There are few things that terrify me more than the thought of a social gaming company making 3 billion dollars. It’s a notion I hadn’t given much time to, before listening to Jesse Schell reeling about the unexpected successes of social gaming.
How did FarmVille manage to attract more users than Twitter?
It is clear that game designers care about their user, and winning their attention in these tumultuous times is addictive. But unlike most other designers, I’ve yet to meet a game designer that doesn’t understand the basics of psychology and I’m beginning to think there is a correlation between the two.
Psychological tricks create the commonality between these successful reality games; tricks that incentivise time investment with virtual rewards and then lock these virtual rewards into financial commitment. Tricks that ultimately provide a real sense of belonging and achievement. It’s a clever system that is not limited to the virtual, which is what makes its success both terrifying and exciting.
After all what is a game if it’s not fun and addictive?
Continual monitoring and tracking are a part of our lives, like it or not this is the way we have evolved. We are leaving behind a historical trace, a valuable pool of shared metadata that will outlive our physical existence. For the first time ever our grandchildren might live in a world where their ancestors can be physically fabricated from the virtual legacy that is left behind. As what we leave behind becomes more important, crass commercialisation cannot be the only benefactor from the immersion of reality and technology. Can we use the psychological understanding of social gaming to design better behaviour and tackle social challenges?
Posts
