Social Media: More on how points can be used to drive user behav. Posted by jeremyliew in business models, game mechanics, gaming, social media, social networks. Trackback I’ve posted in the past in praise of Amy Jo Kim’s principles of game design and in particular, the way that social media sites can use keeping score to drive the user behavior that they want. Last week Rajat Paharia, CEO of Bunchball, pointed me to an interesting NY Time’s article that gives further evidence that users will do more for points than they would otherwise. The article summarizes one case from a very interesting paper published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2005. Points can give people the illusion of advantage. The article describes an experiment where students were asked to do two tasks; one for a reward of a vanilla icecream and the other, slightly harder, for a pistachio icecream. A second group was asked to do the same two tasks, but instead were rewarded with points; 60 points for the easier task and 100 points for the harder task.
How can you use this? Why do gamers game? Posted by jeremyliew in game mechanics, gaming, mmorpg. Trackback In a post about how virtual worlds can engender real emotions, I mentioned Nick Yee’s paper The Demographics, Motivations, and Derived Experiences of Users of Massively Multi-User Online Graphical Environments. In it Nick extends on Bartle’s categorization of the four player types. In 1989-90, Bartle hypothesized that there were four player types, summarizing an active discussion thread among power users of a particular UK MUD (Multi-User Dungeon, text based precursors to MMORPGs). His long but amusing summary is below: …labelling the four player types abstracted, we get: achievers, explorers, socialisers and killers…i) Achievers regard points-gathering and rising in levels as their main goal, and all is ultimately subserviant to this.
Bartle notes that like all stereotypes, these categories don’t necessarily apply exactly to all individuals, but still have predictive power. What are game mechanics? The phrase “game mechanics” sends a pleasant shiver down my spine. At the heart of every game are these mysterious whirring clicking mechanisms that deliver to the player pleasure and thrills.
We use them, we build them, but I’ve never seen a good unified definition of game mechanics that gives us a practical base upon which to build great games. Here is one. It is clobbered together from a variety of influences though many of you will recognize some central tenets from ‘A Theory of Fun’ by Raph Koster. Game mechanics are rule based systems / simulations that facilitate and encourage a user to explore and learn the properties of their possibility space through the use of feedback mechanisms. It is a simple definition, but it offers a good amount of insight into why games work and how we can make them better. Feedback loopsCentral to the model is the concept of feedback loops that encourage learning. Player performs an action.The action causes an effect within the simulated game world. DICE 2010: "Design Outside the Box" Presentation Videos - G4tv.c.
How To Make Facebook, FedEx, And Amazon More Fun. Editor’s note: Should everything be a game? In this guest post, Gabe Zichermann argues that fun is good and that game mechanics will find their way into all sorts of products and businesses. Zichermann is the CEO of professional mobile social networking startup beamME and the co-author of the upcoming books “Game-Based Marketing” and “Funware in Action.” What if everything we did was a little more fun?
Ever since Foursquare burst onto the scene with its clever badges and simplified “mayoral” achievements, people have been going gaga for game mechanics (and Gaga videos, circumstantially). Its competitors and allies, from Gowalla and Yelp to Miso, Hot Potato and my own startup, beamME, have been evangelizing the value of points, badges, levels, challenges, leaderboards and achievements as an easy and powerful way to get consumers to engage with a product or service. This use of game mechanics outside of games—also known as Funware—is taking the social web and mobile apps world by storm. The Game-ified Life. [Translations: Japanese] You should watch this talk on the future of games by game designer Jesse Schell. It is the most mind-changing talk I’ve heard in many years. There were so many new ideas in it, and they went by so fast, that I have already watched it twice and will probably watch it once more.
It’s that kind of talk. I became a fan of Schell when I discovered his book The Art of Game Design which is not only the best book on designing games, but a great book about designing anything complex. (My full review of his book is here.) Schell begins his talk with very narrow concerns about Facebook games, which is not surprising since his audience here is other professional game designers.
In the second part of his talk he notices how many of these unexpected hit games have the common element of “breaking through the reality barrier.” It’s the last third of his talk where Schell really gets going. I bet there’ll be a movie based on this scenario soon enough. The New York Times > Log In.