“Play. More. Games.”: A Conversation with Bret Wardle

CommLab Podcast with Bret Wardle

Sherna Varayath 0:09
Hello there and welcome back to the eLearning Champion podcast, where we explore key strategies, trends, and innovations shaping the world of digital learning. If you've been searching for the cheat code to design better learning, you're in luck. Prepare for a high score. Calling in Bret Wardle, who will share how gamification can transform your LD into an epic quest. Hi there, Bret.

Bret Wardle 0:55
Hey, how are you doing? I'm so happy to join you.

Sherna Varayath 1:00
Wow, that's really nice to hear. So Bret brings 15 years of passion from Salt Lake City and crafts better digital experiences by applying game mechanics and psychology. He uniquely asks what makes gamers tick, finding practical design lessons in unexpected places as highlighted in his 2022 TEDx Talk. When he's not building, he's exploring games across all eras and mediums, convinced they hold valuable lessons for today's experience design. This blend of experience, curiosity, and love for games helps him spot unique possibilities. We are thrilled to have you as our guest, Bret.

Bret Wardle 1:42
Yeah, I'm so happy to be here. That's an amazing intro. Thank you so much.

Sherna Varayath 1:46
Thank you. Now before we dive in, dear listeners, make sure you're a true eLearning champion by hitting that follow button from wherever you're listening in to us from. Moving to the first question, Bret, how did you originally become interested in game and gamification design?

Bret Wardle 2:05
I grew up a lifelong gamer. I've been playing games since I was a little kid and have always loved it and started actually in game design like a lot of people start in software or L&D design and then start to learn a little more about games.

I spent over a decade in the game design field. I worked for some small studios in Salt Lake, worked for Electronic Arts, working on The Sims franchise, even worked in the birth of Facebook gaming and that explosion of mobile gaming when it took off and ultimately just got a little bit burnt out from that industry and moved my way over to software, but found that is right when user experience design and product management was taking off and found that what game designers have been doing for 20, 30, 40 years even is not much different than what user experience design does. We’re still looking for what makes the user engage with a product, what keeps it sticky, all those same kind of things. That's really where I found my entry point, moving from game design to software design. And I've been here ever since. I love finding that mix between how can we talk about software the same way we talk about games. Like I can sit down with a friend over coffee or dinner and talk about the latest game for hours, but we don't have those same conversations about clearing our inbox or the latest spreadsheet we built or anything like that. So that's really how I got into it.

Sherna Varayath 3:27
Wow, interesting. Now could you explain what the term gamification means to you?

Bret Wardle 3:50
Yeah, absolutely. So gamification as a term in whole is like a blessing and curse, right? A lot of people view it as sometimes a negative term. It gets this bad connotation where people feel like, hey, you're just adding high scores and leaderboards to things and not everything has to be a game or a competition. And so I think a lot of times people are turned away from that, rightfully so. A competition or a high score isn't for everyone. And that's one of the things that I try to push, we can't just make everything a high score and call it gamification. But at its core, gamification is simply using game design mechanics and game design psychology in non-traditional game settings. So instead of a video game or a board game or anything like that, you're applying these same mental models, the same psychology to the software we use every day, to the learning in engagement that we build and design every day, and at its core, that's it. And so whether we like the term, dislike the term, unfortunately it's the term that's stuck. So we're forced to use it. And I think we, as gamification designers, need to be better at informing people what it can be, that it is more than leaderboard and badges and achievements and that kind of stuff. There's a lot more to it. There's storytelling, there's narrative, there's customization, there's boss battles. There are all these different things that don't have to do with competition, I can beat you and I'm better than you. And we, as designers, have to get better at explaining that if we want that term to lose some of that connotation.

Sherna Varayath 5:31
Absolutely, yes. Now, as someone who started in traditional video game design, what things do you think the industry does well that L&D professionals could learn from?

Bret Wardle 5:44
For me, the biggest thing as a game designer was you spent a pretty large amount of your time just researching, you would just play games. I would say, probably 50% of a game designer's time was research, playing games. One of my favorite stories back in the day. I was on a team that was building a sort of Mario Party-esque game, but it was around a different intellectual property and we as designers locked ourselves in a room. We said, hey, we're going to spend 24 hours in this room. We're not going to come out. We're going to have someone deliver us food and we are going to play every single Mario Party game for those 24 hours. We have a dry erase board. We're going to start taking notes of all the mini games we can play, all the customization ideas. And we spent all that time just researching and playing other games and taking notes and keeping this meticulous set of data for what was good, what was bad, what we did like, what we didn't like, who we thought our key player was, what was our demographic. And sometimes in L&D design and software design, we lose track of that. We don't research. I'm amazed at how often when I talk to people about gamification design, they're like, Oh yeah, I'm trying to implement an avatar building system. And I'm like, oh, have you tried Mass Effect or The Sims? They have incredible avatar systems. People are like, oh, I don't play games, I just design L&D. And I'm like, how can you call yourself a gamification designer and not play games? We have to understand the medium. So I think that's the biggest thing from that perspective. As a game designer, you had to play games, you had to understand the mechanics, you had to know what worked well, what didn't work well, what was good for your demographic and I think we need to take that on a little bit more. One of my mantras as I talk and discuss with people about gamification is the sense of play more games. The one thing that I want people to take away is, hey, as gamification designers, we have to be playing more games, we have to understand those mechanics even better.

Sherna Varayath 8:00
Right. Interesting. Now, what is something that traditional game design and development could learn from the things that we do in L&D design?

Bret Wardle 8:11
The one thing that I love in software design, L&D design, is we on this side of the fence are significantly better at the project management, the product management side of things. We're better at putting in Jira tickets and keeping track of work and scoping things out and putting things to a calendar. I can't even think about the amount of crunch time that I had in game design where we were coming up against a deadline and we were sleeping under our desks, were waking up, and doing again. These were 20-hour days with 4 hours of horrible sleep. And I think that's one of the things that the game design field can take away. We also do better at creating personas and making empathy maps. And some of the more tangible things that we have in design are better on this side of the fence. As a game designer originally when I was in the field, we had some architecture type documents where we're like, hey, we're building this game for 5 to 12 year olds who play on consoles, but it was flimsy at best. So I think we do a significantly better job of that on our side of the fence and making sure that we hit deadlines, we know what we need to do. I think if we could combine those two things, the research from game design and the project and product management from software design, we could have this best of both worlds.

Sherna Varayath 9:40
Well, yeah, that's a unique combination. Now, in the past you've talked about the value of studying gaming history. Could you tell us why you feel this would be valuable for those in the L&D field?

Bret Wardle 10:04
I like thinking about how far games have gone back and it's honestly no different than any other history. If you want to be a politician, you go and study political history. If you want to be a scientist, you have to go and study like, hey, where have we come in the field of science over the last 50, 100, 200 years? Gaming is no different. If we want to be a gaming designer, we should know throughout history what worked, what didn't work. Because the game industry has had ups and downs and ebbs and flows, and we can learn from those things. Gaming is baked into our

DNA. Games go back 8000 years. They've unearthed a giant what I consider the original arcade where in Kenya, there's multiple Mancala boards dug into rock where societies would gather and play Mancala together and part of it is the socialization, some of it's the competition. We honestly don't know because these games predate good history and bookkeeping. So we really don't even know what the purpose was. But people have been playing games for 8000 years and even if we look more recently, the birth of computers, if you go back to EDSAC, EDNIAC, EDVAC, all these original giant computers where they're taking up whole rooms, it took less than 10 years from the invention of the modern computer for us to go, well, what should we do with all this power and we went, well, let's make a game like we have OXO, we have Space War, we have Tennis for two. It took less than a decade for us to go, hey, we have all this power, let's make games. And that was one of the first things we sort of jumped to. So I really do think there's a ton to learn from there. I've talked at a couple of conferences about those lessons and you can find some of those if you venture out to my YouTube. I have links as well to some of those presentations I like to share. I'm a proponent of the democracy of information. I'm happy to share any of those lessons. Yeah, I could talk about the history of games for a really long time. It's a topic that's very close to my heart.

Sherna Varayath 12:25
That's visible, yes. Now what are some of the distinct lessons you can think we learned from the history of games?

Bret Wardle 12:36
Yeah, so I have three that I always go to because I think they have very distinct examples. One is the idea of quality over quantity. Throughout the history of games I mentioned that ebb and flow. We had a couple of points where game companies were just putting out as many things as they could, hoping that hey, if I release enough stuff, one of these will be good. And this video game crash of the 1980s was really based on that. It was, hey, we're just going to put as many games out there, and society in general grew this distrust of the game industry. They were like, hey, I'm paying this money for this game and it's garbage. Part of that was the ET game on the 2600 or the Pac-Man port to the 2600 is one that comes out and it more or less crashed the video game industry and it was struggling. It wasn't until Nintendo came in and created this original quality seal where people knew, hey, if it has that Nintendo seal, it's good, it's of quality. And that honestly is what brought the video game industry back. It was halfway in its grave before that happened. And so you see that over and over. It's repeated itself a couple of times in that industry. That's one of the lessons that I really like. One of the others that I actually love Nintendo for is this idea of build by partner, trying to understand, as designers, as builders, when do we build something ourselves? When do we purchase something to help us? And when do we partner with someone? And Nintendo has been great at this through the years. They have these great intellectual properties themselves. They have got Mario, Metroid, Zelda, all these things, but they know when to partner with people. And some of the great examples of that are the Super Mario RPG. Years ago on the Super Nintendo, they wanted to build an RPG. They had this Mario property, but they had never built a role-playing game before. So they reached out to Square that had built a ton. They were the makers of Final Fantasy who have built these huge, fantastic RPGs. And they said, hey, we have our intellectual property, you guys are great at building role-playing games. Let's bring this together, let's partner and you build an RPG based on our property. And they created an incredible game by being able to know we're out of our own element here, don't know how to do this. We need to partner with someone that does. And you see the same as we go through history. They do it again with Smash Brothers. They're like, hey, we have the Smash Brothers franchise where we're bringing together all these characters. And very quickly they ran out of Nintendo properties. We're like, yeah, we can add Zelda, we can add Mario, we can add Metroid, can add Donkey Kong and now we're kind of out. And so then you start seeing those build by partner conversation. We're like, hey, how do we get Sonic into the game? How do we get all these other properties that aren't Nintendo properties into our franchise so that all the players can enjoy us? And I think that's a great lesson as well. And then the other more recent one is the idea of building systems over one off features. A lot of times as designers we think, hey, if I add this one feature, it can make something better. We're starting to go the way of needing to build systems. You see this in games like Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite. They've built these systems where users can create content. They're making the majority of their money on user generated content. It has nothing to do with stuff they've built themselves. They've made tools, they've built the systems for other people to build stuff for them, and so we can't always do that as L&D designers. We can't take user generated content as it is all the time, but we can start to build systems where maybe the users have some input, maybe what the users do shift and change the way that we learn, and we can start learning as a community and instead of us having to be in charge of making every change and validating everything, we can build this community where that system controls itself to a certain extent. And I think there's a whole bunch more lessons, but those are three of my favorite from the industry.

Sherna Varayath 17:05
Now that we've learned the three lessons, how has the history of games shaped the current trends in gamification for educational purposes?

Bret Wardle 17:22
Edutainment as we call it, the mix of entertainment and education have been around forever, right? I remember in the United States we had the Oregon Trail game.

But that is what we played when we were kids. We would learn about the United States history through this game. And you can still find copies of Oregon Trail and remakes of Oregon Trail all over because it was engaging. It taught us something, but was an engaging game. You take the history out of it and it's still fun to play Oregon Trail. So these things aren't new. They've been around forever. But I think as we start to migrate, it goes back to playing more games. We need to absorb those games, try them and try to find the psychological links. That’s the biggest thing to me. How we talked about how I can have spirited conversations about video games for hours, but I don't always do the same about my latest training or learning or anything like that, that's kind of pushed to the wayside. That's work and that's something I have to do for work and that's something I have to do for school or whatever it is. I think we need to start thinking about that psychology differently, like how can we make the conversations we have around L&D, around products, be closer to like we have for games? We really need to hone in on that psychology and think about, hey, throughout history of games, what has created these conversations? What fosters a good conversation and a spirited conversation? And how can we take those same mechanics, those same psychology elements, and put them into our products? That's the way I think we need to start thinking and looking through the history of games and trying these games and taking meticulous notes on like, hey, how did this make me feel? What did I do? And thinking about it from that perspective is that next step for us.

Sherna Varayath 19:24
Right, interesting. So what would you suggest to help eLearning champions experience more games themselves?

Bret Wardle 19:38
The greatest thing that the society we live in now, a lot of times games can be an undertaking, right? Just a few weeks ago, I just finished The Last of Us series and it's a 40 hour game. In the professional setting, we don’t have 40 hours to play the game. The nice thing is we now have YouTube, we have Twitch, we have videogaming podcasts. If there's a game that I want to understand, if I don't have the 40 hours to go and play The Last of Us, but I want to understand the design elements, I want to maybe see how it made people feel, I can fire up any one of those. I just released on my YouTube channel a roughly one hour video that talks about all the game mechanics of The Last of Us and how they work, what works well, what doesn't, and there's hundreds others just like that. So if I come across the game where I'm like, hey, I'm building an L&D experience that is really heavy on character creation and I know that Mass Effect, The Sims, some of these other games have great character creation, I can just go out and search. If I don't have the time to play those myself, I can go find a podcast, I can go find a YouTube video, I can do any number of things and cut that research. Instead of me having to go and research for 10, 20 hours, I can watch a 30-minute video about the character creation process and see what they did there. That's a really good idea. The Sims is a great example. It has way more controls than you would probably ever need for an L&D design. But it's great to see like, wow, they have a lot of stuff here. Out of all this stuff that they have, what's good? What's bad? What do I need? What do my users care about? Maybe my users don't care about changing the facial features, or maybe we're making a cartoon, so we don't need that level of fidelity. I can go and do that research significantly faster than I could five or 10 years ago. And now as we step into an AI age, that goes even faster. I can go and take some of this data, I can take a one hour video and have ChatGPT condense it down to a couple paragraphs for me. Or I can go out if I don't know what games to play. This is what I use a lot of AI for if I don't know some of the games. If I'm building a double jump mechanic for whatever reason. I'm like, hey, what games have the best double jump mechanics? I can go to ChatGPT, and it'll give me a list of games that use double jump effectively and then I can go into that research. I prefer to play my games just because I'm a lifelong gamer. But being able to find those games can be time consuming and now I can use AI to do that. So we have tons of tools at our disposal now that we didn't have 5-10 years ago. So we really have to dive in and try to experience these things.

Sherna Varayath 22:51
Absolutely. Now, when creating a new gamified process, what do you feel are the most important things to consider?

Bret Wardle 23:02
So I've talked about this at a number of conferences, but I go back to what I call the gamification Triforce, it's a triad. I call it the Triforce because as a gamer, that just is better to me. But the key is understanding three things: understanding what type of user are you going to have, what type of KPI or key performance indicator are you trying to change, and finding the game mechanics that match those two, because every user is a little bit different. Sometimes we don't put ourselves into the shoes of our user and that's where you run into that problem of like, hey, what if I just add a high score list? Well, high score lists don't actually work for the majority of people. There's a very small sector of users that enjoy competition, and if my users are not those type of users, they don't like competition, then it's not going to be effective. And on the same line, if I'm trying to enact change on a certain key performance indicator, maybe it's engagement, maybe it's growth, maybe it's retention, or maybe I have financial KPIs where I'm trying to enact sales or something like that, those are all different as well. And what game mechanics work for engagement are sometimes different for what works for retention. If I want someone to stick with my software, stick with my learning, the game mechanics I might use are different than if I want someone to maybe convert from a free to a paid membership. So we've got to understand those things. And anytime you're biting off a new project in the L&D space, especially within gamification, it's worth the time to think about those things and think about, hey, what type of user do I have? What type of key performance indicator am I trying to get to? And then find the game mechanics that work. For that user type, I don't know if you're familiar with the Hexad player type, but the Hexad player types are what I go to. It's a system that's been around for a little bit and it's one of those like if it isn't broken, don't try to fix it. And I just stick with that. I think it does a really great job. If you're familiar with the Bartles player types, it combines that with self-determination theory. And so it kind of mixes what do players do and why do they do it. And smashing those two things together is exactly what we need to do as designers, understanding both sides of that coin.

Sherna Varayath 25:40
Wow, interesting. Now in both your book Gamification for Product Excellence and your Ted Talks, you discussed gamification for product design. How does that differ from learning design in particular?

Bret Wardle 25:56
To be honest, not a lot. That's the greatest thing, there's not a huge difference between those two. And that's what I love. I'm not traditionally an L&D designer. I've found my way into this space through product design, but when it's all said and done, both sides of that coin, we're both trying to create engagement. We're both trying to create retention. We both want our users to keep information and have it stick with them. The goals are the same, whether you're using a product or building a training or even building games.

Sometimes people lose track of what the purpose of a game is, but ultimately a game's goal is you want your players to be engaged with your game. You want your players to enjoy your game. You want them to stick with your game. You want retention. So whether we're talking about L&D, about product design, or actual game design, it's all the same. We can put a different skin on it, but we all want the same stuff. We all want to make our players happy, and we all want our players to stick with us and enjoy those experiences. So it's always fun to me to talk about whenever someone brings up the difference between these things. To be honest, there's not a lot, we skin it a different way and how we make money from things is obviously different. But at its core, we really just want people to enjoy things. And whether that's a game or a training or a product, it's all one and the same.

Sherna Varayath 27:26
Exactly. Now coming to one of my favorite questions, what future trends do you foresee in the intersection of gamification and L&D and UX design?

Bret Wardle 27:49
Yeah. So for me, we talk about the future, right? We say like, hey, what does the future hold for us? We talked about the history. I kind of go back to the history, I think we're reaching this sort of Fulcrum, where things are going to go full circle like games. We talked about 8000 years ago in Kenya. Games are in our DNA, we are inherently programmed to play games, enjoy games, socialize around games.

It's kind of baked into what we do. And I think we're finally coming full circle with that. There was this stigma with gaming for a while, like, oh, gamers are just young, they're just young kids, only kids play games. And there was this weird stigma that kind of happened in the 80s and 90s that painted a really weird picture of games and gamers. And as our generation gets older and we realize, no, everyone is a gamer, those of us that are getting older grew up on games. I think we're finally coming full circle where that stigma is finally disappearing. We don't have the same conversations. I don't know if you've come across this, but sometimes executive leadership, that older generation, it's like, no, we don't want to do gamification design. Games are for kids. Our users aren't kids. Well, our users are those kids. We're getting to the point where the people that are our users were that gaming generation. They grew up in the 80s and the 90s and the 2000s, and are now reaching adulthood. They are the ones doing the trainings and getting education and all that stuff. And so I think the future kind of holds that stigma will disappear. There is not the stigma tied to someone that enjoys video games or someone that enjoys board games. Those walls are being broken down and I think that's a big part of it and as we get more and more through to that, all these people that are growing into gamification are more familiar with other game mechanics too, which is great for us. It used to be that OK in the 80s video games were you run, you jump, you shoot. That was the only mechanics. There wasn't always a lot of story. Well, we're getting to the point where some of these games have an incredible story and puzzles and character building. They're 20 years old at this point, if we look back to what was built in the early 2000s. That's now 20 years old. And we're talking about games like Half-life and Monkey Island. Some of these games have incredible mechanics. And so we're getting past the point of gaming is just running, jumping, shooting. Well, it's not anymore. We have incredible stories and I'm excited to see as we get older and as L&D designers we can start to reach out and touch these other things where gaming isn't just about the high scores from arcades anymore. We now have all these other game mechanics at our disposal. It's an exciting time. I think we can do some really incredible things as we move towards the future of gamification design.

Sherna Varayath 31:18
Wow. Yes, it's incredibly an exciting time and what an incredible discussion we have had. Bret, we're all feeling ready to hit the start button on our next gamified learning adventure. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your insights.

Bret Wardle 31:32
Yeah, thank you for having me. It was such a great conversation.

Sherna Varayath 31:36
Absolutely. So dear listeners, do take a moment to share your feedback with us. Find CommLab India on your favorite social media platforms. And of course, if you haven't already, make sure you're following the eLearning Champion podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, take care and happy learning.