I was invited by the ASAE’s Tech Council to host the first #asaetech Twitter chat last Friday. I thought I would go out on a limb and ask everyone to discuss this post and awesome slide deck by Game Thinking expert Amy Kim. (This is a new deck from her; I posted one back in January here).
In this presentation, she walks through seven core concepts for engaging people in your game (or site) through game thinking. Her seven tips are (see the post linked above for more explanation of these):
1. Know who’s playing – design for your members’ social style.
2. Build fun, pleasure, and satisfaction into your core activity loop. – how can you make it fun for people to engage in your community sites?
3. Change the user experience over time. “There are three key stages of a player’s life cycle: novice, regular, and enthusiast. They won’t experience a web site, game or other experience in a static way. They need different content to be satisfied.” – are you thinking about your communities in terms of these different user stages?
4. Build a system that’s easy to learn but hard to master. – This is about keeping people engaged at the beginning and interested over the long term. As we all know, after the initial flurry of activity when you first invite people in, things will die down (if not die completely) if you don’t nurture the site with new stuff and “leveling up” on a regular basis.
5. Use game mechanics to light the way towards mastery. – Are you helping people move from a to b? To figure out what they can do in your community site?
6. As players progress, increase the challenge and complexity. “This is called “flow†in game play, where you try to keep the player interested in the experience, balancing between anxiety and boredom. You have to keep the gamer in the middle, or the flow channel.”
7. Embrace intrinsic motivators. As per Dan Pink, whom we’re all familiar with at this point.
We didn’t have time to get to #7, but here’s an excerpt from the chat, which went really great. Thanks to all who joined and watch this space for details of the next one, I hope you’ll join us next month!
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