Gamification Mechanics — Tracking Progress

Taking a closer look at progress and how to track it we can determine there are broadly two types of progress.

In reality it’s going to be a varied spectrum of different types of progress so there will be overlap and dependence on context. But if you take the approach of categorising the progress into the following two types it will help determine what will be required to implement tracking of them.

We can put progress into soft and hard types.

In the first instance of soft progress at the “softest” end this isn’t distinguishable from just tracking experience itself.

When we are using time as a metric to experience and progress then this is definitely soft progress and tracking merely needs to measure interaction and engagement time for an activity or collection of activities. A related measure of soft progress is activity completion. This is a lower level than milestones or achievements. Tracking this could be completions of tasks by opening videos or even for the user to manually check off a list.

Soft progress is all about quantifying engagement but not about the user themselves.

Hard progress is where we’re looking at the user themselves changing.

This is about improvement in some way. Typically this is about gaining skills or knowledge. We could use the same techniques with soft progress tracking to infer improvement. A certain number of hours spent on going through videos and with some spaced repetition would be a reasonable passive way to track hard progress.

What we really want is active tracking to prove that there is hard progress and improvement.

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