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Designing Bible Software for Agency
- 1. Designing for Agency in Bible Study Stephen Smith BibleTech 2019 April 12, 2019
- 2. Argument Bible software supports only a small subset of the Christian life as lived but can support more if we consider agency during the design process
- 3. Overview • Defining “agency” • Player Experience of Need Satisfaction model: how current Bible software does and doesn’t meet the needs identified in the model • The Christian life as lived • A practical Franken-Bible application that tries to apply this model: www.expandedbible.com
- 4. life led well life going well life feeling as it should Vision of a flourishing life
- 5. What is agency? • Literally, “the ability to act” • Video game theories talk about player agency in terms of making meaningful choices • Because software is interactive, it can support these choices on a wide scale • Exercising choices that lead (or not) to a flourishing life
- 6. Limitations of “Bible Engagement” • Often with the Bible, we measure “success” of a product or a campaign in terms of engagement—how much time and how often someone reads or hears the Bible • It’s easy to measure and is a reasonable proxy for spiritual health, but this focus leads to engagement being an end in itself rather than whether we’re actually meeting people’s needs
- 7. Religious orientations in sociology • Intrinsic: religion as an end in itself • Extrinsic: religion as a means (e.g., to status or power) • Quest: religion as a continual search for truth Whitley and Kite, 2010
- 8. Extrinsic Christianity is like an “idle game” • An idle game is one that plays itself for you as you go about your regular life • You can drop in as often as you like to affect what’s happening, mostly just accelerating what would happen anyway • Similarly, extrinsic Christianity isn’t really affecting your life or bringing about change; you just participate when you want and when it brings you some advantage
- 9. Self-Determination Theory • Psychological theory from the 1970s exploring intrinsic motivation (in general, not for religion) • Argues that people have three basic needs: • Competence • Relatedness • Autonomy
- 10. Player Experience of Need Satisfaction (PENS) • Grows out of Self-Determination Theory (competence, relatedness, autonomy), applying it specifically to games, but with implications for any software • Model developed in 2007 to provide a theory of fun and satisfaction for video games immersyve.com/white-paper-the-player-experience-of-need-satisfaction-pens-2007/
- 11. Competence in PENS • Feeling of mastery and progress • Satisfied by “optimal challenge” or “flow” • Also by subsequent expression of mastery—“mastery in action” • Sense of power
- 12. Bible software marketing appeals to mastery
- 13. Extrinsic rewards undermine intrinsic feelings of competence/mastery • Naive gamification converts intrinsic feeling of competence to an extrinsic one • Games have rewards of: • Access. Unlock a previously inaccessible area/feature • Facility. Increase player effectiveness (e.g., a new skill/weapon) • Sustenance. Reduce a negative play state (e.g., an extra life) • Glory. Quantifiable but don’t affect play state (e.g., badges) • Praise. Game verbally or textually saying, “Great job!” • Sensory feedback. Temporary visual/audio/tactile feedback (e.g., fireworks) Phillips 2018, eprints.qut.edu.au/119100/1/Cody_Phillips_Thesis.pdf Affect play (intrinsic) Don’t affect play (extrinsic)
- 14. Relatedness in PENS • “Desire to connect with others in a way that feels authentic and supportive” • In multiplayer games, can happen either with real people or with non- player characters (NPCs) • In single-player games, can happen with NPCs or outside of the game through forums or livestreaming
- 15. Relatedness in Bible software: public 1. Forums: TTFKJVO score 2. Social sharing: YouVersion reported over one million shares per day in 2018 YouVersion’s most-shared verse from 2018
- 16. Relatedness: YouVersion • Share your activity with friends • Directly communicate with friends • Up to 150 friends (Dunbar’s number)
- 17. Facilitating deeper relationships? • Proximity. Being close together to one another encourages frequent serendipitous interactions • Similarity. Players will generally be more likely to become friends if they perceive one another to be similar • Reciprocity. Players must engage in escalating back-and-forth interactions in order to negotiate shared social norms • Disclosure. At higher levels of friendship, there needs to be an opportunity for safe, consensual, intimate sharing of weaknesses Verbatim from www.lostgarden.com/2018/12/social-design-practices-for-human-scale.html
- 18. Bible software as NPC • Chatbot • Voice • AI
- 19. Autonomy in PENS • Not just freedom to do whatever you want, which can be overwhelming • A difficult interface can detract from autonomy because the player knows what they want to do but not how to do it • Think of autonomy as “volition,” or “wanting to do the things that you are doing”—you can willingly give up freedom in exchange for other goals, such as enjoyment Scott Rigby, youtu.be/3vct13OhIio
- 20. Autonomy in Bible software Logos Workflows YouVersion reading plans
- 21. Reading plans • Short form (63% a week or less, 90% a month or less) • Produced by a variety of organizations and distributed widely and freely • Often promote the sponsoring organization’s brand • In keeping with the times, almost entirely devotional, occasionally evangelistic • Short form (generally pamphlet- or booklet-sized) • Produced by a variety of organizations and distributed widely and freely • Often promote the sponsoring organization’s brand—but also often anonymous • In keeping with the times, 75% evangelistic—some devotional 1800s Gospel tracts Source: Mullen 2017
- 22. 2019 Bible software marketing Competence Relatedness Autonomy • Everything You Need to Study the Bible In-Depth and with Accuracy (Logos) • Better Tools (Accordance) • Faster Searches (Accordance) • Deeper Study (Accordance) • Study with the Resource Guide (Olive Tree) • Build your Bible Study Library (Olive Tree) • Make yourself at home. Your private groups, intimate fellowships, and biblical community now have a place to live online (Faithlife) • Uncover Biblical Truth for Yourself (Logos) • Customize Your Experience (Olive Tree) • Daily Reading Plans (Olive Tree)
- 23. Designing for agency • Means designing to support competence, relatedness, and autonomy across a wide audience • Bible software, in general, supports competence across a narrow audience: mostly male Christians in some kind of leadership role • This narrow focus limits the market for Bible software because it doesn’t support life as lived by most Christians
- 24. The Christian life as lived
- 25. Topic clustering Hierarchical Ward clustering in SciPy based on verse similarity
- 26. 80% of topics fall into this bucket: “human relationality;” i.e., relatedness
- 28. Self-worth cluster: terms • self worth • our worth to God • miscarriages • newborn baby • giving birth • God knew us before we were born • womb • being special • potential • the sanctity of life • stillborn babies • child sacrifice • when life begins • conception • being under construction • birth • bioethics
- 29. Ten verses consuming the most clusters 15.3% Jer 29:11 For I know the plans I have for you 6.4 John 3:16 For God so loved the world 6.0 1Cor 10:13 No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind 5.6 Eph 4:29 Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths 3.8 Prov 22:6 Start children off on the way they should go 3.6 1Cor 7:15 But if the unbeliever leaves, let it be so 3.4 Isa 41:10 So do not fear, for I am with you 2.9 Acts 20:35 It is more blessed to give than to receive 2.5 Gal 6:9 Let us not become weary in doing good 2.3 1Cor 6:19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit
- 32. Print version Main text in bold 152,000 translation options at 66,000 places Some options tagged “traditional” or “literal”; or is a different view or manuscript 900,000 possible verse translations (30x regular Bible)
- 33. Digital version • The Expanded Bible is actually a digital-native Bible that happened to be published in print; it should be interactive rather than static • Taking cues from interactive fiction games, the digital version requires you to translate the Bible text as you read it
- 35. Prototype interface: “lectio machina” • Requires active engagement; you slow down and consider which of the options is best. • Make a choice before proceeding: you have to choose from the existing options. • Can make global decisions like “Always use the literal translation” or “Use gender-inclusive alternatives.”
- 36. Live interface Competence. As you translate, you become more familiar with the text and the decisions that translators make. You feel like you get better as you go. Relatedness. Share your translation socially and with a small group. Autonomy. You have freedom to express yourself within constraints. It’s also enjoyable.
- 37. “Reward” for finishing a chapter • Custom audio recording (computer-generated) • Pre-recording the Bible 30x (2,100 hours) isn’t feasible • Text-to-speech is the only economically viable way to create an audio version of your translation • But you have to be happy with not much inflection, plus Jesus and his disciples visiting “Caper-nom” rather than Capernaum • $3,000 to create all possible permutations
- 38. Designing for agency • Consider features in light of competence, relatedness, and autonomy • Learn and design for what your users (and non-users) need and are already doing so that you don’t unintentionally exclude part of your potential audience
Notas do Editor
- What is agency? Published in January. Argues that theology has lost its influence over everyday Christians because doesn’t support the idea of a flourishing life; it’s an interesting book and has some parallels with the argument I’m making here about Bible software. In this book, agency represents the choices you make in love so that you can live a flourishing life. Their model suggests that the choices you make interrelate with how you’re feeling about your life and the circumstances in which you find yourself. I’m going to borrow part of this definition of agency.
- Video games offer a number of useful parallels to Bible software and provide a useful theoretical base because they’re both software, and a lot of people are thinking about how to make better games and how to make games that are better for people.
- Agency isn’t just people choosing to spend time with the Bible. Engagement is what Facebook uses. So let’s talk about what these needs are, starting with the abstract and becoming more concrete.
- People who genuinely believe their religion. In this presentation I’m talking about an intrinsic orientation because these are the people who want to grow in their Christian life. Extrinsic: if they’re popular at church, they want to go there because they’re popular, not because they actually want to go there.
- Nothing bad happens if you leave an idle game alone; it keeps playing itself. This is Universal Paperclips, where your job is to make paperclips, first one at a time and then exponentially more until you convert the entire mass of the universe into paperclips.
- We’ll define these needs as we go.
- Why are some games successful, and why do people find some games more fulfilling than others? Has decent empirical support that following this model leads to a better game across a variety of metrics. Not perfect but good enough to inform decision-making.
- Not too hard (frustrating) or too easy (boring). Applying what you’ve learned and creating a sense of satisfaction from that.
- These are how leading Bible software packages (Logos, Olive Tree, BibleWorks) portrayed themselves in the mid-2010s. Turn you into a Bible study superhero. The marketing appeals to a stereotypically male sense of power, which matched the 80-90% male userbase at the time. In other words, the rhetoric is tailored to the target audience.
- For me, adding a leaderboard demotivates me; it turns something I enjoyed for its own sake into a competition. Animal Crossing Pocket Camp fishing tournaments. Catch fish, feed them to a hungry beaver, gain furniture. Now I can see how many more fish my “friends” have caught and how much better they are than I am.
- People will find ways to connect with each other if they’re passionate about the same thing
- One Bible-translation-focused forum I checked had a TTFKJVO value of 33 posts. YouVersion reflects 80% of shares on Twitter that include a Bible website link. Sharing is one of the most-common activities on BG, with over 15% of visitors copy/pasting a verse.
- People you know or who are in your Facebook friend list (which is probably in part why they encourage you create an account using your Facebook login). Limited controls over highlights and bookmarks
- Really tough in Bible software to create a healthy community.
- Have a personal relationship with your Bible software.
- If you’re working on a sermon at 2am on Sunday because you have to deliver it in eight hours—which is actually quite common on BG—you’re not feeling autonomous because of the impending deadline. Like waiting in line to board your airplane vs. Disney World.
- Logos Workflows make it easier/more enjoyable to work through something you need to do. Does busywork for you so you can focus on higher-level tasks. Reading plans are a low-stress way to assuage your guilt about not reading your Bible.
- Reading plans are updated gospel tracts for the 21st century and, in keeping with the times—according to Barna, half of millennial evangelicals think it’s wrong to evangelize—have a devotional rather than an evangelistic focus. And since it’s in a Bible app, you’re probably already interested in the Bible. Outsource evangelism to an app? YouVersion reported 950 million reading plan days completed in 2018 from an install base of 350 million devices. ATS had distributed 37 million tracts by 1840 to a population of 11 million (Ayres 2012).
- Still heavy on competence, but not exclusively. Nothing about relatedness, at least in the top-level features.
- Support competence, relatedness, and autonomy in the Christian life as actually lived rather than how we as Bible software designers want it to be lived. Using data, let’s understand what people want from the Bible.
- Topical Bible, 70% US, probably heavily evangelical Christians. Start with 12,870 most-popular topics with high-quality verses (as determined by visitors), about 90% of total views. The merging process leaves 6,385 topics that have enough verse variety to overlap well with each other. The clustering process yields 3,732 topics in 198 clusters, or 75% of views; I wanted a manageable number for your handout and aimed for cluster sizes of between 5 and 40 topics. I then hand-arranged the 198 clusters into your handout. So the individual clusters (non-bold) have math behind them, but the larger groups and labels don’t.
- What they don’t want is systematic theology. About the human experience rather than abstract principles. But this is what existing Bible software users want. Book I mentioned earlier / academic theology. “What are the nature and properties of God” vs. “Should I eat shellfish”
- High-level groups. Me: things about myself that don’t directly involve other people. Others: things that involve other people, even if they’re about you. For example, hypocrisy appears here because you probably don’t think that you are yourself a hypocrite. Family: people you’re dating, married to, parents of, or children of. God and the Bible are the ones that most fall into typical theological questions: whether dance is appropriate for worship services, applied eschatology. Comfort could fall under Others, but it’s not clear whether it’s for you or for someone else. Social: social issues of the day, probably change over time. Often situationally dependent.
- 17 terms under comfort. Three clusters here: self worth, birth, and growth or potential.
- 52% of all clusters have at least one of these ten verses. Each verse consumes that cluster, so that it doesn’t count toward the totals for verses lower in the list. Variety of topics. Lack of Psalms. 1Cor shows up 3x. Only 1 gospel.
- Just as the topics people are interested in vary depending on circumstances, people’s motivations also vary. This is a separate model, still for games, that quantifies the different motivations that gamers have, in different proportions. Many have parallels in Bible software and even church life, aside from action. This model gets at a little more detail than high-level competence, relatedness, and autonomy.
- To get even more specific… Currently contains the core of what I’m about to describe. Grew out of a hackathon last October. Thanks to Keller Davis and Joe Carter.
- Published in 2011 by Thomas Nelson to compete with Amplified Bible, two months before HC’s acquisition of TN. Similar to Amplified Bible but more rigorous and consistent. But the complexity makes it a little overwhelming. Both word-level and concept-level translation alternatives.
- Interactive fiction game from 2014.
- Data preparation was the hard part, as always—source files were usually rigorous but not always; had to hand-review 1,200, or 5%, of the choice points.
- Also understanding the text better. You put your mastery into action. Experiencing the Bible in a way you wouldn’t be able to experience it in print.
- Tried to make rewards tied to the core experience rather than extrinsic. Still missing a number of features, like progress tracking. Entirely static; it saves your decisions to your local device but doesn’t persist them in the cloud, making them fragile.
- If you want to create a tool for users who are mostly interested in systematic theology, then that’s what you should do. But if you want to create a tool for a wide audience, it’s important to consider what their needs are and how to design for them to promote their agency.