warming the kiln…
Audit layer
Octalysis is one of the most comprehensive maps a gamification designer can carry — eight Core Drives, white-hat / black-hat polarity, left-brain / right-brain split, four experience phases. Hatched ships it as an audit lens, not as a marketing pitch. Configured feature surfaces declare CD weights; the Planner Design Audit tab renders the live radar; cross-framework drift checks fail PRs that lean black-hat without an opt-in pairing. The audit is the product feature — Octalysis is the lens.
Yu-kai Chou published the first version of Octalysis in 2013 and the full book — Actionable Gamification — in 2015. The framework's reach is unusual for a gamification model: the radar diagram is recognisable to many practitioners, and the model gives teams a shared vocabulary for eight Core Drives, two polarities (white-hat / black-hat), two hemispheres (left / right brain), and four experience phases.
That same reach is why Octalysis is risky as the *headline* framework. CIOs and HR buyers may have heard of it, and some have also heard the criticism: black-hat designs that talk about Loss Aversion and Scarcity without an ethics layer can create manipulative pressure. RAMP / SDT and Werbach 6D are the safer headlines because their academic anchor is unambiguous.
So Hatched uses Octalysis the way a senior engineer uses a profiler: never the headline of the demo, always the page you open to defend a design. The Planner Design Audit tab renders the live 8-CD radar from declared feature weights; the hat bar surfaces black-hat creep; the Octalysis ↔ Hexad mapping table feeds the cross-framework drift checks. The framework gets to be precise without having to be the slogan.
Octalysis's eight Core Drives, normalised 0–10. A healthy configuration sits above Yu-kai's 60+ working threshold; this sample is at 53 and still leans white-hat.
Octalysis is not where buyers land first — it's where we go when we have to defend a design. The three surfaces below are how that defence is built into the product.
Planner → Design Audit tab
Every active feature's `cd_weights` aggregate into a tenant-wide radar. Yu-kai's working threshold (60+ across all eight axes) shows as a green band; thin coverage on any axis raises a recommendation card.
Planner → Design Audit tab
White-hat / black-hat balance and left-brain / right-brain balance render as horizontal bars. Cross 70 % on either extrinsic side and the Overjustification banner surfaces with one-click links to Autonomy and Mastery features.
apps/api/test/framework-meta-invariants.e2e-spec.ts
Two invariants are enforced on every PR. `primary_core_drive` must equal the argmax of `cd_weights` — no "primary" claims that don't survive a sort. Any feature with `hat_mode: 'black'` must declare a `paired_white_hat_event` — Yu-kai chapter 14, encoded.
Each Hexad player type resolves into a primary and secondary pair of Octalysis Core Drives. This mapping is the bridge that lets the same registry feed both the audience tab and the design-audit radar — and the drift checks fail PRs that contradict the table.
Achiever
Primary CD: CD2 + CD4 · Secondary CD: CD6
Development & Accomplishment + Ownership. Scarcity reads as a badge-rarity hunting cue.
Philanthropist
Primary CD: CD1 + CD5 · Secondary CD: CD4
Epic Meaning + Social Influence. Gifting reads as giving from your own balance — Ownership.
Socialiser
Primary CD: CD5 · Secondary CD: CD1 + CD4
Social Influence dominates; shared identity layers Epic Meaning and Ownership on top.
Free Spirit
Primary CD: CD3 · Secondary CD: CD7 + CD4
Empowerment of Creativity. Customisation collects Unpredictability and Ownership as it goes.
Player
Primary CD: CD4 + CD6 · Secondary CD: CD2 + CD8
Ownership + Scarcity (extrinsic rewards). Accomplishment and Loss-Avoidance round out the loop.
Disruptor
Primary CD: CD7 · Secondary CD: CD3
Unpredictability + Curiosity. Disruptors test the limits of the system; CD3 is the creative tail.
Octalysis is the audit lens — never the headline. We use RAMP for the ethics framing, Hexad for player-type segmentation, Werbach 6D as the onboarding wizard, MDA for the engineering architecture spine, and Fogg + Hook for the per-feature behaviour contract. Six frameworks, one coherent system — and Octalysis is the one that catches all the others before they ship.
The 6D wizard takes ten minutes — and pre-populates the Planner with the features that match your objectives, players, and culture.