The most important function of a leaderboard is to serve as a device that tells a participant what their goal is, but also the progress in reaching said goal. However, its specialty is to guide users toward it without laying down instructions.
This is the give-and-take of the leaderboard’s intuitive function. Once the user knows that they have an objective to drive them, they get going. On the other hand, facing a reality that they interpret as an insurmountable hill to climb can also take away any sense of motivation before any actual competing.
While this situation reflects the key facts about how leaderboards work, their mechanisms have a bit more to offer, but also their pitfalls. We will address their complexities and assess their integration into gaming, especially if they are to be at their best.
We’ll try to integrate and exemplify several applications of the leaderboard concept, but we will focus on the freeroll slot tournament. It gamifies a mechanic that relies on chance, even if it isn’t gambling per se, which is why we also decided to join a freeroll tournament on SlotsCalendar for practical testing.
The role of visible ranking in boosting effort
There are three major mechanisms in which the leaderboard concept can drive the user’s motivation and subsequent effort:
- Goal clarity, which gives them a tangible target that has a number next to it. Without it, the tournament format raises no psychoglocal stakes.
- Social comparison creates goalposts that the player can understand by simply checking the ranking. Otherwise, there is no point of comparison.
- Progress feedback maintains a continuum of performance that the user can assess constantly.
In scientific research, a 2017 experiment by Landers, Bauer and Callan used a leaderboard-driven task across multiple conditions and corresponding scores, yielding some interesting takeaways. Namely, it found that a leaderboard increases performance, with similar effects when the goals seemed either difficult or impossible. It also involved no specific instructions, so the leaderboard provided the impetus.
In the context of a freeroll tournament, the system makes it so that explicit effort does not make a difference since results depend on random outcomes. Instead, the focus is on persistence since the next spin can be deciding.
When comparing the scientific literature with the freeroll concept, we realize that the motivational factor is the same, even with a different underlying mechanic. The explanation for it is the structure provided by the leaderboard, which gives a clear goal (finishing in certain positions to land a prize) and progress feedback (the current ranking, which can shift).
Flipside: How leaderboards can backfire
The issue that leaderboards can have is the negative perception that lower-ranking players can feel, either through accumulated failure or after a single unsatisfactory experience.
When repeated bad luck or uncompetitive performance shows a continuous lack of success, then the motivation factor dissipates, leaving only the upper level of the leaderboard to find a sense of satisfaction from it.
It’s also possible that these players can have (or gain) the drive to close the gap to those ranked above them, especially if they’re within range. However, this momentum can easily disappear when the failure to do so accumulates over multiple tournament participations, which is a steady level of confidence erosion explored in the ‘Discouraged by Peer Excellence’ 2016 study by Rogers & Feller.
Given this reality, we can easily infer that self-consciousness threatens the social and motivational upside provided by a leaderboard. The interesting thing is that it applies quite significantly to the middle-placed participants, whose middling ranking placed the ‘average’ label that is likelier to lead to lost interest.
Such a lack of competitiveness, including in results, can also create an incentive to cheat. Tournaments with no entry fee, as freerolls clearly represent, also tend to offer real-value prizes, making it appealing to create multiple accounts to increase the probability of landing a good score. This simply makes strict identity verification even more important than it already was.
Design directions that boost a leaderboard’s usefulness
We’ve established the core of the motivational factor and the follies of leaderboards, and now it’s time to present several designs associated with this mechanic. Namely, we will discuss methods to use and integrate them.
The 2011 ‘Gamification by Design’ paper by Zichermann & Cunningham splits them into two major types:
- Absolute leaderboards, which are technically infinite showcases of ranking. They allow you to see every position out of the total. The most motivated players tend to be in the top third, per their findings, suggesting that top placement is generally unattainable given the magnitude of the gap to the top.
- Relative leaderboards, on the other hand, only show your immediate surroundings. They highlight usually four or five players below and above you, which localizes comparison and can be universally motivational. The point of comparison becomes much closer, which suggests that it’s much more attainable.
As far as implementation goes, there are several practices that can be part of the overall design strategy of a leaderboard-driven tournament. They would be the following, in order to be applicable and, arguably, helpful:
- Field segmentation creates substrata or parallel rankings to a global one. We see these in many mobile games, for example, where divisions or friend rankings integrate relative leaderboard mechanics.
- Regular resets depend on the type of tournament. For example, most of the freerolls that we’ve been using as reference last a week at most, which is by design. Too long a tournament makes it stale, so a refreshing ranking is better.
- Broader prize distribution does not imply the ‘participation’ trophy principle, but the idea of stretching the reward pool in a way that widens the motivational aspirations. If you can earn a reward for placing in the top 5% or 10%, not just by winning, then a clear goal becomes much more attainable.
- Creating a contained experience can go in two major ways: making the winning point a value (first one who reaches the goal wins) or by capping the number of attempts for each player (a certain number of spins in a slot tournament).
Integration into games and tournaments
Traditional games, whether they’re for mobile or consoles, have been converging with the tournament format as they’ve been trying to add more actionable motivational factors. Whether they’re based on skill or luck, these competitions boost the significance of gameplay, which is a definitive upside.
We’ve seen multiple integration methodologies, and some of them are the following:
- Matchmaking and divisions are what we were saying above: the player’s reference points are those near him in terms of experience, performance, and ranking. Competitive games have added this dimension to titles that may not have had a reason to integrate this mechanic.
- Resets and promotion/relegation systems have created a segmented experience in terms of timing. There are incentives for each tournament, which is essentially a league, and the results at the end of that period can mean moving to a higher or lower level of competition (or stagnation). Freeroll tourneys offset this principle since they don’t involve skill worth evaluating, but jumping from tournament to tournament is a reset.
- Personal bests, especially when the competitions rotate and end up having the same mechanic, add a new side to the leaderboards: historical performance. The user sees how they’re doing in the current iteration of a tournament, but also how their benchmark number, which can indicate improvement.
How leaderboards and freerolls are mutually beneficial
There are three major things that we’ve observed by assessing the role of leaderboards and their applicability in freeroll slot tournaments:
- The ranking is the structure. Slots machines don’t usually have one since you’re simply spinning and hoping to win as many rounds as possible. However, the leaderboard gives you an attainable purpose based on which you perceive and relate to the timeline of the tournament.
- What the leaderboard measures is luck (and possibility persistence). Some tournament mechanics ask you to accumulate points based on spin results, while others simply require you to get the biggest multiplier. The ranking illustrates slot variance, which is completely random.
- Fraud risk is the highest for them. Motivation to play without losing money is high, but the impetus to cheat the system with multiple accounts also depends on that motivation. It’s a threat to organizers, which requires protective guardrails.
The freeroll-centric takeaway is simple: the leaderboard is the heliocentric system that gives meaning to slot spinning and stimulates the existing motivation of not having to pay for the entry.
Conclusion
A keen conclusion for this analysis of leaderboards and motivation is that they are very good at creating a competitive edge, but they can also be discouraging. They’re a way to add gamification to fields that usually don’t have something like this, and the design of this feature can make it more palatable.
At the same time, having a bit too much of an emotional edge for competitive reasons can lead to excessive play, especially with the freerolls that have a gambling mechanic at their core. The best way to interact with them is to do it responsibly.
