Game Design
Artful Design Reflection #6
Recent years gamification is becoming more and more important for product and service makers as a way to increase stickiness of usage.
But what does it really mean?
In chapter 6, Ge mentioned three principles to achieve the hidden goal behind gamification:
- Lower inhibition for intended behaviors by gamifying expressive experiences
- Create satisfying core mechanics to induce a sense of flow
- Motivate longer-term engagement through social and peripheral gamification
Here’s my interpretation. Let’s say we have a software we want more people to use for longer period of time. Then we first identify what is stopping people from using the software. We want to think of the current journey of using this software. What are the obstacles in this journey? When are people frustrated? What is difficult for beginners? These hindering points in the game are what we want to gamify to make things easier.
Then we think about how to gamify it. We want to create core mechanics that are satisfying for users, and we want to create peripheral mechanics to sustain that flow. For example, designing a puzzle piece a certain way is making the core mechanics of the game, but creating 10 levels of puzzles with increasing difficulty is designing the peripheral experiences. Since each puzzle is fun and there are 10 levels, people will play this game for a long time.
Fair enough.
We can see a lot of peripheral mechanics in many games now, such as badges, points, stages, and etc. Everyone is trying super hard to get the gamification right, but I think most fundamentally, one needs to figure out the core mechanics that creates that very initial sense of flow.
I’m recently playing a very minimalistic game call A Dark Room, in which I’m exploring what is happening a mysterious village by collecting various items like wood, meat, fur, and making tools and building structures. I needed to arrange and allocate villagers to collect items I need to in order to purchase or craft certain things. The storyline is happening on the left hand. It’s super simple, but it got me engaged for a legit few hours because it is very satisfying to strategize collecting things and to unravel the story.
The fundamental question is how to create the sense of flow. What’s the user input and what is the output given back to users. How quick should the feedback be given, in what aesthetics? What emotions are we triggering? Specifically, how can music contribute to making the core mechanics or aesthetics to achieve that flow? This is what I want to keep exploring in this class.