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Amy Jo Kim on Mixergy.com – 5 Fundamental game mechanics

5 Fundamental game mechanics

These five game mechanics are not all the fundamental game mechanics. They are five game mechanics that are particular useful for social software and web services. They’re useful, they’re low hanging fruit, they’re applicable. There’s a lot more sophisticated things you can do, but these five are a great place to start.

Points

The most fundamental thing that makes something seem like a game is points. People look at their Twitter followers and they see points. People look at the number of their friends and they see points. Anything that looks like points, smells like points, quacks like points is going to be points. Once you’ve got points you can do leader boards, if you choose. That’s why there’s “mayor” of Foursquare, because of points. Once you’ve got points, you can also do levels.
Collecting

The game mechanic of collecting is very main stream. Very familiar to people. You amass collectors. There’s baseball cards. There’s trading cards. There are Beanie Babies. There fans you’ve collected from your trip around the world. A lot of people are collectors. Badges are a good example of that. Badges tap into a collecting mechanic. Badges are interesting when there’s more to earn. You earn one badge, well there’s more. What does it mean to complete a set? If you can frame your badges as sets that you can complete, boom, you just tapped into the collecting mechanics.

Feedback

Feedback is not just games, of course. Feedback is good software design. Feedback is good user interaction design. But, games are particular good at feedback. And that’s why I consider it a game mechanic. If you’re ever played any games like Rock Band or Karaoke Revolution or Guitar Hero, those games gives you feedback on so many levels about what you’re doing they actually makes you better at your skill. And that’s what feedback fundamental does. It keeps you on the road to mastery. It tells you if you’re on the right track. It helps you get better like a great coach. That’s what great feedback does. The better your feedback the more it’s going to feel like a game and an engrossing system.

Exchanges

Taking turns — or exchanges is the shorthand I use for that. Playing chess is taking turns. Having a conversation is taking turns. Many games have this back and forth of taking turns. Tit for tat is taking turns. Giving and receiving a gift is taking turns. This taps into this very fundamental human engagement of, “its my turn, it’s your turn, it’s my turn, it’s your turn…” which is one of the most basic game mechanics we learn as kids, wait your turn. And you can tap into that. Humans are very familiar with what a conversation feels like, and if your system feels like a conversation. Feels like taking turns, you’re going to draw people in.
Cutomization

It can be customizing your character, like a World of Warcraft. Or blinging-out your profile on MySpace. Those are both great examples of customization. Any time you have a rich profile you can decorate….All that kind of customization was really pioneered by games. And thinking about how to allow people to customize their experience is much more what’s traditionally been in the gamer dynamic. Gamers customize their interfaces, customize their characters, etc. Now, what we’re seeing is that style of customizing both your identity and your environment is creeping into more everyday activities.

Make sure to checkout the excellent interview on Mixergy.com

Urlaub

The Urlaub is near. Only one day to go

Digitalkamera gesucht

Ich suche eine digitale Spiegelreflex. Kann jemand was empfehlen. Ich tendiere in Richtung Canon EOS 500D oder 450D

Gmail no longer in Beta

BREAKING NEWS: Gmail is no longer in beta!!!

okay…. finally

Video of Mark Zuckerberg talking about Facebook’s future direction

Railswaycon is over

And I took some notes. A larger post will follow here and on the imedo devblog
Overall it was fun. Good presentations, but the rooms were to small and there were not enough powerplugs.

RailswayCon 2009 Berlin

Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow I will be attending RailsWayCon 2009 in Berlin

My new project: nightflyz.com

I started a new project some weeks ago: Nightflyz – Party Guide Wordwide
If you want to trade links please leave a comment.

Optical Illusion what do you see on this picture?

What do you see here?

Why do people pay for stuff they could get for free?

Kevin Kelly:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

A quote from: Kevin Kelly – Better than free

Youtube HD

Seems I’m late to the party but youtube enabled HD. So if the content was uploaded in High definition (HD) to youtube there is now a small link beneath the video which allows you to watch youtube videos in HD.
But HD is in this case not really HD, but a slightly better resolution than their standard youtube videos.
I like the higher quality videos that youtube hd enables! Well done youtube!

The Space Game

There is a new game coming soon by the casual collective guys which is right up my alley! It’s called “The Space Game” and features mining of asteroid belts, building supply lines and defending against space pirates! So basically your typical towerdefense mechanics in space and with a few twists added. It looks pretty sweet and should be a lot of fun. I guess I will be all over this! ^^

Here is the blogpost about The Space Game and here is the video they created which shows you some gameplay footage:

Battlestar Galactica returned

Finally! I’m so excited. Let’s see what will happen in this season

The easiest signup form

check this out:

pretty neat huh?

thanks to christian for the heads up!

Games I play at the moment

Just got back into WoW a while ago, but now I also started to play some browsergames again. Basically both typical build & raid games.
First I started (for the first time ever) to play the famous OGame (by Gameforge) and boy you can really tell how old this is. I hope the new UI is coming soon to all the servers, because the old one is HELL! Javascripts not working and what have you. The new UI looks quite nice though. Can’t wait

The second one, which has a much better UI from a usability standpoint for now is space-pioneers. I played this game extensively before and I know its potential to eat up my sparetime, but it’s fun

All this playing and also watching some videos of last year’s Eve Fanfest got back to working on my own little browserbased game again. I really got quite far this time around, but there’s nothing to see just yet If only I had more time on my hands and Photoshop on my mac *hint hint*

The World of Warcraft has me, again

Yeah, what can I say … the hype won me back.

Got back and finally hit 40 with my warrior! Plate Armor at last!

They give you a mount with 35 now, so traveling is not that a big pain in the ass anymore.My trusty Kodo steed looks funny though riding the pavements in ogrimar. I just hope it doesn’t fall over.

The graphics got an overhaul as well and I am thinking of getting a new graphics card now ^^ Bumped the graphics up and my card almost died, haha. Looks nice though.

I also got back with my hunter. It’s still very low, but extremely easy and fun to play and I deal alot of damage with my pet. It’s much easier to level than my warrior :/ If I knew that earlier I would have had stuck to Wow longer altogether.

Also watched 10 Days of Knight on Project Lore. Man, this Death Knight quest chain looks like alot of fun. Unfortunately I need to have burning crusade and wrath of the lich king installed to roll a death knight. Well, take all my money blizzard and make Warcraft 4 an awesome game

Dota in the Browser

Check out Minions if you like playing Dota (which is a very popular multiplayer WC3 Mod). The guys over at casualcollective did it again! Very addictive game
Ok, next round…

Update:

Here is the blogpost about Minions on the CasualCollective Blog and there is also a video available on youtube:

Have fun!

The new WordPress Dashboard

I like it. Especially the Quickpress. I can see me use this more often from now on.

When is mediocre good enough?

That is the question.

Do you rush out and deliver product eventhough you know that it needs more polish? Do you use your customers / users as beta testers because you ran out of time polishing?

Blizzard, Ning, Apple delivered when the product was amazing. They earned their customers respect and are doing great. The famous Blizzard statement: “It’s ready when it’s ready.”

How about you? Do you want to lead the pack with amazing product or be a mediocre wannabe?

You decide.