De-Gamification - Flexibility to Play Your Way - Extra Credits

Question: Can you think of a game you've played where you didn't care for the game's challenges or puzzles that much? Maybe they were too hard or too easy, but you enjoyed being in that game's world so much that you had a great time anyway. Have you ever enjoyed keeping a ping pong rally going with a friend without keeping score? Are you a fan of Minecraft creative mode? I think there's a pattern here that we can use to make our games better. This episode is brought to you by The Great Courses Plus. Go greatcoursesplus.com/extracredits to start your 1-month free trial today. Gamification, as we have discussed before, is when designers apply extrinsic compulsion techniques often associated with games like scoring, achievements, or levels to add a layer of engagement to anything, from forming healthy living habits to encouraging success in school to helping people stay focused at the workplace. But, gamification is not today's subject. I want to talk about de-gamification. Gamification's strict measuring,

rewarding, and acknowledging can guide people to behave in specific ways, for good and ill. De-gamification relaxes or removes those measurements, rewards, and acknowledgement, so players have more freedom to play in their own way without feeling that it's inferior or wrong to do so. So, for example, let's say that we take a game and we start by stripping out all of its achievements. How does it hold up? Probably pretty well. I mean, all games should be designed to be compelling at this level. That's just the first layer of gamification, though. We can dig deeper, peel away more layers. What about removing in-game elements that inspired gamification? Features like score, multiplayer leaderboards, time limits, content unlocks. The more gamified elements we turn off, the more we can bring into focus how intrinsically rewarding we've made our game feel. When you're designing your game, you can literally switch off elements before testing the game with people. Adding game features takes hard work and precious time, but

temporarily editing code to skip specific functionality is, in most cases, pretty quick and easy to do. We made an episode years ago on intrinsic and extrinsic incentives, and the importance of designers asking themselves, "Is this mechanic or system inherently engaging?" De-gamification is a grounded way to explore that question directly. Try playing your game with no score, no timer, no ammo limit, and no damage. Is it still engaging? And by the way, I'm not saying that those elements are bad design or that they don't belong in games. Gamified mechanics like these are key components in a lot of great games. Many e-sports would lose many of their devoted players and spectators if they were stripped of scores and ladders and leaderboards. But, temporarily stripping such elements out to test how your game fares without extrinsic rewards is still a valuable exercise. And sometimes, you end up accidentally discovering a rich vein of de-gamified fun in the process. See, developers will often add temporary de-gamification options to their game during

development. Stuff like cheat commands and console debug functionality. It makes testing parts of the game way easier. And sometimes, when a designer on the team plays their game with the de-gamifying test cheats on, they discover a different kind of fun. And they might even decide that the game would benefit from including this when it ships. Sometimes, this is as simple as just leaving the cheat codes in there. In other cases, it might lead to adding alternate modes, temporary power-ups, or even rethinking and retuning the core game experience. Many of us do love the way that games challenge us, but there's also value in being able to take that challenge away. Cheat codes empower young, busy, or less skilled players to experience parts of the game that they otherwise wouldn't be able to reach. And on top of that, cheats also enable totally different styles of play, allowing us to play with the game instead of against it. What's left after de-gamification is essentially a toy to play with or a playground to play in. In a de-gamified

game, you play for your own reasons, not to prove that you can pass the designer's tests. De-gamification lets us explore the game's aesthetic experience in safety. It brings our focus on how it feels to run, jump, shoot, and climb, or even just to look and wander unobstructed. When testing a de-gamified build, are there tasks that you and the testers invent to amuse yourselves in that free-form experience? Maybe you try to take out a bunch of enemies with a single shot, or you try to get to hard-to-reach areas. Those kinds of activities can inspire the achievements that you'll add to the game later. De-gamified testing can reveal other ways to entertain a player who has mastered your game's challenges. Or think of it this way, when people walk up to your game's booth at a conference, the experience they're going to have in the next few minutes is a lot closer to a de-gamified version of the game. Even if all the intended limits and challenges are properly in place, when somebody plays such a small segment of your game, they're not going to be concerned with mastering or even understanding those challenges. They're

just looking around, seeing and hearing what it feels like to clamber up buildings, command a few units, or take just a few random turns at high speed before wandering off to see the next shiny demo. Those first few minutes are so essential to hooking the player and getting them to like the game. Heck, sometimes it can turn out to be more fun, at least for some players, to leave a mode or even the entire game de-gamified. Consider Minecraft's creative mode. It's still Minecraft, just without any dangers, searching, or limitations. It's pretty rare for a game to ship with a fully de-gamified mode, but clearly it can resonate with people. De-gamification is also an especially good fit for open-world sandbox games because exploration, creation, and just messing around are part of that genre's appeal. No Man's Sky's 1.1 update added a creative mode, and sure it's not everybody's style, but it's ideal for those players who so wanted to explore the universe without that frustrating distraction of grinding for survival.

Creative mode isn't simply an easier difficulty mode, and it's not just a cheat mode either. It's a completely different way to engage with the game. Degamification doesn't have to be a rigidly binary all or nothing choice, of course, nor does it have to be cleanly set aside in a separate mode. Sometimes degamification can be a way for the designer to retune a game's core play experience, to change the sort of enjoyment it provides, or the kind of player interests it speaks to. Later entries in the Just Cause and Saints Row franchises let you drop in powerful weapons and vehicles on demand, because it's just more fun that way. Does it make the player overpowered? Well, yeah, but while that might be a negative in challenge-focused games like Dark Souls, Just Cause and Saints Row are not primarily about overcoming challenges. They're about giving the player a huge playground to just run amok in. Now, obviously, I'm not saying that easy games are better than hard ones. I'm just saying that in certain games, giving players over-the-top conveniences or forgiving difficulty can be part of a

designer's choice to intentionally shift focus towards some types of fun instead of others. Degamification can also highlight a game's narrative or artistic aspects. Conceptually dangerous narrative worlds can be explored more fully by using forgiving game mechanics. Inside and Life is Strange both present deep worlds where, despite menacing events, mistakes aren't heavily punished. Virtually any challenge can be retried over and over again without lasting consequence, and rather than ruining the games, that removal of challenge frees the player to explore the narrative's many possibilities and soak in its aesthetic qualities. So, whether you use degamification to refine your game's first impression, or to ship a whole secondary mode with traditional challenge limits removed, or just to explore the additional fun that cheat codes and overpowered player characters might offer. It's an easy-to-use design tool, and one that is well worth trying out. If you can think of any games that were more fun due to de-gamification, or even just fond gaming memories you've

had when you got more out of a game by using cheats, let us know in the comments. I'd love to hear them. See you next week. This episode was brought to you by The Great Courses Plus, an on-demand video learning service offering a wide variety of top-notch video courses. If you like this episode on gamification, maybe check out Games People Play, a course on the applications of game theory to life and business and more. Click the link down in the description, or go to the greatcoursesplus.com/extracredits to start your 1-month free trial today.