Missions, Quests, or Tasks?
OPENFORMAT integrates a versatile decentralised system for missions, achievements, and rewards, capable of modelling complex game progression systems and adapting them for non-gaming applications.
OPENFORMAT as you may know is equipped with a decentralised mission, achievement and reward system that’s flexible enough to model most of the game progression and achievement systems we’re familiar with from the last 20 years.
Whether starting with simple achievement ladders (Duolingo) or complete multi branching pathways with levels and parallel “win goals” (Ubisoft Valhalla) - it can be daunting to know where to start when thinking about these systems outside of actual video games.
Bringing these behavioural systems into the non gaming world requires as much thought if not more (than within video games) than you might think. Let me explain…
In a (video) game you are being rewarded for progress (unlocking new spells as your Wizard makes progress) and at the same time you are being given missions (clues) as to what you are supposed to do next; which in the open world genre is essential to a players sense of purpose and fulfilment.
In an online system, say a fitness tracker application, the basic system is no different. We want to give the user a path of improvement and the more they “play the fitness game” and increase their “level” the more rewards and achievements they could unlock as they progress up the “ladder”. For now we’ll call this the Fitness Motivation Ladder.
However as an application that is more than just a “video game” there are other things that we want the user to potentially do. We’d like to communicate with them, tell their friends, monetise them, etc… let’s create some more missions…
So we can now introduce the idea of a Profile Ladder. This is a linear set of tasks/missions/quests where we reward the user for giving us data. Gone are the days where a system takes a users data without permission and then commoditises it without permission and a ridiculous impenetrable set of privacy terms.
This Profile Ladder not only gives the user the personalised experience they want, it also allows the application to gather useful data fairly by essentially “buying” it from the user. The system could even build up a specific set of data for ethical marketing (i.e the system could play video ads based on a users “owned profile” data and reward the user, more on this shortly).
Ok so we’ve now got a set of:
Fitness Motivation missions - the meat of our application and unique to the application
Profile missions - what can we fairly learn about our users
Things are starting to shape up… The next default category of missions are External Missions. The things that happen outside of the application that you’d like to have an influence over. Again like Profile Missions these can be pretty generic: join our discord, refer a friend, share on socials, etc. These External Missions are the conduit to the outside world and if paced correctly could be the difference between success and failure for an application.
As mentioned earlier as a user builds up a profile (that they own) we can introduce a variant of External Missions which are Sponsor Missions. Nobody likes adverts, at best they interrupt the content flow at worst they’re intrusive and inappropriate. So let’s reward the user for participating in advertising - if they choose to. We could have a whole ladder of missions dedicated to rewarding users based on content from sponsors. This could be a thing from watching a video to scanning a QR code on a billboard in the street.
We’ve now got four ladders of progression for a simple fitness application.
Fitness Motivation missions - the meat of our application and unique
Profile Missions - what can we fairly learn about our users
External Missions - what can we do to encourage the user to create network effects
Sponsor Missions - passively monetise a user as their choice
There are many ways to surface these ladders to a user and while we’ve not really touched on what the actual missions for each ladder are or the nature of the rewards themselves - we have created a simple framework to communicate the basics of getting our application working within the world of game mechanics.
Of course there are ethical considerations whenever we’re in the psychological sandbox of dopamines and rewards but I’ll save that for another post…
Quests, missions, tasks, whatever we call them - they are key in progression, fulfilment and meaning for the user within a modern application.