eLearning & Gamification: Apply the Octalysis Framework to Your Training

by AJ George 

Last week I gave a pretty in-depth explanation of Yu-kai Chou's Octalysis Framework that I thought might be useful if you'd like to incorporate gamification into your eLearning courses. So far I have mostly covered what the Octalysis is and how it is set up. Now I'd like to get into how you can apply this to your own course.

First, a refresher on what the Octalysis looks like: 

 

If you'd like more information on how the framework is set up, check out last week's Octalysis Framework article (including an explanation of Right Brain vs Left Brain and Black Hat vs White Hat drives).

Yu-kai provided a few examples of the Octalysis in action so I'll start by using a couple of those. Here is his Farmville analysis:

 

Notice visually that the "web" is larger for areas with more appeals to each drive. According to Yu-kai, Farmville excels at appealing to the Ownership, Scarcity, and Social Pressure drives. It is less appealing to the Meaning and Unpredictability drives. Yu-kai's belief is that a successful game does not need to thrive in all categories, as long as some of the areas are thoroughly fleshed out.

Here's another example. This is Yu-kai's analysis of Facebook:

 

Facebook is a near mirror image of Farmville. This means that while Farmville is based more on Left Brain drives (ownership, logic, calculations); Facebook is more Right Brained (creativity, social expression, socialization).

And what about those numbers on the Octalysis (Farmville gets a score of 414 while Facebook gets a 448)? Yu-kai admits the numbers are subjective, but here's how you can roughly calculate the score:

1. Give each of the eight sides a score from 0 to 10.
2. Square the values on each side.
3. Add them all together.

For example, using Yu-kai's Farmville example above, I guesstimated about what he would rate each side given the visual size of the "web" and then squared that number.

Meaning: 1^2= 1

Empowerment: 5^2=25

Social Pressure: 9^2=81

Unpredictability: 1^2=1

Avoidance: 9^2=81

Scarcity: 10^2=100

Ownership: 10^2=100

Accomplishment: 5^2=25

I then added all of those values up to get an Octalysis Score of 414 out of a possible 800. Statistically this makes Farmville look like it's not doing so well (no one ever passed math with a 52%), but based upon Yu-kai's other analyses he gave as examples (Diablo 3 got a 284 and Twitter got a 267), it looks like a score of 400 or above is actually doing quite well as far as gamification is concerned.

I don't think it's a perfect system of analysis, but in an area where one does not currently exist, I think Yu-kai is really on to something here. The Octalysis imagery itself is nice to look at, but I think the lazy route of just assigning a score to the 8 different areas and calculating an Octalysis score could be just as useful in determining whether your gamification elements are lacking. I tried it myself by applying the Octalysis to Draw Something to see if I could pinpoint where the weakness was that caused the once massively popular game to peter out so quickly.

Meaning: Was there any? 0

Empowerment: For the artists out there, this was prime time to show off. The lack of chat function (which I hear they later added--but long after I stopped playing) made it hard to provide feedback on how awesome your drawing skills were. 7

Social Pressure: Playing against real people, and often those that you knew, meant an angry person on the other end if you failed to play in a timely manner. Not much (or any?) social media integration however. 7

Unpredictability: Aside from the occasional addition of new words to draw, not much. 1

Avoidance: When I stopped playing this game, you could only play up to 99 turns against a person before you started over. I think that was a real hindrance in encouraging people to play indefinitely. 2

Scarcity: Having to wait for your opponent to play before you could play again meant constant phone checking to see if the other person had played. This may have driven players to encourage their opponent to play more often/frequently. In this case, that was a good thing. 5

Ownership: The more you played, the more colors you could "buy." In a game of drawing this is a big deal, but there are only so many colors so with time, this prize would become redundant. 4

Accomplishment: Because you and your opponent were "in it together," guessing the image was dependent upon how good each of the drawings were. Unlike a real life game of Pictionary, you weren't playing against other teams. You couldn't really beat the other person, which probably became dull rather quickly to those with a more competitive nature. 3

Octalysis Score=153 And now we know why it fizzled out?

Yu-kai says he will continue to expand upon his Beginner's Guide to Gamification to include more in-depth information on scoring the eight drives. He says he is working on a 90-part series and has currently only released the first five parts, so I suspect much more information will be added over time.

Go ahead, try this out on your own gamified learning. Does the Octalysis framework emphasize strengths or weaknesses you didn't even know where there? How does your score stack up? Given that training has the additional motivations of need to know, job requirements, and the like, how much should your eLearning rely on its gamification score? I look forward to reading your comments below.

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AJ teaches a live, 3-hour class that offers tips/tricks for improving the look and feel of your PowerPoint presentations: Slide Sprucing: Remodeling Lackluster PowerPoint Slides for eLearning and Presentations.

Comments

[Yu-kai Chou]

Great post!

The reason why Drawsomething fizzled off is less on having a low Octalysis Score, but more because they didn't design for the 4 Phases of a Player's Journey http://www.yukaichou.com/gamification-examples/experience-phases-game/

Basically, they didn't design well for the Endgame.

Keep up the good stuff!!