Reshebnik on gamification. Task # 1: Internet project with UGC content

With this publication we are starting a series of articles devoted to solving problems in various fields with the help of gamification. The purpose of the article is to provide theoretical information and a general solution algorithm. The first task: how to make a working Internet project with content that users must generate with the help of gamification. Let's get started!

Formulation of the problem

Given:

So, there is an Internet project. Most of its content, if not all, must be generated by the users themselves, it can be of different types.
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To find:

Participants themselves must publish content, evaluate and moderate content posted by other users.

Training example:

Suppose there is a tourist web service on which participants must upload travel reports. It will be used to make the text less abstract, however, all that is written further will be suitable for other services with UGC content.

Theoretical background

A game add-on or gamification consists of three layers: game aesthetics, game dynamics, and game mechanics.

Game aesthetics is an emotional package that defines how users perceive gamification of a service, how they perceive themselves and their actions in it. The aesthetics are realized due to the person’s imagination, the general atmosphere in the game and the service, the graphic design of the service, text messages and the general tone of the service’s communications with the user.

Game Dynamics - describes what happens on a gamimated service and in a game over time, how the role of a participant in it changes, what are the short-term and long-term game goals of the service user.

Game mechanics - a set of specific mechanisms, rules, elements that allow you to implement the desired dynamics and aesthetics. It is game mechanics that are implemented functionally on the Internet portal, but their tasks are to support the game through, aesthetics, history, dynamics.

Algorithm of the decision

Big story on your service

Truly massive and viral are the stories and aesthetics of service, not mechanics. The idea of ​​gamification should work even in retelling to friends, and bejdis, which are traditionally distributed, do not retell.

In the training example “Travel service with travel reports” you can leave everything as it is, i.e. make a functional and convenient reporting service. But if we are talking about gamification, then it can be submitted as a “club of travelers”. The game almost always allows the player to experience a new gaming experience for him. Let the service allows the user to feel like a pioneer. A sort of Christopher Columbus of the 21st century. Laying out his report, the user seems to be putting on the map valuable information unknown to guidebooks, but valuable and authentic for the country for which it is indicated.

Emotional repacking functionality

Suppose your service has a purely utilitarian functionality. For example, a vote that is necessary to assess the quality of published content. Emotional repacking is what the user thinks and how he perceives normal actions when he performs them.

In our example, the voting function regarding the quality of a published report can be emotionally overplayed. For example, the user is told that he is participating in the selection of the most creative traveler of the month.

Social gameplay on the Internet service

Social gameplay is a gameplay for building social micro-communities and the joint solution of more global tasks that cannot be solved alone or can be solved more effectively with the division of responsibilities. A service can simultaneously have several communities that to some extent compete with each other. The service encourages competition and the development of large communities, the cooperation of individual users.

In the educational example of the “club of travelers” one can single out several micro-communities. For example, by type of travel or by country. As it was written above, the micro-community together solves a big task. For example, open the whole map. Those. the implicit task is to remove the “fog of war” from the map, and a piece of the map is opened with each report. There may be a competitive challenge, for example, competition between countries according to where the level of authenticity of information is higher. The community task can be defined both by the service creators themselves and by their loyal users.

User Career in Social Gameplay

The user's career determines how his role and capabilities in the service change over time. In fact, the social gameplay and the user's career in it relate to game dynamics and set clear short-term and long-term game goals for the user.

I will illustrate the career option on the example of the "Club of travelers". The user comes to the service novice, begins to deal with the service independently. After certain events committed on the service, representatives of different micro-communities turn to the user, in game terminology - clans. They can do this through the functionality of the service, for example, invites. They make a proposal to become his mentors and when he figured out enough, connect to their community. By connecting to the organization, the user receives opportunities that were previously not available to him. A role model can exist in a community, for example, a novice, a mentor, a map territory curator, a researcher, a traveler. The user makes a career in the community, he himself becomes a mentor, gets wards, gets access to opportunities and tasks inaccessible to beginners.

Formal elements of the game

In order for gamification to become like a game, you don't need cool graphics, you need formal game elements. I will list them and show them by example. Players - users of the service, presented in the aesthetics of the game by travelers. The objectives of the game - determine what the user must achieve, progress is stimulated by specific mechanics. For example, the goal may be associated with the "opening of the card", to become the "king of the mountain" in some territory. Victory conditions and the player's progress conditions in the game are also formal elements of the game. They describe what is the criterion of user success in the service and how to achieve it. For example, a career in the micro community, the seizure and retention of territory. Alternatively, you can open territory with published reports, and capture - with assessed reports.

Game mechanics to manage micro-community users

Various game mechanics are used to control the activity. Their choice is determined by the dynamics and aesthetics. For example, daily tasks, quests, group missions, awards with a limited time of action, ratings, ragged cycles, which explain why the user returns daily to the service. Game mechanics apart from aesthetics and the main dynamics do not work, or work for a short time.

Adaptation of the solution algorithm for a specific service

For this Reshebnik it does not matter which Internet service to consider. However, for the implementation of gamification for a specific Internet service, it is critically important what the service is about, what behavior you need to achieve from the users on it except for content generation.