I approach the end of my senior year at Stanford — a year during which I enrolled in the bulk of my Human-Computer Interaction courses — having developed an inventory of design concepts, techniques, and guidelines. This past fall, my HCI journey began with an introductory course focused on the design of user interfaces, addressing functionality, visuals, and accessibility from a user-centered perspective. In the spring, I zoomed in on game design.
Video games are just one type of interactive program. There are other types of interactive programs, such as the more general category of “apps” that are not necessarily games. An app is a computer program designed to provide its user(s) with some sort of a tool, service, or experience; it is a system that can be in one of many internal states, and it conveys information about that state to the user through a sensory medium. Almost always, the user has some degree of control over this system, and they use the UI to instruct the program on what they want it to do.
In my introductory design class, we developed a design vocabulary to help us understand, diagnose, and appreciate the user interfaces we were building and creating. That same vocabulary can help us understand UI within games. The same heuristic evaluation done on a social app’s home page can be applied to the inventory pane of an MMORPG; the principles of visual design used to organize information on a webpage also inform the design of an in-game shop.
If video games are a subset of user interfaces, then, of course, we can take the vocabulary we share about apps and use it when talking about games. But can we use the words invented to talk about games and use them to talk about apps? At least in my HCI coursework, this has been an underexplored question. I’m going to give it a go.
If you’re familiar with it, the term “gamification” probably popped into your head at some point during the last paragraph. For those who don’t know, gamification roughly refers to designers taking elements from games and adding them to other kinds of things to gamify them. For example, a habit-tracking app might include trophies, quests, or an XP bar to encourage users to build habits and reward them for consistency. Gamification is a way for developers to inject entertainment and rewards into an otherwise unmotivating or dull user experience. Its application can turn controversial when people start to question the motive behind its implementation.
Regardless of your stance on gamification as it exists today, I think it underutilizes the potential of game design in non-gaming settings. Simply pasting your favorite game mechanic into a personal finance app doesn’t immediately make budgeting more fun or engaging. What’s more, doing so completely misses the fact that all those badges and quests are enactments of game design principles, not the principles themselves. I think this is a key misunderstanding in the world of gamification. Designers seek the benefits that games offer as products, such as engagement, user retention, and habit formation, and they think that making their app more like a game will get users to “play” it.
I’m not saying that isn’t true; in fact, it probably is to some extent. Duolingo famously gamified language learning by incorporating several common game elements, including health, leaderboards, and streaks. What I am saying is that it wasn’t specifically health, leaderboards, and streaks that made Duolingo a more engaging and retentive app. Instead of using hearts to penalize the user for making mistakes, the app could have implemented a different kind of reward system that works just as well, if not better. In fact, they did. Duolingo switched from a heart-based system to a randomized “energy” system designed to be more encouraging. The app hasn’t yet suffered a catastrophic failure.
If it were really the hearts that defined games, then anyone who wanted the effects of that mechanic would have to implement health exactly as it was implemented in games, and there would be no substitute. But it’s not the hearts; it’s how a health system affects the game and the player’s experience.
Health limits the player. When health is low, the player is incentivized to be careful to avoid running out of HP. If their health hits zero, they have to stop playing until they are revived. These mechanics create the dynamics that Duolingo really needs: the scarcity of hearts makes players slow down and think before putting in their answer, encouraging higher accuracy as a result of more thorough thinking. Suspending usage when the user’s health hits zero creates a monetization opportunity. The new “energy” system utilizes new mechanics while keeping these dynamics intact.
What designers need to realize is that, to gamify their apps, they should look to the concepts and theories behind those game mechanics they keep borrowing. Game designers are quite good at describing and improving their games using a vocabulary of design concepts, so non-game designers who want to gamify their apps ought to try learning to speak the vocabulary of games.
This year, I learned a few of those words in the game design vocabulary, words I think non-game designers might want in their toolbelt. I’ll present a couple of them to demonstrate how I think we can learn to gamify our apps the right way.
Ludonarrative Dissonance:
I described this concept in another post I wrote earlier in the quarter as follows:
Click Hocking coined [the term ludonarrative dissonance] in a blog post critiquing a disconnect between Bioshock’s presented narrative and the narrative created through the game’s mechanics. In short, there is dissonance when the game’s mechanics tell a different story from its narration.
In that post, I picked a game called The Escapists to illustrate how ludonarrative dissonance appears in games. The game positions you as an inmate trying to escape from prison by crafting items and evading the attention of the guards while you plan your escape. When you get caught misbehaving (fighting other inmates or guards, hiding contraband, digging escape tunnels, etc), the game punishes you for your actions. However, the game is designed in such a way that some antisocial actions (such as fighting) are severely underpunished relative to the punishments incurred for other behaviors (such as digging tunnels). What’s more, some of these bad behaviors can actually help you escape; for example, guards carry keys to open locked doors, and you have to knock them out if you want to get one of those keys.
In The Escapists, the prison setting gives the player the impression that it is bad to get caught misbehaving and that the consequences are undesirable. However, the mechanics of the game reveal that some misbehaving is actually beneficial to the player and will not be appropriately punished according to the player’s expectations. When there is a mismatch between the story the game tells and the story its mechanics convey, you get ludonarrative dissonance.
This concept was specifically created to discuss a phenomenon in games, and it is a well-established concept in game design, but it has applications outside of games as well.
For example, there is ludonarrative dissonance in the Uber Eats app. On their App Store page, they describe how simple it is to order food on their app: Pick your food order from any menu and add it to your cart with a few taps. That’s it! In reality, it takes a lot more than “a few taps” to complete an order. I counted around 15 taps to order a Chipotle burrito bowl, including a cross-selling page that interrupted the checkout flow. That flow didn’t even include selecting my location, which you must do on your first order. In my case, most of those taps were selections to customize my bowl.
How does the narrative Uber presents compare to the narrative told through the mechanics of the Uber Eats app?
- Uber Marketing: “Our app offers a large selection of food options yet requires minimal interactions to get what you want.”
- App Mechanics: “You can use this app to get whatever food you want, exactly how you want it, without leaving your home.”
One narrative emphasizes how little interaction is involved, while the other boasts the level of customization you can achieve. This is ludonarrative dissonance. The resolution to this dissonance comes the same way it does with games: pick one narrative and correct the other. Instead of focusing their app description on simplicity and the lack of required user input, Uber could align their marketing with the narrative the app tells; they could write something like this on their store page: Order whatever you want, exactly how you want it, all without leaving your home.
Permadeath:
In the rogue-like genre of video games, players typically fight through a procedurally generated dungeon that cannot be restarted after the player dies. In many video games, death is used as a mechanic to temporarily delay the player rather than end their playing experience. If a player dies in a first-person shooter, they can often respawn a few moments later to get back into the fight. Since death in videogames is seldom permanent, the industry uses the term “permadeath” to describe the kind of death that you cannot undo.
If we focus on permadeath primarily as a game-ending mechanic, we can map it onto a variety of non-gaming situations. The term could be used in non-gaming design to describe a permanent end. On social apps like Instagram, accounts can be automatically terminated for violating the company’s Terms of Service. While most apps have an appeal process, a user who actually violates the platform’s rules is unlikely to recover their account after a ban. Such a ban permanently disables the user’s account and removes all of their content from the platform. In many ways, a permanent ban is the permanent death of the user’s account and an abrupt ending to their user experience.
Permadeath serves both a mechanical and narrative purpose in video games, and non-game designers can learn from it to design features that cause permanent changes. Imagine if, just before an account got banned, a social media user was given a warning emphasizing everything they would lose:
Your account is at risk of being permenantly terminated due to repeated violations of our Terms of Service. If you continue to disregard the policies of our platform, your account will be permenantly suspended. You posted on this account 108 times over the past 9 years of your life. You have sent 1204 messages to 41 friends including Christine, Tyler, and Avi who you chat with regularly. If your account gets terminated, all of those conversations, posts, comments, likes, shares, and connections will be erased from the platform. Don’t throw those memories away. This is your final warning.
By understanding the role of death in video games, non-gaming designers can learn how to imbue hard stops in their apps with more weight and significance. Users can be made to understand how much time and energy they have given to the app, and how they will lose everything if their account is deleted.
There is so much that designers can learn from studying games, but I really don’t think that game mechanics are what they should study. Underneath the fun, there are rich narrative, psychological, and philosophical concepts that explain why the mechanics designers use to gamify their apps work. Borrowing game mechanics to gamify an app is not necessarily a bad idea, and it may accomplish the designer’s goals; however, not all game mechanics will work in all settings, and it seems almost by accident that a non-gaming designer could transplant a game mechanic into a traditional app and magically make the app more engaging. Just like game designers can learn traditional design to make better games, non-gaming designers can learn to make engaging games to understand how to make engaging apps. The concepts underneath those game mechanics will be much more universal, useful, and sensible in all sorts of ways.
Additional Credits:
Featured Image was generated by GPT-4o
