[Editor's Note: The  following post by Tom Ewing was originally published by and is syndicated with permission by our sister site, GameAccess.]

I have a dirty gaming secret: I’m rubbish at lots of them. Anything that involves reflexes, timing, pixel-perfect judgement or any kind of co-ordination will floor me. I am condemned by fate to be an eternal noob.

That’s not to say I don’t like games, of course. What I don’t like are leaderboards, points, hard-to-unlock levels, and badges. Just looking at those gives me the same kind of sinking feeling I had when I was a 16 year Morrissey fan thinking about going to a disco – they represent a world of achievement and fun I can only press my nose against.

That list of things I don’t like may look familiar to you – they’re also the mechanics most commonly cited when people talk about “gamification”. One of the big reasons people get excited about gamification is its possibility for engagement – introduce game mechanics and respondents (or customers) become more motivated.

Unless they’re like me, and feel less motivated.

Am I just a freak, though? (“Yes!” cries the inner Morrissey fan.) There have been plenty of studies showing the link between game mechanics and user engagement and activity. You shouldn’t design your game-like things exclusively for a grump like me. But you should keep my sad example in mind anyway, because you have to remember not to only design for winners.

For instance, let’s move a half-step away from games and think about salaries. Salaries in a company are a kind of leaderboard, after all! Except they’re not, because they’re generally kept secret, and I suspect most people would prefer it stayed that way.

But if leaderboards and levels are so motivating, why keep salaries a secret? Well, one reason is probably that we don’t think of work as a game, but another is that if you’re off the bottom of the high-score table, and have no real hope of getting onto it, you might well end up thinking “sod this” and going off and playing another game instead.

A table of salaries, in other words, represents a hierarchy, and hierarchies aren’t fun. When I was first working on online communities in a research context I got hung up on the idea of the 90-9-1 rule – the one which says that 1% of your users will be heavy contributors, 9% light contributors, and the majority will do nothing. My initial notion was that trying to change these percentages would improve the health of a community.

I now believe I was wrong: what matters isn’t the level of contribution, it’s the level of mobility between tiers. If the 90-9-1 rule is a hierarchy – if the tiers are more or less frozen – you’ve got a static, boring, predictable community. If the tiers are fluid, you’ve got a vibrant, unpredictable one where more people will contribute when they have something to offer.

I think gamification – or at least using visible, competitive game mechanics – works the same way. If you know you’ll never get onto the leaderboard, the leaderboard isn’t a great motivator. The same goes for the badges you’ll never get, the areas you’ll never unlock, and so on. This isn’t a radical perspective – it follows from standard “gamification” advice: that you should make sure every effort a participant makes at least has the potential for reward.

But that’s not all you have to do. You also have to ensure that the aggregated effect of all those rewards is a fluid system, not a hierarchy. You don’t want to end up with the kind of game that motivates only the winners. Because otherwise losers like me might simply walk away.

About Tom Ewing
Tom Ewing is a researcher and writer based in London. A regular speaker and award-winner at research industry conferences, he helped kickstart the research community’s interest in  game mechanics and their applications with a presentation at the inaugural Festival Of NewMR. He will be doing some very exciting things involving gaming and research which he’s about a week away from being able to talk about. His favorite games are the Civilisation and Pokemon franchises. Find out more about him here.