I recently attended the interactive portion of the sxsw festival. I’ve been organizing and collecting my thoughts and notes. The following is the first of a series of posts that I’ll make. The first topic I’m going to cover is…

Gameplay & Sustaining User Interest.

notes taken from the following presentations:

Stephen P. Anderson – Sustaining Passionate Users
http://twitter.com/#!/getmentalnotes
#sxid

Seth Priebatsch – The Game Layer
http://scvngr.com/
#gamelayer

A topic that came up repeatedly at SXSW was game theory. Game theory becomes valuable when you can integrate elements of game play into your site or app in order to attract and sustain customers.

Various game elements include: countdown/timing mechanisms, shaping mechanisms (elements that teach or persuade), delighters (small, unexpected, playful pleasures), loss aversion (make customers not want to let go), status building, level based incentives, adding measures to any item or process, feedback loops, and membership (among many others).

More than one speaker warned about the limited payoff of reward based incentives…
- Goals and Rewards do not equal a Game – those elements don’t make it interesting alone. The user must be challenged.
- Extrinsic rewards drive a need for more extrinsic rewards. Intrinsic rewards are viable for long term strategy and engagement.

Good user engagement pulls a user into the content. One speaker gave three progressive levels of user content engagement.
- The content is boring, deal with it.
- The content is boring, but I’ll add some interest on top of it, or after it.
- The content is important and I’ll tell you why – invite mastery of the content.

Most games eventually end. Game-play might get users interested, but why do they stay? Common responses include: it works, it does one thing well, it’s reliable, it has utility, my friends use it, and there is no other option.

Location based services (Foursquare, Gowalla, Scvngr etc.) have had a lot speculation around them. I thought Seth Priebatsch’s thoughts were most in line with my skeptical stance on these services (though he is the founder of Scvngr). Seth stated that a lot of time and money have been invested into these location based serves with little return on investment… yet. I’m not saying a successful model won’t be found, it just hasn’t proven itself quite yet.