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This was my response as well. I've been researching all of this stuff for a while now for my PhD thesis. I'm a CS guy, not a Psych guy. I'm largely interested i

This was my response as well. I've been researching all of this stuff for a while now for my PhD thesis. I'm a CS guy, not a Psych guy. I'm largely interested in what works, not why. I've largely steered towards behavioral economics because there's clear experimental evidence that's easily understood. Social games use BE effectively and often (although it is not clear to me how many developers really understand what they're doing, and how many are just copying Zynga). Skinner is not entirely rejected by everyone (Ariely uses variable schedules as to describe email addiction in Predictably Irrational), and it seems to make sense when you're discussing reduced problems like slot machines or email. However, it feels too reductionist for all problems. I'm largely working more with Daniel Pink's Autonomy/Mastery/Purpose framework, which seems to do a lot better at describing why people are encouraged to perform more complex tasks over and over, particularly games. Games tweak AMP very directly, and they fail quickly when one isn't in alignment. Autonomy is the freedom to make decisions, mastery is the space to get better at something and continue learning, purpose is discovering that what you're doing matters to you. What people are seeking is usually feedback. Feedback about themselves, feedback from others. Feedback is usually the only reward you get, but feedback is what is required for AMP to work; you need to know what choices you are actually making (autonomy), you need to know how well you're doing (mastery), whether what you're doing is affecting anything that matters (purpose). Feedback is what drives people that care about karma on Hacker News or Reddit. HN is a decent example of this if you're karma-oriented: you can write what you want (autonomy), but you can't do much to encourage people to agree or upvote (mastery), and if no-one upvotes you, you lose your purpose. Instead, if you focus on a goal like "writing makes me better at understanding my own ideas", you really can get a real AMP thing going. How many blogs have died because the author thought no-one was reading? I think designing for AMP is the real desire engine; a self-perpetuating intrinsic motivation built on feedback.

benkant 15y ago
Interesting. Which department/group are you doing this in? It doesn't seem like the type of PhD you'd usually do in CS.
- Lewisham 15y ago
  I'm part of the Center for Games and Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz, which is a video game research center. You're right that this research isn't particularly pure CS. When I started it was very much focused on social games and whether the lessons from them could be applied to other software. It just so happens that motivation theory is a pretty wide body of literature, so you can spend a lot of thought cycles outside of CS. You can spin it as a software engineering thing (architecting for retention), an HCI thing (how users respond to different interaction patterns) or even something outside CS altogether. Once you venture towards the user-end of the spectrum, you can put a lot of different hats on CS research. You just have to be careful that you don't end up either trying to end up spending lots of time learning another undergraduate major's worth, or worse, not knowing enough and being laughed at by a different academic group.

benkant 15y ago

Interesting. Which department/group are you doing this in? It doesn't seem like the type of PhD you'd usually do in CS.

Lewisham 15y ago
I'm part of the Center for Games and Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz, which is a video game research center. You're right that this research isn't particularly pure CS. When I started it was very much focused on social games and whether the lessons from them could be applied to other software. It just so happens that motivation theory is a pretty wide body of literature, so you can spend a lot of thought cycles outside of CS. You can spin it as a software engineering thing (architecting for retention), an HCI thing (how users respond to different interaction patterns) or even something outside CS altogether. Once you venture towards the user-end of the spectrum, you can put a lot of different hats on CS research. You just have to be careful that you don't end up either trying to end up spending lots of time learning another undergraduate major's worth, or worse, not knowing enough and being laughed at by a different academic group.