ETech07: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software

Amy Jo Kim of ShuffleBrain gave an excellent tutorial on ... Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software. She is also the author of the book Community Building on the Web.

First, she emphasized thinking of the user as a player and participant, not just a user. She started with a few definitions of the word game and settled on "a structured experience with rules and goals that's fun". For example, ebay and flickr can be viewed as a game in this definition.

Why are games good at driving behavior? Because well designed games are fun to play and it is a basic human need to have fun and play. The best designed games enable a player to engage in flow - "...an experience that is at once demanding and rewarding--an experience that ... is one of the most enjoyable and valuable experiences a person can have" (from an Amazon review).

What are game mechanics? Features that engage a player, or make a game fun and compelling. The five basic components of games mechanics are collecting, points, feedback, exchanges and customization.

We all collect things (I can't help but think of George Carlin's A Place for My Stuff, Skit). Giving the player the ability to collect things and enabling them to show their collection gives the player "bragging rights"; it can also encourage them to complete a set if the possible contents are predefined, e.g., baseball cards, or habbohotel cards.

Points are common to most games but are better when you can "redeem" them for something, e.g., a discount coupon, frequent flyer miles, better support (ebay), etc... Once you have a point-system you can create leaderboards, like at youTube. But choose your leaderboard with care, what is displayed will express your sites values (which might not be what you hoped), and it will be gamed by some players. One way around this is to have multiple leaderboards (most viewed, most comments, highest rated, etc...) or even statistical ranking leaderboards (flick explore) that are harder to game. Also, points enable you to have levels, which are really just categories for accumulated points, and are better when rewarded for being attained, for example, ebay has a star/color levels. In role playing games they usually unlock new powers. They do the same on many social sites, for example, on ebay one can become a power seller once you get enough good ratings. Even credit card companies do this, the more you buy and the better customer you are, the faster your phone calls are answered.

Feedback helps players learn to master the skills needed to play on the site and it should make the site more fun -- it should make mundane tasks fun.

The ability for exchanges (structured social interactions) between players should be available whether the exchanges come about due to explicit rules (like chess) or implicitly (commenting on each others photos on flickr).

Players should have the ability to customize, it increases investment by the player. A mySpace user home page is a great example of customization as are second life characters.

Related article: The Core of Fun: Ralph Koster.

Related blog posts: google, technorati.