Leveling a virtual character and other methods of gamification in Agile
All adults are a little bit children and everyone likes games. Methods of using game mechanics are actively used in education and marketing to increase engagement, customer retention, and increase the time of interaction with the application. Also, the use of gamification methods is applicable to project management, and in this article we will discuss some approaches to combining the ideas of task scheduling management in flexible methodologies and motivation using game mechanics.
One of the most important aspects in staying motivated is recognizing the connection between effort and effective change. Unfortunately, for IT projects, the result is not always obvious, and even the visualization of metrics through the use of KPIs and other performance indicators does not contribute to the perception of personal progress, so you can pay attention to other mechanisms for creating motivation, among which one of the most important in the 2010s years, gamification was designated.
The term gamification was first introduced in 2002, as an evolutionary development of the idea of ”Homo ludens” proposed in 1938 by the Dutch historian and cultural scientist Johan Huizinga (although marketing often cites earlier examples of the use of a reward system for a purchase, for example, the American Cracker Jack’s case with adding a small reward to each pack). The most frequently referenced article when discussing gamification in non-gaming contexts is “Deterding S. [и др.]. From game design elements to gamefulness // Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference on Envisioning Future Media Environments — MindTrek ’11. 2011. It defines that “The main principle of gamification is to provide constant, measurable feedback from the user, which provides the ability to dynamically adjust user behavior and, as a result, quickly master all the functionality of the application and gradually immerse the user in more subtle moments. Another method of gamification is the creation of a legend, a story with dramatic devices that accompanies the process of using the application. This helps to create a sense of ownership among users, a contribution to a common cause, an interest in achieving any fictitious goals. In addition, gamification uses a phased change and complexity of goals and objectives as users acquire new skills and competencies, which ensures the development of operational results while maintaining user engagement.”
Among the main aspects of gamification are:
dynamics – the use of scenarios that require the user’s attention and real-time reaction, an element of competition and development, which are elements of the motivation system for performing in-game actions;
mechanics – the use of scenario elements typical for game scenarios, such as virtual awards, statuses, points, virtual goods, the presence of generally accepted rules that are understandable and accepted by all players (at the level of presentation and algorithms)
aesthetics – creating an overall gaming experience that promotes emotional involvement, the presence of a game world (or legend) that creates an environment and contributes to immersion in the atmosphere of the game process, receiving an emotional response from interaction with the game environment;
social interaction – a wide range of techniques that provide inter-user interaction, characteristic of games.
According to research by B. Reeves and J. Red (Reeves B., Leighton Read J. Total Engagement: How Games and Virtual Worlds Are Changing the Way People Work and Businesses Compete / B. Reeves, J. Leighton Read, Harvard Business Press, 2009 .) to implement a successful game design, you need to use 10 ingredients: self-representation (avatar), three-dimensional environments, story, feedback, ranking of reputation and experience levels, the presence of in-game purchases (market) and economy, competition within the rules, the presence of teams, communication and time frames.
To manage motivation in game methods, special mechanisms are used – leaderboards, elements of competitions, digital medals (badges), character development (gaining experience points), personalization and improvement of the avatar, donation and research. An employee can see how the characteristics of his virtual avatar change in the process of performing tasks, and this creates for him an additional personally significant value of the activity, the mechanism of which can be easily perceived and realized.
When designing a motivation system using gamification, one can rely on the following psychological theories:
theory of 16 basic desires (development of the theories of A. Maslow and W. James);
the theory of self-determination – considers the problems of the emergence and development of motivation;
foundations of collaborative involvement – affects the social aspect of motivation;
behaviorism – considers the impact of rewards and punishments on motivation;
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory – defines the conditions for deep meaningful immersion in productive activity.
To start using gamification in Agile, you need to solve several important questions:
what goal will the players included in agile sprints with gamification strive for (this determines the scenario and rules of the game)?
what behavior is habitual and natural for your team and how to translate it into game dynamics?
what types of players do your employees match and how can this be reflected in game mechanics? (for example, according to the classification of R. Bartle, User Types Hexad and etc.)
after the first iterations, you may have to make adjustments to the selected game mechanics, so you need to have metrics to assess the effectiveness of the team before and after the introduction of gamification;
when used correctly, gamification allows you to visualize the processes and progress of the project, and you need to be able to correctly interpret these results and use them to further plan the work of the team.
One of the options for setting goals for the introduction of games can be as follows:
make teams work together – for example, put them in one virtual environment;
promote joint activities – for this you can use game mechanics (for example, combinations of different skills or the need for several players to solve a puzzle);
organize mandatory communication – the virtual environment should provide the ability to communicate (by voice, text or through virtual objects);
motivate teams and use the “spirit of competition and mutual assistance” – game mechanics can also be used here (for example, dividing the team into parts and awarding points for successfully solving problems);
move the team from the current environment – for this the game must contain a scenario and a description of the world and characters in it;
motivation is supported by rewards and punishments – for this, a clear and logical scheme for obtaining points (or penalties) and rewards should be thought out (it is still better to strive for positive reinforcement of success than to avoid punishment).
A great example of gamification was presented in a talk Jane McGonical at the TED conference.
The simplest use of game mechanics in Agile is to jointly average task evaluation and scoring based on task story points or the number of completed User stories. Also, metrics can be the number of lines of code or an increase in test script coverage. Assigning experience points and issuing rewards (“achievements”) are the most typical solutions when implementing gamification, but also in Agile you can use reward and penalty game mechanics when tracking the movement of tasks in a kanban board, which can affect accountability indicators (when completing tasks in term), speed (when solving a problem faster or slower than the score in story points), intelligence (when solving complex problems), etc. To simplify use in Agile, it is desirable to provide integration with task management systems (for this, an API is usually provided by Jira, Trello, Github / Gitlab, etc.) and the ability to integrate with social networks to publish achievements (unless they are NDA).
In addition, social mechanisms (encouragement and mutual assistance) can be used to maintain motivation and progress in solving problems. It also allows taking into account the various psychological characteristics of team members, which can be motivated by both social approval and personal motives, interest in development through solving complex problems, and the desire to do tasks together and share experience with colleagues can become a motivating factor. Also, when used correctly, game dynamics can help in planning sprints and distributing tasks, not only in terms of the specialist’s competencies, but also his psychological characteristics of interaction with the team.
To implement gamification, it can be used as a simple integration with existing solutions (for example, for Trello, you can use power-up Gamify Work with Yera Sync), or create your own implementation using one of the frameworks (for example, OASIS). And of course, you can always make an offline implementation in the format of a board game (or, for example, Lego) to maintain tactile contact and visibility of progress.
I invite everyone to comment on your experience of using gamification in project management, to argue about the effectiveness of using game mechanics in Agile (and other areas such as education, health, tourism, etc.). And in the second part of the article, @ArianaKolin and I will look at some examples of using existing gamification support tools (such as Pointagram, Hoopla, Habitica and others) to apply game mechanics in planning and monitoring the execution of tasks in an Agile methodology and discuss how motivation can be maintained through the methods of social support and visualization, as well as what psychological characteristics of different categories of “person playing” affect the effectiveness of different mechanics and the style of teamwork.
I would also like to recommend free lesson from my colleagues at OTUS, where popular misconceptions about retrospectives will be sorted out. The teachers will also talk about a set of useful practices so that the team will happily wait for the new retro. In class you will see a very illustrative exercise to deepen understanding. And as a bonus, you can talk about more old-school project management practices that will help manage expectations.
