Examples of Psychological Motivators

* Fun: can change behavior for the better (examples at thefuntheory.com)
* Sequencing: sequential goal development. Break things down into goals or challenges.
* Status: ability to increase your standing among people.
* Scarcity: we infer value in something that has limited availability or is promoted as being scarce. When you see supplies are low, you are encouraged to take action. Examples: limited tickets left, limited amount of points to allocate, limit amount of characters, etc. The more of an incomplete picture you see, the more you want to see the rest of the image.
* Feedback loop: we are engaged by situations where we see our actions modify subsequent results. Examples: visual search with automatic reload.
* Delighters: we remember and respond favorably to unexpected and playful pleasures.
* Set completion: the closer our collection is to being complete the higher our desire to get a complete set of items.
* Ownership bias: we value a good or service more once our property right to it has been established. People want to ensure representations of you are accurate. Examples: Foursquare mayorship.
* Social proof: people tend to follow the lead of others when they don’t know what they should do. Examples: Digg votes, Outlook campaign.
* Recognition over recall: do not ask to recall things, let people recognize through visual presentations.
* These principles are going to be available as a card set of 50 insights that can be used as an easy reference and brainstorming tool. Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to the design of Web sites, Web apps, and software applications. Learn more at Get Mental Notes.

More at Get Mental Notes

All there!!!

A great article talking about the rising business of virtual goods in social gaming:

“The people playing these games on social networks don’t define themselves as gamers — they are just killing time, having fun,” Mr. Liew said.

Game creators talk openly about their strategies to make people pay for virtual goods: get them addicted, then steer them to purchases that speed up the pace of the game and help them succeed. In FarmVille, for example, the tractors’ gasoline tanks replenish themselves slowly over the course of a day. Instead of waiting, players can pay to buy gas — something that might be considered cheating in more traditional games.

There seems to be several drivers for virtual goods transactions:

• Competition - to get ahead in a game, status or rank
• Gifts - virtual goods become symbolic of one’s care/emotion for another
• Personalization & Customization- for purchasing personalized items to show off to others

via core77

Does the system encourage or facilitate appropriate behaviors from its users? Does it ’speak’ using appropriate cultural language and social gestures? How do its target users want to interact with one another in the first place?

With social software, the object of study is less tangible. A social interaction designer must consider not only people, environment, and existing tools, but also the unseen elements of the system such as social relationships, power dynamics, and cultural rules. Who are the stakeholders in the system and what do each of them want or need? How does information flow and where are the friction points? What does it feel like to be a part of this particular culture?

There was a great example in the article called Bragster which was a sort of ‘I dare you’ community of bragging rights. Such a great idea taking a fun social behavior (an American one) into a digital platform with all its glory and oddities.

The writer also has a site http://socialsoftware.org that is actually designed nicely with a  question/comment format with ‘likes.’

PicTag is essentially a piece of social software (though we don’t have much social features yet) combined with gameplay. What we are really trying to figure out is how social we need to make it to offset any of the gameplay’s ‘down’ moments. It seems that with social gaming, a game that might not be so fun to play by yourself might actually be really fun when played with other people. Games like ‘charades’ completely rely on social dynamics for it to be fun while other games like ‘tetris’ might simply be enhanced by social features.

So the main question is what sort of social interactions would be vital to a fun and engaging PicTag experience? What sort of things would make you keep coming back to open the app? What sort of rewards or satisfaction would keep you wanting to upload more photos and make more game moves?

In Lazzaro’s model, ‘People fun’, based on mechanics like cooperation,  communication and competition, is one of the most important emotional sources of experience value.  Based on this view, Lazzaro believes the combination of social emotions with traditional skill-based game emotions offers tremendous potential for game makers and creators of social experiences, and predicted the emergence of hybrid experiences that combine these two sources of emotion several years ago.

In Lazzaro’s view, feelings are the motivation and reward (the source of ‘value’, in business terms) for playing a game. Lazzaro believes people play games specifically to experience the different feelings
games can create; “the opportunity for challenge and mastery, the sense of accomplishment, the feeling of total immersion, a ticket to relaxation, or simply the opportunity to spend time with friends.”

Link

http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2005/08/designing_rewar.html

Another good one on the use of ‘alea’ in game design:

http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2005/11/the_rituals_of_.html

Some things I found worth noting:

Emotional rewards: related to the above, but applicable when the player feels they have done something for someone in the game. Animal Crossing’s present giving, for instance. A draw for Type 4 Participant players.

New Places: like new toys, new places are a mimicry reward for players driven to explore (a common drive!). Especially of value to Type 3 Wanderer and Type 1 Conqueror players.

Fixed Interval Schedule: that is, a reward is provided after a set amount of time. This provides better control over the rate of reward, and comes with the same post-reward pause as a fixed ratio schedule. Indeed, pauses are inherent to fixed schedules of all kinds. An example is the new items in the shop each day in Animal Crossing - the player comes back on future days to see what’s new.

A more successful attempt to incorporate alea into a game can be found in my beloved Animal Crossing. In fact, this game is packed full of alea - checking the (random) items in the shop each day, fishing, looking for insects, seeking buried treasure and the monthly lottery are just a few of the ways the game leverages aleatory elements to create fun play. In all these instances, the player faces not the threat of loss, but the potential for something wonderful to happen by chance.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/mcgonigal

alternate reality/narrative
massively multiplayer collaboration/alliances
participation in larger thread/collective goal
cognitive surplus
happiness engine

economy of engagement-

* satisfying work to do
* the experience of being good at something
* time spent with people we like
* the chance to be part of something bigger