game Battlefield 4 brings the player to a near-impossible scenario of taking over territory in the "China Rising" DLC pack. • Unsurprisingly, it is banned in China. 7
game, Flight Control, players assume the role of an expert air traffic controller to guide airplanes safely to a runway while preventing possible collision. • Costs 0.99 USD in iTunes • 4.5 stars • HD version also available now 9
Players are conditioned that the higher the level, they get access to more features in the games. E.g. • Can wield better weapons, armours and items • More story progression • More skills and abilities • A status symbol 24 Showing progress and not telling you how many more
• People don’t like to feel lost. • Rewards verify that the user is on the right path. Examples: • Can be just a tick beside an objective. • Can be a free item • More Experience points and achievements! 34 Todo list
listed.! • Usually a main story mission and optional side quests. • Measurables are important.! • Know where you are and how much you have done. • Use achievements and rewards to validate behavior.! • Overdoing it is costly. 36 Key performance indicators Top 5 / MIT Awards and recognition
of goals you have. • It’s good to break down the goals into smaller sub-goals. • You have to put them in relevant buckets. • Each time you finish a task you progress a bucket by striking off the task. • The feeling of striking off is the Reward. • The number of items you strike off is the Measurable. 45
in a list? • Give you a sense of volume of the stuff you have to deal with • It lets you know where the “end of the tunnel” is • when you’re doing the actual work, you don’t want to be distracted by all the stuff that you might still need to do. This allows you to operate in a state of enhanced focus and control 46 Getting Things Done by David Allen
will Objective is. • Team should code consistently • We can test for code style compliance, e.g. JSHint • Count the number of failures. Reach zero JSHint warnings. • Code performs as reliably • We can write test cases • Get the percentage of test case successes. Reach 100%. • Get percentage of coverage for test cases. Reach 70%. 52 I want customers to use a glitch-free Analytics console Arbitrary value
You can write silly test cases to gain coverage. • Mitigated by code review. • You can write true === true test cases to push success percentage. • Mitigated by code review. • There are 2 fundamental assumptions:! 1. improving code quality leads to lesser to-be-reported defects,! 2. close-to-zero reported defects translate to quality product 53
to make up proxy measurables and agree that they matter. • We count defects fixed • We count test cases covered • Other real life usages of these proxies • Per-capita GDP serves as a proxy to quality of life 54
• There was a trial program in US to encourage students to read by paying them by the number of books they read (Measurable). • The students did read more books, however, they were found to read thinner books. • Why is money a bad reward here? 58
motivators like cash doesn’t work when people are given lateral-thinking tasks • In fact, when cash is introduced as a motivator, people’s performance on creative or complex tasks drops. • Therefore cash rewards are not ideal for incentivizing creative thought process. • In the case of reading, the reward is having to read. That is intrinsic. 59 Drive by Daniel Pink
BCG consultant Bob Wolf surveyed 648 open-source developers to understand why they participate in these projects. • They found “that enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver.” • A large majority of programmers, the researchers discovered, reported that they frequently reached the state of optimal challenge called “flow.”. 60 Drive by Daniel Pink
the house will always win in a well- designed game. • The illusion of winning is vital to motivating players, this may reduce significance to bigger goals. (Keep grabbing low hanging fruits.) • It’s hard to make a perfect system and people can exploit a poor system. E.g, children reading thinner books. 61
We can however make Objectives and Measurables obvious, make recommendations and enable everyone to define their own successes. Rewards come in to validate we are on the right path. 62