Business has gotten complicated! Talk with any manager in any industry, private or public, in any country, and you will hear the same compliant. Running a business or government or any organization in today’s economy is complicated!
Supposedly we have lots of technology – business intelligence – to help deal with this complexity. And it does help but falls short. This blog suggests an approach to apply gaming design to a collaborative process of data analysis. In other words, the challenge is involving all stakeholders in the process of understanding data and generating solutions in a fun and engaging manner. Gamification?
Overview of Book
A new book Gamification By Design by Zichermann & Cunningham from O’Reilly distills the essentials of game design and offers several tutorials on applying these essentials.
In Chapter Two, a key to maintaining the engagement of a player within a game environment is the Flow Zone, avoiding both boredom and anxiety… just the right balance of ability with challenge, as shown in the figure. This balance needs constant reinforcement with rewards (or punishments) at certain intervals and certain amounts. The game designer has the role of mentor to understand the player’s frame of mind and to assist him with the journey along the flow zone.
In the next three chapters, game mechanisms is explained as a framework to enhance engagement, such as:
- Points: indicators for various accomplishments, such as experience, skill, reputation, and the like.
- Levels: indicator for progress or maturity through the game stages. Higher levels usually imply more rewards and resources.
- Badges: awards for accomplishing certain tasks or skills. Can replace Levels, but should be complementary to Levels.
- On-boarding: Act of bring a novice players into a game system. Note especially the player’s first minute!
- Quests: Giving the player a goal (or several goals) without specifying the specific means for accomplishing that goal.
The latter chapters offers several tutorials in game design. One tutorial uses an open-source project called Altered Beast, after the classic Sega video game. It is instructive since it describes the coding (in Ruby-on-Rails) for levels, badges, events and the like. Another tutorial uses Badgeville as a generic social loyalty platform with an impressive list of customers, like Deloitte, NBC, Discovery, and Universal Music Group.
Relevance to Data Analysis
Usually data analysis seems like a lonely wandering through a bewildering forest. Few would consider this activity as fun and engaging. Yet, most would agree that the ability to effectively analyze data focused upon business problems is an important success factor for both individuals and organization. Could we transform this lonely wandering into a collaborative and engaging activity involving more persons? In particular, could game design be applied to data analysis?
What if… Imagine a virtual world whose ‘things’ represent entities and relationships within the data. Then, data analysis is the rearrangement and highlighting of those things into meaningful ways. Assume that the rearrangement task is aided by in-depth meta analyses that guide persons is permissible (valid) analysis steps, like that of Tableau and other interactive data viz tools.
Imagine a group of persons interacting in this virtual world, discussing the interesting things and suggesting better arrangements.
Imagine several game mechanisms (like points and levels) that track the contributions that a person makes, along with ratings from others on those contributions.
From this perspective, the maturity of this data world could be measure by the paths that people create and then utilize. The maturity measure could be based on the degree of order that enhances the relationship among data items, like an entropy measure in Information Theory. In effect, a path tells a story about the data…its origin, context, and impacts. Hence, the virtual world should be consider a data studio that is in constant flux.
DISCLAIMER: The above paragraphs are hand-waving ideas with little substance. In the game of data analysis, the devil is definitely in the details. There is much work required to mature this idea about a game for data analysis. Your collaboration is appreciated. Please comment below with suggestions to improve/refine this embryonic idea.
The problem that is outlined by Richard is not as simple as he has outlined. The real crux of the issue is actually about interpretation (read ability), relevance (read motivation) and in turn the effort (vs incentivisation) that leads to hit and miss results.
I believe that ‘flow zones’ where you can obtain points, levels, badging, on boarding, quests etc are relevant but fall short because they assume that everyone has the same ability, motivation, and will respond consistently to the incentivisation. We know from our indepth experience and analysis here at Global Dawn that is simply not the case.
My main issue is that the suggested solution really falls short for me as does most gamification. What it recommends is layering techniques over the task and solving the engagement issue for some but not for all in a consistent meaningful way. It deals with users understanding and hopes the ‘fun’ will influence the motivation of the task and in turn results.
I think a more relevant and successful alternative would be to create a
system that understood the level of motivation and ability of each person at each point of interacting with the behaviours required to be performed against the data.
This would mean you could tailor the facilitation of support, messages and rewards at each point to ensure that the activities are completed, by all based on them as individuals. You dress/layer this alternative up in fun and playful ways but the core is more responsive and full proof. My vision for true engagement is a heuristic persuasive gaming engine which tailors the way people experience information and that had a direct impact of what was delivered to them via a tailored dashboard based on relevance.
Several excellent points, Andy, such as: “system that understood the level of motivation and ability of each person”.
Could you give an example of a “heuristic persuasive gaming engine” that has or could of this ability, especially as it relates to data analysis?
Great book review Dick, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s chart illustrating the balance between boredom and anxiety is a great tool to show that there is a trade off between making games simpler to use, which is what clients and new users always push, and less interesting to play in the long run, which is a requirement that is rarely voiced in the development of educational games.