Thinking like a Game Designer

This week starts off with exploring the notion of why one should gamify and uses Foursquare, formerly known as Dodgeball as an example. Dodgeball use to be a location-based social networking service, with which users would text their location to notify friends of their location.

The downside? That’s all you could do and if there wasn’t that one little aspect regarding critical mass… Meaning, success was dependent on engagement and the amount of people currently online. Also, there were not a lot of choices and no progression, so users didn’t really have a reason WHY to use the product.

Later Dodgeball turned into Foursquare and succeeded immensely. How? By adding badges and points by rewarding users for going to places. Simply because the element of Gamification gave users the feeling of progression and by creating (and rewarding) habits, foursquare was able to close the engagement gap.

(Also, tiny side note, Foursquare evolved again and introduced Swarm, a through and through gamified product, which I will introduce to you in a later post.)

Being a Game Designer is a state of mind, everybody makes up games, more or less. Especially when resolving problems. It’s not about thinking like a gamer, not about the experience of a game, but thinking, how to get there. What structures and frameworks do you need to use?

So how do we do this?

1) Think about the players (users / customers / employees). They are at the center of the game, they need to feel like they are in control, by making their own incentivized choices, giving them a reason to play. Sounds simple, right? Players play and people love to play.

2) Follow design rules. One of the many fascinating ways to design rules is creating a player journey, a path of progression for a player to follow, a pathway to mastery. Starting with an on boarding. Start off easy and get more difficult and complex to keep players interested and engaged. Create an experience, let users interact and play with your product.

3) Tapping into emotions. I (and the course) have mentioned over and over again the importance of fun and something so seemingly obvious gets forgotten so quickly. The point is (very simply put) making an experience engaging and therefore producing an emotional response.

What makes a game or a gamified project engaging? You’ve guessed it: FUN. And since I love this topic so much, it deserves it’s very own post, which you can find out NEXT WEEK. Stay tuned :)

#gaming #gamification #gamedesigner #foursquare #swarm