Irresistible Apps: Motivational Design Patterns for Apps, Games, and Web-based Communities

Chapter     4

Gameful Patterns

Gameful patterns are those which have the qualities of gaming. What those qualities are is difficult to define, but we know it when we see it. When we want to play around with it, understand the rules of it, and think about strategies to approach it: these are the things that have the qualities of gaming. Creating interactions to support gamefulness is the process of “gameful design” and will typically use game design elements. The patterns in this chapter are all heavily inspired by games, such as Score, Leaderboards, and Badges. Because many games also rely on social interactions, many of these patterns could have appeared under the social patterns categorization; but they appear here if their gamefulness is ...