Lithium are a leading provider of Social CRM solutions, their Principal Scientist of Analytics Michael Wu, Ph.D, has a fantastic blog on the company’s Lithosphere community portal. Recently Michael has been posting a series of articles exploring the science and psychology behind gamification. In the first few posts we learned about Fogg’s Behavior Model (FBM) and how it relates to Game Mechanics and Game Dynamics.

What is Gamification?

At the most fundamental level, gamification is the use of game mechanics to drive game-like engagement and actions. The logic is dead simple. People love to play games. But in everyday life, we are often presented with activities we hate, whether it is boring chores or stressful works. Gamification  is the process of introducing game mechanics into these abhorred activities to make them more game-like (i.e. fun, rewarding, desirable, etc.), so that people would want to proactively take part in these tasks.

What are Game Mechanics?

So what are game mechanics? They are principles, rules, and/or mechanisms (much like mechanics in physics) that govern a behavior through a system of incentives, feedback, and rewards with reasonably predictable outcome. Some of them are so predictable that they can almost be seen as a kind of behavioral or psychological reflex, much like the patellar reflex of your knee when tapped by a physician. There are many game mechanics, and new ones are being discovered and constructed by game designers every day. Gamification.org has compiled a list of well know game mechanics (some of these are actually gaming dynamics, see below), but there are myriad, because humans can be motivated in practically infinite numbers of ways.

Game mechanics are just the basic building blocks. They can be strung together and combined in interesting ways to drive a very complex sequence of actions suitable for different contexts or desired results. The outcome of this? You can pretty much gamify anything.

For example, gamification of education can make children want to go to school and learn. Gamification of work can make people excited about work and boost productivity. The Lithium founders, being pro gamers themselves, have discovered ways to gamify community participation so that members of Lithium-powered communities are much more engaged and motivated to participate.

What are Gaming Dynamics?

The basics sound great right, and it appears we are ready to change the world now! As always it’s not that simple, because game mechanics are not enough. Why? Well of course, people are different and they are motivated by different thing in many different ways. Game mechanics that work well for one type of players may work poorly for other types. Moreover, people get bored with routines after a while, so this is where gaming dynamics comes in.

Gaming dynamics are temporal evolution and patterns of both the game and the players that make the game (or any gamified activity) more enjoyable. Early game researcher, Richard A Bartle, has identified at least four type of gaming personality: Achiever, Explorer, Socializer, and Killer, and different gaming dynamics are required for different types of gamers. For example, killers require a gaming dynamics that are much faster than those for socializers. An engaging game will tend to get progressively harder to challenge the achievers inside everyone of us, so we don’t get bored. The appointment dynamic, used in Farmville, can coordinate different players that are rewarded by different game mechanics to collaborate together. The progressive-unlock dynamic, used in Foursquare, adds serendipitous surprise to the more routine points and achievements game mechanics.

if you want to take a crash course in the science behind gamification I highly recommend following Michael’s blog here