Game Design Secrets: 3 Powerful Components to Hook Your Users
Learnings from the techniques of “fun games.”
Learnings from the techniques of “fun games.”
To win in the digital age, you need to win the attention game. Sudhir Venkatesh, Director of Social Science Research and Health Research at Twitter, said the most important metric for social media companies is the time the user spends on the app.
For an app to succeed, it must get a user addicted to increasing the time spent on the app. And the gaming industry has been mastering and pursuing the art of addictive apps long before SNS. If you look deep into the industry, you realize it has many precious learnings for making products that captivate users.
According to Yoshida, legendary producer, and director of Final Fantasy XIV, the essence of gaming is a sense of accomplishment. Three components create this sense of accomplishment: 1. An attractive goal (motivation), 2. Users’ ability to act, 3. Reward.
1. Goal
The goal of a game has to be attractive enough to be worth pursuing. Or else the user will not be motivated enough to play the game. Usually, the goal is tied to fundamental human needs that have been ingrained in our DNA from the hunter-gather past of our ancestors. Some common goals of games are below:
Hunting and collecting. Examples are Pokemon (collecting new monsters), Monster Hunter (hunting new monsters), Dragon Quest.
Competition. Examples are Mario Kart (racing), FIFA (football)
Social Connection. Examples are prominently SNS such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. “…we have a basic biological imperative to connect with other people. That directly affects the release of dopamine in the reward pathway.” (Dr. Anna Lembke, Medical Director of Addiction Medicine at Stanford University)
Problem Solving. Examples are Tetris (Puzzle), Candy Crush Saga (Puzzle)
Another critical factor of the goal is that it should be aptly difficultーnot too easy or not too difficult. There is a perfect balance for a game to be motivating, and the key is to allure the player into a state of “flow.”
“Flow is a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter: the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the Theory of Flow
2. Action
The game has to progress with the user having the ability to control the avatar or player. When the user controls the player, there must be three things: intuitiveness, responsiveness, and sociality.
If the actions are not intuitive, the user will feel frustrated and detract from the game. Two great examples are Mario and Netflix. On the game Mario, there are no instructions when you open the game. Instead, you see the character on the very left side of the screen, and the user has no choice but to move to the right. The screen then progresses to the right, “teaching” the user that he/she is going in the right direction.
Also, Netflix has an auto-play function that keeps the app in progress. So the user only has to lay on the couch or bed.
Another vital factor is responsiveness. If there is no feedback on the screen, then it will cause some frustrations with the user.
Finally, adding a sociality to the action is essential. Whether it is a ranking system to show how you are doing or having some sociality to the game (i.e., going on a quest with your friends), it will allow users to stick to the game on a long-term horizon.
3. Reward
The final component is the “Reward” of a game. According to American psychologist B.F.Skinner, a particular action will be strengthened if the reward for an action is “uncertain” or, in other words, “intermittent reinforcement.”
He demonstrated this concept with an experiment with a pigeon. First, he conditioned the pigeon to eat when a lightbulb shines. However, he didn’t guarantee food every time the pigeon pecked for food. Instead, he gave food on random occasions. The intermittent reinforcement strengthened the pigeon’s responsiveness to peck when the light bulb shines.
In the modern world, this is exemplified on the refresh screen of SNS. You refresh the screen in hopes of finding a new notification or interesting posts on the feed.
“You pull down and you refresh, it’s gonna be a new thing at the top. Pull down and refresh again, it’s new. Every single time.” — Joe Toscano, Former Design Consultant at Google
Also, the reward system should give the user some sense of growth. A sense of growth can be delivered in many different ways. One is a level-up function, such as a pokemon increasing its level. Another way is to increase the difficulty of the game. On social media, it is the number of likes, notifications, followers, or snap streak.
In short, a goal, action, and reward have to be intricately designed for a game to be captivating. These components have been time-tested and are used in prominent social media services too.
There is a lab at Stanford University called the “Behavior Design Lab,” which has been studying the art of behavior design since 1997. The founder of Instagram, Twitter VP, and Facebook International Growth Manager has been a student.
BJ Fogg, the founder of the Behavior Design Lab, has envisioned the importance of technology in human persuasion way before the advent of smartphones and mobile devices. In his book that he wrote in 2002, “Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do,” he mentions that “Networking and mobile technologies create the new potential to persuade at the right time and place.
There are demerits and merits to creating addictive games and apps, but it is no doubt that these techniques are beneficial. Therefore, it is worthwhile to go through the above components when designing a new app or service.