Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software
Amy Jo Kim, ShuffleBrain

Meeting Report by Alison Ruge

Taking Amy Jo Kim’s principles to heart, it’s possible to make even the most productive social interactivities "fun." We already knew we could lose track of time and become immersed in our work but now we know how to help others fall into "flow". Kim reviews three case studies of social media – YouTube, Twitter and FaceBook -- implementing specific qualities of game mechanics.

She points to recent trends demonstrating how social media with game mechanics is the future of networked entertainment.

• accessible technology (open apis, widgets, clearly documented third-party UIs, like Twitter),
• syndication (YouTube videos can be played anywhere), and
• social game mechanics, which structure activity around a creative challenge that is matched to their skill level, with functionality that opens up over time, balancing the user experience between the emotional states of anxiety and boredom.

Kim recognizes social game mechanics in the following forms:

1. collections (Flickr lets you collect photos to demonstrate your aesthetic savvy),
2. points (Digg lets you demonstrate insight into what’s going to be popular), and social points given by other players (Flickr’s metric of “interestingness” are points generated by others based on how many people have seen your video, shared it, etc),
3. feedback demonstrating mastery (Guitar Hero, Karaoke Revolution, Rock Band, Dance Dance Revolution offer compelling visual and auditory cues),
4. exchanges both implicit (comments on FaceBook) and explicit (MySpace “Add Me as Friend”), and
5. customization (MySpace profiles, avatars in WoW)

Case Study #1: YouTube
YouTube allow users to /collect/ a video playlist as "My Favorites"; accumulate /points/ by viewing and rating videos, looking at the "Most Popular", "Most Recently Viewed," "Most Favorite"; give and get /feedback/ by commenting on a video and getting an email when someone comments on yours; /exchanges/ by sharing videos with friends; and, /customization/ by making your own personal channel.

YouTube demonstrates specific key trends in how social media are creating value and spreading fast. YouTube offers very /accessible technology/ user experience; it’s very easy to upload your own video. The site also has mastered /syndication/ in the ways it allows users to put one’s own video on their blog or webpage, and link YouTube to your site and vice-versa. This makes for "tendrils" all over the web.

Case Study #2: Twitter Amy Jo Kim calls Twitter "elegantly simple over time" and marvels at how well they’ve kept complexity at bay in the face of success and popularity. Twitter allows users to /collect/ friends as photos, while smartly separating friends and followers as two one-way links that when connected, become friends. Twitter also carefully employs social points in a way that does not dilute the intrinsic motivations for using the site. The temptation exists to post "Leader Boards" showing which users have the most friends among all users of the site. But this can distort behavior by making points the exclusive reason for being on the site.

Twitter gives users’ casual /feedback/ by exposing who is checking out your profile. /Exchanges/ happen in the same form as reputations have emerged on eBay and Amazon Marketplace, by helping users leave feedback. The casual email request of "Leave me positive feedback and I’ll leave you positive feedback" is an emergent social dynamic, not a forced part of the system.

Twitter also shows how /accessible technology/ spreads social media in a networked environment. Specifically, Twitter works across platforms: on the web, on your mobile phone, with your IM. This allows users to meet their fellow players where they are. As a distributed experience, it’s easy for users to engage. Twitter made their API open from the start. Lastly, Twitter has made /syndication/ easy, helping users put a Twitter feed everywhere and anywhere.

Case Study #3: FaceBook FaceBook helps users enjoy /collecting/ friends, fans (one-way friends), and photos. They’ve found that collecting creates stickiness: the more you collect, the harder it is to leave. FaceBook /points/ come with playing online board games with your friends. Their social leader boards have a different impact on behavior because it is more compelling to know where your friends stand as a group. Instead, FaceBook offers users "Leader Boards" that include only their acknowledged "friends", and so it becomes a friendly sporting feeling of knowing who has most of what.

FaceBook users /exchange/ in a variety of ways: "Add to Friends" if you know the same people (recommendations), add a comment to someone’s news feeds, and comment on someone’s photos. Using exchange in this way triggers the experience of starting a conversation and create a conversational interaction between the user and the site.

/Customization/ is easy, since the FaceBook home page IS your home page, presenting at top your requests and updates from your friends. But, the news feed is the best example of customization on FaceBook. It’s only valuable to a user once they have a critical mass of friends. And, it’s incredibly easy to add friends, create a page or a group; all are examples of /accessible technology/.

If /syndication/ can be internal, it means allowing the supply of material for reuse and integration with other material. FaceBook pulls "friends" into the game environment but maintains a "walled garden" regarding sharing the information across the web. In this way, FaceBook is a platform.

If game mechanics and social media are the future of networked entertainment, how do you prepare? Amy Jo Kim encouraged BayCHI members to start small with using game mechanics as appropriate in their social media user experience designs. She said, "Co-evolve your game in partnership with your players. Use these principles of game mechanics as inspiration, not a recipe. Make sure every feature is integral to the premise of the site." She emphasized other principles, all in her words:

1. Build content-sharing networks. Make it easy for players to create, share, rate and discuss content.
2. Leverage standard data formats. Build around widely accessible formats like XML, SMS, voting. The more you can leverage standard data formats, the easier it will be to extend to new platforms as they emerge.
3. Assume you are a cross-platform service, and make sure your data lives on the network so that your user can engage with you from any location or device they choose.
4. Prepare for syndication. Enable widgets, open your API, encourage third-party clients so that you don’t have to do everything yourself and more people feel they have a stake in the success of your site.

Learning how people behave in social environments like religious institutions, café, clubs, is a great starting point, but the translation to digital environments isn’t easy.

Scrap-booking parties are a reasonably social way to sell something. But when you sit down to design it, the simple real-world structure isn’t a good match for the virtual user experience. You’d need to tune the game by providing a challenge that is shared by you and your friends, something with more native capabilities for the web. Take the idea and the pattern and then blend it with the web environment.

How much is too much (feedback or points)?
It’s not too much if it’s not distracting to your user experience. It’s not too much if you’re not asking the user to pause their engagement during their activity until it’s appropriate for them to take stock with how they are doing.

This is an area where game designers spend a lot of time tuning the information: how often it updates, where it’s located on the screen. Peripheral vision is still easily distractable. But movement can be exciting, motivating. Give the user moments of tension and release by showing them how they have improved and how they compare to others during those breaks.

How does this translate to the mobile environment? The usage patterns of mobile users are in short bursts, which is very different from how people play games on their PC or a console. CenterScore in San Mateo created mobile Hangman. It shares easily with others from a mobile phone; a simple and short game + your mobile phone network – this is the holy grail. And looking at where people are, and the impact of that context, like ambient noise, is important to crafting that kind of accessible, social experience.

What does it mean when implicit exchanges aren’t reciprocal?
Implicit exchanges that aren’t reciprocal create fans. The problem comes up that when you have a friend say, "Why didn’t you know about my activities? Why aren’t you checking up on me?" As long as the exchange is honest, it’s not a problem. The problem comes up when the content provider is using the fans for something, as opposed to just having a fan. For example, it's manipulative to use exchanges when they are for public relations or marketing exploits.

Original Announcement

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Over the past few years, we've seen an explosion of interactive services that harness the collective efforts of users. On the web, services like MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook, Flickr, and Digg are providing hours of entertainment to millions of people. These game-like services are changing the face of networked entertainment, and rapidly displacing television as a leisure-time activity. They share three key elements: user-generated content, community infrastructure, and game mechanics. In this talk, I’ll review the psychology and system thinking behind game design, and explore how to use game mechanics to create interactive experiences that are fun, compelling and addictive.

Amy Jo Kim is an internationally recognized expert on community architecture and social systems design. She has designed products and services for AOL, Digital Chocolate, Electronic Arts, eBay, Harmonix, MTV, Nokia, Square/Enix, and Yahoo! Amy Jo is the author of Community Building on the Web, a design handbook (available in seven languages) that's become required reading in game design studios and university classes worldwide. She's currently working on developing a collection of "smart games" for online social environments.

Social Design and the Yahoo! Pattern Library
Christian Crumlish, Yahoo!

Meeting Report by Alison Ruge

As a Pattern Detective, Crumlish observes social design patterns in the wild and curates the Yahoo pattern library. He focused his tenure as curator on social patterns, because they are the most interesting new set of patterns on the web. Plus, Yahoo has bought Flickr and Del.icio.us, two exemplars of great patterns demonstrated on the Web, from inside Yahoo.

The phone comes with me, so I am the phone.
We don’t have a social culture for using cell phones yet because they are so new. One item of social etiquette that hasn’t been widely absorbed is that you don’t have to yell into a phone for the other person to hear you. Another example is that the people around you don’t want to know what you’re saying. The cell phone's ubiquity is influencing interpretations of availability and "presence", influencing how people assume they can reach others at any time.

A common refrain heard when people start a call has some bearing on social patterns of emerging rules of etiquette. Well-mannered phone users start a call by asking "Is this a good time to talk?", "How much time do you have?", and then "Do you want the 5-minute version or the 10-minute version?" It's not yet fully and widely respected that people are doing other things while they are using the phone, and these questions are an important factor in the right and best use of use the phone and what it means to call people.

Social Design Patterns
Social design patterns look like a neural map, mind map, in which one node might be the "self" whose identity stems in a mental map toward "avatar" and "attribution", "presence" and "reputation." Social design patterns might connect from "community" with its "relationships", "groups" and groups’ "norms" and "rules". "Activities" bind to "conversations", "comments", "reviews", "ratings" and "sharing." Recognizing these relationships can improve awareness of not only rules of social etiquette but also how we live in this technologically-mediated world.

Social Patterns of Presence
One of the most compelling examples of social patterns comes in the expression of "Presence." It’s easiest definition is as an online place, shingle, brand, but it’s increasingly recognized as:

1. one’s lifestream – one’s curriculum vitae, daily blog
2. one’s availability – whether you are online, taking calls, playing a game; status-casting: song am I listening to right now, my last Twitter message
3. mindfulness, paying attention – because, how much bandwidth are you really using during that conference call?

Social Patterns of Preference
Social Patterns are reflected in the aggregate of one’s preferences, the steps one takes to protect privacy, the measures taken to configure one’s environment online. For example, consider what composes your attention. Track yourself one day. When you turn on the computer, where do you go? These are patterns that start with you, but connect with others.

Social Patterns of Reputation
Reputation is emerging as a key indicator of how one fits into a social pattern. Reputation is elusive, though; you don’t control it, and it’s not in any one place. Everyone has their own idea of what your reputation is, but most people have no idea and have a flat perception. It’s a ubiquitous, spontaneous and highly efficient mechanism of social control. Reputation uniquely concerns the likelihood of the entity to behave in a certain way sometime in the future. Its importance is reflected in the efforts people take to "status-cast" their activities online.

Reputation Design Patterns
Reputation design patterns emerge in various forms, exposing underlying systems in that social fabric. Reputation requires comparison and credibility, but it comes in several forms including the simplest, everyday one of asking someone for a recommendation or a review. Eigentrust algorithm is a reputation management methodology. It finds that reputations gain status in different ways:

1. Caring – help others to gain status
2. Collaborative – share goals and work together to gain status
3. Cordial – accomplish individual goals that do not conflict with others to gain status
4. Competitive – compete against others for the same goals
5. Combative – share opposing goals, so that if one wins, the other must lose.

Personal Social Networks
Can we hope for the emergence of personal social networks? This would potentially allow us to take our own network with us, wherever we go around the web. It would reduce the redundancy of having to reassert everything each time a new space is entered. Open social design patterns include open APIs, third-party RSS feeds, running external code, and structured exporting capabilities that work as a badge.

Note: Christian is looking for an intern. Check out the last few slides of his presentation for the description of this opportunity.

Original Announcement

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Social networking sites are proliferating. New social media aggregrators appear every day. Venerable old sites are adding social features or trying to activate the social profiles of their users and members. A number of the interaction patterns that drive social relationships online are becoming clear (as well as a number of nasty "antipatterns"). Christian will talk about social patterns, previewing some that are in the works for the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library as well as others that he has noted "in the wild." The newly redesigned Yahoo! Developer Network site is the host of Yahoo's open design pattern library. Over the next few months, Yahoo! will be rolling out a series of open and social APIs and the pattern library will be gathering and sharing best practices for social web design.

Christian Crumlish started designing and building websites in 1994 after years of writing and publishing about applications and user interfaces. Today he is the curator of the Yahoo! pattern library and is director of technology for the Information Architecture Institute. He studied philosophy at Princeton and painting at the San Francisco School of Art. Christian is the author of, most recently, The Power of Many: How the Living Web is Transforming Politics, Business, and Everday Life (Wiley, 2004), and he is working on a book about online presence and identity, tentatively titled Presence of Mind. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, Briggs, and his cat, Fraidy.