There are two general approaches that I have noticed again and again in discussions of education MMOs (and there are still far more discussions than produced, playable education MMOs):

• Take educational curriculum and put it into the visual and experiential language of MMO video games (often with a comic book or cartoon derived art style)
• Take existing MMOs and create educational curriculum to facilitate the use of these existing MMOs in classroom activities

I think that both approaches completely miss the beneficial points of applying MMO game thinking to real-world education. This article will elaborate a bit on areas that I think should get less emphasis in educational MMO designs (relative to the emphasis they currently enjoy), and some neglected aspects of MMOs that I believe are far more important to make a successful educational MMO.

What Makes MMOs Immersive and Motivating?

Educational MMO makers tend to emphasize only the superficial qualities of commercial MMOs:

• Fun Graphics – The thinking here is that if you make the educational material look like a cartoon, comic book, or popular video game, you will suck the player into the experience before they realize it’s nothing more than a textbook hussied up in games’ clothing. Problem here is that this is the exact same philosophy used by other “geniuses” like Chick tracts (I’m sure comics about Jesus and hellfire handed out to kids at heavy metal concerts really do wonders to convert jaded youth to a new religion). Chick tracts do get read… but they often also get made fun of and dismissed completely. They don’t have the desired effect of communicating the message of Christ most of the time, and a game MMO that only tries to wrap the textbook learning in a veneer of gamification is also going to give misleading results as well: people will play it, and maybe even enjoy it, but they might not learn any better than if they’d just been given a more cost-effective textbook or video format. Attention grabbing aesthetics are only a small part of what makes MMOs popular (and sometimes visuals aren’t even important… just look at the success of Kingdom of Loathing, a great game, and Runescape, a…nother game). Also, too much focus on style over substance and solid teaching runs the risk of the medium distorting or dilluting the message, as seemed to happen with Evoke.
• Any Kind of Interactivity – Too often this means you can move around, click things, and otherwise manipulate a graphical user interface. A textbook where you click from page to page is still just a textbook with hyperlinks. Sometimes there are story elements or mini-game challenges that must be fulfilled to get to the next node in the linear learning path, but that type of play is still a world away from the experience of a successful MMO like World of Warcraft or Happy Farms. Real decision-making, self-directed exploration, achievements and goals chosen to impress the player’s actual friends, and mastery experimentation (trying to figure out optimal ways of doing things better, faster, etc.) are seldom emphasized even though these are the real-world fuels that fire MMO player activity… not the mere fact that you can click and move around preset points of interest in a virtual world. There is NO additional benefit to standing in an overpriced 3D virtual world and clicking on a premade dialog so that you can watch a native woman grinding corn in a 3 second animation loop, compared to spending 3 seconds looking passively at a photograph of a woman grinding corn in a textbook, okay? If I see one more really crappy edu MMO design for “bringing history to life by immersing players in a 3D recreation of <historical period>” I will shit a laser chicken.
• Classroom Integration – Keep the game digestible inside the limited class time available, and help teachers integrate the new world of MMO learning into their extremely old-fashioned classroom-based teaching methods. The bell rings at the end of the day, kids go home, and any potential passion for a classroom MMO is squelched by the reality that you can’t keep progressing on your own and lack any real autonomy or self-direction in the game. The game is the more the school’s and the teacher’s than the student’s in most cases. College courses utilizing very diverse open-ended platforms like Second Life have been a strong exception to this particular problem (I’ve seen wonderful presentations by students and faculty who all learned so much together in relatively open-ended SL-based class activities). But seriously, if your game isn’t online and available to students from home, and if said students never voluntarily login outside of class hours… then you’re probably kidding yourself that the game is intrinsically engaging.

What I think is really important about MMOs for education, and what I would focus on if I were designing an educational MMO experience of any kind:

• Empowerment – Players in MMOs should feel like they are charting their own destiny. Successful MMORPGs let you choose to play (that right there is a big deal… work is something you are obligated to complete, play is purely optional). Then they let you choose your class, your skills, your talents, your quests, your play style, and your goals. Even simpler MMOs like farm games let people decide what to plant, who to steal from, which friends to help or hinder, and more.

Beyond the intrinsic gameplay rules, there is nobody telling you what to do; contrast that with a classroom-centric MMO design with a teacher telling the student to get back on task and finish the next class objective when they decide to try a different task, experiment with the game systems just to see what happens, or to chat with friends whilst jumping in circles for 10 minutes until their natural motivation sends them onto the next game challenge.

In many educational MMOs there is a ridiculous amount of linear design and everyone is on rails so that a whole group can progress in a generic, standardized way that mirrors the generic, standardized educational systems in most mainstream schools (yeah, I’m a little biased against mainstream classroom teaching techniques; that’s why my kids go to Connections Academy, a truly personalized school experience that helps kids play to their individual strengths and interests). These teacher-centric patterns of engagement defeat some of the most important elements of MMO design that give players an addictive sense of autonomy and personal power.

• Timeliness – MMOs are there for players when players are in the mood to play. The superiority of any educational resource that can be accessed when and if a person is in a state conducive to learn cannot be stressed enough. This is why I generally think educational MMOs are going to really take off targeting adult sectors, like knowledge workers. Kids’ limited school time is simply too valuable to risk on untested new learning techniques (and teachers are already stressed with the limitations and challenges of mainstream classroom teaching so there is little incentive to try something new and risk lower performance on standardized tests, etc.). However, adults can decide for themselves how to spend their educational time, without government mandated “standards” and other legal obligations obscuring what is best for each individual learner.

Also, adults are now facing continuing educational demands that no other generation has faced (it used to be that you just learned on the job through something like an apprenticeship or family business, then higher learning cropped up and we got the college system of today with undergraduate and graduate degrees… but those things are now becoming obsolete as the pace of change necessitates continual adult learning, not just 4, 6, or 8 years of post-secondary education). In the future, I see a world where adults don’t just pursue a degree program then call it quits—they subscribe to online colleges for most of their working lives (but with options to meet in shared, multi-college, classroom and lab space in the physical world). Online study becomes a continuous, self-directed process, not unlike the ongoing challenges of a typical MMORPG, except the character is you and the challenge is to develop your real-world knowledge and career (this is the type of educational MMO I’m pitching right now… will let you know if anyone bites).

• Incentives – Whether they are based on social status or extrinsic rewards like cool mounts and new gear, MMOs are fantastic at creating compelling reward systems that make players genuinely want to achieve the goals modeled by the game system.

For example, I’m attending online business school right now, and I’m training pretty heavily to improve my arena rank on my main WOW character. For college, I’m doing the readings and whatever assignments and discussion is required to get my full points, but nothing more than that. For WOW, I’m doing the minimum in-game PVP to actually try to increase my skills, AND I’m searching for new information online, reading supplemental resources, watching player videos, and practicing in battlegrounds that don’t contribute directly to my arena ranking. It’s certainly not because I care more about WOW than I care about my business education, but the incentives in the WOW activities are a hell of a lot more gratifying today (and we all have a tendency to prefer action that rewards us now versus action that rewards us far in the future). If I were learning about a real-world, work-applicable skill with the more effective WOW-style reward system, I could see myself spending the same amount of voluntary time and enthusiasm on what would otherwise be a boring grind (like studying for any CompTIA certification, no offense to their curriculum developers).

However, part of why MMO incentives work so well in MMORPG games is that the player has a ton of autonomy to decide which incentives appeal to them. Once you put the player on the rails and tell them what their goals are, you significantly reduce the emotional pull of the incentives (and you reduce the likelihood that the incentives play into the social status that matters to an individual and their peers). Imagine if all of the raiders in WOW were told they needed a minimum PVP arena score to pass the “PVP module” of their WOW experience, and that’s pretty much the magic-busting effect that I think most education MMOs have when they tell a group of players that they all have identical, rather than parallel or complimentary optional goals in an educational game. As an added bonus, if you have different groups of players working on different self-selected goals in the game, then you have opportunities to design challenges for “cross-functional” teams that draw on unique strengths and abilities between players (that the players hopefully were able to tailor to their own preferences and self-concepts). To really work the MMO magic, I think that strategic incentives can be dictated by teachers/curriculum, but that tactical incentives need to be chosen by players.

• Deep Personalization – Speaking of player preferences and self-concepts, deep emotionally significant personalization is a pretty big part of why any MMO is fun or not. Can the player be the best version of themselves in the game or are they being forced to pick from personas, avatars, and self-concepts that do not resonate at all. Personalization needs to go a lot deeper than letting someone pick the gender, hair, and shirt color of their avatar. It’s about giving players a perspective or viewpoint in the game world that resonates with their own real life perspective or viewpoint. Moreover, it’s about creating opportunities for the player to project themselves onto the game experience in ways that are not actually supported by the raw game mechanics or interface. Who my Lord of the Rings character is to me is much more than what any Turbine developer can see, even if they watch me in-game for hours and look over every aspect of my player info in their logs and databases. That game is one I play mostly with the love of my life, and there are all kinds of sweet little bits of our real romance tied up in that toon and the experiences I’ve had there.

A good educational game will allow time and space for players to really invest emotionally, to play around with their friends, to flirt with that cute kid in class, and to really project a part of themselves into that virtual place. If an educational MMO fails to engender genuinely human emotional experiences in the game, then it’s not really tapping the kind of experiences that make real social MMOs tick so much as it’s taking single-player games and adding people-puppeteered NPCs to them.

What do you think? Are education MMOs effectively targeting the aspects of MMO design that really get players engaged and motivated, or are they focusing too much on making the sale and pleasing whoever is paying for the game development? Educate me. Please also share the links for any good online adult/professional education MMOs if you know of some… I have been having a hell of a time finding any good ones (and Project Evoke is over, but I’m looking for more info about their challenges and successes too).

Sometimes we are so immersed in our personal subcultures that we fail to see how anyone can NOT get the jokes that we take for granted.

Nowhere is this becoming more of a problem in my media diet than in the realm of gamer humor. Something happened this past week that made me wonder if gamer humor has crossover potential or if the misapplication of gamer humor is going to become a problem now that gameification is the new the black.

Gameification may be encouraging game designers to apply the stock tools* of game design to applications that might be much better without even a whiff of Leeroy Jenkins’ chicken.

*If chainmail binkini and “<blank> of <blank>ing” jokes are any less of a stock game tool than “badges” I’ll eat my lush dwarven beard.

But Everyone I Know Thinks It’s Funny!

Obviously, the more edgy or weird your jokes are, the higher the risk/reward potential is for creating a spectacularly offensive dud or the next big viral joke. Geek culture may be cool now, but gamer culture is still a niche experience, regardless of our powerful self-referential presence on teh Interweb.

Put another way, an All Your Base Are Belong to Toys “R” Us campaign is not going to play as well to the mommy market as one might hope, even acknowledging that the majority of online gamers may be women (at least according to research using very small samples to guesstimate the gender of online gamers).

There’s a big difference between enjoying games and being so into gamer culture that you understand gamer jokes.

But Humor will Help My Gameified App Go Viral!

Maybe, but maybe not. Contrived viral mega-hits like Old Spice Man are relatively rare compared to surprise, organic viral hits like Chocolate Rain. Many perfectly funny blog posts, videos, podcasts, and more never go viral in any way that transcends their pre-existing core audience. CollegeHumor type sites are chock full of hilarious content that reaches its core demographic, but fails to spread very far beyond the bromarket (hey, it’s classier than sausagesegment, nardsniche, etc.).

If your humor has breakout potential, like the Old Spice Man, then integrating the jokes into the app itself may be a good idea. Otherwise, it might be better to leave the humor to the marketing campaign and keep the app and core user experience humor agnostic.

Fortunately, most popular products and services are designed to be fairly humor agnostic so that a customer can be satisfied even if they personally don’t get the humor in an annoying marketing campaign (humor that a person doesn’t find funny tends to get annoying pretty fast). A lot of Microsoft Windows users didn’t dig the bizarre Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates commercials, but I doubt many people defected to a competing OS based on their unamused response to that one campaign. The backlash to misfired humor in marketing is not even that bad when a campaign both misses the funny bone AND offends people, as did Coca-Cola with their rank amateur “edgy” Dr. Pepper Facebook app (that inserted a reference to the infamous 2 Girls 1 Cup porn site into the status updates of participating users of ALL ages). I’d be floored if anyone who actually likes Dr. Pepper stopped drinking it over that campaign, regardless of the bad press and media flack.

In this day and age, nothing short of a humor campaign with overt racism, sexual violence, or sacrilegious themes is likely to piss off a significant number of previously loyal customers who will actually boycott your products. People already buying and satisfied with your products are going to be hesitant to switch over one lame, unfunny campaign.

But What Happens When the Inside Jokes Are in the Core User Experience?

The new product that inspired this post is the upcoming productivity game EpicWin. If you’re a gamer, this could be the GTD app of your dreams (note, I am not yet sure if they actually support the GTD process or if it’s just mentioned in a pithy way).

Swarthy dwarven toiler, eh? This reminds me of… oh yeah: the most famous productivity RPG (and many others that have been imagined but not yet created).

First up, (and this is a bit of gamer ranting, but stick with me) RPG does not equal “high fantasy” with the dwarves and the sorcerers and Helm of Hack-Writing. As someone paying for 2 WoW and 2 LotRO accounts every month, I can honestly say I enjoy a fantasy RPG as much as the next girl, but there is more to RPG writing than cribbing from the Gygax legacy.

So why would not only the first (Chore Wars) but now (arguably) the second most promising productivity RPG have dwarves and D&D style player stats (stamina, strength, etc.)? Originality aside, I hope the creators of EpicWin are shooting for gamers-into-GTD and not any wider market. Hopefully, the devs made the game skinnable with more thematic options so that players aren’t really forced to pick an in-game persona from the played-out stock RPG archetypes (well, besides treemen, since whatever a treeman is, I want one).

I’ve seen an app that tries to do a productivity RPG without all of the generic fantasty trappings (Level Me Up for the iPhone), but it didn’t get much press, whereas EpicWin has blown up recently with a lot of enthusiastic coverage.

This might mean that the closer a productivity game looks to a conventional entertainment game, the more well-received it will be in the media. But I’m not sure that the average productivity app user will be smitten with the whole gamer humor vibe.

Do you think the familiarity of gamer humor and other gamer conventions lend appeal to productivity apps? Or will the gamer humor limit the potential market of this productivity app to gamers and sabre-toothed limes? +1 Comment of Opining

• Can gameplay be used as incentives for attentive t.v. commercial viewing? Could games help television advertisers cultivate the interactive engagement and motivation that lead to direct response after ads are viewed?

• Are commercial games rare because games were not effective in this role in the past? Or is it because so many marketers assume any type of game has to involve an expensive prize or legal consultation to make sure the promotion is on the right side of gambling and lottery laws?

• What types of games would be compelling during live broadcast commercial breaks? What issues would need to be addressed to prevent people who did not watch the commercial from simply scraping the commercial contents from a web resource after the actual broadcast?

Zapping and Zipping Commercials into Extinction

Since the development of the home VCR, advertisers have been concerned with zipping—fast forwarding through commercials during recordings of sponsored television programs. Newer technologies have only increased advertiser paranoia that television viewers are prerecording shows and then skipping the commercial breaks. A similar concern was raised with the advent of remote controls which let users change the channel during commercial breaks with very little physical effort (zapping).

When advertisers complained, the television networks produced studies that showed viewers were already avoiding annoying or boring commercials by leaving the room or otherwise diverting attention during commercial breaks regardless of the remote control or recording devices. The general result was that big brands had to make more interesting commercials or utilize product placement and other clever ways to integrate ad messaging into television programs.

More Watchable Commercials = More Expensive Commercials

Commercial production values are often very good. Feature-film quality t.v. commercials are not uncommon today and some commercials are enjoyable enough that they can function as short-form programming (these top-shelf commercials tend to go viral online too). Many commercials have been episodic or featured some type of comedy skit to keep viewers from zapping or zipping away.

However, this has not always resulted in the strongest brand messaging. How many times have you seen a remarkable, attention-grabbing commercial but you could not remember what was being advertised? Or you did recognize the brand, but the flashy commercial did absolutely nothing to warm you to the product. I can think of several commercials that I like much more than the products they advertise.

I’m a sucker for CG rodents, but there’s a better chance I’ll drive a washing machine or a toaster than a Kia.

These great-looking commercials from big brands cast a cold, dark shadow over the local advertising on television today (your local injury lawyer and car dealership ads look pretty shabby by comparison). Just about the only way for a local commercial to get significant attention is if it’s SO BAD it becomes legendary for sucking.

So if a small business brand is still interested in broadcast television, but dancing CG hamsters would break the ad budget (and you know you can’t go suck for suck with Eagle Man), why not try games?

Seriously, I’m asking you.

I searched around and couldn’t find much information about the lack of gameification in my local television ads. I think that gameplay would be a very cheap way to make a local commercial more compelling and actionable, especially now that there are location based game services to tie into (Foursquare, Gowalla, etc.).

Can you imagine a beer commercial during a sports game that tied into a web-based “betting system” promoted through local bars? If the team you picked when you started your bar tab is ahead when the commercial runs, you could get a discount on your beer from that advertiser in any participating bar. And if your picks win on 4 consecutive “game nights” with the commercial (trackable on a mobile app), you could get a better deal like a $2 pitcher. Interactive television promotions like that are totally doable today.

Game Design for 15-Second Commercials?

First, let’s look at some business issues that might kill a gamercial before it starts (sorry, I can’t help but make up terrible gameification buzzwords… it’s a sickness).

• Are commercial games rare because games were not effective in the past? I am still researching this. I have vague memories of game codes on commercials (from the 80′s or 90′s) that tied in with some kind of print promotion, but I am having a hard time finding information about gameplay that viewers can participate in during broadcast television commercials. I will do a follow-up post once I have more information (and hopefully some interviews). Leave a comment if you have any leads. 

• Do many marketers assume any type of game has to involve an expensive prize? Generally, yes, I do think marketers assume a contest prize has to be some physical deliverable with a cash value. In fact, I found this game show that asks users to watch 30 commercials in a row, then call in to answer 3 trivia questions about the commercials they just viewed. After that point, they are entered into a drawing for $1,000.00.

However, there is ample evidence that today’s digital lifestyle has boosted the value of virtual goods enough that access to virtual items can be a very attractive prize: virtual world goods, virtual goods in online games, virtual gifts on social networks that support gifting, badges on collection-oriented games like Gowalla and Foursquare, coupon codes, and digitial media like desktop or mobile wallpapers, ringtones, or video clips.

• Are gamercials rare because of the legal wrangling with pesky gambling and lottery laws? This may be a deterrent. Many potential problems can be avoided if standard eligibility rules are followed (check any contest running from a major company and you’ll see common rules about who is and is not eligible to win). Even better, choose game rewards with no cash value. Though an experienced attorney in this area should be able to structure your game rules appropriately, a small local business will already be spending quite a bit to make a commercial and buy television time so minimizing additional legal expenses may be another reason people don’t put games in their television ads.

• What types of games would be compelling during live broadcast commercial breaks? The average commercial hook is 15 seconds long. Luckily, there are many games that lend themselves to short, burst-y rounds of play. Some possibilities include memory games, hidden picture games, word games, trivia, and collection/scavenger hunt games (codes, symbols, or other collectibles that can be seen or heard, then recorded via mobile, computer, or home phone). If there was some time-sensitivity involved between the time the commercial is viewed and the time it is recorded, it could create a powerful call to prompt action that most television commercials lack. The types of video response contests that run frequently on YouTube may also translate well to commercial breaks on broadcast television (such as a challenge to record yourself in a “reaction shot” to the end of the current program or a commercial set to run later in that same timeslot, and then some chance to win fame or freebies by posting your video on the sponsor’s YouTube channel).

• What issues would need to be addressed to prevent people who did not watch the commercial from simply scraping the commercial contents from a web resource after the actual broadcast? Time-sensitivity may not help prevent “cheating” in a world where it only takes one person to watch the broadcast and disseminate the game token (whatever it may be) to thousands of people online with one tweet or post. However, if the point of the ad is to arouse action, brand awareness, and attention, it may not even be desirable to limit the viability of game tokens spread virally after the broadcast. Ultimately, the best thing a game could do for a television commercial, particularly the lower-budget local ads, would be to inspire any kind of word-of-mouth sharing in a local or online community.

Would a good game make you pay closer attention to television commercials? Would you tune into certain programs or watch the news on a particular station if you knew there would be a round of trivia or some game token to collect? Add a Comment

(And how awesome would it be to have a call-in contest to get Eagle Man to go lay an egg on your friend’s car? I would watch a 15-second commercial for that.)

This post will explain the potential usability problems if you add funware to your existing user experience, and what types of users are most likely to be impacted (hint: it’s not the dumb-as-dirt minority you are probably scoffing at already). In the conclusion, I’ll give 4 actionable tips to improve the usability of your funware (and drastically lower the chance that your funware will drive users to drive their tech support staff crazy).

“I Have the Pac-Man Game and I Want to Disable That?”

Have you heard the audio recording of a tech support call resulting from Google’s super-cute interactive Pac-Man logo? This poor woman uses Google for productivity and instead she found a noisy game on the Google search page, so she called tech support to try to get the game removed.

Awkwardness ensues, but the tech support hero helps her work through the problem (which is mainly that the game sounds are still audible while she is trying to do other stuff in her browser, the way she probably does every day). If you’re a good software designer you are going “oh that’s a problem, hm… how could they have avoided this issue” but if you’re a less user-focused software designer you’re thinking “what a dumbass, there were several ways for her to work around this without calling tech support.”

If you’re in the latter camp, you need to go work in tech support for a while. Seriously, it is boring and repetitive and you rarely get to solve any interesting problems but you can’t design good software unless you understand what it’s like to be a “pure user” with no idea how to troubleshoot or work around a software experience that doesn’t match your mental model.

The majority of tech support calls are from people who use their computers for very specific tasks, and then one day, something is different. They don’t know why or what to do about it, but they know that whatever they expected to happen with their computer did NOT happen. That the user cannot figure out a solution on their own is no more a personal failing than when your car breaks down or a flight is delayed and you need to seek a mechanic or an airline employee to find out what’s going on.

Ok, but you’re not going to actually quit your job and go work in tech support. Here’s the next best thing, just listen to the above-mentioned Google Pac-Man logo tech support call, if you haven’t already:

What if that was your website or application? Would you want your customers to feel that lost, stupid, incompetent, or frustrated? Probably not, but neither did Google.

However, that lady was not alone in her confusion: many people had problems with the game’s audio, including Sam Diaz, senior editor at ZDNet (and I really doubt he’s a computer illiterate kinda guy). So clearly, there were some real technical issues with the game even when a user grasped the “Google changes the logo to a game for fun” concept. The result of the auto-playing, unmutable, unclosable Pac-Man logo was frustration and confusion for many Google searchers that day (followed by a rash of commentary on how counterproductive the surprise game may have been in terms of lost worker time and money).

Google added funware to delight Google search users, not to confuse them. So what went wrong?

Noob User or Noob UX Design?

Is this lady just a moron? Or is it moronic to assume you can stick Pac-Man on your productivity tool randomly, for one day, without confusing the hell out of some people? I’m hoping to convince you that it’s the latter. That woman was probably no dumber or less intuitive than the average user of most websites and apps.

We’d all like to think that the only reason some people get confused by software is that those people are idiots, but there is a certain responsibility we all share to make software usable.

Software should pretty much work the way people expect it to, or compensate for user experience anomolies by effectively reorienting the user. If you change something significant, you have to take the user gently by the sleeve and say “it’s okay, you’re still in the right place, but we made a change and this is how it works now” because too many people lack the mental model to effectively self-troubleshoot a technical or usability problem with a website or app.

I’m also going to try to convince you that it’s easier than you might think to confuse even your “smartest” customers with random whimsical weirdness they weren’t expecting because users have mental models of how stuff works. Software and web sites work a certain way, and offer certain expected features, based on the user’s past experiences. When you dump your new funware features into an experience that already has a mental map that is incongruent with funware, you are responsible for designing an informative, gentle segue from the old mental model of how your software works to the new one that includes funware, marketing games, or reputation systems.

Also, you should give people a graceful, easy, unobtrusive way to learn more about your funware and to opt-out or turn off the funware portions of the user experience if the user is just not digging it (especially if there is ANY audible feedback as there are few things more unforgivable than audio on a web site or app that can’t easily be silenced short of muting all system sounds).

Battle Tactics from the Tech Support Frontlines

Extremely not fun fact: I used to work internal tech support; first at a large, local government agency and then at a very large downtown-Minneapolis hospital. Despite the monotony of the work, I was actually pretty good at helping people. It’s primarily a customer service job in that the biggest challenge is listening, communicating, and figuring out what the user’s actual problem is (the user has no idea most of the time, and they are usually frustrated beyond helpful communication by the time they call tech support).

I am glad for the experience helping all kinds of people use software. It was eye-opening. It’s too easy to forget what software looks and feels like to people who have no idea how to build it. Games and funware are the same: the experience from the viewpoint of a “pure user” with no idea how the systems work is totally different from the experience of a game developer.

Here’s the biggest lesson I learned working in the tech support trenches: your users may be tech support n00bs, but they are not dumb or lazy. Just like you are not dumb or lazy because you need to visit a doctor to find out what’s wrong with your body. People generally don’t have problems with computers because they are idiots, so much as they have problems because software was not designed to be friendly enough to all users.

Many of my callers were extremely intelligent, experienced computer users with graduate degrees or higher: nurses, doctors, civil engineers, and high-level executives. But I also supported the clerical staff, the housekeeping and cafeteria staff, everyone who works at the city bus and lightrail (from drivers to mechanics), everyone who worked at the wastewater treatment plants (where nearly every computer had whitelist internet access only because so many of the workers had been caught enjoying porn on the job), and many other folks from all levels of education and work experience.

You might be surprised that some of the most jaw-droppingly dumb calls I handled came from the folks with the higher education (and much higher salaries); people with more gadgets, apps, and peripherals than they had time to learn how to use it all. Basically, I’ve found that people of all experience levels frequently run into tech support issues when their mental model of how something is supposed to work just doesn’t match reality. Intelligence, experience, and education just don’t factor in when a busy person is trying to do a specific task and something just is not working as expected. They just need it fixed, don’t care to figure out how, and they often need to call a tech support worker.

As you design your funware, realize that it’s software and it typically will need to intrude on the user experience and user interface (or else the user won’t even know the game is afoot). This means your funware is in a position to cause tech support problems if you do not make a basic effort to integrate the funware into the mental model your user has of your product, service, web site, or tool.

Please, Think of the Tech Support Workers

A little foresight and some user-friendly design will prevent your funware from causing that tech support call. Your users (and their go-to tech support team) will thank you.

• Avoid auto-playing anything. If your landing page converts better with an auto-playing video, fine (but at least use a major, tested media player or embeddable media service so that your users aren’t burdened with a buggy homegrown player mucking up their browser). If your Flash or javascript game doesn’t get any play because nobody notices it without some kind of auto-start feature, you did something wrong with your page design or your game start screen. Keep doing split-tests until you find a static start screen image and accompanying headlines to attract users to the funware application. Auto-start (or any animated page element) is really just a cheat to command automatic attention from users who can’t help but notice your loud sounds or flashy graphics so don’ t be shocked if your users feel cheated and click away from your obnoxious, needy web page.
• Add a Close button. Whether you use the Windows style X button, a Mac style button, or the word “Close” with a hyperlink, just include some way that a user can dismiss your funware. That leaderboard you put on their profile page (you know, the one that does the fancy AJAX shit to update without page reloads) might be genius to your team, but I would bet at least some of your users want that thing gone. Now. Most professionally designed websites feature sophisticated CSS these days so it should be no problem to let users hide and show various page elements at will. Being able to close all or part of your funware UI will go a long way toward pacifying a user who doesn’t understand or enjoy the funware today (and I really do think that a person’s mood on a particular day can be a huge factor in how they receive a tickle from your new funware app as annoying versus delightful).
• Add a mute button. This should be self-explanatory. If your funware has sound effects of music, you need to provide a mute button that turns all sounds off completely. That is the bare minimum you can do, especially if your funware auto-plays. Optional enhancements include a volume control and setting a cookie or server-side setting so that your user’s sound preference is retained for future sessions. Also, there are special considerations if your funware app fires any type of audio notifications to the user (status pop-ups or alerts). If you have event-driven sound effects that might interrupt the user while they are multitasking in another app, consider adding a very simple way for people to silence those alert sound effects (or customize them to shut up under certain conditions if your users ASK for this kind of fine-grained control). This is probably a good place to note that best practice for new games is NOT to shove all your player options into some convoluted multi-level system menu because it is irritating to have to click through 4 sub-menus like Options>Audio>Alerts>Exceptions to get to the right setting. Most people do not want or need super fine-grained control over audio in your funware. Just let them turn sound on or off quickly and easily, preferably with one click (an elegant little speaker icon in the corner of the alerts or app is a good solution).
• Add an info button. A small question mark icon will do, but I like the “what is this?” text link because it doesn’t require the user to mouse-over the icon for a tooltip to confirm the question mark is an information button. This is where you gently explain to your user what your funware is doing on their web page (especially helpful if you are plopping some game stuff into an experience that previously had zero game stuff). If you are not a good copy writer, use Twitter or Google to find someone who is great and pay them a small sum for a VERY short blurb explaining your funware to your particular user base. This one little courtesy feature could literally mean the difference between your user getting back to work/life as usual… or your user spending ten minutes on hold listening to Kenny G, followed by ten minutes trying to explain to a weary tech support person that there’s a Pac-Man in their productivity tool.

When you design your funware, do you ever ask yourself “what if my user is not expecting this game” (or if you still prefer “what if my user is a complete idiot”)? Add a Comment

Why Lazzaro’s Theory of Fun Is Useful

Lazzaro’s work is comprehensive and she thinks outside the box of the mainstream video game industry.

Her insight goes far beyond just making a game fun for the sake of fun. Unlike design professionals in every other industry, such as architects and productivity software designers, game designers sometimes resent having to design games that produce other measurable, quantifiable outcomes besides fun. Creating a functional building, working within end-user specifications and other design constraints is essentially what an architect is paid and expected to do but there are obviously major perks for architects that also create enjoyable, livable, beautiful spaces too. The aesthetic component is there, as with website design, but the practical constraints really define the design challenge. It’s the same in a marketing game or gameified application trying to achieve outcomes above and beyond a good time for the player.

When the game has to serve a purpose beyond simply being fun to play, I think it’s best to look to designers like Lazzaro for insight rather than to the mainstream video game industry right now. Studying Grand Theft Auto or the intricacies of a good tower defense game WILL NOT help you develop a great social media title that engages your customers with your brand. Studying how and why players experience fun, engagement, and motivation while gaming WILL help you.

Her understanding of fun is rooted in the observable experience of gaming, playing, and engagement. Sure, she looks at mainstream video games, but the important difference for me is that she also looks beyond and synthesizes a lot of other relevant observations. Her theory of fun is not a personal manifesto justifying how one person likes to design games, nor is it a dissection of “best-selling” video games to see which mechanics were popular among the self-selecting group that played those games (the latter is particularly unhelpful for the broader application of game mechanics outside of traditional video games because there have been very few video game hits that sold enough to even be regarded as popular in the realm of popular media like top box office movies, best-selling books, or high-rated television).

Lazzaro Offers Actionable Insights for Experience Design

Lazzaro’s work is honest-to-goodness research and insight on the experience of fun, coupled with actionable insights on how designers can better delight, engage, and motivate people. If I could attend a game design workshop or Q&A with anyone in game design today, I’d probably pick Lazzaro or McGonigal because they 100% get the big picture of play and the myriad of game forms that exist (and will evolve in the future).

One specific, actionable idea is how Lazzaro presents player emotion as a palette of colors the experience designer can use to paint entertainment, engagement and motivation onto a process, product, or interface design. I would love to see an infographic like this for marketing games, to help marketers match verbs, emotions, and desired outcomes with types of play we can engender with game mechanics.

I particularly like her holistic look at fun (acknowledging the important role of frustration and other prerequisite distressing emotions that also contribute to engaging entertainment experiences, such as the fear of a terrifying horror game or the bittersweet sadness when we lose or a character we like is harmed). Lazzaro’s work seems to be as close as we currently have to a “universal theory of fun” for practical applications.

Other Game Design Theories Don’t Gel with Play as Work

If you’re looking at play as work, you’re not talking about gaming as an art form anymore. Unless you think going to work every day is a form of performance art, I think the kind of gaming we are seeing with Foursquare, frequent flyer programs, and blackjack are more about real world pay offs and entertainment more than they are about art. Some games are definitely, unquestionably, art. However, just as some written works are art, there are many other types of writing that do not function in an artistic context at all.

A lot of the big-name guys in game design seems to focus more on specific types of fun, such as learning and mastery (hard fun, fiero) without a balanced look at all the other ways people like to play. There is even a persistent effort to conceptually separate “real games” from software toys or other kinds of game-rule constrained or mediated play. And the result is often game design discussions focused on the types of complex nuanced game systems that most people don’t enjoy playing (casinos have more slot machines than blackjack tables for a reason). One of the narrower definitions of gaming ever bandied about as gospel is this one by Greg Costikyan:

A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal.

That’s a good definition for some types of games, but it isn’t comprehensive enough to be accurate (what’s the goal in Nintendogs? what are the game tokens in a game of tag? how is rock, paper, scissors artwork?) and it completely misses the point of why we play or why games are enjoyable.

Dungeons & Dragons is clearly a game with players making decisions to manage resources through game tokens in pursuit of game-designer defined goals (mainly to “level up” and develop the characters), but everything that makes the game fun and engaging (including the primary goals pursued) comes from outside the base rule system of the game. The player goals (including the goals of the DM, who is essentially a player of the D&D game system too) and actual gameplay in D&D more closely resembles an hour with a sandbox game like The Sims than a round of Chess which has a definitive, predefined static goal for every player.

Even the rule systems of D&D themselves are collaboratively created by the game designers and the players (particularly the DM player) to create house rules and unique interpretations of how complex rules interact. What Lazzaro calls “easy fun” abounds in a game of D&D, but many game designers would focus only on the “hard fun” parts of the game design: the rule book, the reference tables, and the quantifiable stat (points, levels) and badge (items, gear, story hooks) rewards (and a bit on the setting and aesthetic window-dressing) rather than the more salient components of the game that actually make it fun for the DM and the other players. The social fun, and the curiosity of what will happen next is at least as important as the combat resolution rule system. Hell, the biggest part of what has made D&D a successful game is that it provides a great opportunity for the DM player to tell a story and explore their game design skills with willing players in a social setting (a combination of social fun and serious fun). The designers of D&D weren’t experts in player emotion though they sure developed an enduring and influential game franchise.

Like most successful games of the past, D&D designers were simply committed to play testing until they found the right game rules to make the experience fun. This made game development a bit risky, like trying to write a best-selling novel and reiterate on reviewer feedback before you published. You could do your best, but the market ultimately decided if your game was fun. For people who are in the business of providing value besides fun, the risk and expense of trying to develop a fun game using trial and error alone is not the most attractive proposition (hence we see a lot of me-too, copy-cat game design in marketing games because a familiar game design that is well-liked already may reduce the risk of market rejection).

Marketing games and play-as-work projects need to have a much more robust understanding at the outset of what specific kinds of fun they are targeting. It’s not enough to just target “fun” when fun obviously has so many different facets and experiential qualities. Your new Android app might live or die by its ability to get fun right on its first release (how many people reinstall a rejected app to see if it “got better in the next version”?). In fact, your product’s particular flavor of fun will limit the market it attracts and retains. You might create a game that IS fun… for 40% of your customers. Not an epic fail, but how do you go about making it more fun? How do you know what types of fun you are not delivering without a much more detailed vocabulary about the component emotions of fun?

Lazzaro’s Theory of Fun Is about Outcomes

That’s why Lazarro’s theory of fun, focused on experiential emotion rather than the game mechanics themselves, is extremely useful when you’re trying to make games that provide real world outcomes and value above and beyond fun.

In all fields of design, a focus on the outcomes you want, not the tools or design philosophy you like to use, will lead to better designs. And in experience design, user emotion targeting is really more important than creating a “good” game by traditional game design standards. Foursquare is not going to win any game design awards, but damn if they aren’t successful in their niche right now.

Do you think about the full spectrum of fun when you design user experiences? Do you spend as much time thinking about player emotions as you spend on the game mechanic and rule design? Leave a Comment

Short of hiring an experienced game designer, how does a business or creative person learn enough about game design to effectively integrate social badges, leaderboards, and points systems into non-game products?

This is a tough question because every single one of the best books I’ve read about game design are too long, too academic, or too esoteric (for someone who isn’t a hardcore gamer or old enough to have played decades of the games referenced in the texts). I’m starting to see some short, simplified books describing the new Funware trend, but they tend to convince people that Funware is the new hotness, rather than help people actually apply it.

People need an accessible marketing-oriented book that instructs a game design novice on the finer points (and pitfalls) of using game mechanics in their product or user experience designs. I have not found that book yet, but parts of it exist in many related books. It’s not that this information is not out there, it’s just not available in an effective format for some of the folks who need it now.

So, no dream book yet, but I saw a FANTASTIC slideshow today.

If you’re a website or app designer, there is a good introductory slideshow now for using game mechanics effectively in non-game product designs, thanks to Sebastian Deterding.

I saw this slideshow linked last night from @avantgame and it was a wonderful summary of how games are effective motivators and the pitfalls you might encounter if you try to leverage game mechanics in your user experience design for products that aren’t traditional games. It’s best watched in fullscreen because there is a lot of small text, but it’s well worth your time.

Like a Boombox, Game Design Is Not a Toy

My favorite part of Sebastian’s presentation was his smart assessment of how the same things that make games fun can directly conflict with the design goals of task-oriented applications and tools (where speed, efficiency, and flattened learning curves are ideal). Knowing the limits of game mechanics (or at least areas where they will prove most challenging in real world application) can help tremendously in keeping a new Funware project on the right track.

Fun is awesome, but giving users new (and unwanted) ways to have fun may not have the transformative results you expect. The demand for new fun ways to waste time is not as great as you might imagine (most of us have more than enough ways to enjoy our free time… the problem is finding more free time, not more ways to have fun).

More often than not, I think we want our utilitarian chores to go by as quickly and efficiently as possible so we can get to the truly fun things that are optional in every way: the real games, the candy.

Be Careful with Psychological Triggers

Another point that is only briefly touched upon in the slideshow is the mine field of using (or misusing) psychological triggers in game design. In a work situation, this can backfire because the game is not being played voluntarily and there may be notable real world consequences involved. Nobody loses credibility at work for having a lame Farmville Farm but how would a poor score on a prominent industry social network affect someone’s reputation among their coworkers who thrive on that site? Most likely, the poor performer will abandon the site before they’ll look bad in front of a coworker or superior from their workplace.

Many game mechanics play off social competition, progressive challenges, and psychological effects which can easily lead to negative user experiences like jealousy, counterproductive competitiveness, compulsive behaviors (something that I believe is rampantly abused in MMORPG design, but that’s another topic entirely), and feelings of incompetence or failure.

Not being able to complete a task successfully at work just means you need more training or experience. Not being able to accomplish a task in a game often means you are losing (or maybe falling behind others), which can lead to unfavorable outcomes associated with negative feedback. As Deterding points out, the feedback in most games is excessive (positive and negative). Many game systems attach an arbitrary value (points, titles, badges) to tasks that might otherwise not seem like a big deal. The last thing the designer of a tool or app wants is to make their user feel incompetent. Fun should be a value-add, not something that comes at a psychological price to any of your users.

Fun Is More Subjective Than Usability

I’m reminded of a “team building” exercise I was coerced to participate in when I was a lowly admin assistant in my late teens. I’m an artsy introvert, the creative-spectrum opposite of a “theater person”, and I actually failed gym class once in grade school… so a mandatory game of what amounts to physical Charades + dancing is NOT fun for me. I would have preferred just getting bombarded by my coworkers in a round of dodgeball to having to act out “disco” in front of anyone over the age of 5. Call me uptight, but asking me to play that game was like challenging a blind guy to pictionary… not cool at all.

I remember feeling beyond embarrassed, and, eventually, I quietly sat out after a few rounds of feeling silly and incompetent. The lady running it wasn’t a total ass, but she did remind me that my team needed my help (or said something encouraging that I now only remember as publicly rubbing in the embarrassment). In retrospect, that was a good experience for a game designer to have, but at the time it just contributed to me disliking that job.

When people are mandated to participate in any type of game, it definitely runs the risk of putting someone off. If your website or app has a real world utility, you might not realize that people feel “mandated” to use it. How much is one customer worth to you? Can you afford to lose any users over something as trivial as poorly executed game mechanics? It’s just something to keep in mind when we are blurring the line between work and play.

Consider making your game mechanics opt-in (or at least provide a graceful way to opt-out) if you are using any kind of social or psychological trigger in an app someone might depend on or feel obligated to use in a non-trivial professional or educational context. For example, let people hide their scores from shared leaderboards (perhaps structure the alternative as a personal best-score board that only compares current performance to past performance of the same user or a user-approved subset of all users).

Without sufficient care, a mandatory chore + game mechanics = a proverbial pig in lipstick.

As a general rule, the more stressful, important, or time-sensitive a task is for your users, the more you may want to minimize (or eliminate) active gaming and use passive game mechanics judiciously (with a special eye toward creating tangible, compelling value and rewards for your users). And, of course, be careful when you assume that everyone has the same ideas of fun if you are putting gameplay into a mandatory experience (like an app you expect people to use primarily at work or as a hardcore productivity tool).

I think that teacher-mandated games in schools also runs the risk of seriously putting kids off a subject if they can not perform well in the game (one of my daughters was forever traumatized by mandatory time playing Math Munchers… each kid had to pass certain levels for class but she was unable to process the problems fast enough to win… yet she could DO the math). I’m sure the teacher thought she was adding fun to the classroom, and for most kids it probably was fun. But if that class had been a product my kid could have stopped using or buying, they definitely would have lost her business after she fell behind the entire class on the multiplication and division modules.

Your Game Could Be the Exception

Still, there is a huge reward when someone creates the new game rules and user experience that DOES make some chore fun.

You might craft a magical synergy of gameplay and utility that creates fun, engagement, and motivation where once there was only drudgery and busy work. There are good reasons to experiment and try to create new types of games (even in our utilitarian tasks) but keep in mind how very difficult those design challenges will be to execute well.

Do you think poorly-used game mechanics can deter people from products and experiences that are otherwise valuable? Add a Comment

Motivational Lessons from Guy Trying to Break a Board

• Don’t give up trying to do something that you want to do and know you can accomplish. He’s not trying to break a granite slab, he’s breaking a thin board. He knows he can do it, and he doesn’t let a few false starts dissuade him. Your first business, product, or client might not be what you wanted or expected—but with enough motivation and a realistic goal, your 20th or 30th try might work out.
• Redefine success so it is attainable for you. Smart people don’t expect to become millionaires from their entrepreneurial efforts. Odds are pretty good that your startup will, at best, pay your bills for a while before you have to adapt, grow, or move on. Very few small businesses skyrocket their founders to fortune and early retirement, though it’s fun to aim high. This guy was hoping to snap that board in one epic headbutt, and he switches to a fresh board after bending but not breaking the first. He clearly still wanted that epic win. But then he realizes the second board is half bent and that’s good enough. In fact, he still breaks it as planned, just not in the ideal way that matched his initial vision. There are probably few entrepreneurial concepts more important than this one: define your success to be achievable.
• Be proud of attempts made and lessons learned. This guy could have deleted this video. It didn’t go how he planned it would. It feels a little embarrassing at times. But he had the guts and integrity to post the video anyway. I think he recognized how well the video communicates his main motivational message, not because it went perfectly, but because it went wrong so many times. The real reason more people don’t try to start their own business is probably fear of failing in public (or worse, of only getting by when too many people think owning a business means getting filthy rich). Guy Trying to Break a Board finally did break that board, and he’s not afraid to show you how many times he failed along the way.

Do you have the guts to post a video showing how many times you’ve tried and failed in your projects? Add a Comment

It could be argued that special events, like holidays and splashy promotional games, need to happen infrequently to retain their value.To understand the strengths of special event games, I think it’s appropriate to consider why we don’t have holidays every day. I’ll also discuss the risks in looking at a successful special event game like the annual McDonalds Monopoly game and thinking that it could be so much better if it were extended to an ongoing promotion, like a loyalty program. I can see where people would make this leap because if something is good in small doses, it must be great in bigger doses, right?

But when it comes to making a game event special, less is more (in so many ways).

Who Wants Christmas Every Day?

I think Christmas (both the secular gift-giving holiday and the religious Christian holiday) is more special, engaging, and inspirational because it only happens once a year (and in the dead of winter where the colors of twinkling decorations outside livens up the monochrome landscape to great effect). The bright punctuation of Christmas in the middle of winter is so powerful that Christian author C.S. Lewis was able to relay a very adult concept (spiritual awakening, or a thawing of faith) to children by setting the action of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe in a “Narnian winter” where it was “always winter and never Christmas”—a state of dreary suspense. Many a kids’ show or book has centered on the literal or figurative quest to save Christmas because there is something inherently tragic about an eagerly anticipated once-a-year chance for a holiday that never comes.

I think it’s also true that there’s something tragically underwhelming about a Christmas that comes everyday. I don’t think people, even kids, would really enjoy a never-ending Christmas. Unless you’re Ron Wood or that badass Wizzard drummer with the afro:

UnBirthdays Just Aren’t That Awesome

Aside from the lack of novelty and anticipation, there is something untenable and impractical about constant, ongoing special events. We celebrate our birthday, rather than our un-birthday, because frankly nobody wants to give presents and make a big to-do over everyone we know 24/7/365. It would spoil the fun by becoming a repetitive chore, like doing the laundry.

That’s why it is a little strange to me when marketing game designers want to encourage more year-round pervasive games instead of infrequent, simple, and targeted special game events.

Think of a special game event like a limited-time marketing campaign. If you ran the same marketing campaign, the same copy, and the same creative year-round, your message would definitely lose its impact over time. I’m not saying the same is true for a well-designed ongoing marketing game program, I’m just saying that there are effects that are stronger, easier and cheaper to obtain using a special event game for a limited time rather than a long-term, ongoing game design.

You can combine special event games and long-term games (think of the limited-time sweepstakes mini-game or scratch-off game inside of a larger ongoing loyalty program), but in most cases, participating in the long-term game then becomes a barrier to entry for the smaller special event games (unless you specifically design to avoid this). The bigger, long-term game can also intimidate and turn-off non-gamers who think it all looks too involved to be fun.

Ongoing Combination McDonalds Monopoly Would Suck

I’m no critic of combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bells because they make sense. They could add a bong store or triple bipass clinic and I wouldn’t blink. But if there was a Pizza Hut and Battleship location or a Scrabble Taco Bell, it would be a little weird. Now, it should be obvious by now that I was very positively impressed by the Game Based Marketing book by Zichermann and Linder, but their suggestions for improving the successful, annual McDonalds Monopoly game didn’t click with me. Any suggestion that the Monopoly game promotion should be a continual year-round attraction is as weird and counter-intuitive for me as walking past a KFC Jenga in the food court (though if it involved using your teeth to remove pieces from a tower of extra-crispy chicken, I probably would try it… for science).

I’m not sure you even need the power of pervasive gaming when you have junk food that hooks people like crack. I’m not sure that Americans need another reason to pick up a burger, but let’s say I’m tasked with designing a game for a fast food joint. I don’t think pervasive is the way to go for a branded game. I think special event games are way more powerful for a fast food joint because ongoing loyalty programs don’t attract attention, viral marketing, or press the way a splashy limited-time contest does. The decision of which place to eat at is largely an impulse decision people make right before they go get some food. That’s when the publicity and viral effect of a high-profile limited-time special event game can be more valuable for driving food sales (my assumed ultimate game goal for this market) than a loyalty program that will still be there for another meal in the future .

Limited-Time Offers > Everyday Savings

I have a fond childhood memory of driving from the drive-thru at one McDonalds (with ice cream cones) to the next McDonalds (which, in a big city, is like 4 blocks away) to get more boxes of cookies just for the Monopoly pieces (because we were embarrassed to do all the transactions at one McDonalds). Being irrational like that, buying more food than you need, and making a point to go out of your way to a McDonalds is not something people will do indefinitely. Eventually, you’ll get sick of eating McDonalds. Or Wendy’s will run a splashy, limited-time contest and you’ll have to go there instead because, you know, that Wendy’s contest isn’t going to last and you can play the pervasive McDonalds game any time.

A few retail-oriented examples to support my take on this would be March Madness sales, double coupon days, and Black Friday. If you’re Wal-Mart, then you’ve got the everyday savings locked in for most basic consumer goods. But for every other retailer, where brand, quality, and other factors are more attractive to shoppers, the special event sale is truly a good marketing play. Instead of cheapening their offering year-round, they offer splashy limited-time sales. This has a viral effect because people want to let their friends know about the special deal before the opportunity passes. Limited-time sales can also bring new customers in the door, whereas I’m not sure how well loyalty programs function to acquire new customers.

Ongoing low prices are eventually taken for granted (and unless you have the massively efficient processes to make decent profits while still being a low-price leader, it’s not a good pricing or promotion strategy for most businesses). The viral effect and newsworthiness of everyday low prices are also limited because nobody feels pressure to share the deals right away. Everyday low prices may come up in conversation but they don’t motivate people to word of mouth marketing the way a limited-time promotion does.

A marketing game sometimes functions as a product or attraction in its own right (the McDonalds Monopoly game certainly does), and much like the everyday low prices, an everyday game offer can quickly be taken for granted.

How many of us have wallets full of half-finished punch cards for various lunch locations? If we only had one lunch option with a punch card, then yeah, it would encourage us to get lunch at that same place more often than not. But when we get loyalty cards from almost every lunch vendor within a mile radius of our workplace, then we might as well just eat wherever we feel like eating. We can always get our card punched next week.

But when you hit the food court and notice a special game event, like the Monopoly game, you know it might not be there next week. So you might be more motivated to get in that line at the food court before the opportunity has passed. That’s the experiential difference between a special game event and an ongoing loyalty program or pervasive game.

Special Game Events != Loyalty Programs

So while McDonalds might benefit from a loyalty program in addition to their annual Monopoly game, I don’t think that alone is a good argument for extending or altering the Monopoly game program to become a pervasive program. It would lost a little of its magic, and a lot of its viral potential.

Also, building out the Monopoly game to be a full-blown loyalty program would be a good example of what’s known as feature creep in software development. You can always add more features. What stops the insanity is the reality that you want to see this project launch before you die or you have a sensible functional spec that focuses on doing a limited number of things exceptionally well. Designing marketing game systems is similar in that you can always add cool stuff and try to target more and more KPIs (key performance indicators). Though over-extending increases the risk that you won’t be most effective at hitting your most important goals (and hopefully you know what those are, otherwise you probably shouldn’t be wasting resources to make a marketing game yet).

It’s easy to look at your marketing game design and think “wow, we could use this feature to drive engagement on our website… ooh-ooh, and we could add this other feature to increase opt-ins for our newsletter… and it wouldn’t be hard to add points and rewards here to drive conversions in our online store… and OMG, wouldn’t it be cool if people could visit our shops and geotag a tweet to get a coupon to unlock a lolcat with a special QRcode on its belly that you can snap with your mobile to download our app that lets you login for a badge you can show on your Facebook if you allow our FB app to access your complete medical history and contact information for two hot friends…” before you realize you’ve gotten somewhat off track from the original marketing goal of your game.

Focusing our marketing game designs on the most important KPIs is crucial. It’s also important that we judge the success of marketing game campaigns on whether they attain the specific results they were intended to achieve, not whether they accomplished every possible marketing goal with just one game.

The McDonalds Monopoly game event has stayed pretty focused in its goals over the years, though I recently learned their focus faltered a bit in 2009, and there was some negative response from consumers.

The Risks of Overgameification

Since everyone’s talking about gameification, and I enjoy playing devil’s advocate (or mirthful wet blanket), I’d like to also add the cautionary aside that extending the Monopoly game might suck the fun out of it.

Overgamification happens when game designers forget that most people are not gamers.

Most people like easy-ass games like scratch-off cards and solitaire. And sometimes there is really no significant business return (or diminishing returns) when you add a bunch of long-term strategic achievements to a game that is meant for the mass market. Yes, the power gamers will appreciate it and you will be able to hold your head high at GDC when people ask what you work on (saying “instant win games” probably won’t get you invited to any roundtable discussions). But easy, dumb features are more accessible.

More people own a DVD player than a game console, even though they both play DVDs. Deep down in your heart you know that all your non-gaming friends aren’t ignorant plebes who can’t appreciate the intrinsic beauty of a well-crafted game system. Gaming is simply a niche hobby, like knitting or pressing flowers. Ok, it’s a lot more popular than knitting, but it’s still not something most people want to do all the time. The idea of keeping score and ongoing strategic, nuanced decision-making can annoy non-gamers. And sometimes it only takes like 1 or 2 extra steps for a non-gamer to perceive a game system as hard or too much work, even though a gamer might think of the system as a mindless cakewalk.

New Online Features for McDonalds Monopoly

Turns out McDonalds already DID expand their Monopoly promotion in 2009 to try to drive traffic to their Facebook page, website, and sponsor programming (the Jay Leno show, apparently). By adding these additional targets to their game design, they probably got some results from the die-hard Monopoly piece collector but what was the net result? How did it affect the majority of their players (most of whom are not hardcore gamers)?

There is evidence that adding more online interactive features may have devalued the promotion by creating too much extra busy-work for the players. Going to the game’s Facebook site and website didn’t give all players enough value, leaving some players feeling like they were the ones getting played.

Maybe a better design, reward, or content payload could have helped, but I generally think the less you ask of your players in a mass market game, the more participation and goodwill you can build. The more you ask of people, the more they think “what am I getting out of this?” and it can be hard to cost-effectively provide enough personalized value for everyone in a mass market segment. If your game targets a narrow, well-defined market segment, then it will be a lot easier to make sure your game delivers value for actions that could otherwise be perceived as busy-work.

Three Tips for Special Event Games

• Keep special events simple and focus on easy, short-term achievements. Long-term goals and overgameification can actually reduce the brand value of a beloved annual special event promotion by making the game too complicated and focused on the business goals rather than the goals and experience of the player.
• Avoid overgamification and time sinks. Gamers have insatiable appetites for challenges and they appreciate an elegant, clever design. Mass market consumers are turned off by games that involve extra work, complicated rules, resources they don’t have (lots of money for purchases or lots of friends willing to do group challenges), or long-term rewards (saving isn’t as fun as spending or gambling for a reward today). Just remember how many people think Blackjack is too hard to play, so they go play a slot machine (which is not so much a good game as it is an amazingly addictive interactive entertainment experience).
• Limit the time horizon for a special game event. The value of a special event game is a lot like the value of a holiday like Christmas or a birthday. If you extend it to an everyday, commonplace program, you lose some of the fun and a lot of the viral potential (and free media exposure, though that really only applies if you’re big enough to get noticed by major media outlets). Even if you want the promotion to run all the time, consider limiting it to certain days of the week or set other limiting conditions to make it feel special and to promote impulsive participation.

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Game Insiders Were Some of the Last to Know

This spring I sat dumbstruck in my home office, watching a video of genius entertainment designer Jesse Schell building the intro to his DICE 2010 presentation (about the future of pervasive gaming) around the idea that professional game industry people were surprised by mega-hits like Facebook’s Farmville and Mafia Wars. Really? Ok, maybe some people just took a while to get onto Facebook (I know I avoided it as long as I could because I needed another online social network like RollerCoaster Tycoon needed a movie adaptation). Some degree of Facebook cluelessness is comprehensible.

But Schell masterfully builds rapport with his audience by highlighting “surprise” hits like Guitar Hero and Wii Fit, and inquiring who in the audience thought the Wii would be the winner in the last gen console war (to which I wondered “who didn’t know the Wii was the only console with mass market potential?”). This makes more sense if you were following the games industry in the earlier half of this decade when every conference was full of game devs trying to comprehend how people could make money creating cheesy match-3 games instead of real games like Battlefield 1942 (thankfully, casual games are now given a lot more respect in the industry, but in 2002 they were a target of much dismissal and derision).

I know Schell was resonating with his target audience because I’ve attended these types of events myself and I keep in touch with game dev friends (though I’m in St. Paul, far from the game industry hotspots). There are certain mentalities and opinions that are oddly pervasive, until the overwhelming evidence and thought-leaders like Schell convince everyone that these other kinds of entertainment experiences matter. DICE gets more of a diverse crowd than GDC, but still people with too much games industry focus and too little attention to the broader entertainment industry and what most people actually do for recreation.

Still, you’d think the games business types would have seen the money, and lit a fire under their developers to learn these new markets.

Game Devs Didn’t See Where the Real Money Was

You might think it’s crazy that game developers didn’t see that the big revenue in Facebook games wasn’t really the “viral effect” of inviting as many people as possible, but rather it was the way the game design pushed certain players into socially competitive, almost irrational, behaviors: logging in every single day for repetitive low-production-value gameplay, paying real cash for game advancement, and participating in ridiculous sponsor offers for products players had no genuine interest in. There was next to no value in the twenty friends you begged to join you in Vampire Wars if they only signed up to help you out and barely played.

The real value was the power player (who invited all their friends just to increase their game influence, regardless of the friends’ interest in the game). The viral effect did pay off when power players roped in new power players who also started playing like it was their job. But overall, it wasn’t a volume racket, it was a social hack to put people into a hyper-competitive situation trying to one-up people they knew in real life (while clobbering random internet adversaries on the ever-present leaderboards).

So, even though many game developers tried to dismiss Facebook games as some bastardized multi-level marketing scheme that only served to collect as many registered users as possible, the real money was in the familiar place that game devs should have recognized right off: the passionate player. People were genuinely invested in Facebook games. And why was that so difficult to see?

Facebook Games Are Considered Shitty By Gamers & Game Devs

Bottom of the barrel. Any hack could design Fashion Wars. We’re talking text-based games that any beginning web programmer can whip up in a week, with one to three central mechanics, no audio or music, and scant 2D interface art. Who would play these games passionately? Who would pay to play them?

Schell explained to the DICE crowd that the sponsored offers and paid game advancement were psychologically justifiable because as the players did what the game motivated them to do (log in, invite friends, advance slowly, become impatient…), they had to justify their continued investment in the game. Eventually, it made sense to do the sponsor offers, to kick in some cash. It made sense to ask people who didn’t want to play to sign up anyway. It made sense to friend people and join groups just to find more people for your pirate crew or mafia gang. Basically, these simple bare-bones games that would earn you nothing but derision and eye-rolls from the pro game dev community had mastered something that many AAA games couldn’t get right: motivating the player to generate revenue for you.

Remember The Sims Online? It took a massive professional team, tens of millions of dollars, and over 3 million lines of code to launch that world of fail that barely motivated players to play, pay, or, hell, just keep logging in. If The Sims Online were free to play (and at the end, it basically was), it still would have bombed. That’s how awful the experience was, despite all the talent, craftsmanship, and innovation they tried to put into it. Yet here are these crappy online multiplayer Facebook games motivating the cash right out of player’s wallets for next to nothing in return.

You’d think game devs would be studying this phenomena to figure out what was pushing player engagement and motivation, but most game designers I’ve talked to basically dismissed Facebook games as shitty designs with repetitive, unimaginative gameplay. According to real game designers, these Facebook games were only successful in the sense that they had a lot of registered players, and they only got those players because of their viral invite features (which are simply the Request forms provided by the Facebook Apps API). It was unthinkable that these games were successful for any other reason.

Marketing Games Are Generally Considered Shitty Games

Now, I’m not arguing that the Facebook games I’ve played were original or even particularly fun, but I do maintain that many of them were extremely well designed to do what they were intended to do. They were marketing games pushing players toward the purchase of game rewards and participation in sponsor deals. They were 100% in service of a business goal.

Yes, players could have fun along the way. Yes, that was a key constraint in the design. But fun was not the only, or even the most important, measure of success for these designs. Success was motivating the players to generate revenue. As a concept, I know this pisses gamers off. And since most pro game developers are passionate gamers, designing a game with that primary measure of success is repulsive. A few designers dig persuasive games, but it’s usually in the context of promoting an educational, political, or social cause. When the design goal is just profits, that turns almost everyone off.

For professional game designers from the games industry, where fun is King (not conversions or content), there needs to be a shift in thinking from “hey, you know what would be cool?” to “hey, you know what would really engage and motivate people to convert for our sponsor?” if game designers want to be a vital part of the booming online entertainment and funware marketing industries. Thinking like a lowly marketer is definitely outside of the comfort zone for a lot of game devs, hence people prefer to work on real games (games for gamers like themselves). When do you ever meet a young person who can’t wait to work on advergames at an IGDA chapter meeting? Or someone who is working to apply game mechanics to persuasive messages outside of education or social causes? Gamer game designers don’t get excited about marketing games the way passionate marketers do.

You can see why some would look down their nose at profit-focused, pragmatic game design. However, the funny thing is… the market validated these Facebook games with huge participation. If these were really bad games, why did they make money? Why were they so popular?

It’s well worth considering the possibility that the pursuit of excellence in AAA games is like the quest to create fine art films that appeal to only the most sophisticated movie goers (while everyone else is happy as a pig in shit at Transformers 2).

BTW, These Surprise Hits Were Not for Socializers

Another misunderstanding (that isn’t touched upon in Schell’s presentation) is that game devs think Facebook games are all highly social games (because they’re on a social network platform).

Facebook games tend to tap the traditional gamer types of achievers, killers, and some explorers (the completionist variety who want to keep advancing in order to see what comes next). Interestingly, few of the mega-hits like Zynga and Playfish games actually provide a good social experience for the socializer gamer type (even though the games are technically hooked into players’ existing social graph, there was little opportunity to develop meaningful in-game exchanges with other players).

Players are much more likely to build and grow new friendships in a richer online game like World of Warcraft or Runescape, or  in a chatroom-focused game community like Habbo Hotel or Pogo.com. Likewise, there are few opportunities to achieve a positive social status in a helping or supporting role within Facebook multiplayer games. There is very little interpersonal contact to occupy the traditional MMO socializers who like to become organizers in their communities, guild leaders, and resources for fellow players.

Bartle’s familiar socializer and explorer traits won’t apply to some of the marketing games, pervasive games, and new hits in online entertainment. Many of the design theories in the game industry are going to need significant revision to account for the broader, previously overlooked reality of the interactive entertainment industry beyond just games.

Facebook Game Shock Isn’t Even the Tip of the Iceberg

The typical pro game developer is not surprised when the latest AAA console game sells well, but they seem a few beats behind when it comes to understanding how their craft relates to engaging, motivating interactive entertainment like Club Penguin, Stardoll, IMVU, Second Life‘s Ozimals, Foursquare, Polyvore, and HuffPost Badges.

People are starting to catch on, but I don’t really think game developers who were weaned on hardcore gamer culture appreciate how the gameification of life will impact the old school games industry.

To put it gently, the kinds of games that professional game designers like to design are no longer the only games in town. It might be a little disheartening to realize that what makes a good, fun game design in the land of game markets is not necessarily the same magic that works in marketing games, pervasive games, and persuasive gaming (though there are some folks who do think traditional game design skills are transferable). On the flip side, once pro game designers start thinking outside the games industry boxes, marketing games and more might improve dramatically.

Converging with Game Industry Outsiders

As Schell humorously highlights in his DICE talk, the pro game devs are generally not the folks designing these new hit entertainment experiences online. He jokes that it’s just whoever happens to be there, but the subtext is that many of the hot new entertainment hits online are designed by marketers, business people, and folks who hardly understand how their product even contains game mechanics (another reason that business-friendly concepts like Funware are so critical to get people framing these techniques correctly in the greater context of game and virtual world design).

When Schell described a day in the future, he only briefly touched on traditional game products (the game of Tetris on the bus, a game on the back of a cereal box, and some kind of multiplayer game played while watching television). Many of his other gameification examples involved the government, art foundations, businesses, and other non-entertainment entities handling these pervasive game services. And it’s true that game mechanics for government, non-profit, and business applications are HOT right now.

I expect that marketing people will be working on more games in-house as people learn how to use game mechanics effectively. With the convergence of traditional marketing and internet marketing, marketers need to learn about online interactivity. It’s very likely that there will be less need to outsource a game design in the future than there is now because the effective use of game mechanics will become part of the mainstream marketers vocabulary too. And a key take-away idea here is that game outsiders will be designing the experiences that compete directly with professionally designed games for player time and money.

People who make good games like Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Braid will be competing for customers and jobs with people who learned game design from studying the success of Farmville and Frequent Flyer Programs. I sympathize if you punched your desk or muttered an expletive of disgust just now.

Some Outsider Perspective Can Help Games Too

These outsiders might appear to bring nothing to the table for game developers, but sometimes a little perspective alone can be a welcome addition to a design team.

When I was about 22, I started taking a big interest in PC and console gaming. I loved chess, Scrabble and cards as a kid but I was never a gamer. My family never owned a console system. But once I played Civ III on a boyfriend’s laptop, I was hooked. By 24, I was reading game development books, following game developer blogs, playing as many games as I could, and subscribing to IGDA listservs to learn more about the mainstream game industry. I knew that these were the people who understood game design, the gamer markets, and the ins and outs of running entertainment software companies. I volunteered to work at GDC three years in a row just to afford the trip so I could attend the lecture sessions. So although I’m primarily an entrepreneur and marketer, I have a serious interest in game design too.

After about 4 years of that, I realized that the most valuable people to follow were academics and futurists, entrepreneurs, marketers, and economists. It’s not that the games industry isn’t full of experts in game design and execution. It’s that they don’t seem to have much vision for how to apply that knowledge in the problem spaces outside of console games, mobile games, web games, board games… games, games, games. They even call their industry vertical “the games industry” even though they are all really in the business of entertainment. The only thing more stubborn than their focus on games is their obsession with fun rather than the full spectrum of emotional engagement and motivation.

There’s an old marketing anecdote about the decline of the US railroads. None of the railroad barons thought of themselves in the greater context of the market they served. They only saw themselves in the railroad vertical, and they saw their only competition as the other railroad barons. Well, automobiles came along with many other technologies, national highways, and eventually certain freight markets and almost all passenger markets dried up completely. If the railroad barons understood that they were in the transportation industry, not just the railroad industry, maybe they could have developed trucking fleets and other products to meet the changing expectations of their customers.

Maybe when more people recognize the broader market for game design, professional game developers won’t be surprised at all when they see wildly successful non-game entertainment sites and crappy online games monopolizing users’ time and money.

I say “maybe” not because I don’t trust that the brilliant game developers will cotton on, but because I’ve been watching Gamasutra and IGDA for so long now that there is no excuse for anyone to be surprised by Club Penguin or its ilk. People have been talking about the new online entertainment options and all their ramifications for at least 4 years now. Yet every time, it’s the same chorus of “well, that’s surprising” which translates to “I thought that was a shitty product.”

During this same period, some of the most celebrated game designers put their heart and soul into designs that were considered innovative by their game designer peers, only to see the market generally ignore them (I’m thinking specifically of Raph Koster’s Metaplace virtual world, which evicted its player-creators after a brief beta and quietly relaunched as a Facebook game company).

I only got into gaming in a big way as an adult so perhaps I’m just a lot more open to entertainment design ideas and trends from outside the games industry. But for the record, us outsiders were not surprised at all.

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Curators of What Now?

If this keeps up, we’ll be getting our Subway eats curated by Sandwich Fixin Curators.

Talking about “curating functionality” has to be the most pretentious way possible to describe product design. Designers, developers, and engineers are not curating when they develop a solution to a problem. When features and functionality gets cut, it’s not even remotely close to a curator at the Smithsonian deciding which pieces to acquire or study for a collection.

The article tried to frame everything and the kitchen sink as a curator of some sort.

No, Facebook is not a curator of the web. Facebook is primarily an ad channel that collects and leverages user data to sell targeted advertising; Facebook does not even review web submissions from the majority of their content creators, much less curate the web content published on its domain (unless we count removal of TOS violations as “curation” now). It certainly doesn’t curate content on the other billions of domains across the web (though if someone thinks their cousin “liking” a link counts as curation of the web, then this explains why genuine attempts to curate the web have not been very successful).

I recently told my 13-year old not to cuss on Facebook, so I’m probably a Linguistic Curator of the Web now.

Apple and Facebook Curate Proprietary Revenue Streams

Both Apple and Facebook claim they are only censoring, er, curating content and apps to protect users from malicious applications, enforce Terms of Service, and to provide a good experience for their users. Both companies make assumptions about what a good user experience entails (to Apple, this excludes porn apps and to Facebook, this excludes even pictures of mothers breastfeeding babies). Both are making their product design decisions to increase the value of their company. Pleasing users is just one constraint on their designs, not the reason they exist. Both companies are willing to shoulder a little public backlash in order to keep profitable policies in place.

Apple and Facebook build value for their shareholders by delivering just enough user value to lure people in to their closed systems. If you want to envision them as curators, then the best fit would be that Apple and Facebook are curators of proprietary revenue streams.

Apple will even go so far as to claim technology like Adobe Flash is too “buggy” to be on its iPhone OS, but the Apple’s real objection is that Flash would open up content channels that divert sales from proprietary channels like the App Store. So I suppose one could say Apple is curating the most profitable content delivery channels from the ones that only add value for users and companies-that-aren’t-Apple. Facebook has the social graph of over 400 million users locked up tight; it’s probably one of the more valuable collections of personally identifiable data on the web.

But again, those collections are a pitiful stretch of the whole curation concept.

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