Gamification 101: The Psychology of Motivation

Hello Ned,

Thank you for the affirmative comment.

Yeah, motivation is a very complex. But it is also a very basic and primal instinct. It works in business, and consumer (end users) alike. Moreover, some of these principles are so robust that they work even in other animals. There are part of it that is purely biological. That is why gamification (if done right) works so well.

I think the cultural aspect of motivation is an implementation detail rather than a principle. We had to do this with our international clients. For exmple, we have the kudos function, that enables people to tell the community that they like a particular post. Communities in different countries would like to use different text (e.g. Like, Super, etc) and different icons. As icon or text that is rewarding to one culture may be completely meaningless to another. I consider these just implementation differences. The underlying principle in these features are still the same.

That being said, maybe there are some fundamental principle of how human psychology operates that has a strong cultural dependency, and I'm just unware of them.

Thank you again for the comment. See you next time.