BEM Gamification: You can't give rewards, they are not yours to give!

One of the cores of the BEM (Behavioral-Experiential-Meaningful) Framework is the fact that, as designers, we are proposing goals to our users/players. If you understand motivations as "the process that initiates, guides and maintains goal-oriented behaviors", then we can have a clear picture that everything we do is about goals and incentives. When I developed the 7 driver heptagon at first I was just thinking about a model of intrinsic-based gamification, but, without realizing it, I was actually creating a model of objectives taxonomy. While many models center their discourse on "mechanics" (probably as a misnomer), I use my 7 drivers to understand objectives, genres/schemas, and feedback systems. The main idea was to avoid the use of more extrinsic "rewards" in my gamification projects, and move towards more intrinsic "rewards".

But the more I have been going down this rabbit hole, the clearer it has been to me that the layman's use of the word "rewards" is a problem in itself and leads to many bad design choices. What exactly is a rewards and how can you give one? This question bothered me as I found many "rewards" I was designing were not rewarding enough (and that's why iteration is key in the design process).

When I looked at a basic reward, I found we were really talking about a goal that the designer wished would reward someone, and that was pushing anticipation in the "player's" brain. Let's use a simple example:

"If you read 50 blog posts on gamification, you win a free gamification consultancy."

Let's brake this into parts: we have a trigger and a consequence. The trigger is a goal itself, as player's need to achieve the objective to be able to activate the trigger. But winning the gamification consultancy is a goal in itself, right? From this basic structure I came up with the idea of a system of deferred goals. This is a complex system that creates distance between the player and some goals by bread crumbing the motivation. Let's look at a more complex design:

"I want to go to the University to get my degree, I need my degree to find a job, I need a job to get money, I need money to live in comfort."

Where is the reward in this flow of deferred goals? While living in comfort can be a more universal "reward", all of the other objectives can reward this student depending on her motivational profile. For many, the sole fact of being able to go to a University can be a reason for happiness. Still, almost nobody would call any of this objectives a "reward".

We associate the word "reward" with extrinsic, short-term gains, with heavily pushed incentives where we are trying to bribe someone unto doing something they are not doing right now.

"If you finish the report on time I will invite you to a fancy dinner."

If I ask where's the reward here, most people will recognize it is the fancy dinner invitation... but is it?

If you worki with motivational models (be the self-determination theory, Octalysis, Hexad, Setentia's, BEM, FROGCHAMPS or any other), you know that different things trigger the "reward response" in different brains, which is why it is so hard to predict how someone will respond to this kind of incentives. And in this simple design you will be able to notice that:

1. If you hate fancy or snub things, you might feel uncomfortable having to go to a fancy dinner
2. If you feel awkward in a one-to-one situation with your boss, you don't want to be invited
3. If you don't like me at all, you won't want to spend more time with me

If any of these 3 conditions are met, the reward becomes a punishment, something to be avoided at all cost! Now, without pretending to, this design is pulling people from finishing the report on time!

But maybe you are the kind of people that hate delivering things late: by finishing the report on time you feel instrisically rewarded, maybe to the point that you are willing to go to the fancy dinner just because being late is not a possibility in your mind.

But we, as game and gamification designers are dealing with finding pleasurable goals! Our objective is to find ways to make our player's feel excited, to make them feel rewarded! Incentives are born from the anticipation on the player's brain of achieving something they consider meaningful, and not being disappointed when they get there. And we notice that sometimes our game mechanics have more influence on this outcome than our "rewards". And, even more, that the recipe of mechanics creates the experience, and not one mechanic in itself!

My point is, a "reward" is a trigger in your player's brain, not the goal in itself. Calling something a reward may create a level of anticipation that might help to nudge some behaviors, but in a world where everything is labelled a "reward", we have become apathetic to this kind of promises. The mobile game industry, I believe, has be pushing this even further by labelling every little thing a REWARD in their games, when most of those things are not that appealing to everyone.

A reward is not yours to give, because you can't control how your player will respond to your deferred goals. You promised that if your client redeemed 30 points, she would get the best hamburger! But then she redeems it and finds it unappealing: you just punished her for her effort! And this design principle can have even worst effects. For example:

"If you take a course on Machine Learning, we will give you a cooking book"

If you don't find cooking books interesting, it can nudge you away from taking that particular course.

So, in my BEM Framework we don't talk about "rewards" anymore, from a design standpoint. We create objectives that we hope will trigger the reward system in the player's brain. And if we do that we can find that the pleasure points in our design can be elsewhere and we can create the right emotional mindset by using the correct feedback system. The feedback elements will be our bridge towards creating the emotional response! And we have to test the design, because player's might find their engagement where we didn't expect it, or hate the thing we thought they would love.

As a final reflection, think about how PBLs became a synonym for bad gamification designs. This happened not because badges, points and leaderboard could not be rewarding, but because we thought of them as rewards on themselves, like if calling something a badge should have a super power in terms of motivation. Many lazy PBL designs created the wrong incentives and nudge people away from where the pleasure should be! As gamification designers we need to really think about the consequence of a goal or mechanic, because we can do more harm than good if we think "rewards" exist as something you can give.

Want to learn more about the BEM way and how it is a framework that tackle complex questions with care? Follow me on LinkedIn to check when I will be giving my "Introduction to BEM" free webinars!