Gamification in general

[neslihanturan]

Summary:

It seems like for long time we are planning to add some gamification to our app. And currently it is almost happening. So, I think it is good time to organize gamification.

Accesibility:

• I think adding separate items to navigation menu would look too complicated. Instead we can add an item for gamification in general. Under that item user can access to all fun stuff, example mockup:
  
• Also, it would be great if user can access to game via related activities. Ie. accessing review game via browse, featured and pic of the day activity, accessing statistics via contributions activity or accessing nearby game via nearby activity.

UI:
I think we can do some experimental things since it is gamification and should be fun. Ie. using different colors from same color palette for each game, using more informal language, using more animations etc. But another important point each of them should feel common. They should have some common UI elements.

Functionality:
As I mentioned under accessibility, they should be compatible with other activities (like using share activity on share from nearby)

What do you think?

[misaochan]

Interesting suggestion! My initial thoughts on gamification was that it should be organically woven into existing features/activities, rather than a whole new "Play" activity. For instance, statistics/badges would be viewed via an icon (maybe trophy icon?) next to the username, review would be integrated into the "Browse" activity... and we don't have a Nearby game just yet, but if we did I would personally prefer it to just be integrated into Nearby. :)

Is there any benefit to a separate "Play" activity per se? My thought was that integrating it into existing activities would feel more "natural" to the user, and also prevent unnecessary duplication.

Perhaps in the future if we actually come up with a Pokemon Go-esque game, then a separate activity would be warranted IMO.

[neslihanturan]

I can say several reasons to separate it.

• Increasing accessibility and emphasizing that you can have fun and improve the knowledge makes our games more attractive. For a user who rarely uses nearby activity, it can be very hard to discover our nearby game (I mean our nearby game in future:)). But I think pretty much everyone would discover all games when they are together. So separate nav menu item can increase discoverability
• I sometimes confused while using complex apps to find paths to go an activity. I think user should be able to access via related activities and separate games activity, both. It is simpler
• Some games are also playable without related activity. Such as peer review, it is still playable without exploring images. And user can prefer to play it with random images.
• And categorizing makes our purpose more understandable. Like these are our main features, you can upload or check notifications etc. But these (games) are good when you have time and want to improve knowledge.
• Switching between games should be fast. It is time consuming to go related activity and then start to play, when you get bored go other related activity and play other game.

[nicolas-raoul]

I think what we have currently in development is "light gamification", which means making normal tasks a bit more fun, and giving some positive feedback.

After we implement several games, such a screen would be nice indeed.

Some people may object to the use of the term "game". Here is a famous precedent though: https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-game/distributed/

[misaochan]

Thanks for the explanation, @neslihanturan . I guess my concern is that our navigation drawer, and also the app itself, is already getting very cluttered. We will soon be adding "Browse" to our nav drawer (which can hopefully be united with Featured and Review). This means we have 9 nav drawer items (in the best case scenario), and with "Play" there will be 10. I guess I personally feel that would be warranted if there was an actual game to play, but not with our existing features, which are pretty much just statistics and reviews.

[misaochan]

Now that we have "light" gamification in place (i.e. Achievements), I think it may be worth considering how we can ramp this up a bit. From https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:Project/Commons_app/Commons_Android_app_v3#Nearby_places_that_need_photos , a suggestion that I got was to have some goals (e.g. "take a photo of your commute to work", or "take a photo of a vegetable dish from your country", etc) that change every day or every week. We could have achievements or badges for completion of these goals, or for goal-completion streaks. The WoW player in me would call them "weekly/daily quests". ;)

This would likely require some server-side implementation however.