This year’s SXSW Interactive Conference was the largest yet, with the number of attendees surpassing both the Film and Music portions of the annual Austin event. One of the trends we 
noticed was panel discussions about game mechanics. It turns out the same principles that go into a great game are also very effective for engaging, retaining and building a community for your users.
Two panels that concentrated on this topic were led by Stephen Anderson, an Experience Design Strategist from Dallas, and Andy Baio, CTO of Kickstarter, based out of Portland, OR. Both panelists talked about the importance of creating goals for your user that align with your business goals and encourage users to follow a desired path and become more engaged. They also discussed the power of behavioral psychology, particularly in the form of feedback loops, loss aversion, collection impulse and even guilt. Some of the examples cited included:
Gowalla & Foursquare: Both of these apps have turned everyday life into a game where you can score points or deals, achieve new levels (you’re the Mayor of your local Starbucks!) and compete against peers. These apps have become stars in what some are calling the Badgefication of the Internet. Jesse Schell offered some almost-dystopian insights on the “real-life-as-a-game” concept at DICE 2010.
Amazon Mechanical Turk: This was an example used by Baio that didn’t seem obvious to me at first. Amazon Mechanical Turk utilizes a global network of people working on HITs, or Human Intelligence Tasks for businesses and developers.
Baio had used the service before for audio transcription, but felt weird about taking advantage of cheap labor from people whose demographics and status he knew nothing about. Was he contributing to child labor abuses overseas?
His solution? Use the Mechanical Turk to help him find out. He created a task where he paid people to take a picture of themselves with a description of why they do it. What did he find out? 75% of the people are in the United States, more than 50% have bachelor’s degrees and over 60% are female.
What surprised him, though, was the reason a third of the people gave for their participation in HITs. They did it for fun! He realized that they were actually approaching it socially, similar to an MMO. It offered them tests and tasks to accomplish, they liked communicating with other Turkers and their success was measured in cash.
The Obama Campaign: No administration has leveraged the power of the social internet like the current one. During the campaign, supporters were encouraged to participate more by having ranking systems where people could level-up and see how they compared to other supporters in their state.
What Makes a Good Game Experience?*
*This information is borrowed from Andy Baio’s presentation: Gaming the Crowd
Using Game Mechanics to Engage New Users
More and more online communities are leveraging gaming principles like feedback and goals to help guide new users through their site, making them feel more comfortable and connected to content. For example, LinkedIn provides metrics on your Profile Completeness and offers suggestions for what your next steps should be. Positioning a user’s profile in this way makes it seem more like a quest or mission rather than just filling out information.
On Mint.com’s dashboard, you’ll find this same concept applied to their Financial Fitness scoring system. It charts your personal financial fitness and provides a list of monthly tasks that will add to your Financial Fitness score. More central to the Mint model is how they display your monthly budget. At a glance, users can see where they are on budget (in the green), risk going over-budget (warning! yellow!) and where that shopping trip to Anthropologie, or picking up the tab for your friends when you went out for sushi put you over for the month (red, red, red!)
Ultimately, these kinds of principals can keep your users from feeling overwhelmed and give them incentive to stick around.
Building a Rich Online Community
While there are plenty of games that can be played solo, it’s always going to be more fun with other people involved. Community in games allows for opportunities to share, compete and achieve a level of prestige among your peers.
ThisNext is a social shopping site that leverages all the major concepts of game mechanics to build an enthusiastic global community. In exchange for things such as making quality recommendations on products, frequent contribution and reaching out to other members, a ThisNext user is rewarded with improved ranking among the community, giveaways for tagging content and ultimately prestige and VIP rewards. They even have the potential to become a Maven or an Expert Maven within the online community. What ThisNext has done is create a MMO-like system that doesn’t involve any great challenges, it just asks for a users time and commitment.
This same approach is what makes for some of the most successful Facebook apps (think Farmville or Flixster).
Game Fatigue
While applying gaming principles to interactive experiences can foster collaboration among your users or provide them with a sense of achievement, as these concepts become more popular in various user experiences, there’s a risk of burnout by users. If everything starts requiring a certain degree of time investment or carries a certain level of guilt over how much a user participates, then it could turn off users. So look closely at your business goals versus your users’ goals and figure out what makes the most sense.
Additional Resources