Gamification warns designers about the dangers of using leaderboards as a measure of success for its members. Citing its loss of meaning for players if they aren’t first place, many cap the potential of the leaderboard as a meaningful game element for all. Trials Evolution is a side-scrolling motorcycle game with an excellent physics engine. Trials Evolution’s game mechanics break this limit placed on the leaderboard’s potential.
Players can make or download other player-made tracks, so customization of levels makes the game addicting—trial 1 becomes trial 300 from it’s difficult yet intuitive controls. What make the game meaningful are its performance indicators and leaderboards. When you complete a track, you immediately see what your friends have timed relative to your time by placing your friends’ gamertags on the track alongside your finish. By displaying competition among friends as default, Trials Evolution is making use of the frog-pond effect. The term derives itself from the phenomenon observed when a frog living in a pond with small relatives is perceived as being larger than if the same frog lived with larger relatives. This phenomenon goes to show the importance of measuring yourself dependent upon your social context.
In a classic psychological article The Campus as a Frog Pond: An Application of the Theory of Relative Deprivation to Career Decisions of College Men (Davis 1966), the frog-pond effect was examined under the context of a college campus, and the results were not too counter-intuitive. Students who had higher grades were more likely to aim for elite careers. However, when students’ performance was controlled and school quality varied, a given student was less likely to select an elite career the more competitive his college academic environment was. From a social comparison theory point of view, Davis then argued that it was more important to be a “big frog in a small pond than a small frog in a big pond”. With that said, we applaud Trials Evolution for creating a deep multiplayer experience, but it is possible to investigate Davis’ claim further? How can leaderboards make everyone seem like a “big fish in a small pond?”
Delving into social comparison theory and mixing it with competition/collaboration, we uncover the pitfalls and dangers of using leaderboard as an effective form of meaningful feedback. However, interdisciplinary connections between psychology and gamification can create new insight that could help transform the leaderboard’s potential. In a groundbreaking psychology study examining the importance of certain ranks on a leaderboard and competition between neighboring spots, Ranks and Rivals: A Theory of Competition (Gonzalez 2006) sheds light on some not-so-intuitive results. “Social comparison theories typically imply a comparable degree of competition between commensurate rivals who are competing on a mutually important dimension. However, the present analysis reveals that the degree of competition between such rivals depends on their proximity to a meaningful standard.” This means the battle between #2/3 is more “meaningful” than #200/201, and players are less willing to maximize on joint gains (opting for individual, more greedy gains instead). The stigma of the leaderboard causes people to feel a psychological drive upward but also causes irrationality in behavior.
Leon Festinger paved the way for social comparison theory as a prominent American social psychologist. Three key insights of his are the following:
- Humans have a drive to evaluate his opinions and abilities by comparison with the opinions/abilities of others. Both opinions/abilities have a strong impact on behavior.
- People tend to compete with those who have abilities similar to themselves, and not with those much higher or lower than themselves.
- As a judged metric (ex. Running times) gains importance, the drive to reduce group differences will increase. However, once people realize that the metric has become incomparable, comparisons and competition between those groups will cease (ex. People being much higher or much lower than a normal standard).
Lastly, this article explains the results of a psych experiment conducted on the happiness of Olympian athletes. When the happiness levels of Olympians were judged by subjects (through examining pictures and video interviews), they consistently claimed that 3rd place finishers were happier than those who came in 2nd place. This is not so hard to believe because 2nd place finishers may feel angst or regret if they missed gold by a slight margin.
Coupling psychological theory with gamification, some proposed solutions could be designed to improve the use of a leaderboard as a meaningful standard. For example, create a leaderboard for everyone that shows the stats of the person one spot ahead of you on the ranking board. On top of that, show the two people right below you. This will increase the motivation of everyone because each rank has great meaning: to stay ahead of TWO people and to beat the NEXT person. On top of that, the leaderboard could offer suggestions to the player as tips on how to beat the score of the player ahead of you. To give higher sentimental and quantitative value to 2nd place, leaderboards should give out tangible virtual goods—similar to Mario Kart’s red shell—that can randomly boost the performance of that player and magically jump the player to first. Some may argue that cheats like this would take away from the leaderboard’s principal use to show rankings of skill. This is true, but the competition between first and second takes place in a different competitive dimension altogether. In real life, these boosts would be similar to intangible goods such as a kiss on a check or a coach’s motivational speech. However you look at it, the leaderboard has potential beyond its current use. What features would you like to see in future leaderboards?
via Gamasutra
