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<h1 class="entry-title">Create a More Compelling Experience for Your Users Through Game Mechanics</h1>
<p class="meta">
<time datetime="2010-03-08T00:00:00-08:00" pubdate data-updated="true" >Mar 8<span>th</span>, 2010</time></p>
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<div class="entry-content"><p>Ever wonder why some websites are so addictive? Certain sites always keep you
going back, time after time after time. Well, I can’t speak for all of them,
but there’s a subtle reason that some sites draw your attention on such a
repeated basis: They’re actually games.</p>
<h2>Wait, games?</h2>
<p>Try a little thought experiment: If I say, “Yeah, he’s a ______ addict,” what
are the first few things that pop into your mind? For me, top two are “heroin”
and “World of Warcraft.” I’m not sure what that says about me as a person, but
ignore that for now. What makes these two things so addicting? Why are they
basically synonymous with the word “addict”? Lots of people smoke pot. Lots of
people play Call of Duty. Lots do both, and in copious amounts. So why don’t
they get the same label?</p>
<h2>Heroin: it’s a hell of a drug</h2>
<p>Yeah, that reference is to cocaine, another famously addictive substance. Oh
well.</p>
<p>Heroin is the poster child for addiction because it’s got a built-in viral
loop. That sentence sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. It’s very easy to start
out with, as it’s snorted. No scary needles or anything. You get high really
quickly, due to its chemical properties combined with the fact that your nose
is already close to your brain. It gives a really intense high that is also
fairly short. As you do it, you develop both a psychological addiction as well
as a tolerance. You simultaneously develop a deep desire for more of the drug
as you need a larger quantity of the drug to get the same high. Eventually, it
becomes more and more difficult, but you’re so addicted that you get over your
fear of needles and start mainlining.</p>
<p>World of Warcraft works the same way. It’s easy to try, as there are
mechanisms to invite your friends, and the system requirements are fairly low
for a video game. The first few quests are super easy, and so you hit that
quick reward. You get addicted to “Ding!” but it takes longer and longer every
time you do it. Eventually, you max out on levels and have to start doing
other things to get your fix. It may sound funny, but it’s absolutely true.
People talk about “relapsing.” They speak of “craving.” That’s why WoW has so
many subscribers.</p>
<h2>How to replicate this success</h2>
<p>I can’t guarantee that you’ll be able to make your site as addictive as heroin
is, but many sites use the same basic psychology to keep you coming back. Game
mechanics are one of the tools they use to develop that psychological
addiction. This is something we’ve been seeing more and more of lately, but it
isn’t really being talked about explicitly as a major trend. I really think
that this stuff is really important and useful.</p>
<p>There are a couple of different mechanisms that web sites can incorporate that
fall under the realm of “game mechanics:”</p>
<ul>
<li>Collectibles: <em>Any sort of item you can accumulate. Sometimes comes in “sets,” which are finite lists.</em></li>
<li>Points: A concrete number that lets you compare two people. </li>
<li>Levels: A target number of points, you gain the “level” when you go over that number.</li>
<li>Trophies: A special kind of level that’s unrelated to points. You get it for some other arbitrary reason.</li>
<li>Rankings: A place where you can go to see how many points, levels, and trophies others have</li>
<li>Tournaments: A competition between people.</li>
</ul>
<p>We’ve all heard these terms used in games. But in web sites? Okay, let’s try
those things again:</p>
<ul>
<li>Collectibles: Gowalla items. Facebook “Gifts”</li>
<li>Points: Twitter followers. Facebook friends. Number of feedbacks. Reddit Karma.</li>
<li>Levels: eBay “Power Sellers.” Foursquare “Super Users.”</li>
<li>Trophies: Badges, of any kind. “Achievements”</li>
<li>Rankings: FourSquare’s Leaderboard. Klout. Listorious. Hacker News’ top list.</li>
<li>Tournaments: I actually can’t come up with a good example of this. Thoughts?</li>
</ul>
<p>The same feedback loop happens on these websites. You say something
interesting on Twitter, you gain another follower or two. You say something
else, another follower. You check in, oh look, you’re the mayor! You sell an
extra hundred things and get your Power Seller discount.</p>
<p>That’s the hard stuff. It’ll get you hooked, and coming back for more.</p>
<h2>Where’s all of this going?</h2>
<p>This is the current stuff that’s being done with game mechanics. But where
could we go, in the future?</p>
<p>A while back, there was a huge debacle over ReadWriteWeb and Facebook connect.
To give you the basic idea, <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/">ReadWriteWeb</a> is a blog that talks about
everything Web2.0. They wrote an article entitled ”<a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php">Facebook Wants to be your
One True Login</a>.” Read the comments. Notice something funny? Due to some
Google magic, if you were to Google “Facebook login” the day that was posted,
that article would appear at the top under the “Google News” results. Now, RWW
uses Facebook Connect for their commenting system, and a ton of people
apparently don’t know how to use the Internet. So when they said, “Hey, I
think I’ll go to Facebook today,” they Googled “facebook login,” clicked the
news story, and went to RWW. They then ignored that RWW is a blog completely
covered in red that looks nothing like Facebook, scrolled until they found the
Facebook icon, clicked it, logged in, and then said “wtf, this isn’t my
facebook? Why’d they change the interface again???” This happened a week after
a middle-sized interface upgrade on Facebook, for extra hilarity.</p>
<p>Now, I won’t comment on those people or that situation directly. But one of my
favorite Hacker News posters, <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11">patio11</a>, posted <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1119186">a really interesting
comment</a> about the situation. I’m linking to the person he’s responding to,
for context:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>Pyre</em>: Facebook can’t improve their interface to make users not type
“facebook login” into Google as a way of accessing their site.</p>
<p><em>patio11</em>: That is a failure of the imagination. They certainly could –
whether it is worth doing or not is another question, but hey, that is what
God gave us A/B testing to figure out. </p>
<p>“Hey user, it looks like you came to us today from Google searching for
[Facebook login]. Did you know that there is a better way? Type
<a href="http://facebook.com">facebook.com</a> into [blah blah blah]. Try it now and we’ll give you 5 free
credits for [without loss of generality: FarmVille]!” </p>
<p>Great job! You should do that every time. If you do that to log into
Facebook the next five days you use the service, we’ll award you a Facebook
Diploma and give you another 10 free credits for [without loss of generality:
FarmVille]!” </p>
<p>On the back end, you show the above prompts to N% of your users who you
detect coming to the login page from Google search results (this is trivial –
check the referer). You then compare any user metric you want for the “Was
Shown Facebook Login Course” population and “Complete Facebook Login Course”
population with the population at large. Kill the test if it hurts your
metrics, deploy it sitewide if it helps them. </p></blockquote>
<p>How cool would that be? Now the game mechanics aren’t being used just to
increase engagement, but to actually teach people how to use your site or
service. It’s classical conditioning; reward people for doing the right thing,
and they’ll keep doing the right thing.</p>
<h2>Game mechanics are your MVP</h2>
<p>So how’s this stuff relevant to your startup? Well, I think this idea ties in
really well with the concept of a Minimum Viable Product. Here’s the idea:
Build your MVP, and then build game mechanics in. Unlock new features based on
game mechanics. This gives you a few advantages:</p>
<ol>
<li>Your new users only get the most basic experience, which is still useful. It’s a simplified, streamlined experience.</li>
<li>Users only get the new features added that are relevant to how they use the site itself.</li>
<li>You can “fake it till you make it” by implementing the features that are most useful to your users. Is everyone getting Badge A and not Badge B? Implement Feature A Level 2 first!</li>
</ol>
<p>I think that this makes for a really strong experience, if done right.
Foursquare kind of does this already in a crude way with their Super User
features. But I think it could be taken to a whole new level.</p>
<p>Think about this: Facebook, where you can only friend people, update your
profile, and send messages at first. Soon you unlock the ability to use
applications. Then the ability to create pages and groups. The interface
slowly unfolds in front of you. What about Reddit, where posting comments is
all you can do at first? A hundred upvotes gives you the ability to downvote.
Ten comments lets you post stories. (Hacker News sort of does this already,
with a minimum karma before downvoting is enabled.)</p>
<p>If you could pull it off, I think it’d make for a really compelling user
experience. It does bring one extra design skill that many people may not
have, though: balance. Game designers are used to this already, but your
potential “Power Users” might not like having to wait to get more advanced
features. Then again, this might also solve some issues, like spam. If you had
to have 100 positively moderated comments before posting a story on Digg, it’d
be much harder to just sign up for spam accounts to submit bogus stories.</p>
<p>This idea can be taken in a lot of different directions. I’m sure I’m only
barely scratching the surface with this idea, but I think it’ll go really far.
What do you think? Any interesting mechanics I’ve missed? Any really
interesting thoughts for how services can incorporate game mechanics? I’ve
decided to re-open comments, but if nobody uses them, I’ll just shut them off
again. Let me know what you think.</p>
<p>This post has been featured on the Startup Pittsburgh blog,
<a href="http://startuppittsburgh.com/2010/04/create-a-more-compelling-experience-for-your-users-through-game-mechanics/">here</a>.</p>
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<span class="byline author vcard">Posted by <span class="fn">Steve Klabnik</span></span>
<time datetime="2010-03-08T00:00:00-08:00" pubdate data-updated="true" >Mar 8<span>th</span>, 2010</time>
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