his pocket and says: “Here you go, boy. A stall around the corner, buy yourself something. " A player experiences about the same degree of breakdown and cognitive dissonance when he discovers that gold coins inside the game itself cannot be exchanged for anything - you need to leave the game space and go to your mother to discuss cashing. It is at the very moment when we expect rewards from the game that we are thrown out of the game.It is unpleasant.
Here we can go in two ways. We can completely abandon the special game reality and leave only the token system with the possibility of cashing out. This is a family option, when there is a master in the face of mom, and he can declare the rules. For example: one token for washed dishes, a set of stickers for ten tokens. But if we, for example, are in the age category "30+" and live separately, then this is not our option at all. We do not have a master, and giving tokens to oneself is not interesting.
Another way is to stay within the framework of the role-playing game and introduce the exchange of in-game money for in-game items. This is the path taken by Habitica .
4. Vacuum cleaner and Pokemon
So, you are an adventurer again. You have a list of daily tasks (you yourself filled it out), and for completing these tasks you get gold and experience points. The difference is that now you understand why you need gold. Gold can buy new armor, sword and helmet! Moreover, you understand why you need good equipment - with its help you can more effectively defeat monsters! From which, in turn, even cooler equipment drops out - obviously, to defeat even cooler monsters ... There is a recursion hidden somewhere here, but it is familiar and does not bother.
Even if, for example, you are a girl and you are not very excited by the battle with monsters, you are still interested, because a kind random number generator periodically rewards you with kinder surprises - that is, literally, eggs from which all sorts of strange creatures are hatched. Have you always dreamed of a golden flying pig and a zombie cactus?
These are two cool manipulations of a gullible motivational system at once in one bottle. First, collecting sets is hypnotic: if we already have an incomplete set of something, we will inevitably feel an irrational desire to find the missing elements. And if the only thing that stands between us and a complete set of flying pigs is unwashed dishes ...
The fact that eggs drop randomly and at unpredictable intervals is also important. Our brains are not designed to work with truly random processes at all, and if the connection between action and reward is unclear, the brain believes by default that there is — it just takes enough trials to discover the pattern. Something like this, for example, is formed dependence on slot machines - our shamelessly deceived subcortical structures require more, more statistical data, because somewhere there must be a pattern!
Well. We have a game reality with a plot, the value of the dropped tokens does not cause any doubts for us, and we feel an irresistible desire to collect Pokemon. It would seem, what could go wrong?
5. Workarounds
The next problem, oddly enough, is generated by exactly what we really like - the ability to create a personalized list of tasks.
Until we got into the gamification of dishwashing, we were solving the problem of "how to force ourselves to wash the dishes." As soon as we have a game specially designed for this, we, in fact, begin to solve another problem - how to stuff the face of the world's evil (or collect a full set of flying pigs). Cookware becomes just a means of solving this problem. Moreover, which is bad, it is not the only remedy.
How such a reinforcement system works, we all well know from the example of schooling. In theory, the school is designed for the child to acquire knowledge there in the amount of some standard program. But the practical goal of the child is to get a document on education, and intermediate tasks that bring this goal closer are to get positive marks. We understand there are different ways to get a good grade. You can actually teach the subject, you can call on your mother for help, you can write off from a neighbor, or you can apply charm to the teacher and create in him the illusion of extreme interest in the subject. Such a system still has a certain level of efficiency: a child somehow takes out a certain amount of knowledge from school (although significantly less than planned).But here it must be borne in mind that if a child has serious difficulties with a specific subject, then it is very likely that social engineering will be applied to him, and as a result, the child will not acquire any special knowledge, despite motivation by assessments.
Games are also subject to this effect. If it is possible to assemble a complete set of pigs without completing any particular task, we can expect the user to carefully dodge the task. Even if he added it to himself. Even if this is the same unwashed dishes for which everything was started.
The player naturally guesses about the possibility of cheating, so he asks a natural question: "What will prevent me from cheating the game and just telling her that I did everything?" Technically - nothing gets in the way! But a person is a social being, and if he is not, say, a sociopath, then he has some learned ideas about honest and decent. And these representations include the concept of permissible deception. For example, we consider it acceptable to take one ballpoint pen out of work, but we will not take a whole box, because the first is a minor abuse, and the second is already theft. In educational tests, it was shown that the amount of permissible cheating is no more than thirty percent. We are ready to write off so much from a neighbor or from a reseller, without experiencing significant pangs of conscience. And regardless of whether they can catch us on this or not!
There is another limiting factor. According to one definition, play is characterized by the presence of objectively unnecessary obstacles. For example, a footballer has no objective reason not to touch the ball with his hand. It's a matter of convention that makes the game more challenging. When we drop such conditional limitations, the pleasant feeling of overcoming disappears, we become uninteresting, and we quit the game. If we already had such an experience, then we keep ourselves from cheating, explaining that it is unsportsmanlike to play with cheats. Accordingly, if a player accepts the game, then he will act more or less within the framework of its rules, even if it is not very convenient for him and no one is following him.
At the same time, we expect that the player will abuse game mechanics - but only until a certain point, after which he will begin to feel that he is somehow ashamed to deceive his own phone. The problem, we repeat, is that exactly what it was planned to cultivate with reinforcement can fall into this amount of permissible cheating.
6. The destructive power of rewards
What can we do if the player gets tokens for himself in the wrong way, which is required of him? For example, we can entrust the game master with the function of compiling or approving a to-do list for which reinforcements will be issued. In Chore wars, for example, only the master can add a new quest, and this closes the player's ability to collect many, many tokens using tasks like "throw one piece of paper into the bucket."
Here, by the way, we have to ask the question why user quests tend to this type - and what is the significance for the further functioning of the user.
In a classic experiment on the psychology of motivation, two groups of preschoolers were asked to draw pictures. One group of children was paid for these pictures, while the other was not. How was their behavior different? The first effect is obvious: children in the first group drew more pictures. However, the quality of these pictures was significantly lower! More importantly, after the end of the experiment, when the children were asked to draw more at will (just for their own pleasure), it was precisely those children who did not receive payment for their drawings that drew more and more willingly.
We are most familiar with this reinforcement effect in the context of pay. As soon as they start paying us for some activity (including our favorite!), We, firstly, stop agreeing to do the same for free, and secondly, we strive to complete the work at the minimum necessary level and with the least labor costs. That is, as soon as we introduce extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation is destroyed, the pleasure from the activity falls, and the activity is largely formalized. (This, incidentally, is about why you shouldn't turn your hobby into work.)
What does this mean in the context of parenting? For example, if we start giving out tokens for washing dishes, we prevent the child from feeling the pleasure of washing dishes, and the child will most likely refuse to wash dishes for free in the future. A more complex consequence is that the relationship with the child against this background can smoothly move from human to the market plane, and in response to a request for help, we will systematically begin to hear from him the phrase: "What will I get for this?" If this format of communication is not the norm within the family, it can be a very unpleasant surprise.
Another thing to be aware of here is that the token system only works as long as we don't stop using it. Since it cultivates not the desire to perform this or that action, but the desire for a reward, as soon as we remove the reinforcement, the activity returns either to the initial level or even lower (if at the start there was a certain amount of internal motivation, and we managed to destroy it by reward).
If we are raising a child, then this is a significant limitation, because we ultimately have the goal of raising an autonomous person who is capable of self-motivation for all the necessary activities. Reinforcement dependence is not what brings us closer to this goal. The effect of constant reward supportwell researched in autistic adultswho received ABA therapy in childhood. One of the central elements of this system is the systematic positive reinforcement of the child's desired behaviors (candy, toy, tablet, etc.). On the one hand, it works well and quickly - the child understands what he will be rewarded for and adapts his behavior accordingly. It becomes much more convenient for others to interact with him. This is why ABA therapy is loved, and why it is the gold standard in autism therapy. However, after a while it becomes noticeable that the child does not function without reinforcement. He waits for instructions and expects that for any action he will be given something. A typical complaint from the wives of autistic adults is that they lack any initiative in the relationship, and they need to take any action, firstly,ask and instruct, and secondly, reinforce. As a result, the marital relationship becomes more like a parent-child rather than a marital relationship. It is clear that this is an exaggerated case, and autistic people in general experience problems with initiative (ABA therapy does not so much create them as it aggravates them), but this gives an idea of the nature of the long-term consequences.
On the other hand, if the player is already a big boy or girl, and over the previous thirty years he has not formed any internal motivation for cleaning or morning exercises, then, in principle, he has nothing to lose, and if the tokens work for him - thank God ...
7. Medals and Lists
At what point does reinforcement begin to destructively affect performance and motivation? The moment we learn that for our actions they will give us something, and we begin to expect a reward. This means that we can reduce the destructive effect by giving out reinforcements not guaranteed and not the same every time. For example, instead of the same tokens, we can use medals or achievement cards. For monotonous daily activities, this is not an option (you cannot find so much variety there), and if the activity is at the stage of formation, it is very convenient to reinforce it with achievements there. For example: "the howler lord: first time he vacuumed the room!" - or: "drum virtuoso: conquered the washing machine!" Thus, we reinforce not so much a specific action as the development of a new one in general.
Medals can be made by hand from improvised materials (for example, it is very pleasant for children when something was done specially for them), or generators can be used. For example, there is an achievement generator in the style of World of Warcraft :
Superbetter allows you to award unique achievements to friends - if you know they did something heroic, you can express your admiration for them.
Sometimes we may find that no amount of motivation works. It seems that a person has enough reasons to start acting, and he himself is already ashamed that he is such a lazy person, and the activity does not start. And then it may turn out that the problem is not motivation at all!
One of the main functional systems of the brain is the unit for programming and monitoring activities. First of all, it includes the frontal cortex. If this system does not work well, it is difficult for us to make a plan of action and stick to it. We do not understand what to grasp at and are constantly distracted. For young children, this is a natural state, because their function of programming and control is just being formed, and when a schoolchild or an adult cannot build their activities, we say that they have executive dysfunction. Dysregulatory syndrome, for example, occurs in attention deficit disorder and in autism spectrum disorders. It seems to others that such a person is just an unassembled bummer; over time, the person himself also begins to seem so,and he suffers greatly from his inability to perform trivial tasks such as cleaning.
Motivation is of little help here, because activity is stalled at the planning stage. Such people can be useful planners like the same Habitika, and not because there are Pokemon, but because there are lists of what needs to be done. Lists are a reference system that they can grab onto to keep their actions organized. Actually, this should have been done by the frontal cortex, but for some reason it itself did not cope, and then external supports become necessary. If planning is severely impaired, the lists should be more detailed than for neurotypical people. For example, the task of “cleaning up the kitchen” for a person with frontal disorders can be overwhelming due to the lack of a well-defined procedure. What does it mean to clean up? If you need to wipe the surfaces, then what, what,in what order? What needs to be washed, what is not needed? For this person to start cleaning, he needs to get an algorithm. It is desirable in writing and in a column.
In addition to the fact that it is convenient for us to structure our activities in lists, we feel a greater degree of responsibility if we promised another person to do something, and did not make the same decision quietly within ourselves. Accordingly, we can get a synergistic effect by using the planner as a homework notebook in cooperation, for example, with a psychologist. The degenerate token motivation of Superbetter works mediocre by itself, but if the approval of the person from whom we received the task acts as the main motivating element, then the tokens become a pleasant bonus, not so much driving as supporting our activity.
One way or another, gamification doesn't solve all problems. In some cases, it can make our life easier, but it can also create new problems, so it is worth asking the question of what exactly we do with the motivation system through play - and whether we are happy with what will come of it.