How FarmVille Designs for Engagement
philmichaelson.com
philmichaelson.com
* give you karma just for stopping by each day
* give you karma for upvoting other's posts
* give you profiles you could customize by trading in karma
* show you what your friends were upvoting and their Karma
* show you how close you were to attaining moderator status
* allow you to give one virtual gift per day to your favorite contributors
* have your karma decline if you don't stop by in a week
On HN, karma is earned much more rapidly by "skilled" users, even though to get a high karma you must use the site often. Taking this away would rob HN of its most valuable asset -- karma encourages "skilled" users to post insightful comments.
Video games should expand upon what we are capable of. Reward structures and timed events are fine to a degree, but Zynga goes too far. This kind of manipulation needs to be addressed, especially as games become more and more thoroughly integrated with our society.
I am not so sure it's that simple. The real challenge imho is to show how to get critical mass. Not to talk about how you optimize once you have it.
Does anyone know exactly the reason why farmville became popular, cause somehow I think it's not about those 8 principles?
This history of FarmVille implies it was better game mechanics than Farm Town, and Zynga's installed base, that lead to FarmVille's success: http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/01/farmville-history/.
I'd also hypothesize that Zynga grew because they:
* Had a working revenue model, so they could pay for advertising without burning cash. And being able to advertise in the place where someone plays is helpful for conversions.
* Built on a growing platform (i.e., Facebook)
I've been collecting some links to presentations and posts on designing for engagement. See the list here: http://www.kartme.com/phil/web-design
http://www.gamesbrief.com/2009/09/six-secrets-of-farmvilles-...
(HN and SO are similar in this way. You randomly get karma points, which mean people like you, and so you keep checking your threads page to see how much karma you've gotten since you've last looked. Same goes for replies. If there was no karma or no threads page, I bet HN wouldn't have any users.)
Oddly, it was at the point where I had more adventures in a day than I had time to use (and therefore started loosing them) was the point that I started to loose interest.
Super Mario Bros.
Think of the "levels" of achievement:
1) On the smallest level, you kill small enemies, get a "big" mushroom. You get points, and your environment changes.
2) On the next level, you collect coins. 100 means an extra life.
3) Then you beat the sub-levels, 1-1, 1-2, 1-3
4) Finally you beat a "boss" and go to the next "World" to 2-1, 2-1
5) Beat 8 "Worlds" and the "big boss" and you beat the game.
6) Advanced players will compete for the best times, try to create fireworks over the castles, find warp zones, or max out their points.
The key is in progressive achievements and always wanting more. You create a sense of urgency or need and you have someone in the palm of your hand.
Business is no different. I just upgraded my Basecamp account so I could add the "Time" module. I'm on World 2 now.
http://www.vizworld.com/2010/02/jesse-schells-dice-2010-pres...
But help me understand a little better. I don't see designing more compelling gameplay as being a markedly different goal than more compelling musicianship, more compelling novel-writing or more compelling filmmaking. What's your perspective?
I said Blizzard was Too Successful in that WoW achieves profitability to the detriment of fiendish players, many of whom waste untold hours of what would otherwise be productive time. He, being an almost pure libertarian, disagreed with all too familiar logic: "it's not my fault they get addicted", etc.
I then asked him if he would sell drugs, and he responded that he already had. So, regardless of perspective, it is pretty easy to see where these arguments lead; that is, down the slippery slope and out to the extremes as one tries to justify their position.
The Too Successful argument is really a difficult one to draw out moral content from. There have existed people who lose themselves in games (among other things) to the detriment of their "real life" from way back. Forgive me for dredging this up:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=YswmAAAAIBAJ&sjid=K...
So that's the question that has to be answered -- if there have been 500 billion hours of WoW played (just my random guess) in the last five years and 500 million hours of Rubik's Cube played in the 80's, is Ernö Rubik also equivalent to a drug dealer, just in smaller proportions? Finally, maybe WoW is keeping guys from even less productive internet addictions, like, say, editing TV Tropes.
So I think I need to understand the moral line drawn in the too-successful argument. Because otherwise I just see WoW as the current bête noire analogous to any other popular diversion, like video arcades were 20 or 30 years ago. Is there a substantive difference, or is it merely quantitative?
Now the argument that does resound with me, as well as most game designers I know, is that designers are making gameplay that basically abuses the player without enhancing their experience of the game.
Some people have pointed at the simplicity of the gameplay in WoW (i.e. questing is too easy) and said that it's abusive to make simple gameplay compelling. I personally find this bizarre. Abusive gameplay is an area where I hold Valve, Blizzard, PopCap and others fairly blameless. That's not entirely surprising for one reason: their customers pay for the game. A fine player experience is what they hope will create more customers.
With many social gaming experiences, players have come to expect abuse, which is a crying shame. That they will be tantalized, guilted, used to spam their friends, inconvenienced and annoyed. Is any of that core to the game itself? No, the proof being that in most cases if you pay, it goes away. It's beyond just breaching the editorial wall -- the lame way that marketing is integrated into gameplay is what makes pro game designers howl with disgust.
P.S. Anyone interested in investing in a startup that breaks social gaming out of these shackles, please email.