Your car is (probably) gamified
Love it or hate it, the auto industry has embraced gamification, and it’s changing the way you drive.
My new car has a feature that most people despise. My wife hates it with the passion of a burning sun, and I hate it, too. Or at least, I did.
The feature is Automatic Start / Stop. It’s a fuel saving feature found in many newer vehicles to boost your car’s mileage. Essentially, your car detects when you’re just stopped in traffic, for example at a red light, and turns the engine off. When you take your foot off the break, or in some cases when the vehicle in front of you starts to move, the engine turns back on.
To nip this question in the bud, yes, it really does improve mileage (by about 5–7%), but it is annoying as hell and absolutely drove me up the wall when I first started using it. What if I don’t want my car’s engine to flip on and off? What if I don’t want my AC to turn off on a 90+ degree summer day when the sun is beating down through my window? Even worse, the Auto Start / Stop feature cannot be permanently disabled. If you don’t like it, you need to remember to turn it off every time you drive.
And then, I noticed something. When the feature is active, by which I mean when the engine is actually off due to this feature, the display in the instrument cluster changes and starts to count up how many total seconds, minutes, and hours the feature has been active in keeping my engine off. And next to the timer is a running total of how many gallons of gas this has saved.
It’s a simple display, but it totally changed my psychological relationship to the feature. Now, instead of being annoyed that my engine has been switched off without my input, I’m excited for the opportunity to see in real time how much gas I’ve saved. The reason this display is so psychologically powerful is gamification.
When most people think of gamification, they think of adding a leaderboard or badges to an already extant process, such as exercise, shopping, or education. If my car were to give me achievements for hyper-miling, I would find this extremely patronizing, as would most people. And you may be asking yourself, how exactly is a clock that counts your car’s idle time gamification?
The Power Of Feedback
Gamification can be defined as game elements used in non-gaming contexts. One of the key formal elements of a game is a feedback mechanism — basically, a clear signal to you, the player, as to how you are performing in the game. This is what the Auto Start / Stop timer does. Each time the feature triggers, it signals to you how much you’ve accomplished so far, and in terms that matter to you (cost savings / carbon savings). In this way, your gallons of gas saved becomes a score. And more than that: a lifetime score.
So what is the psychological effect of this gamification feature?
- It shifts the moment of Auto Start / Stop activation from one of annoyance (My sense of control! My air conditioner!) to one of excitement (My score!)
- More critically, it makes the driver less likely to disable the feature. This is both because it feels better when the feature activates and because the driver feels invested in their lifetime score and wishes to see it climb farther. Thus, every time the feature is disabled is a wasted opportunity.
In this way, the gamification in the automobile is a vehicle for behavior change (pun intended).
Hybrid vehicles such as the Toyota Prius and all-electric ones like the Nisan Leaf use similar gamification techniques. Usually these are even more playful, such as the display feature that calculates the driver’s performance in terms of gas saving (acceleration, speed, stops and starts, etc.) and abstracts them into animated leaves that grow or whither on the dash. Most vehicles these days, even regular internal combustion, have displays to show you how efficient your driving is (though this is more easily ignored than the score provided by the Auto Start / Stop feature). Normally it comes in the form of a bar that shifts back and forth, and/or a marker that appears on your fuel gauge that pinpoints your car’s average gas mileage.
But even if your car does not have these features built in, you’re probably bringing your own form of gamification with you into the car. And by this, I mean a GPS (or SatNav as it’s called in some countries).
Years ago when I had one of the first models of the Garmin GPS, I noticed this bit of unintentional gamification. If you haven’t guessed what it is yet, take a moment and think about the information your navigation system displays, and which of these might be considered gamification. The secret is, not all gamification causes desirable user behavior.
The feature I’m referring to is the ETA. This is an extremely nice feature, especially if you want to give your friends a heads up when you might be arriving. However, many drivers (not you of course) view the ETA not as an estimate, but as a challenge. That might sound absurd, but think about how it feels to drive with your GPS running. If it tells you you’re going to arrive at 4:55 and you arrive at 4:40, it feels pretty great, right? “I made good time!”
It’s a win state.
Re-framing your driving experience as a race against your navigation system’s ETA can unintentionally encourage speeding, aggressive driving, running iffy yellow and sometimes red lights, and so on.
And what about when you see your ETA getting later? Agony! “Google said I was going to arrive at 3:00 and now it’s 3:05 and I’m still miles away!” It feels bad, and you stew. And when traffic clears up, you jam the accelerator. Is it a safety risk? Maybe. But contrasted with the Auto Start / Stop feature and the Leaf display in the Prius, it also encourages the exact opposite behaviors and outcomes when it comes to optimizing gas mileage.
This is all to say that gamification sprouts up in surprising places these days. Be on the look out for it in your day-to-day life and be aware of how it’s affecting your own habits and behaviors. And if you’re a designer, think your choices through. Well-applied gamification can be hugely beneficial to your user (and the planet). And if that’s true, the effects of poorly-applied gamification should be obvious.
