In the hyperconnected morass that is South by Southwest Interactive, it’s easy to get stuck in the “did I check-in/update/tweet about this panel/party/handshake” infinite loop. With a slew of new apps and sites to check out and an ABGC mindset – Always be Generating Content they say – it can get overwhelming.
But even when it does come time to put the smartphone down, it’s hard.
More and more we are seeing a better understanding of the psychology of motivation and incentive determining the functionality of popular websites, social applications, and online communities. By applying these insights, either borrowed from hugely-popular services or applied anew, developers are creating experiences that are difficult to step away from. Many have hit on the idea of using game mechanics to motivate action – the gamification of the Web.
Game mechanics can include things like points, rankings, badges or other incremental rewards for specific actions. Whether discussed as a larger trend or a specific instance, many panels, speakers and attendees at SXSW Interactive were buzzing about gamification.
Two speakers dealt heavily with gaming as a framework to motivate actions for the social good. Seth Priebatsch, founder of mobile check-in app SCVNGR, described a "game layer" in his keynote. Priebatsch sees a world in which we move beyond the “social layer” we codified last decade, building upon it a vast layer which taps into our individual motivations to encourage action through these game mechanics. If Facebook is the hub of the social layer, Priebatsch hopes SCVNGR is the basis of the game layer.
Similarly, author and game designer Dr. Jane McGonigle spoke to her book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, which analyzes how videogames entice players while making daunting tasks manageable while keeping them fulfilling. She spoke about the benefits of games in a broad way, but the motivators are the same: progression toward a goal, intermediate incentives and competition.
Both McGonigle and Priebatsch see the potential for these incentives to be repurposed for social good. But this isn’t what we’ve seen in practice. The past two years have featured the use of these motivators in a commercial capacity. During the next two this trend is sure to grow.
Game mechanics can create very sticky user experiences when implemented well. Foursquare is the obvious example. Its use of game mechanisms – awarding mayorships, passing out badges, and awarding checkin points – has inspired hundreds of millions of checkins and a 3400% rise in users just in the last year.
Sites like Reddit and Stack Overflow use karma or reputation points to incent valuable comments and additions. LinkedIn's oft-touted progress bar encourages people to add more to their profiles.
In Reddit, Stack Overflow and LinkedIn's cases, the game mechanics are applied narrowly to encourage a very specific activity. While Foursquare has had incredible growth, we’ve seen that recently the company has struggled to find a balance between being a geosocial game and a tool for exploration and making human connections.
This is the struggle many strategists and developers are likely to find themselves in as they try to apply game mechanics to their projects. Coming back from Austin with the gamification-high still tingling in your nostrils, it's tempting to start adding leaderboards to every community you're crafting.
Before you go and do that, consider these three things:
The mechanics need to reinforce the action. This is the hardest and most important piece of including gaming mechanics for your app, website or community. Are the mechanics reinforcing the connections or actions you want people to create or do? Under-implement the mechanics and they’ll feel tacked-on and superfluous. Overstress them and the gameplay can overshadow the primary motive of your campaign, starting a points-race among your users.
Don’t lie with implied rewards. As Evan Jones of Stitch Media points out in his great SXSW talk How Progress Bars Change the Way We Live, for all the simple genius behind LinkedIn’s profile completion progress bar, when you reach 100 percent nothing happens. When you have incremental movement toward an endpoint, like progress bars or rankings or levels, there is an unspoken pact with the user that the progress they are completing will result in some payoff in the end. Not providing one is using the game mechanics to in-essence lie to your users, promising something that never comes.
Part of winning is making others lose. If competition is part of your system, be careful not to turn off new users by allowing early adopters to run away with all the points. Make sure the ranking system you set up doesn’t allow for easy griefing. Foursquare keeps mayorships competitive by limiting each to two months of checkins. Think about a user months down the line, will he or she have an insurmountable barrier to entry?
Game mechanics can create the initial bonds to your community, but the experience must be more than just the game. We can bet that the next breakout online social experiences – whether via mobile, on the Web-based or otherwise – will feature them prominently.
What are your favorite examples of gamification? Any places you’ve seen it backfire?