

The San Francisco Games Revolution Is Over - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/13/the-san-francisco-games-revolution-is-over/

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Alex3917
Honestly I'd say at least 95% of gamification companies were seemingly run by
con artists to begin with. Extrinsic motivation completely kills intrinsic
motivation, a fact that virtually none of the gamification companies take into
account in their design even though presumably most of them know about this
since it comes up right away in any decent book on the topic. This means that
basically none of these companies had a chance in hell of working. Yet there
are tons of investors who've probably never taken more than psych 101 who see
these companies and throw tons of money at them without any due diligence,
because they intuitively seem like great ideas if you don't understand that
they're contraindicated by the academic research. So it just encourages more
people to come along and do the same thing.

Note to investors: find someone who understands psychology and the other
social sciences to help with your due diligence. And not just normal
psychology, but also specifically Internet psych. (Which is actually a field.)
For basically all businesses you should be looking at whether they're
consistent or inconsistent with what the social sciences suggest will work,
work great, or be completely non-viable.

(Also, it should be noted that there are startups that use gamification to
good effect, like Squidoo and Ginzametrics, but these are very rare.)

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uptown
"Extrinsic motivation completely kills intrinsic motivation"

Can you help me understand what this means?

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markbao
Extrinsic motivation takes the form of external incentives to do something,
such as the promise of money. In actuality, though, it seems that these
incentives actually demotivate people from performing the task, because it
kills their intrinsic motivation, their innate desire to do that task (such as
a true interest in the work).

So, instead of an innate desire to take on the task, the person now has an
artificially incentivized desire, which results in lower motivation, since the
motivation doesn't come from their own innate desire to do the work, but
rather from the money.

"At least 70 studies have found that rewards tend to undermine interest in the
task (or behavior) itself; this is one of the most thoroughly replicated
findings in the field of social psychology."
<http://www.alfiekohn.org/managing/cbdmamam.htm> — and see also Alfie Kohn's
book _Punished By Rewards_.

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true_religion
Can gamification be considered a reward in the same context?

It's not money or physical reward, but a 'badge' or an 'achievement'. It's
automatically having the system give attention and recognition to people who
do something the system likes, instead of having that recognition parseled out
by manually by moderators and admins.

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Alex3917
"Can gamification be considered a reward in the same context?"

Yes, the psychology is the same whether you're talking about tangible rewards
(money, physical products, digital downloads, movie tickets, etc.) or
intangible rewards (grades, praise, points, stickers/badges, etc.)

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ChuckMcM
I like the ambiguity in the title, is it Hipster speak or is it literal? Who
knows.

This article is an excellent discourse on the corportification of the gaming
experience. It really points out the notion that 'smart money doesn't
innovate, it evaluates' which is so prevalent in the casual game space. So
much data, the temptation to use it is impossible to resist, but then going
against it becomes equally impossible.

I don't think the revolution is over though. There is a lot of money to be
made in entertainment, but it is true that trying to make it mathematically or
through statistical analysis is in peril. Actual game designers, folks who can
conceive out of whole cloth a fun and entertaining gaming experience, will
come out on top.

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wallflower
> I don't think the revolution is over though. There is a lot of money to be
> made in entertainment, but it is true that trying to make it mathematically
> or through statistical analysis is in peril. Actual game designers, folks
> who can conceive out of whole cloth a fun and entertaining gaming
> experience, will come out on top.

Like there are auteurs like Kevin Williamson and Aaron Sorkin in Hollywood, so
there are true renaissance men and women in game creation.

Zach Gage.

"Gage is an indie game designer — the Bon Iver to Rovio’s Katy Perry, the
artisanal free-range heirloom-turkey breeder to Zynga’s factory farm. He works
out of his apartment and has long hair and a perpetually in-progress beard. He
works on games mostly by himself, collaborating occasionally with friends, and
sometimes he drops into immersive research sessions that can last for weeks.
One recent session was intended to figure out why people like playing word
games, a genre Gage has always hated. (He thinks it’s cheating to build a game
on top of a system that already exists, like words or numbers.)

So he spent two weeks playing Bookworm, Words With Friends and Wurdle, during
which he decided that the genre suffered from a serious lack of strategy —
aside from Scrabble, he says, most of those games are just dressed-up word
searches.

The result of this was SpellTower, Gage’s newest and most successful game,
which allows users to create towers by building words from letters in adjacent
boxes. In its first two months, he says, it earned him enough money to live
off for two years." [1]

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/magazine/angry-birds-
farmv...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/magazine/angry-birds-farmville-
and-other-hyperaddictive-stupid-games.html?pagewanted=4&_r=3&hp)

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ChuckMcM
Sounds like a really interesting person, I expect you could hook him into a
support network of developers, marketeers, and brand managers and his insights
would start supporting an entire mini-industry, like Pierre Cardin, or Ives St
Laurent.

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Tiktaalik
On point #2 I think it's still too early to say whether the handheld market
has been upended at all. Yes you see a ton of people on the subway playing
with their phones, but that may well be an example of the gaming market
growing to include more gamers, not that traditional console gamers abandoning
their dedicated handhelds. Consider that for September software sales for the
3DS were up 89% YOY. It launched poorly, but it also launched at an
unprecedented high price.

The market is changing but I'm not sure if traditional handhelds are being
hurt by the new iOS market.

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mik4el
What do you think about point number five; graphics? Is graphics an important
part in the next future game hit? Graphics is certainly not a priority in the
social games that have been succesful so far. The beauty of many hit social
games I feel is in that they're so easy to start to use and even my mom
understands them, will AAA graphics add to that effectively (since it's so
expensive)?

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drumdance
Disclaimer: I'm not a gamer or games programmer. But it seems to me that
"good" graphics are not just about beauty, but style and personality. For
example, South Park animation is crude but instantly recognizable as South
Park. There would be no point in converting it to Pixar-level quality except
as a joke.

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potatolicious
The San Francisco Gaming "Revolution" never existed. If it did, we'd also have
to talk about the Tamagotchi Revolution and the Furby Revolution.

It was a (very) short-lived phenomenon that was wildly profitable for a short
time, and at no point did it appear to be sustainable. Everyone who thought
this was the beginning of a long-term industry was delusional.

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gojomo
I like to think the "San Francisco Games Revolution" began over a century ago
in 1895 with the invention of the slot machine:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slot_machine#History>

Zynga is merely a continuation in that fine tradition... whether their pivot
to real-money games works or not.

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hristov
And once again techcrunch crashes the ipad ...

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FrankBooth
Complain to Apple.

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hindsightbias
There is no bubble

