In A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Raph Koster suggests different ways that boredom could strike in a game.
- Players might work out how the game works in five minutes and dismiss the game as “too easy” (i.e. any trivial work that isn’t stimulating but you have to do it)
- Players might discover that there’s a ton of depth in the game but all these permutations are below their level of interest (i.e. way too many options that you don’t want to wade through)
- Players might fail to see any pattern at all, and so the game is deemed as “too hard” (i.e. being assigned a task that you don’t have the faintest idea about how to start)
- If variants in the game are released too slowly, the game could be dismissed as trivial prematurely.
- If variants in the game are released too quickly, the player could lose control and think “this game got too hard too quickly”.
- They master everything in the pattern, effectively exhausting the fun, beating the game.
So if you think about this from a real life task perspective, if the task is too easy, you get bored. If the task is too hard or if there are just way too many options, you get overwhelmed and don’t know where to start (All of which probably leads to procrastination). However, once your porridge is just right, you’re able to enter a state of flow where you remain engaged and you continue to work not because you have to but because you want to. In Reality Is Broken, Jane McGonigal states that there are games that continue to challenge you at the brink of your ability, and it’s because of this that makes you want to come back for more.
So an example of this is the game Tetris. Throughout the game, you are constantly challenged because the blocks keep dropping faster and faster as you progress through the game. When the game finally ends, you’ve reached the brink of your ability. There is no “winning at Tetris”, at some point in time the blocks are going to reach the top of the stack and the game will be over. What gives it that addictive nature is the incentive to come back and try and play a little bit better than your previous attempt.
So part of the challenge that we’ll face in trying to provide gamification to education or to the workplace is that in order to get the best outcome, we need the ability to provide challenges that are just challenging enough, that people will see as solvable and achievable by them, but provide enough of a challenge that the task is not trivial.
