game mechanics Archives - TheWayoftheWeb

When I wrote about the gaming layer recently, I pointed to a few reasons why it will become increasingly important in our lives, concentrating on the existing scale and the awareness that an increasing number of businesses now have about how gaming mechanics can improve interaction and revenue.

But there are reasons why this is the moment when gamification really hits. There are technical reasons, such as the rise of high speed internet access to a reasonably large part of the developed world, and the increasing access to technology, whether it’s sneaky social gaming during the lunch hour at work, or the Xbox or Playstation as the provider of entertainment in the living room.

But all of this has come together to effectively create the gamification layer. It’s a generation which contains a large proportion of people who grew up alongside gaming, and are now reaching the stages of their lives and careers where they’re adapting those values and outlooks to their business, much as the elements of Web 2.0, flexible working practices, and hacker/geek culture have all contributed.

I was exposed to early videogames before the age of 5, getting a ZX Spectrum for my fifth birthday, and gaming through Nintendos, Segas, Amigas, PCs, Playstations and currently an Xbox 360.

And I’m not alone:

Xbox Live:

23 million members (Feb 2010)
61% male, 39% female
70% 18-34
20% 35-44
37% household income over $100,000

Playstation network:

50 million members (June 2010)

Stats from Wikipedia and Microsoft Advertising.

We’ve grown up with a form of entertainment that encourages us to load up a game, explore to find the rules and tricks which aren’t in any manual (although they rapidly appear on sites like Gamefaqs), and feature a very regulated work and reward structure.

We use gaming as both a solitary form of entertainment and an online social gathering place to come together with offline and online friends, form groups (‘clans’), find ways to ‘grind’ up through levels and solve problems, and to gain social standing through ranks. It’s as integral as families gathering around the radio or coming together to watch the one TV in the street when the World Cup was being shown.

1925 Radio by Britt-Marie Sohlström on Flickr

And this is the generation that are now running companies, in middle management, and particularly those with a disposition for technology, digital business, ecommerce and social activity online.

And now our children are growing up in a world with even more interactivity (on-demand tv and audio) from all entertainment.

The next few years are definitely the time when the gamification generation comes of age. The first challenge is to realise that this is happening and to think about how it can benefit your customers/audience. The second is that videogames have evolved massively from PacMan to Starcraft 2, and for even the simplest game mechanic to succeed, it’ll take a lot of complexity and knowledge in the background.

The quest to measure and monitor online influence is one that is enticing a lot of companies and individuals. Empire Avenue is a particularly different approach in that it mixes the financial market of stocks and shares, social gaming and networking, and peer review and influence into one big pot.

It seems to have recently experienced a bit of a growth spurt, around the same time as it received a new round of funding, but can it succeed where most other services seem to struggle?

I signed up a while ago, and the premise behind the social gaming element is a logical one. You buy and sell shares in other people registered on the network (similar ideas have been applied to celebrities in the past, e.g. the BBC and Celebdaq), and you can also earn by registering your social networking profiles and blogs and having activity on those sites earn you cash (or in Empire Avenue, Eaves).

All good fun – especially now I’ve started seeing people I actually know virtually or in real life start to appear. The payoff is that brands will be able to contact and reward the biggest influencers relevant to them.

Information and influencers:

Besides adding your social networks, you’re also encouraged to list the brands and interest you have, in typical social network style to build connections and to gift data to the Canadian company behind Empire Avenue – and to indicate which brands can contact you in the future.

But the big data gain comes from the ability to rate the activity content imported by others – specifically those people you invest in. The level of investment and ratings gives you an influence ranking, and the reward is intended to be allowing brands to communicate with those who are deemed most influential by the investment level rather than follower numbers.

Will it work?

There are definite advantages to this approach. Inbound links to blogs are counted by Google, but the rise of social networks means some highly influential people don’t have their own online presence with trackable linking.

Follower counts, particularly on Twitter, are effectively meaningless, due to the fact so many people are chasing high counts, and you can even buy friends and followers these days.

So a peer investment market seems like a more logical way of judging things – we’ll tend to invest in people we know and trust, even if they’re not digital celebrities (Although I suspect if and when Robert Scoble arrives we’ll see an Empire Avenue investment frenzy)

I’m still not entirely convinced that people will focus on investing in people they see as influential rather than trying to ‘game’ the system by simply investing in new people whose value will rise as they add their social networking profiles etc, but I suspect, as with most systems, it’ll be a fairly small percentage of people putting in the time and effort to gain wealth in that way, and those buying patterns could be tracked and minimised in various ways.

I think the biggest challenge on a membership level is to encourage people onto a platform in addition to their main social networks, and effectively onto one which isn’t amount engaging in sharing or conversation. There are plans to open up APIs and allow developers to play with the information, and a Facebook App or integration into the popular Twitter clients would help.

The other big challenge is on the brand level. Brands are increasingly engaging in social media, investing in time and resource to find influencers and brand advocates, and reach out to reward them in some way. But the fact that this is embedded so heavily in a gaming mechanic may put some off (although the rise of social gaming, and the rise of the average age of gamers might mean that the time is right for their type of mechanic), and I do wonder if the rewards will appear before the initial level of enthusiasm has worn off for many people – there seem to be a fair number of people signing up, filling out some details, and then not doing very much. Mind you, the same thing happened with Twitter back in the early days.

And there is one very clever element of the service – by rewarding external activity, those people who sign-up, link profiles, and never come back are still contributing to the data and receiving investments, so the service is still building while they’re absent. And even if they’re not checking their account or registered email addresses, you’ll be able to see which networks they’re actively using and track them down that way…

Now, who wants to buy a piece of me?