BEM Gamification: Learning cycles and Feedback Loops (part 1)

"Brederick, the master, stumbled into Rei, a hard-headed dwarf with little interest for the arcane arts. He wanted to motivate her with a brilliant speech on how magicks had changed the world and how this skill would let her be appraised by the kingdom or Uir. After three passionate hours of lecture, she was not impressed"

- The Book of BEM - The origins of the Rei, the Dark Lord of Uir (part 1).

One of the main distinctions I like to make between BEM Gamification and other frameworks is that BEM has a center on game design paradigms and not on the use technics or mechanics libraries based on drivers or behavioral goals. The other big one is that I use behavioral science approaches to reduce cognitive loads, not to steer behaviors, but to guide the player with appropriate notifications and waypoints. I have always said that behavioral approaches try to reduce the choice spectrum to decrease the possibility of emergent behaviors, but that game designers actually try to give choices to allow players to fail and to build safe autonomy. If you want to reduce failure states or emergent behaviors, BeSci might be better suited for you, but if you want a system that not only nudges behaviors but that also creates a cognitive change, you'd better start working on gamified learning cycles.

First, there was the game goal and the game state

"Lokthar arrived to the hall of meetings. The air of war was tense and the generals were waiting for him. Queen Ryna bowed and showed him the table with the gigantic map and all the pieces: 'if we allow the night riders to enter the northern border, we are doomed. We are scattered and famished, you are our last hope'. "

- The Book of BEM - A historic account of the fall of Darma.

Imagine you stumble into a board game store, that has a lot of tables and people are playing all sort of games. You enter and start browsing them, looking at the boxes and tables and you notice some dark titles: Arkham Horror, Mansions of Madness, Dice Forge, Roads and Boats, Food Chain Magnate, The Cavern, Twilight Imperium, Everdell, Imaginarium and so on. Many of the players have actually joined some tables together because of the sheer magnitude of space needed to put the big boards and the incredible amount of pieces, and you notice that you don't understand what the hell is happening anywhere.

Games are not "intuitive" designs at all! Regular UX/UI parameters don't apply. You see there is a uniformity of conventions, but still, can't even start understanding what each icon on the boards means, and you don't even bother to try to imagine what a blue wooden cube represents on different games. Games are about artificial rules and defamiliarization: a game designer twists regular conventions and creates systems that are not there to make things easier for people, but the whole opposite. You see in Imaginarium there is a "market", but it really works as a conveyor belt and you pay with something called carbonium depending on the price of the card and the position in the belt. This doesn't make sense! It goes against the rules of everyday market mechanics: you never see products changing their prices depending on how close they are to the cashier. This is just weird...

This might be the main reason why games have developed so efficient and effective learning techniques. Every game must be taught. Every game must be learned. You might think that players that have played Call of Duty can then play Borderlands and Destiny because all of them are shooters, and yes, some mechanics are the same, you shoot and jump with the same buttons, but the meta games differ a lot, from role playing, to crafting, to mission selection, to the AI of enemies. Now, board games designers have been slow (me included, but getting better) on developing proper learning tools for their games: in some of them you have to give an hour long explanation before you can even start with the first round of the game! But video game design has a whole topic on how to create great tutorials, because you just can't have human teachers teaching the game.

You might notice most of this games' boards are a mixture of illustrations, maps and art, and infographics, icons and semiotic elements over all. Also, that illustrations are built to help organize the semiotic elements and are not there just for fun. There is a lot of work there, but you just can't make any sense of what is really happening there. So you decide to stop on a table where they are playing a game called Takyon, by colombian game designer Javier Velásquez (self-promotion alert!) and the players stop playing to greet you. The game has paused and you are happy to ask questions, because you are making a research on Gamification and this is just so different to what you have seen in digital apps.

The first thing you'll notice is that the players (usually one that has the better skills on teaching these games) starts by telling you the goal of the game, but not in the way you think.

Narrative Goals

"In the dark corners of the Stench, the swamp Lord put his plan in motion. Others had tried to get the gem of the necromancer, but death and despair was all they could find beyond the gates of Orgk. But his people new despair and death anyway from the horrid swamps, so they would not back off"

- The Book of BEM - The extinction of the swamp clans of the south.

The first thing to notice is that players start by giving you a narrative background: "You see, the world entered an environmental crisis and had to leave Earth for a planet called Nova Terra. There, they started researching about Takyons and came with a way to create time machines! So now they had to decide, should we change the fate of Earth and save it? They built a big AI that determined that Earth could be saved if the manage to accomplish 12 history-changing missions, by sending technologies from one era to another, but that this was risky, as each change would create a paradox that could destroy the world. So, now, we are time agents working on time-locked time machines, trying to save the Earth".

This is a big part of the learning cycle. Much has been said about engagement, but remember, one of the main drives is Epic Identity, which relate to building purpose. If you have to learn a complex system, you need to be motivated, but trying to give arguments on the skills you will develop by playing the game is just not that motivating, as it happens in traditional courses. Games create a Lore, a background of information that creates conflict, as conflict builds purpose. If you like time machines and saving the world from an environmental crisis, this might capture your interest, if not, you can jump to the Arkham Horror table and learn a game based on Lovecraft's work. Games try to make this background as interesting as possible, as imagination is a strong driver of purpose. We can relate with fictional missions sometimes even more than with actual real life ones! Now the game is a serious business for you. You start craving to know how it works, even though you know the learning process will be complex.

But there is a big part remaining: who are you on this whole panorama? Ok, so we know we are time agents, but why, what is our drive? So, the explanation continues: "Each player represents a future corporation trying to win influence by making the most history-changing missions to secure their name on the annals of history. Your mission is to be able to complete more missions than everyone else". It's not just about building competition, which is just another way to create conflict, it is about understanding your role in the game. You want to know who you are and your drives, as this helps to make them your own. You don't like big corporations changing history? Well, this is just a game, so real life ethos can be suspended in the "lusory agreement". There are holes to let you build some characteristics into your role: I might be a good or evil corporation, no one is telling me how I should play. This will become important later on.

The Main Goal and End Game Triggers

"The battle was intense. The party could see the cup of eternity in the altar, a long life awaited for them. But the wyvern was powerful, with a breath hot as the sun. Naimi avoided the claws and tail searching for a way to hit the heart and, finally, after a masterful roll, she saw an opportunity to stab. The shriek was heard in all the Realms. Naimi walked to the cup and drank its magic waters: eternal life. Then she looked back to find all her close friends dead. The fight ended, but she lost..."

- The Book of BEM - The myth behind the 300 year old crazy witch-warrior of Mur.

Now, the players change from narrative mode to mechanical mode. The first thing is you need something more concrete, as "saving the world from a environmental crisis with time machines" is just to wide and ambiguous: where should I start? Every game has some main objectives, things you need to accomplish to get to the victory state: "To accomplish this goal you will try to get influence points, which are being tracked with this token around the board. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins". Points can have different meanings, which will be important when we start reading the game state, but let's not just get ahead of ourselves. In this case, these are VPs, or victory points, a kind of competition-based point system that creates measurable winners and losers. Most board games have some kind of VPs (not all of them, i.e. chess) to quantify winners and losers, as most sport do, which requires a position table, a track to follow progress and the odds of winning the game.

Main goals can be points, but they can be other kinds of game states, like being able to achieve certain positions, like Mario reaching the pole at the end of the level, or being "the last man standing" at the end of the game like Monopoly or Fortnite. But I prefer to go in this example with points so I can better separate the concept of the winning condition and the end game triggers. In chess or Fortnite, winning IS the end game trigger, so this might be confusing, but in many games the playthrough ends before someone wins. So, the friendly board gamer continues with: "Whenever we have collectively reached 12 missions, which can be tracked with this marker, the game ends and we do some game end scoring, depending on the missions we achieved". This can happen in video games as well, like Mario Party, where after the game ends you have some random conditions that award bonus points for some players, like which player moved further, or who won more mini-games. Some gamification projects neglect having endgame triggers, as they expect the game to go on forever, but this can become unmanageable on the long run. This can be solved by creating bigger cycles of play, like seasons or tournaments, but this will be discussed on the next chapter.

Now, main objectives are usually tied to winning states, but main goals can have other ways of presenting themselves. Main goals usually create a sense of progression in the game by creating a "progression loop". As I have said before [in previous chapters], games are all about loops, in this case think of the levels in Mario. The main goal in a particular level can be: reach the pole or press the bridge level to defeat a boss in a castle level. The main purpose of main goals is to create advancement triggers, events that allow the game to move along. You can play the same level for eternity, but if you want to make the game move forward, you need to achieve this main goals. The best reward for a main goal is to move the game forward.

Gamification designs usually suffer from creating main goals around "spending currencies", like in loyalty programs, but this does not move the game forward, it actually removes progression in a sense. There is nothing new to achieve, just keep farming and spending. If your main goal in the workplace is to get a salary, you will feel stagnant really quick, and that is why many people accept promotions even if they liked their current obligations better. Our brain asks for progression loops, for some people this means getting to a certain level of money in their bank account, for others, to be able to open another franchise of their business, for others, to get to a higher level client or start selling abroad. Gamification designers artificially design these goals for you, and, if done properly, you will feel compel to achieve those main goals to feel Mastery & Progression.

Failing states and avoidance goals

"The archers of the Dark Forest were famous for their venom. A single grace and a soldier would fall. Enormous shields were manufactured and hard plates covered the Prince's army. The army advanced, killing every archer in the way, until they found the archers' Shar'ig. One blow and the war would be over. The Shar'ig jumped as if boosted by hidden wings and cut the prince's throat with a regular dagger. The war was over."

- The Book of BEM - Numurs' annals: the only war ever lost

In competitive games, usually not getting to the podium or being the winner means you are a loser. This is the easiest way of creating failing states, but not necessarily the best, specially if you have too many players. This depends on how you manage failing states, which is a big part of the learning cycle design, but this will be better explained when we understand the concept of feedback loops. In cooperative games, for example, this kind of states are not achievable, as there is no podium, just win-lose conditions. So the rules continue: "Beware! This is a semi-competitive game, which means one of us can win, but we might all lose! Each time we complete a mission, a paradox will appear on the board and will lock travelling to some continents. We can actually clean paradoxes using the Paradox Agency and paying Takyons, these green crystals that are really important in the game. But, if any continent gets two paradoxes it becomes permanently locked for the rest of the game. If at any point three continents are timed-locked, we all lose the game, so if you are winning, you should be careful".

Failing states create avoidance goals, which are key for creating stakes in the game design. These avoidance goals can be severely punishing, which might scare or frustrate some players, like playing the Souls Saga (Dark Souls), but usually a game designer creates failing states that trigger punishing conditions you can recover from by some means. For example, if lose a life in Mario, then go fetch a green mushroom, or get a health potion or health kit in any game with health points. Again, this requires understanding feedback loops, but for now we can be happy by understanding that gamification designers should use similar procedures to create meaningful learning cycles, as goals create a measurable way of identifying progress, which creates engagement.

Secondary goals and strategic paths

"You have three choices son: you can marry Nathelie even if you don't love her and bond the Kingdoms, you can escape to the Woods of Alier and leave me to die, but regroup to fight another day, or you can fight an impossible war and die a Hero of the people, and save us all."

- The Book of BEM - The death of King Loshfim and the revenge of Prince Fingel

Now, you decide to watch the players' boards and notice that some players have a lot of incomplete missions and others only one. Also that a player has a lot of technologies of one kind, while others have multiple technology types and you wonder why everyone's game is so different. Here comes one of the main engagement systems used in game design: a game design paradigm that is still not so used in gamification and that really creates a connection with the Core Drivers: optional missions and strategic paths!

You will notice here that the friendly player, feeling satisfied with this introduction, goes on by saying: "Now, there are different ways of getting these influence points: you can get them from technologies (the round tokens with tech icons), or from completing missions in three levels of difficulty. For example, you can try finishing multiple missions in level one difficulty or just a few in higher difficulties, which is achieved by delivering more tech to one continent in one moment in time". Okay, you might be getting lost here, you don't have the game as a reference point and can't see the mission cards, but here is the jist of it: no game has a dominant path to achieve a goal, or at least it is usually hidden behind a black box. Games create optimization behaviors, which can be nocive for enjoyment, like with farming mechanics, as we saw in previous chapters, so game designers try to create scenarios of choice where multiple paths seem equally rewarding in the end. These secondary paths are optional, but can give you a strategic boosts, so you start choosing them in a more voluntary way, which creates game styles and variance in the game.

In board games you actually incentivize different paths by locking some for certain players depending on some rules. For example, let's see how you make actions in Takyon: "To select an action you move your time machine to any of the action spaces. You always have to move your time machine. If you want to move to an warp action space occupied by another player, you must pay that player one Takyon". Not being able to repeat game actions or having to pay other players to perform an action creates conflict in the decision making process, as you can't farm the same action twice and need to start thinking on "sequential moves": you need to create a strategy, a model of thinking about the future.

But there are other ways to understand secondary goals. For example, every mission that delivers a tech to different continents award you extra points at the end of the game, but future technologies award points depending on how many you manage to not spend. You are faced with the choice to try to balance all those goals or specialize in one of them. In video games you have secondary quests and missions that award experience points and goodies, as well as secondary narrative arcs. You can also find optional coins or prizes not needed to complete the game, and curiously enough, players lose more lives getting the optional stuff than completing the main one.

And all this secondary goals are created based on different play styles, which is tied with motivational theories. And here we have to stop and see how secondary goals are designed based on the 7 drivers.

Goals of Mastery

"Bringing the message to Lady Dwin Lei was simple but long. Xei had a long trip ahead, 7 days of the most secure road, an easy goal with great pay. By the third day she found a path through the marshes that could shorten the trip a couple of days. She had the skill from her time as a ranger and was simply bored. No one ever heard from her again"

- The Book of BEM - The lost love letter that could have united the Feuds

Mastery is achieved by self-reliance and potential growth. High performance players are constantly seeking new challenges, like the "Achievers" in Bartle's player types. For this players you can create different strategies, for example:

• Escalated difficulties for the same tasks: have you seen those three-star feedback systems at the end of game levels? Getting the first star is usually the main goal, the one to achieve if you want to unlock the next level (progression loop), but the second and third are there to give you secondary goals of improved performance. In gamification this means being able to create escalated goals for you users, where they can decide to just move the game along, or do the hard task. As this is optional, you should not measure completing this hard tasks as a requirement, they must be voluntary.
• Optional bosses: Boss fighting or boss levels create natural main goals in your system, and create clear progression loops. But you will find many players enjoy more searching for optional hard bosses or hard levels. Have you played the secret levels in Donkey Kong Country? Have you fought in the Pantheon or the Colosseum of Fools, or passed the Path of Pain in Hollow Knight? Have you fought all the Valkyries in God of War IV? Have you fight the Ultima Weapons in Final Fantasy? Have you played all of Mario's optional levels? This are, again, optional tasks, that only those that are more Mastery oriented enjoy. This might nudge some players to give an extra mile of work, but only if they feel it's voluntary.
• Mentoring mechanics: in games with Guilds, like World of Warcraft, some emergent behaviors appear when some players get to a level were they are more driven to improve their guild members' skills, than to improve their own. Guild masters start to find ways of mentoring other players to have a more powerful community, so they can be able to make better cooperative missions. This leads to Masters teaching young padawans in the art of better game play. There is usually no mission that states you need to do this, but there is usually a systemic incentive to learn how to accomplish this.

Continued in this link for the second part!

If you want me to help you with a gamification project, don't hesitate to PM me or send me an email to [email protected]. My team and myself would be more than happy to help you!