Beyond Points — Learning from Game Development from a Service Design Perspective

To create positive experiences for the customer, it seems natural to look at an industry that puts all of its concentrated efforts in providing fun, emotional and engaging experiences: Games.

The Game Industry as a creative powerhouse

Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo once said of creativity: “… prerequisite is an environment — social but also spatial — in which people know they can experiment, take risks, and explore the full range of their faculties” (Brown, 2009, p.32). And Casey O’Donnell finds this embodied in game development when he says - it is “… a creative collaborative process involving numerous disciplines rooted in a particular culture producing creative, artistic and culturally important works. … This is the video game industry.”

The openness and experimental approach towards technology and experiences that characterize the game industry allows to explore boundaries much easier than other industries. Users actually strive for new experiences and show flexibility in what is an acceptable product both in terms of quality, interaction and taste.

Finding Motivation in Games

If you happen to have a Dropbox account, chance is that you started by following a short tutorial on how to use the service and software. This tutorial led you to install its software client on your device(s) and more, rewarding you with extra permanent storage along the way as a sort of trophy for your work. These Gamification elements here are about creating engagement and motivation, increasing the chance that the user completes the tutorial and is able to use your service correctly afterwards. An early nudge to prevent frustration later on.

LinkedIn shows (or at least used to show) every user a “Profile Ranking” leaderboard which puts the user in direct competition to all his contacts, if they want it or not. It is based on metrics which look at profile views and overall number of contacts, encouraging its members to network and post more actively through the platform if they want to climb the ranks of this leaderboard.

“Many of these systems — if not the vast majority of them – start with the same three elements: points, badges, and leaderboards. […] [they] are so common within gamification that they are often described as though they are gamification.” (Hunter & Werbach, 2012, pos.1008)

By now, various groups have attempted to create Gamification Frameworks that make it simple for uninitiated people to start thinking about services and businesses in a way that lets them apply these game elements and mechanics. This includes the designer and researchers Sol Klapztein and Carla Cipolla (2016) who published their work on the topic which includes a version of the customer journey in services with the addition of room for game elements.

While the method continues to spread, others call for caution. In 2011, Ian Bogost, professor, philosopher, researcher and game designer, said: “I’ve suggested the term ‘ exploitationware ’ as a more accurate name for gamification’s true purpose … to bring about results meant to last only long enough to pad their bank accounts before the next bullshit trend comes along.”

From Game Development to Service Development

The following is a writeup of additional areas in game development, outside of games themselves and how learning from them could be beneficial to Service Design. The aspects we explore are: Early consumer testing and community building, Guilds and clans, and Modding culture.

Early User Involvement and community building

The gaming community was one of the first to embrace platforms such as Kickstarter and has a long history of early customer testing. At the core of this lies necessity and belief. Small teams and passion projects — basically no budget — have made it the best option to incorporate users as testers and contributors, seeking sources of money and attention/marketing as fast as possible. In this vein we can see a lot of similarities with the developing StartUp culture, especially the Lean Startup method.

With Alpha and Beta versions, game developers allow and/or invite users to start playing the game while in development. It gives the developers a chance to have a number of players testing the game, collecting opinions and reports on the game, bugs that otherwise would later on hamper the playing experience.

The game industry has established this as a sort of preorder mechanism: it allows players to prepurchase the game, usually at a discounted price, while gaining access to the unfinished but playable game in the meantime. This method provides players a way to engage with the game and developers on a more involved level. They are part of the process.

Games such as Rust (Facepunch Studios, 2013) have started to blur the line between what the user actually pays for. This game has been sold over 3 million times while only being offered as early access version since 2013 and has never been declared finished. Embracing this development state and continuous feedback cycles as well as involved community building is something that services could profit from. Startups and Games can already be observed treating the “product launch” as a window rather than a deadline/day. And nowadays we can also observe the power of this in the exploding NFT area where Discord has become a hub of NFT community activities.

Guilds & Clans

In many cases community is the very thing a game provides. It is the element that keeps a game alive long after the initial experience it was designed for. While gaming clans/clubs have been around for much longer, the rise of online gaming has been a catalyzer for this development. By now, it has become a regular practice for many games to include special aspects to encourage this behavior. This includes communication features for groups, dedicated visuals/badges that make it possible to identify the players group as well as making certain parts of the game basically only achievable/playable if the player is with a group.

The learnings for service design, could be the following — even if tasks are mundane, having others sharing the moment and work can lead to a social dynamic that creates group motivation. Group building can be facilitated with aspects like communication channels, visual identification and specialized options/goals for groups. It should be explored if this dynamic can help services to provide a new layer of group oriented offers. Meanwhile, in Service Design, the user is usually regarded as an individual and the building of small groups is seen rather as too difficult or even something negative, keeping this area widely unexplored.

Modding culture

“Modding refers to the act of modifying hardware, software, or virtually anything else, to perform a function not originally conceived or intended by the designer, or achieve a bespoke specification.”

Counter Strike, one of the most famous games over the last two decades. originated as a player made mod before being bought by the original company and turned into an official game. And other games put modding functionality on their banners and promise that that the community will be able to modify the game extensively and therefore will have a stream of vibrant content.

When I originally wrote these notes, it was 2016, since then, a couple of services come to mind that have really started to shine with user made content. From Notion and their user made templates, to the many many functionalities that can be gotten in Figma with custom plugins. Service Designers and Businesses should start looking at these working “Modding” concepts to see how a service can be opened up with useable parts that can be rearranged by more advanced users and then redistributed for the main user base. Or which points are left open for others to finish and expand upon.

In conclusion, the mentioned examples are just touching on the topic of what this fast paced and consumer involved industry is creating at the moment. Because of the size, user motivation and fueled by the possibility of the digital space, there are certainly a number of strategies already in place that are under the radar. With the huge attention that Gaming is getting, this will intensify and probably bring more and more of these workings to a broader audience.

This article is an adaptation of an essay I wrote for my studies at Politecnico di Milano in 2016. The full essay can be found and read here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313677831_Expanding_on_Gamification_in_Service_Design_-_Additional_Value_in_looking_at_the_field_of_Game_Development