How to Design Addictive Games
If you had to choose between buying a toy or a game for your child, which one would you and should you buy? Games and toys work very differently. Games have clear rules, structure and a competitive element. The games that are well designed can be powerful. They get people hooked. Games generate fanatic behaviour among their followers.The hugely popular game Angry Birds designed by the Finnish company Rovio has a cult following. In Finland there is a cola named after the game Angry Birds that outsells other well known cola. The game has even spawned a theme park in Finland which hopes to become bigger than Disney. All over the world you can see a game addict, device in hand, mentally half tuned (at best) to what you are saying but fully immersed and engaged in the make-believe world of games.How are toys different from games? Toys are unstructured. You make up your own rules as you go. The physical object could stand for something entirely different. The bed sheet could be a flying cape. The pencil could be a rocket.So what should you buy for your children? You should buy them toys - not games. I have listed my reasons here
During the last London Olympics, the game design company Hide&Seek created 99 Tiny Games that could be played in specific places and with rules that would be less than 140 characters. The game Gorillas In Your Midst was “a gorilla game for two or more players”. The instructions were pasted in public places and had to be good enough to get a passer-by to stop and play. I caught up with Mark Sorrell the game designer at Hide&Seek about what goes into designing a game that hooks people and makes addicts out of them.He says, “A game has rules. Those rules create a model in our head. We need to know the rules and then behave according to that. The rules exist but the game exists only in your head. Two people experience the same game with the same rules very differently.” It is always intriguing to understand what makes others like the games you don't or not like the games that you are obsessed with. To design a game, we need to use the agile process. Try out an idea, get feedback and then get back to making changes on it. "Games are designed based on principles of Behavioral Economics. You have to understand the Machiavellian aspects of human behaviour.", says Sorrell.Meanwhile gamification is growing. Gamification is about taking the essence of games—fun, play, transparency, design and challenge - and applying it to real-world objectives rather than pure entertainment. In a business setting, that means designing solutions for everything from office tasks and training to marketing or direct customer interaction by combining the thinking of a business manager with the creativity and tools of a game designer. Should these games and the process of gamification be taken seriously?If we need to teach people something, should you gamify it? Does gamification help people to learn? Is that something we should learn from game designers, I ask Mark."Absolutely not. Learning is intrinsically enjoyable. Learning is like playing. Play is how we learn. You should learn from game design experts how not to gamify learning. That is why grades are not a reflection of how much you have learnt. Grades are a gamification of the educational process. The grades are supposedly an abstraction of the knowledge. But the moment you focus on how to get better grades and stop asking yourself if you are learning enough. The external reward of grades takes away the intrinsic motivation to learn. The problem with the educational system is that there is too much focus by students on understanding the rules of the game so that they can manipulate the system to get better grades."In his blog, Mark expresses his dislike of gamification, "Pointsification, that’s the term, isn’t it? Some badges, some points, some extrinsic rewards to make you do all those things you don’t want to do.” Instead take a regular game and slap on some elements of learning to it and not the other way ‘round. The activity has to be intrinsically rewarding to someone. Adding badges to any random activity is not going to let people like doing something they do not.What should you buy for your children - games or toys, I ask Mark. "Toys.” says the game designer, without even pausing to breathe.---------------------------Follow Mark Sorrell on twitter @sorrellRead his blog here