Weber Shandwick Social Studies Blog

I’m passionate about gaming: how design and mechanics influence behavior, how games can enable better communication and collaboration, and how they can be used to motivate real-world actions that help improve organizations and maybe even help save the world.

So I’m very excited to be attending this year’s South by Southwest Interactive festival. This is the first year there’s been a dedicated track for panels about games and gamefulness. (In fact, there’s so much activity that this year’s program guide is as heavy as my laptop.) You can see my itinerary here.

My first panel today was Gamechanging: Turn Your App Into A Cooperative Game. Presenters Thor Muller (Get Satisfaction) and Buster Benson (Health Month) talked about the power of cooperation to motivate people. Cooperative games, they said, are good platforms for encouraging behavior change and sustaining long interactions.

Fig. 1 – The view from Buster’s seat.

Buster discussed how the mechanics of Health Month use social dynamics to promote healthy living. For example, a paying member can sponsor one non-paying member per month who they think could use help staying healthy. The paying member is rewarded by the feeling of having done something good for a friend, while the non-paying member is impelled to live up to the obligation they now feel toward their friend. Also, when a member lapses and does unhealthy things that cause penalties in the game, other members can “heal” them and bring them back into the fold. This act of societal forgiveness helps the struggling player to not give up in despair.

In his talk The New Frontier of Social Gaming, Zynga’s Chief Game Designer Brian Reynolds shared his “secrets” of social game design:

1. Make something everyone can play. Everyone understands the concept of being a farmer, or living in a city, making Farmville and Cityville universally accessible.
   

   Frontierville image by Sob Controllers, licensed under Creative Commons

2. Give it away for free.
3. Yes, free. The more friends who play or observe the game, the more value the game has for the player. Shutting out people who don’t pay for the experience makes the game less valuable to those who do pay.
4. Let people express themselves. People like to use social games in creative ways that show others how unique they are, and remind them why they like the player
5. Make ways to share and socialize.

Brian shared some of the nuts and bolts of game design: the challenges that designers must overcome (such as how you teach people to play the game quickly, and in an entertaining way so they don’t get bored), and the process of making a game. Brian’s method is to have his team build a playable prototype quickly — say, within two weeks — and then play it over and over again, making improvements until the date it’s scheduled to launch. During some projects, his team would create two or three different versions of a game per day.

Fascinating stuff! Now I’m going to grab some dinner and head to the TechSet kickoff party. I invite you to follow my Tweets from SXSW at @waderockett.