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

okay…. finally

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

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

pretty neat huh?

thanks to christian for the heads up!

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*

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

Update:

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

Have fun!

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.

Found via Are Video Games Recession Proof?

Click to see the video

Looks interesting.

It is possible to pass a :layout option to a render :partial call like this
<%= render :partial => 'some_list', :layout => 'list_widget' %>

I certainly learned alot and I just want to say, if you ever have the chance to see Justin Gehtland, go for it! He’s one of the most brilliant and funny speakers I’ve seen.

The hotel and service personal were all very nice. A very pleasant time overall. Can’t wait for next year.

It will enable you to use layouts/templates for your HTML Emails and it will inline CSS information inside the HTML to make sure it works in almost all Email clients.

For more information see my blogpost on imedo’s devblog about awesome_email

This serialization framework is heavily used inside Google itself, lightweight, easy to understand and definetly worth a look (YAML anyone?). Check it out here: Google Code – Protocol Buffers

Get it here: http://ennerchi.com/projects/jrails

Or install it with this command:

./script/plugin install http://ennerchi.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/jrails

and copy all the javascripts to your apps public/javascripts directory.

That’s it. You are now rolling with jQuery and jQuery UI goodness.

Normally you would add an element like this:

<div style="clear:both">&nbsp;</div>

after your floating elements to clear them. With this method you don’t need to do this anymore.

Just add this to your stylesheet:

.clearfix:after {
    content: ".";
    display: block;
    height: 0;
    clear: both;
    visibility: hidden;
}

.clearfix {display: inline-block;}

/* Hides from IE-mac \*/
* html .clearfix {height: 1%;}
.clearfix {display: block;}
/* End hide from IE-mac */

and also add the “clearfix” class to the element that wraps your floating element. That’s it.

How many domains do you have and what of them percentage is unused? Do you use some kind of domain parking service on those unused domains?

Eventhough I personally have never played any of the Diablo games, this one looks really sweet!

Checkout the official Diablo 3 site where you can watch a cinematic and a gameplay trailer. The cinematic trailer looks awesome like always and will water your mouth for more! The gameplay trailer shows the barbarian and the witchdoctor classes in action and you’ll get so see 2 boss fights.

Blizzard want’s all my money and sparetime I think ^^

There’s also a short screencast you can watch to see how easy rails deployment can be: Passenger Screencast (the video is made by Ryan Bates from railscasts so the voice should sound familiar )

After that I made a human hunter, and I had good fun playing him. Then I went to the first instance and guess what? Blue screen of death. Wow!

Apart from the bluescreens, the quests are more of the same old same old. “Go hunt 5 of these wolfs … Oh thanks, now talk to that guy.” and so on. You run around alot. The graphics look nice, but not as polished as WoW’s. Also there’s alot of instancing going on, at least in the beginning. I’ve barely came across other players.

I will give the game one more try I guess, but these bugs are bad. Maybe it’s my graphics card, but bluescreens should not happen – ever! Wow and Warcraft 3 run like a charm

Hope you like them.

On the galaxynomads development blog (which I can’t access at the moment, because I have no access to my old email account) I announced in November 2006 that I was going to develop it with Ruby on Rails. As time went by a few things came up and I found a great new job (day to day Rails development, yeay!) and I also moved to Berlin earlier this year.

So as you can imagine I haven’t had much free time to develop the game. I did some small things and all, but nothing really that good to show off really. Basically groundwork for all the game mechanics.

Last week I took a short leave and I could actually work on the game a bit. I built 2 prototypes of a hexagon tiled map, using some of the stuff I learned from looking at weewar.com and kdice.com which are also very popular and great browserbased games.

The first prototype didn’t work out so well so I started a new one by using a new approach. So the second time it really worked like I had expected it to. It isn’t pretty yet, but the basics work. The map has several layers with an imagemap on top. This is how it looks so far:

It highlights all the surrounding hex tiles when you hover over one tile and shows what map points (extra money points or capture points i.e.) and units are currently inside the tile. You can also click on the map to activate a certain tile.

I used jQuery for the DOM stuff this time, because it’s a very nice lightweight alternative to prototype and scriptaculous. So far I haven’t run into any issues.

If there are any developers or designers interested in joining the game making process feel free to leave a comment and I will get back to you.

I was listening to it for quite some time now, and I thought I should share the love. If you’re into electronic music you will LOVE this podcast: Inside Outcast

Have fun with it!

just came across these wonderful free icons: http://www.famfamfam.com/archive/silk-icons-thats-your-lot I’m sure it’s old news, but I like them.

Also go to http://www.joesgoals.com to see some of them in action.

I recently discovered the YUI Library CSS Tools, that include reset.css, fonts.css and grids.css. It makes cross browser styling simpler and more fun.

Reset.css removes all browser default styling from all elements. So you can start with a consistent state for all browsers. After reset you have to explicitly set all styles for your site’s elements.

Fonts.css normalizes font-sizes and enables cross browser resizability of your type.

Grids.css offers a variety of liquid and fixed width layouts that work in most browsers.

Check out the YUI Website and the video about the YUI CSS tools.

found this nifty toolkit http://utilitybelt.rubyforge.org/ which enables simple syntax coloring, editing lines within your favourite texteditor (like my beloved textmate) and much more. Check it out!

I’m currently reading “Smart Start-Ups” by David Silver. I just recieved it today and am only a few pages in, but this seems to be a very interesting read! I highly recommend it, there’s alot to learn from David Silver!

The companion website can be found at: http://www.smartstart-ups.com

By the way: Amazon rocks! I ordered the book yesterday (sunday) and had it at my doorsteps this evening (monday). Nice job!

Of course there’s the allknowing wikipedia, that comes with some great articles: Reputation System and Reputation Management. So there you get the basic ideas how reputation systems work.

Board software, like vBulletin, comes with reputation features built in or some other board engines, like the popular phpBB or Invision boards, have mods that enable user reputation. So if you like the idea of giving more power to your powerusers you can add these mods and start using a reputation system out of the box. Christian Mezei of SeoPedia describes the features of the invisionize mod in his article Invision User Reputation System (mod)

Most of these systems let users score each other’s posts and give each vote a certain weight based on a number of factors like number of posts or their own reputation, like I mentioned in my last post User Rankings in Online Communities.

What about online games, like the MMORPG World of Warcraft?

Well, reputation in Wow is certainly different as users can’t directly vote on each others characters. The rank of a user in the community is mostly based on their gear and level. The more highlevel equip a character has, the more his owner is committed to the game. So it’s easy to tell powerusers from casual players in Wow, because of their high level gear.

Ever played a browsergame where you start out with say a planet or a village and then harvest resources to upgrade your buildings. Then harvest some more to then build an army to kick your neighbours ass? That’s a build and raid game.

Raiding

Eventually at some point in such a game it becomes more feasable to build a large army to raid your neighbours and or kill their army and collect it’s leftovers (=resources). That way you are able to build faster than you would by just waiting for your buildings to produce enough resources. Normally a good player will start raiding very early on, to suppress its neighbours. Repeatingly raiding your neighbours so that they cannot catch up with you is called farming. If you become a farm of such a player, you are basically canned, if you haven’t heard of “saving”.

Saving

Since I mostly played space games I will use those as an example here.
So if you don’t want to become a farm for other players you have to build transport units and send them on save-flights, taking all your precious resources with them. During that time your resources are saved from enemy players and when your fleet returns you, have the resources at your disposal again. If you don’t save you will likely fall prey to a player that will strip you dry from your ressources.

Also, in many games of this kind it is possible to destroy ships that are in stationed on a planet and flying through space. Your neighbour comes visiting you, destroying all your ships and collecting the remains (debris), which is usually a big amount of the resources you used to build the ships. Now he can build even more ships and you will have a hard time catching up with him. He now has the advantage, and you, depending on the value of the fleet, will need some time to rebuild your ships.

So, saving your resources and fleet is vital to your success in such a game.

The thing with saving is, that your saveflights can only last a certain amount of time. So you mostly cannot send your fleet away for say 3 days. And you also cannot time the return of your fleet very precisely. That means that if something gets between your scheduled playtime and you miss the return of your fleet, the chances are high that your fleet will be destroyed while in orbit.

My Story

I have played a game called space-pioneers and was kinda successful at it too, because I had alot of spare time on my hands. My fleet was pretty decent in size and there were many attempts by other players and one player especially to destroy it. I always managed to save my fleet and to be there when it returns just in case I was attacked by one of these players trying to destroy it. It worked quite good until this one time. I was gone for 10 Minutes (way to work) and got into a conversation with a co-worker that took a while longer than planned. I switch on the pc and check with my fleet only to find it blown to a million pieces. The one player that tried so hard, finally managed to find a point in time when my guard was down. I tried to rebuild the fleet after that, but somehow I lost the fun and realized how much this game dictated my day, so I quit.

But am I all done with build and raid games? No, after a while I started playing some other games of this kind and I wondered why I do that after this unpleasant event.

Here is my take on it

Men like to build stuff. Since most of the players of such games are male, that probably makes up a big part of the success these games have. Also beeing able to dominate other players by farming them or destroying their fleet for example, may also be a motive for some players.

Well I’m not a specialist in the art of gameplay mechanics but I think that building stuff and upgrading your buildings to possibly unlock better buildings and units, is a very vital part of successful games. If you look at games this way you see that it’s everywhere. Take RPGs like World of Warcraft for example. You quest to improve your stats – to slay bigger monsters, that drop even cooler swords and shields. This grind seems to be vital to a successful gameplay, because at some points in these games – when you beat the big monster or have the resources to upgrade your powerplant to level 25 – you get that sense of achievement that your “hard work” has paid off.

What do you think makes build and raid games successful?

It doesn’t look pretty yet, because I will primarely focus on the gamedesign first and make it pretty when the need arises.

In addistion to switching from Java to Rails, I also changed the concept of the game quite a bit. It will become no epic tale of your own tribe of galaxynomads as originally planned.

I forced myself this time not to make a big game like it that, because it takes such a long time to write it and I might lose interest in it again. So I decided to take some aspects of the original game idea and make a lightweight casual game out of them.

The idea is now is basically a duel game with starships. You will travel the galaxy and fight other players with your ship. You will have several slots on your ship to customize it’s abilities. Over time you will find new equipment for your ship that you can use to fight better players and so on.

I think this will be alot of fun and threre are some twists and treats I have planned for the first release, so stay tuned

The question I have is: What is a good way of showing a user’s commitment to a community other than post count or signup date?

What I have seen work very well the following example.

A forum, that I’m a member of, has reputation system where you earn reputation points (positive or negative) from other users that rate the posts you make on the board. If you make a useful post you get plus points and if you spam or troll you get minus points. You get the idea.

Now, the more positive points one user accumulates, the harder he can punish spammers or trolls on the forums by rating their posts negatively. That way powerusers that post useful stuff over a long period of time can build up a strong reputation. Also the stronger one’s rep is, the more he can reward the poster of helpful stuff and the harder he can punish trolls. After a certain threshold the trolls account is suspended and he can’t post anymore. An admin has then to step in and verify if the punishment was justified or not.

Overall I think it’s a really good system if done right and the users handle it with care. But it can be gamed by creating multiple accounts and voting for your own posts with your fake accounts. But smart admins will figure those accounts out very quickly I guess.

I heard that slashdot does something similar, but more advanced where every user can actually rate posts and comments by random.

Reputation systems will get more important with the advent of social networks and futher penetration into the mainstream market. I will investigate some more on this topic.

I’m a Rails Developer with experience in many fields.

Programming languages: PHP, Java, C++, Ruby, JavaScript – been there, done that.

Webdesign: Photoshop, CSS, HTML – pretty solid knowledge

I began programming as a young boy (10 years, I think) on my awesome Amiga 500 with expansion box (FPU + more RAM). I started out with Basic and made a small game where you could kill lemmings with your mouse cursor. I had advanced blood effects (red circles really) and speech output. Yes, you heard right. The old Amiga could talk back in 1992.

PC’s really couldn’t keep up with the graphics and the overall package the Amiga delivered, but Commodore somehow managed to blow it.

Well, but enough of that. I don’t want to bore you to death with my childhood memories.

After my first steps with Basic I got a Amiga 1200 and tried to understand Assembler  programming. My parents eventually bought me a very expensive Assembler programming toolkit, but I lost interest very fast, because I couldn’t get my head wrapped around the whole thing.

Then after years of Amiga goodness it was time to switch. Commodore clearly had no future, so I got a PC for christmas. A Cyrix, anyone remember them? On this machine I began coding with Borland C++ Builder.  A really awesome tool back in the day. Way ahead of the market, like my beloved Amiga. (I think you begin to see a pattern here) My texteditor was even featured in a magazine and I recieved emails of people how much they liked it. That was a key moment I guess. People actually like stuff I made on my computer.

After that, there was the internet and all changed. The first websites I made had clouds as a background pattern and a rotating 3D-Email gif. Good times. Then I made a Anna Kournikova Fansite and actually got quite alot of traffic. I even had over 100 people on my mailing list back then.

For this site I made alot of wallpaper backgrounds. First with Paintshop Pro and later with Photoshop. I got really quite good at it and more people came to see my latest stuff. I began pumping out so many wallpapers, boy I wish I still had them.

But somehow this led me to wanting to become a designer or an artist. I always liked draw ing and actually I’m still quiete good at it. Not like many people on deviantart, but better than the average person I guess.

However, I tried to become a Designer after finishing school, but at that time everybody and their dog wanted to be a designer (around 1999-2000) so the market was flooded with people and I didn’t even get a chance. Well, sad story.

In a fast overnight decision I went and begun studying business informatics, but that was rather boring so I quit and chose to do something more practical. Like learing to be a professional programmer. I got the job and the company tought me alot of stuff, but also showed me how not to run projects and how to dismotivate your workforce. After finishing my training I went looking for a better alternative as a Rails Developer. In the company before I was programming Java (with all the good stuff like hibernate and spring). XML Madness and overengineering of simple problems. Waterfall and what have you. Almost any mistake a software company could make in project management. However I wish them luck with their big upcoming project.

So after that episode I’m currently fresh employed by a little startup that is running a web community about health. I’m now in my 2nd month there and it’s very interesting to see what it takes to get a startup off the ground.

So I hope you liked my first post. Please leave me some comments. I’m sure I will find time to post more on this blog, because I find it very refreshing getting my thoughts out there.

See you soon, take care!

I don’t know yet what and how often I will post here, but now I’m a blogger. Yay!