Amy Jo Kim studied experimental psychology as an undergrad, received a Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Washington, and now (among many other things) teaches game design at USC. Her session at ETech was called “Putting the Fun in Functional” and focused on the mechanics of game design and how these concepts can be extended to other non-game systems and applications.
Kim discussed five key mechanics of game design, why they are important and powerful, and examined examples of how they can be used in other settings. The five game mechanics discussed were collectiing things, earning points, providing feedback, exchanges, and cusomization.
Many of these mechanics speak to very primal response patterns inside the human psyche, which is why they can be so powerful. Another key point is that games are designed to be fun and engaging, and whenever you can make any system or appliation more fun you’ll likely improve the user experience and get them using the system more regularly and for longer times.
Collecting is the act of amassing stuff and showing others all your stuff. It is a very primal behavior in humans, and impressive collections give the collector legitimate bragging rights. Some non-game examples of applications that include collecting are flickr, MySpace, and WOW. Kim pointed out that parents, especially of young boys, have probably seen this dynamic at work in the various card collecting games that are popular now. (As a parent of a 10-year-old boy I can definitely back that up!).
There is also a lot of power in the idea of “completing a set”. When people have been collecting something and they only have a few more items to collect to complete a set they will work very hard on getting those last few items. Kim pointed to the Pokemon craze as a good example of this concept, where their slogan is “Gotta Catch Them All!”
Earning points is the basic way that most games keep score, but this mechanic can also be extended to other kinds of applications. eBay is an example of a non-game setting where earning points is a key part of the experience. Kim called these “social points” and noted that it is fun and compelling to accumulate these kind of points. Not to mention that it improves one’s standing in eBay and is a necessary ingredient to having success in eBay.
Social points are points that are given by the users, not the application or game. Besides eBay, other user rating systems like those at YouTube and MySpace fall into this category as well.
Another kind of point earning that Kim noted was very powerful are redeemable points, along the lines of the old S&H Green stamps model. Modern examples are frequent flyer miles and the drugstore.com dollars you earn when you make purchases on drugstore.com. Kim pointed out that users will feel better about using your system and less like they’re wasting their time if they get something redeemable out of the experience. And this applies especially to women, which according to Kim are more concerned than men with whether they are wasting time. (For example far fewer women will spend hours playing a game, partly for this reason).
Once you have a mechanism for giving users points you can then build things like leaderboards and levels, which are based on point accumulations. Leaderboards and levels tap into our competitive drive, and levels in particular are useful for punctuating a user’s experience and can reduce the repetitive nature of some tasks. A non-online example of levels is how karate belts are awarded. Among other things, levels can make it easy to quickly access status and allow unlocking of specific powers, features, or access.
Feedback is an extremely important mechanism for engaging users, and something that games have gotten pretty sophisticated in providing. Feedback can accelerate mastery and make an experience more fun and compelling. Kim noted that one of the advantages of the various AJAX applications that are becoming popular is that they feel more fun to use than the previous web page model, mainly due to the improved feedback they provide. MySpace is an example of a non-game application that gives lots of feedback, including notifications on messages, comments, and just about anything that goes on there.
Exchanges are a structured social interaction, like taking turns or gifting something to others, and can be either implicit or explicit. Taking turns in a chess game or trading is an explicit type of exchange, whereas providing feedback on a eBay user or gifting is an implicit type of exchange.
Kim spoke a lot about the gifting which she said is a very powerful type of social exchange. When someone receives something as a gift there is usually a very strong desire to return the favor. Kim suggested that is developers wanted to create interesting social interaction spaces that implementing a gifting scheme would be a very good idea.
MySpace has both explicit and implicit exchanges. The Add a Friend feature is an explicit exchange because it requires a response and an agreement, whereas the Commenting feature is an implicit exchange as there is no requirement for a user to comment back to someone who comments on their MySpace page.
The last game mechanic Kim discussed was customization. Allowing users to customize their experience, or doing it for them, can increase their investment in the system and create a barrier to exist. Kim noted how their were several news aggregation sites she liked, but once she could customize her Google page it was a strong incentive for her to always use Google News because the interface included other things she had personalized for her own interests.
Kim distinguished between the automatic type of customization that a site like Amazon does, which has proven to be very helpful and effective for its users, and personalization that is achieved by the user having to specify things, like the way one sets up a MyYahoo or a Google home page. Both methods can make the user experience more fun and engaging and personal.
MySpace was again held up as an example of a non-game site that incorporates this mechanic as it allows for a great amount of cusomization. (Noticing a trend here?) Kim commented that while MySpace gets knocked regularly for how ugly and busy its pages are, that’s not a particulalry important issue for its particular demographic, but the ability to totally customize their MySpace experience is. “MySpace reminds me of walking into a teenager’s bedroom,” noted Kim.
Kim concluded by pointing out that MySpace has successfully implemented all five of the game mechanics she discussed and this is probably one of the reasons it’s had such runaway success. Developers working on social systems would do well to keep these basic mechanics in mind, and adding them to an application can help make it more fun and engaging, and who wouldn’t want that?
