Gamified Persuasion in the Metaverse
The metaverse is commonly described as a “gamified internet.” Recent developments toward a metaverse reality highlight two things: changes in user purchasing/consumption habits and the evolution in strategies for brand engagement. As the video game industry approaches a global net worth of $400 billion, marketers who learn the ins and outs of creating engaging game experiences stand to benefit. This article explores the experiential possibilities of games, ways to enhance experiences of play, and strategies for the generalized application of play and engagement in virtual contexts.
Introduction
The metaverse is often described as a “gamified internet.” Recent developments toward a metaverse reality highlight both the changes in user purchasing/consumption habits and the evolution in strategies for brand engagement. As the video game industry approaches a global net worth of $400 billion, marketers who learn the ins and outs of creating engaging game experiences stand to benefit.
Integrating marketing initiatives in gameplay means closing the gap between game design and “gamification.” For marketers, using games as a tool for engagement began with Brett Terrill’s recognition of “gamification” as a marketing strategy . Gamification is colloquially known as the process of applying game mechanics and design to non-game, every-day consumer contexts. However, a decade of cautious attempts has produced mixed results with no clear framework for creating meaningful engagement. In fact, some marketers have been accused of using gamification to lure and exploit businesses or to check a box — “[T]he purpose of a ‘gamification strategy’ is to satisfy a company or a division’s desire to be able to claim that it has a gamification strategy”.
Bridging the gap between game design and gamification necessitates moving beyond simple feedback systems (points, levels, badges) and towards an analysis of gameplay. In the following sections, this article will explore the experiential possibilities of games, ways to enhance experiences of play, and strategies for the generalized application of play and engagement in virtual contexts. For marketers, refashioning our perceptions of games will enable us to “see what games are, what they should be, and what they might become.” (The Game Design Reader)
The Experience of Games
“The meaning of games is, in part, a function of the ideas of those who think about them.” (The Study of Games)
Integrating marketing initiatives in gameplay means closing the gap between game design and “gamification.” For game designers, a game is a system of rules and results to be encountered by a player through which meaningful play emerges. This definition underlines the participatory experiences afforded by a game — experiences of play. For marketers, the focus on the player experience undermines the colloquial understanding of games as a repeatable set of mechanics. With this pivot toward experience, “gamification” becomes the process of applying game mechanics and design to non-game consumer services “to support a user's overall value creation”. This “service-model approach,” which is similar to the game designer’s definition, makes explicit the participatory experience inherent in games through which value can be enhanced.
The engagement that marketers seek to imitate through “game-ifying” brand experiences comes from the experience of play. Through an understanding of gaming experiences, marketers can move beyond simple mechanics and join their game-designer counterparts. Consequently, the next section will focus on how games generate effective experiences of play.
Engaging Play
What makes a game engaging? The question is best answered using two perspectives: first, engagement insights from motivational psychology; second, effective methods for encoding engagement via game design. Literature in psychology identifies engagement as a behavioral aspect of motivation. Motivation and Action (2008), a handbook in the field of motivational psychology, explains that two primary characteristics of motivated behavior are “control-striving” and “goal engagement.” Control is achieved through goal-setting, and the intention to engage a particular goal depends on “situational stimuli” and personal preferences” (page 9). Personal preferences are motives: power, affiliation, and achievement; situational stimuli, on the other hand, generate incentives via positive or negative actions, outcomes, and consequences. The degree to which motives correspond with incentives determines the individual’s experience of goal-engagement: “a situation acts as an incentive for a specific individual [depending] on whether or not it corresponds with that person’s…motives” (page 8). To summarize: The experience of engagement is a product of personal motives corresponding with situational incentives.
Insights from motivational psychology serve as an effective foundation for developing in-game engagement strategies. Established in the previous section, game designers and marketers are explicitly concerned with creating engaging in-game goals. Examined through the insights of motivational psychology, a game is a kind of situation that affords incentives. Those incentives are engaging when they correspond with the motives of its players. Enter: game mechanics, the elements of the game that shape actions, outcomes, and consequences. Sailer et al. synthesize a list of game elements that commonly function as incentives, including “points, badges, leaderboards, progress bars, performance graphs, quests, meaningful stories, avatars and profile development,” and memberships. The kinds of incentives encoded in game elements are used to appeal to various motives. In other words, game mechanics are the devices that drive engagement.
The path to engagement largely happens through facilitating experiences rich in incentives and rewards. Phillips et al. concentrate on a specific kind of incentive — one of positive experiences or rewards. They distinguish six reward types and organize them into the motivations of power, affiliation, and achievement (see Appendix 1). In their subsequent work, Phillips et al. rate the engagement potential of these reward types. By far, the most engaging games utilize rewards from all three motive types.
In the reverse, engaging game incentives function as behavioral conditioning devices. Through continued engagement and investment, “extrinsically motivated behavior can become intrinsically motivated as a result of an individual internalizing the value of the behavior” (ibid., pg.2). Marketers understand that games add value onto the player over time — as the creation of brand loyalty. We established earlier that games facilitate value-creation through user participation. Similarly, by incentivizing specific gameplay behaviors, games function as a method for educating consumers toward specific purchasing habits. The key insights for marketers are that engagement facilitates both value-creation and loyalty-building.
Marketing in Metaverse Gaming
Brands that thrive in virtual contexts do so by understanding user needs and reinterpreting their product offering as a set of rich experiences and rewards. The rapid inflows of brands onto the gaming platform Roblox reinforce the demand for gamified brand experience. In-depth discussions from Chipotle’s marketing team demonstrate the effectiveness of engaging with a Roblox gameplay experience.
One of the most prominent metaverse gaming platforms is Roblox. Roblox is a massively multiplayer online arcade application, with daily traffic reaching over 60 million users worldwide. Roblox most commonly functions as a gaming platform, but Roblox CEO David Baszucki sees things differently. “Play is a subset [of Roblox]. This gets into how we work together, how we learn together, how we connect with others, how we consume.” (Roblox 2022 Investor Day, 00:15:10). Roblox’s VP of Global Brand Partnerships Christina Wootton speaks directly to the rapid inflow of brands in Roblox: “Over the past two years, we've seen over a hundred brand activations, and we're just getting started” (1:26:15). As a key pillar of their platform monetization, Roblox is working hard to guide brands into the game space. developing interactive billboards, in-game brand partnerships, and full-blown brand/game experiences. “Every brand will have a Roblox strategy in three to five years.” (1:21:09)
An example of successful gamification on the Roblox platform is Chipotle’s Burrito Builder. Burrito Builder is a robust game experience where players roleplay as restaurant workers for a variety of rewards. In an interview on Into the Metaverse (Ep. 32), Candice Beck, the Chipotle’s director of social, influencer, and web3 , discusses the intent and approach behind building their metaverse brand experience:
“We wanted to take core insights of the community and build something that they would actually want to engage with” … “Take into consideration what they’re doing there, what are the problems you’re trying to solve for them, what is going to provide value; are there any other access points?”
The answer to all of these questions, Chipotle came up with a diverse set of incentives that addresses various motive profiles. Drawing from the taxonomies described above, the following reward types are featured in Burrito Builder :
Glory reward: “There was a leaderboard and people were awarded on the leaderboard.”
Sensory feedback reward: “We served virtual food on Roblox. We actually created a menu-item that was inspired by Roblox, it was called the Roblox Burrito.”
Facility reward: “Roblox players come into the restaurant, go to the cashier, change into their apron, and hop on the line.”
Access reward: “We were the first brand to exchange that in-game currency for real-world items: burrito bucks for a real burrito (that you could order in our app). And we also [allowed] our loyalty members to exchange their rewards points for a Roblox gift card.”
The success of this experience demonstrates the effectiveness of seriously engaging with a gameplay experience. Chipotle’s marketing team began by learning the core motivations of players, and then building a game whose rewards targeted each motivation. The result of this approach was a record engagement: The average user spent 10 minutes on Burrito Builder. This example serves as a proof-of-concept for marketers, both within and beyond game contexts.
Conclusion
Considering the mechanisms for creating engaging experiences can lead to effective brand experiences in games and beyond. Individuals are most engaged through a rich collection of experiences and rewards that appeal to a variety of motivations. Brand marketing teams can enter these spaces by reinterpreting their product offerings as rewards that drive engagement.
Just as the idea of play, rewards, and positive experience extends beyond the realm of gaming, so should the insights from engaging gamification. Considering the importance of reward diversification, community engagement, and thoughtful experiences, brands can effectively market in the metaverse.
Endnotes
Barrera, Kevin Giang, and Denish Shah. "Marketing in the Metaverse: Conceptual understanding,
framework, and research agenda." Journal of Business Research 155 (2023): 113420.
Terrill, B. (2008) My Coverage of Lobby of the Social Gaming Summit available at: http://www.bretterrill.com/2008/06/my-coverage-of-lobby- of-social-gaming.html
Werbach, K., Hunter, D.: For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business., Wharton Digital Press, Philadelphia (2012)
Chitroda, H. (2022, May 12). A brief history on Gamification. KNOLSKAPE. Retrieved February 13, 2023, from https://knolskape.com/blog/brief-history-gamification/
Bogost, I. "Why Gamification is Bullshit. Walz, SP; Deterding, S.(eds), The Gameful World. Approaches, Issues, Applications." (2014): 65-80. See also: Bogost, Ian. "Exploitationware." Rhetoric/composition/play through video games: Reshaping theory and practice of writing (2013): 139-147.
Tekinbas, Katie Salen, and Eric Zimmerman, eds. The game design reader: A rules of play anthology. MIT press, 2005.
Avedon, E.M., and Brian Sutton-Smith. The Study of Games. New York: John Wiley, 1971.
Tekinbas, Katie Salen, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. MIT press, 2003.
Huotari, Kai, and Juho Hamari. "Defining gamification: a service marketing perspective." Proceeding of the 16th international academic MindTrek conference. 2012.
Literature in education studies explores games for increasing engagement; see: Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Page 4; Heckhausen, Jutta Ed, and Heinz Ed Heckhausen. Motivation and action. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Robinson and Bellotti provide a methodical taxonomy of game elements (Robinson and Bellotti, 2013).
Sailer, M., Hense, J., Mandl, H., & Klevers, M. (2013). Psychological perspectives on motivation through gamification. Interaction Design & Architecture(s), 19, 28–37. Zugriff unter http://www.mifav.uniroma2.it/inevent/events/idea2010/doc/19_2.pdf. See also: Page 30: Robinson, D., Bellotti, V.: A Preliminary Taxonomy of Gamification Elements for Varying Anticipated Commitment, Proceedings of the CHI 2013, Paris (2013)
For a literature overview of this topic, see: Poeller, Susanne, and Cody J. Phillips. "Self-Determination Theory—I Choose You! The Limitations of Viewing Motivation in HCI Research Through the Lens of a Single Theory." Extended Abstracts of the 2022 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. 2022.
Phillips, Cody, et al. "Redefining videogame reward types." Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Australian Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction. 2015.
Phillips, Cody & Johnson, Daniel & Klarkowski, Madison & White, Melanie & Hides, Leanne. (2018). The Impact of Rewards and Trait Reward Responsiveness on Player Motivation. 393-404. 10.1145/3242671.3242713.
Bernhard, Jane, and Candice Beck. “Marketing in the Metaverse with Candice Beck - Director of Social, Influencer and Web3 at Chipotle.” Into the Metaverse, SuperSocial, 17 Nov. 2022, https://www.intometamedia.com/p/s2e32-marketing-in-the-metaverse. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023.
Appendix 1: Reward Types (Phillips et al, 2015)
Rewards of Access grant the player admission to otherwise inaccessible environments, environmental objects, or game modes (including narrative cutscenes).
Rewards of Facility increase the effectiveness of the player within the game state.
Rewards of Sustenance mitigate burden, such that a negative play state (such as losing all health or running out of ammunition) is less probable.
Rewards of Glory are considered to be videogame rewards that do not impact moment to moment gameplay, and that are quantifiable in either the game or meta-game through points, achievements, badges and definitive victory conditions, such as winning the game.
Rewards of Praise communicate (verbally or textually) a form of praise or flattery via game systems to the player.
Rewards of Sensory Feedback provide the user with overt aesthetic or tactile feedback that is designed to promote positive affect in the player.