It seems
everyone is talking about gamification: the idea that any service can be turned
into a game, reasoning that through reward and bargaining mechanisms a user
will interact more with that given service for presumably greater rewards.
Although
gamification seems to be the current zeitgeist, the idea is relatively old and the new part is this explicit in the customer-server
interaction and inherent in the development process of applications and
services.
Many of the
underlying concepts of gamification come from Game and Economic Theories such as
those extensively researched and developed by Nash, von Neumann and. It is the
principle behind the usage of store cards, air miles, nearly every loyalty
scheme and most recently (in internet terms) the idea behind the “free” service.
Despite
gamification now coming to the fore, gamification is already relatively well
established in many areas including privacy, although not as explicitly as
currently being suggested. For example
you get your social networking (or blogging provision!) for free by giving up
your privacy – you get a free service (and advertisements) and the service
provider gets your behavioural profile.
We can simply
demonstrate this aspect of gamification in privacy by constructing a small
normal form model using Game Theory techniques. Consider the payoff between a customer and some service – if the
customer registers with that service then they obtain an enhanced service:
| Service | |||
| Basic | Enhanced | ||
| Anonymous | Random advertisments, No personalization, No identification of user, No targeting, No profiling | 0 | |
| Customer | Pseudo-Anonymous | Random advertisements, Some session provisioning, Pseudo anonymous tracking Limited profiling – non traceable | 0 |
| Registered/Identified | 0 | Targeted advertising Full user experience, Customisable, Profiled |
The difficulty
here is assigning values to the sets of features available versus the data
collection. In the above example disabling cookies has probably better payoff
than leaving them enabled, primarily at the expense of the quality of data
being collected by the service versus the consumers’ privacy. If we consider
what the enhanced service might provide then the fact that the consumer is
being profiled is outweighed by the advantages of the enhanced service.
Certainly in the above, it is in the service’s interests to ensure that the
benefit to the consumer outweighs any privacy (or other) concerns.
Payoff matrices
for services such as Facebook, Google, Skype, Amazon etc, can be similarly constructed?
It might just be that a well-defined payoff is what is contributing to those
services’ popularity when put in the context of privacy.
Things get more
interesting when services are combined. For example would letting Amazon
provide Ikea with your purchase details being a step too far regarding personal
privacy? Maybe Amazon should consider teaming up with Ikea… 10% discount
vouchers on book cases for every 20 books bought…as long as you tell Amazon
your Ikea Loyalty Card number. Just no recommendations for books on interior
decorating please!
To further
strengthen the gaming link, in the above the customer is also presented with a challenge
in optimizing the reward – what is the cheapest way of getting a cheaper
bookcase?
It might also just
be that gamification becomes one of the drivers behind improving the quality of
Big Data. The more “points” your score using a service, the better the quality
of the profile and better service. The question here then becomes are we as
individuals (or even as collectives) that interesting or for that matter, are
we as consumer that discerning in the content from service providers and the
back-and-forth bargaining? Do we care enough to be interested in playing the service
improvement game?
Will
gamification improve on the experience for the consumer and turn us all in to marketers
of our own information? Will recasting
your service as a game lead to greater popularity, more consumers and success?
What interests
me, assuming the above answers are positive, is then how to do this through the
embedding the economic principles of gamification inherently into the system
design.
References
How do I play?