Relatedness
The need to feel connected to other people — seen, appreciated, in service of something with peers.
Ethics layer
Self-Determination Theory at work.
We believe motivation works best when it comes from within. Every Hatched widget, ceremony, and nudge is designed to feed Relatedness, Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose — Deci & Ryan’s three basic needs, translated into product language and paired with the Purpose layer RAMP teams expect. We don’t make your employees feel dumb. We don’t punish absence. We don’t manufacture FOMO.
Why Self-Determination Theory?
Edward Deci and Richard Ryan spent forty years showing that humans are intrinsically motivated when three psychological needs are met: relatedness (to other people), autonomy (over one’s actions), and competence (the Mastery axis in our product language). Daniel Pink popularised purpose as the long-arc counterpart in Drive (2009). The combined frame — sometimes shorthanded RAMP — is one of the best-supported ways to defend a motivation design.
Single-framework gamification platforms tend to ignore SDT because it constrains the design space. RAMP says you cannot keep a workforce engaged by stacking points on rewards forever — the extrinsic loop wears thin, and worse, it can erode the intrinsic motivation that was already there. That last finding is the Overjustification effect (Lepper, Greene & Nisbett, 1973). It is also why Hatched ships ethics rails by default.
For an HR or wellness buyer the practical version of this is simpler: choose a system you can defend in a Tuesday-morning meeting. RAMP is that defence — peer-reviewed, replicated across cultures, and explicitly opposed to manipulative dark patterns.
How Hatched feeds each need
Registry-backed feature surfaces declare which RAMP axis they primarily feed. The Planner Overview surfaces this as a four-axis radar — so you can see at a glance whether your config leans extrinsic (left brain) or intrinsic (right brain).
Autonomy
Control over your actions and the way you express yourself — meaningful choice, opt-in everything, no forced loops.
Mastery
Getting better at something that matters to you — visible progress, fair criteria, an in-widget tutorial when you’re new.
Purpose
Belonging to something bigger than the score — tenant mission, contribution, identity that carries between sessions.
The Overjustification warning we ship
When the Planner left/right brain bar reads extrinsic above 70 %, Hatched flags the config: “Overjustification risk — your gamification is heavily extrinsic. If your users are already intrinsically motivated, this may *reduce* their engagement.” The warning links straight to the Autonomy and Mastery surfaces (Marketplace Dress, Build-From-Scratch onboarding, in-widget tutorials) so the fix is one click away.
Marketing copy, the RAMP way — Kudos worked example
The Planner can turn a feature’s RAMP profile into a five-row copy seed buyers can adapt for their own product. Here’s the one we use for Kudos — concrete, low-tone, anchored on a single RAMP need.
Kudos — Recognition That Doesn’t Feel Cheap
- For your users
- A simple way to thank a teammate, and a quiet way to feel seen.
- Powered by
- Relatedness. (And a touch of Purpose, when tied to your mission.)
- How it works
- Any user can send up to 5 kudos per day, in your taxonomy. Recipients see their thanks in a Trophy Shelf — no score, no leaderboard.
- Why we built it this way
- Kudos respects clause #3 of our Ethics Pledge — no negative norms, no gamification of gratitude. Built on Self-Determination Theory’s Relatedness need.
Where RAMP fits in the Hatched stack
We use RAMP for ethics framing and the narrative voice. We use Octalysis for design audit and the radar that catches black-hat creep, Hexad for player-type segmentation, Werbach 6D as the onboarding wizard, MDA as the engineering architecture spine, and Fogg + Hook as the per-feature behaviour contract. Six frameworks, one coherent system.
Stop picking frameworks. Pick what to build.
The 6D wizard takes ten minutes — and pre-populates the Planner with the features that match your objectives, players, and culture.