
How Simple Game Mechanics Can Impassion Your Users - AndrewWarner
http://mixergy.com/amy-jo-kim/
======
roc
Game Mechanics will inevitably make a site less about what it's _supposed_ to
be about and more about The Game.

E.g. Karma/Moderating systems glorify/reinforce consensus opinions to the
detriment of actual discussion.

Friend counts destroy the real value of a friend connection.

Upvoting of articles leads to 'popular' articles inevitably taking the fore
from on-topic articles.

etc.

~~~
teamonkey
The talk was about how to get people to do more business with you, not about
keeping things on topic.

~~~
roc
And I was talking about the value of that 'more business' which comes from
Game Mechanics. Whether you're trying to sell sneakers, services or page
impressions, changing the user's focus on the site will necessarily change
their behavior. Which will cast doubt on the applicability of your old
knowledge of how the site works.

Suppose you're trying to sell shoes and you notice that shoes with reviews
sell better. So you add a karma reward system to incentivize reviewers.

The very act of soliciting those reviews with rewards will be reflected in the
average review. And the relationship you formerly noted between reviews and
sales, may no longer hold true. It may have been that the former relationship
was truly between _informative_ reviews and sales. And your reward system has
created a flood of _preference_ reviews which don't have the desired effect.

~~~
jmm
"Inevitably" vs. "necessarily" vs. "may no longer/have been" is an important
distinction.

The community itself, the nitty gritty of the mechanics, and moderation all
play a role in success/failure in respect to the underlying biz goal(s).

------
Jen
She spoke a lot about human psychology,so I wondered what her background was.
I had wrongly assumed that she was a "techie"-turns out she has a PhD in
Behavioral Neuroscience from University of Washington, and a BA in
Experimental Psychology from UCSD! What a fascinating lady and incredibly
interesting interview.

------
RyanMcGreal
thesixtyone.com seems to do a really good job of this.

~~~
trafficlight
For the most part they have a pretty good system. There are definitely artists
that shoot to the top of the list every time they upload something new which
causes a lot of artists to be overlooked. That said, the community itself
tries to make up for it by finding those underloved of songs and making them
visible.

It also seems like the current system is showing some strain with a growing
userbase. Things that worked a year ago don't seem to function so well
anymore. Specifically, there aren't enough hearts given per day to spend on
the growing number of songs uploaded. And since a song's visibility is
directly tied to the number of hearts it receives, a lot of good songs go
unnoticed because nobody enough hearts to go around.

Nits aside, I still love the site. It's done more for me as an artist than
anything else I've done so far.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
> Specifically, there aren't enough hearts given per day to spend on the
> growing number of songs uploaded. And since a song's visibility is directly
> tied to the number of hearts it receives, a lot of good songs go unnoticed
> because nobody enough hearts to go around.

What you've just described is a hearts recession. Paul Krugman will tell you
that the obvious solution is to increase the liquidity of the hearts market.
:)

