When a learning experience promotes action or assigns homework, the usual reaction is cries of bloodthirsty outrage, in the learners' heads at least. Yet, some learners will go home and play games for hours without any extrinsic incentive.

Clearly, games fulfill core drives for motivation, which many learning experiences do not. This lack of motivation is a stop sign to growth. Without motivation, learners won’t engage with the experience or self-learn outside of it.

How can we motivate our learners as much as games motivate their players?

In 2003, Yu-Kai Chou journeyed to answer this question by studying the core motivational drives games promoted. After 9 years he summed up his learnings in The Octalysis Framework: a framework that explains all human motivation under eight core drives.

When none of these core drives are filled, there is zero motivation to do anything: basically, how you feel about your taxes. But the more that are promoted, the more motivation we have.

I envision a world where education is fun, accessible, and effective.

Gamifying our Learning Experience Design (or teaching) with The Octalysis Framework is a critical step toward pursuing this. I've been using the framework online and offline for the last few years. Online, I’ve impacted 500+ students with four video courses alongside four years of YouTube, podcasting, and blogging to an audience of 10,000+. Offline, I’ve taught 100s of students inside Cornell Outdoor Education, Ithaca High School, and Cornell SPLASH.

It’s been, dare I say, game-changing for not only my learners' motivation but also the degree of fun, engagement, and effectiveness of the experiences I create.

Let me help you do the same by exploring each of the eight core drives and how you can apply them to your LXD. Make sure to read until the end because only with an understanding of all eight core drives can you skyrocket your learning experiences into the next stratosphere.

Implementing The Eight Core Drives

Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning and Calling

Chou states "Epic meaning and calling is the core drive activated when a person believes they are doing something greater than themselves or were 'chosen' to take that action."

Humans have an insatiable need to feel like their actions mean something. We aspire to feel like a participating thread in the tapestry of cosmic time.

You could integrate this by framing your experience as helping one fight against societal issues like climate change, world hunger, or wait times at stoplights because every true European knows roundabouts are the future. You could frame your experience more from the self as weaving skills, habits, connections, ways of being, connecting to core values, or stitching over negative versions of these. You could create an overarching story where learners are characters in a meaningful journey who can unveil more of the story through their learnings.

The essential prerequisite of creating epic meaning and calling is knowing your audience.

What are their fears, insecurities, aspirations? By connecting your experience to these things, you bless it with purpose.

For example, I created epic meaning and calling in my Backcountry Cooking class for Cornell Outdoor Education. The difficulty I faced was getting college learners motivated to cook anything more complex than ramen noodles spiced with imposter syndrome. Taking insight from core drive one, I announced for the third class, they would cook a meal not only for themselves but also for another COE class: geocaching.

Stakes.

Their bad cooking could now harm others, namely the sanity of college students already on the brink of death from chronic cramming. This gave them an epic goal to work towards and, therefore, more motivation to learn during the first two weeks. The third week came, and they were tasked with making homemade burritos full of guacamole, sour cream, cheese, ground beef, and, of course, love.

They killed it, getting five Michelin stars from Geocaching.

 The Geocaching and Backcountry Cooking classes vibing.

Core drive one gives learners a reason to participate in the experience, but without the next core drive, they won’t be able to assess their progress.

Core Drive 2: Development and Accomplishment

Chou states "Development & Accomplishment is our internal drive for making progress, developing skills, achieving mastery, and eventually overcoming challenges."

All humans want to feel like their actions are leading somewhere aside from the ceasing of consciousness which awaits us all. In a complex, foggy digital world, concrete growth and becoming good at something feels fantastic.

We can integrate this into our learning experiences by showing progress in leaderboards, badges, before/after snapshots, achievements, rewards, or other forms of feedback.

One of my email courses, Self-Learning Quest, builds heavily on this core drive. Throughout the five-day email course, every lesson confronts the players with a boss. Completing the lesson and implementing the action items beats the boss and continues the storyline, which threads throughout the course. The feeling of accomplishment from defeating bosses, integrating insights from the lesson, and continuing the story drives players to keep going through the email course.

 An example of one of the bosses players were asked to fight against.

Another thing we want to consider regarding core drive two is getting our learners in the Goldilocks Zone, where their skills and the task's difficulty are balanced. In this zone, they can enter what researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow, as their attention beam shines entirely on the present moment, radiating them with energy. Entering flow is like doing drugs without doing drugs (don't ask how I know) and flowers learners' motivation for learning in the future.

Keeping them in the Goldilocks Zone becomes a careful balancing act of aligning the task's difficulty with the learners ' skills. You could give them differing difficulty options for the learning experience, change it automatically based on their skills, and more. If you want to learn more about getting more into the flow using gamification and the ACTIONS framework, check out my article.

Be careful.

It's crucial that your feedback choices show meaningful progress. Grades are a classic example of where this can go wrong. While grades can sometimes be helpful indicators of progress, they often don't measure what learners think they measure (and as we'll get to later, can hurt motivation). Frequently, they're better at showing a student's test-taking and rote memorization abilities than their true understanding of the topic.

You want your feedback methods to be meaningful, as close as possible to the real-life situation in which they will be using this learning, and never to become a goal in itself. A metric that becomes a blind goal ceases to be a good metric. When this happens, learners focus more on the metric than on learning.

Core drive two helps learners assess their progress in the experience. But without the next core drive they won’t feel they have meaningful agency over how they progress.

Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity and Feedback

Chou states "Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback is expressed when users are engaged in a creative process where they repeatedly figure new things out and try different combinations."

I believe every person has a need as raw as the Earth's pull toward the sun to express their creativity. Perhaps it's a pull to make a monument of ourselves for future generations. It could be a primal drive like that of hunger of thirst.

Whatever the case, we can build it in our LXD by giving learners autonomy over their projects, providing meaningful choices, and giving learners agency in the experience.

This works especially well if the projects involve making something: a podcast, video, slide deck, essay, a mix of things, and so much more. For example, my Educational Psychology class allowed us to choose between any two teaching principles we learned over the semester and create a slide deck showcasing how we integrated them into our assigned teaching roles.

Another way we can build core drive three is by providing a meaningful array of choices that can be mixed and matched. This often takes the form of constraints. Constraints don't inhibit creativity, they often foster it. For example, doing an improv scene but only being allows to say the numbers 1-10 and use a few prop items.

One more way we can empower core drive three is by giving learners agency in the experience. Let them decide how grading will work if there will be grading. Let them decide what they want to learn more of. I began teaching a class at BOCES by giving the learners six different options for things I could teach them about and letting them vote. They picked the art of habit change. Of course, this is tougher to do if you have to teach them something specific, but you can still give them agency.

Giving learners agency over the experience doesn’t just build core drive three; it builds core drive four as well by making them feel they own an aspect of it.

Core Drive 4: Ownership and Possession

Chou states, "Ownership And Possession is our drive to own or control things."

The world is a large, often dangerous place. People hold inherent value in what they can claim as their own in the infinite garage sale of the Universe. The endowment effect explains how we hold things in higher value simply for being ours compared to the exact same thing which isn't.

Some ways we can incorporate this into our LXD is through creating achievements and collectables, learning portfolios, and resources.

One great example of how we can integrate this into our LXD is Yu-Kai Chou's gamification learning community, Octalysis Prime. While navigating the various learnings in the community, you can randomly come across Geomon, basically knock off Pokemon, and enslave them—I mean, peacefully catch them. This sense of ownership drives people to stay in the platform and continue going through the learnings.

Another way to build this core drive in a longer learning endeavor is through creating learning portfolios. These are collections of a student's work from investing in their learning experience. Seeing all the essays, discussion posts, and images I had created for my global film studies class gave me tremendous pride and motivation to keep learning. You could even let learners take creations from the experience home, especially if they are physically based.

Another terrific way to build this core drive is to have learners create resources that become a part of future iterations of that learning experience. The knowledge that one's own work could be used to teach future learners drives motivation to learn well in the present.

Impacting future learners with one’s own worth isn’t solely explained through core drive four—core drive five is a large motivator as well.

Core Drive 5: Social Influence and Relatedness

Chou states "Social Influence & Relatedness includes all the social elements motivate people."

Humans are social creatures. Whether you love or hate a single McDonald's McNugget, it’s baffling to think of the cooperation necessary to create such a thing. We need to be understood by others, accepted, and collaborate or compete to grow.

There are tons of ways this can be incorporated into your LXD: group projects, accountability partnerships, mentoring, competitive or cooperative games, discussions, teaching others, etc.

One of the most effective ways I've seen it integrated was through my time in The Part-Time YouTuber Academy. During this live cohort course, learners were split into groups named after Harry Potter houses. Every week, each group met to discuss learnings and talk about our YouTube channels. Our homework was to create one video each week, and each member's participation was added to a total house score that was shown on a leaderboard against other houses.

In addition, every week, our videos were analyzed by a YouTube expert who gave us feedback on how we could improve for the next time. All these social factors fed together to create a wonderful learning experience.

One of my other favorite ways this core drive was built was when I took The Linking Your Thinking Workshop, hosted by Nick Milo. After the four-week course, there was a week solely for presentations, where learners showcased cool things they had made with the learnings. This not only showed me the breadth of creativity the course learnings could be used for but also made me feel much more connected to my fellow learners.

Importantly, there were multiple presentations in a single time slot, and they weren’t recorded, giving added motivation to go to them because of our next core drive.

Core Drive 6: Scarcity and Impatience

Chou states "Scarcity & Impatience is what makes us desire something simply because it's extremely rare, exclusive, or immediately unattainable."

Especially in our consumerist copy-and-paste industrial society, having something of true rarity feels like putting a stamp of importance on one's name.

Some examples of how we can integrate this into our LXD are limiting enrollment, limited access to content or learning paths based on previous learning, limited-time learning resources like guest lectures, limited feedback opportunities like office hours, and finally, limited retry options.

The most obvious and perhaps most potent way this core drive is used in LXD is through time limits. Time limits inherently limit how much we can spend on each part of the experience, which puts pressure on the learners to use that time as well as possible. When I joined Cornell Speech a few semesters ago, I had a couple of weeks to learn how to do impromptu and give a speech according to the traditional framework. This time limit encouraged me to learn as fast and effectively as possible.

One of the things that made learning impromptu even more fun is that the speech I had to make differed each time since the question changed. This made me more motivated to learn because of core drive seven.

Core Drive 7: Curiosity And Unexpectedness

Chou states "Curiosity And Unpexpectedness drives us to fill curiosity gaps and keep engaged because we don't know what is going to happen next."

Humans have made it as we have largely because of our ability to learn. Krik encounter tiger in brush. Tiger almost kill Krik. Krik more careful when around that brush.

Unexpected things are what can kill us. So, being curious and engaging with uncertainty are baked into our very core.

We can integrate this drive into our LXD by creating curiosity gaps, uncertain questioning, narrative shifts, surprise encounters, and more.

For example, my Six Pretty Good Books professors started most lectures with an activity or showcase. Instead of spoiling the magic trick, he told us the lecture itself would explain how the activity worked. By creating a curiosity gap at the beginning of the lesson, he kept people engaged throughout the lecture so they could fulfill it.

One more way we can integrate core drive seven is through narrative shifts. Portray your learning experience from a certain frame and then suddenly shift frames to gobstop learners. For example, you could give an experience on how to become a better conversationalist by starting with the question: what can we say to have better conversations? Once you've got some good answers, you could say: "These are all great, but being a better conversationalist, first and foremost, comes not in what you say; it's how well you listen." This unexpected frame shift creates a curiosity gap in why that's more important, motivating learners to learn.

My Psych and Law class also did a great job integrating core drive seven through uncertain questioning. In most law classes, including this one, anyone can be cold-called to answer a question anytime. You could be sitting there, wondering how you'll be able to satisfy your caffeine addiction when, wham! “What was the ruling of Plessy Versus Ferguson?” The uncertainty of being called on motivates students to listen attentively during class because they fear looking like idiots.

In this last case, students were also motivated to avoid looking like an idiot in front of the class, which leads us to our next core drive.

Core Drive 8: Loss and Avoidance

Chou states "Loss and Avoidance is the motivation to not lose what you have and avoid something negative. On a small scale, it could be to avoid losing previous work or changing one's behavior from fear. On a larger scale, it could be to avoid admitting that everything you did up to this point was useless because you're experiencing a quarter-life crisis at 21—that's a fifth of your life out the window—and you haven't called your mom in five days, and you're graduating and..."

This core drive is bolstered by loss aversion, humans' tendency to feel twice as much pain for losing something compared to the pleasure of gaining something of equal value.

We can incorporate it into our LXD by creating punishments, public commitments, making streaks, conditional privileges, and more.

One of my favorite examples of this is Duolingo. Every night if I'm hanging out with my friend Rushika I'll hear the words "Oh shit, my Duolingo." This is Duolingo speak for, "I don't want to lose my precious streak." The fear of losing a streak is so extreme for some, they will avoid airplanes entirely and spend $100s of dollars to freeze their streak before going on vacation. The motivation to avoid losing one's streak keeps people coming back and learning languages.

Another great example is the cooking class I took at Cornell--yes, I a white man can cook, barely. Every class, we were given a recipe we had to prepare during class, which was then tasted by EVERYBODY at the end and rated on several scales. Needless to say, this motivated everyone to not fuck up, god please not fuck up. Every class, I had the pleasure of witnessing the five stages of grief in real-time. There's nothing as soul-sucking as watching someone take a bite of mac and cheese expecting something akin to their grandma's home cooking only to watch the life barrel roll out of their eyes as they plan exactly how they will never have to breathe oxygen in your presence again.

This did not happen to me.

One more way to implement core drive eight is through public commitments. I used this strategy when taking Charisma University with my brother—yes, I had to learn charisma, and I've gotten much better at it you judgy mean person. Before taking the course we each made a commitment to go through one lesson a day and integrate the action items. The fear of failing at this commitment kept both of us motivated to do it, and we finished the course after just two weeks.

So where done. That's all the core drives right? Not exactly.

Bonus Core Drive 9: Sensation

Boom, bonus core drive.

I bet that's really activating core drive seven for you now, isn't it?! Almost as if I did it on purpose.

Years after Yu-Kai Chou created The Octalysis Framework, he realized he had missed another core drive: sensation.

Sensation is the core drive motivating us to sense the world, fulfill bodily needs like food, water, and sex, and enjoy experiences like music, exercise, and more.

The first way we can integrate this in our LXD is to make sure nobody is missing some of their core sensory needs. Nothing will kill your experience faster than a bunch of terribly hungry or thirsty learners . I once taught a high school class the period before lunch and I spent half the time wondering if they were raising their hand to ask if they could eat me.

When our base needs are filled, however, this core drive is an incredible complement to all the other drives. The best way to use it in your LXD is to make experiences more visceral by adding sensations to them.

Music, for example, is great for fostering certain emotions in your experience. Want to make people feel a little faster and action-oriented? Put on some tighter, louder music. Want people to feel sad? Put on something with a slower pace and more downward-spiraling chords. Of course, music and emotion are more complicated, but the basics are pretty intuitive.

Another question you can ask yourself is what unique senses complement an experience. Most learning experiences incorporate sight and sound, but the experiences that stick out often include the other three. For example, my introductory neuroscience class at Cornell began with the professor letting us smell a Durian. For most, it smells terrible. For some, like me, it smells divine. The difference lies in brain chemistry. Incorporating this interesting sensation immediately got us hooked on understanding neuroscience.

Understanding the nine core drives isn't enough. You must balance them against each other depending on what short-term and long-term goals you have for your learners. This is how you skyrocket your LXD into the next stratosphere: differentiating between white hat and black hat core drives.

White Hat and Black Hat Core Drives

White hat core drives are represented by the core drives at the top of the Octalysis Diagram: Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling, Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment, and Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback. White hat core drives make us feel agency, power, and control.

Black hat core drives are represented by the core drives at the bottom of the Octalysis diagram: Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience, Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity, and Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance. Black hat core drives make us feel obsessed, addicted, and anxious.

What about core drives 4 and 5? They can be either white or black, depending on the situation.

Why should we care about this in LXD?

Because we want differing ratios of black hat to white hat motivation depending on the situation.

Black hat core drives are best for motivating us to take action in the short term.

The problem is black hat core drives are relied upon too heavily, they leave a bad taste in our mouths.

White hat core drives, however, are best for motivating action in the long term.

In general, for learning experiences, white hat core drives should be in higher ratio than black hat ones. This is because ideally learning should be a lifelong pursuit. We don’t want people to associate learning with a loss of agency, control, and power.

One example of this gone wrong is the way grades are implemented in much of modern education. Grades "work." They are so incredibly black hat they get learners to take action on their assignments. The problem is that after years of black hat motivation, many learners lose their love for learning entirely, seeing little point in learning unless the Grade God has "blessed" it with a magical number.

Don’t make the same mistake in your learning experience design.

The Octalysis Framework is an invaluable tool for creating more effective learning experiences. The central question you can ask yourself before creating any learning experience is which of the core drives are most relevant, and how you can build them inside your experience.

Yu-Kai Chou has a free tool for brainstorming how to integrate the eight core drives or reverse engineering something already made to promote the core drives, which you can see here.

Games don't have to remain relegated to the game sphere. By understanding the underlying human motivational principles of what makes them tick, we can create learning experiences that are just as fun and engaging in real life. And with the added bonus, they actually improve our real-life characters.

If you want to learn more about gamification, check out my gamification playlist on YouTube.