Addiction Based Game Design For Web Apps
Ever wonder why World of Warcraft has such a devout following? The reason is because of a concept known as addiciton based game design. It’s used in a variety of games to draw the user in, and get them hooked. It has made Blizzard millions, and these concepts can be used when designing web applications and other kinds of programming as well.
What Is An Addicting Design?
Addicting game design is based around the idea of giving the player rewards for completing repetitive tasks. This has been around since the old arcade games. You can see it games like Galaga: shoot more ships, get more points. Get more points, earn extra lives. It’s also very common in RPGs, where player complete quests or fight enemies to gain experience and/or money, to upgrade their character and their equipment. The Idea to give the player several steps in the process, with enough rewards along the way to keep them going. World Of Warcraft does this to perfection with their skill system. When a player gains a level, their skills don’t improve, but the maximum number of points they can have in that skill does. So they get a reward with each level, they also get smaller rewards as they use the skills to gain more points for those skills. Basically people like having numbers that they can increment, and be rewarded for it.
Microsoft has also used the principal with their Achievement system. As players complete tasks, they get achievements and points that is tied to their gamer profile. Have you ever found yourself doing something in a game that wasn’t that fun, but you found yourself doing just to earn an achievement? I know I have.
How This Applies to Web Applications
These same principles can be applied to Web Applications. Have some way for your users to earn experience, reputation, etc. You also must have some way to reward them for it. Some forums have custom user titles that posters earn as they make more posts, or get ‘rep’, which some forums have as a way of voting up other users. Digg also does this a more silent fashion: the more stories you submit that get a lot of diggs, the easier it is for you to make the front page.
Competitive Drive
If there is one thing users like more than earning points, ‘leveling’, and so on, it’s being able to do it and being better than other people at it. If you had a forum, you could do something to highlight your top users. Being competitive is simply human nature, and you can use this to your advantage to get people more involved with your site, and keep them around.
Examples of Addictive Design
Two sites that I use frequently have used these principles to make their site a more fun expierience for the user. One is Kongregate, a flash game site. Players can earn badges in certain games, which work in a similar fashion to Achievements on the Xbox 360. Badges are worth a variety of points, from 5 for an easy one to 60 to an impossible one. Players can also earn points for a variety of other activities on the site, such as rating games. As players earn points, they gain levels like in an RPG. Kongregate also has special challenges that allow players to win cards for a game called Kongai, a collectible card game that can be played on the site. Kongregate is a ‘metagame’, and playing games to get awards has become a game in and of itself.
Another site is StackOverflow, a forum-like Q & A site for programers, by posting and answering questions, they gain various privileges.They also have an achievement-type system. Here is a list from their site:
| 15 | Vote up |
| 15 | Flag offensive |
| 50 | Leave comments |
| 100 | Vote down (costs 1 rep), create new tags |
| 200 | Reduced advertising |
| 250 | Vote to close or open your questions |
| 500 | Retag questions |
| 750 | Edit community wiki posts |
| 2000 | Edit other people’s posts |
| 3000 | Vote to close any questions |
| 10000 | Delete closed questions, access to moderation tools |
as you can see, users go from having less privliges than a regular forum user, to basically being a moderator. It not only motivates people to post on the site, but to do it well so they can earn more points and awards.
In Conclusion, you can see how using systems like this can help to keep users sticking around and using your site more. The more time they spend on your site, the more opprotunities you have to reach out to them with whatever message you would like to send or offers you are trying to promote. You could even reward users for referring other users, and help your site go viral. Have you ever applied these principals to a website or application you’ve made? Ever gotten hooked to WoW or something similar?
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I ran across this article while writing a Linked-in recommendation for Mr. Cook. I did not realize that you where also building web apps. I may eventually have some referrals for you. informative post. Say hello to everyone at J House for me.