Games are great at engaging people for long periods of time, getting them involved, and, if we put it bluntly, influencing people’s behaviour through their very design. Something conspicuously missing from Design with Intent v.0.9 is a satisfactory treatment of the kinds of techniques for influencing user behaviour that can be derived from games and other ‘playful’ interactions. I hope to remedy this in DwI 1.0, so here’s a preview of the eleven patterns I’ve included in the new Ludic Lens on behaviour change: patterns drawn from games or modelled on more playful forms of influencing behaviour.
These aren’t original, by any means. People such as Amy Jo Kim (see her great presentation ‘Putting the fun in functional’), Sebastian Deterding, Francisco Inchauste, Jeremy Keith, Geke Ludden, and of course Ian Bogost have done work which explores this area from lots of different angles, and it also draws on decades of research in social psychology. Russell Davies’ Playful (which I really should have gone to!) looks like it was very pertinent here too. (Note, this lens doesn’t cover Game Theory-like patterns, some of which are indeed relevant to influencing user behaviour, but which I’ve chosen to group under a new ‘Machiavellian Lens’)
My main interest here is to extract the design techniques as very simple design patterns or ‘gambits’* that can be applied in other design situations outside games themselves, where designers would like to influence user behaviour (along with the other Design with Intent techniques). So these are (at least at present) presented simply as provocations: a “What if…?” question plus an example. The intention is that the card deck version will simply have what you see here, while the online version will have much more detail, references, links and reader/user-contributed examples and comments.
Challenges & targets
What happens if you set people a challenge, or give them a target to reach through what they’re doing?
« Whoever laid out this coffee tub as a target for throwing coins knew a lot about influencing people to donate generously and enjoy it