Make A Game Out Of Your Online Community

Apply game mechanics to your online community.

It’s a huge concept, but here’s a few things you should consider implementing.

• Collecting. Give members something they can collect. Maybe friends? Maybe badges? Maybe awards? Perhaps moderation powers over the community.
• Points. Let people earn points. Points for answering a question, or accumulating high ratings from others. Points for writing a great post or winning new member of the month.
• Feedback. Rank the people by their points. Or by how much they have participated each month. Encourage members to give feedback on each other. Make a habit of it, no post goes without a reply. Automate feedback as much as possible. A league table of people with the most points.
• Exchange. What can members exchange with each other? Badges? Pictures? Status? Just great advice? Is advice enough? Find things of value that members can exchange without much effort.
• Customise. Let people have some ability to customize their profiles or how they see your community. Encourage them to top each other. Highlight the best profiles and ideas for following/engaging in your community.

How important is game mechanics to online communities? Peter Kim believes game mechanics defines much about social media. It's difficult to see how an online community can thrive without any of these elements. It should certainly make your online community more fun.

Comments

[Johnny Truant]

Great points. I think customization is absolutely essential... you need some way to really showcase the personalities of the members. The simplest example is avatars -- a forum without avatar photos is nearly useless, IMO, because it feels like a bunch of faceless robots.

I've also seen custom user titles that change as participants generate higher post counts. And hell, post counts themselves can be status markers. I've seen people generate 10k posts in 9 months before.

[Grant Simmons]

"Game mechanics"

Interesting points that address peoples' competitive instinct.

Part of this, that I've found really relevant and effective both on and offline is what I call the "completion syndrome"

Most people need to complete things. They have a sense of satisfaction and sense of accomplishment when a 'job' is out the way.

This is a reason some forum 'rankings' work so well when they illustrate (for example) 5 'bars' and bars are filled to represent levels of (numbers of) responses.

Same with Disney's online virtual world Toon Town (as my son - and wallet - would attest to) players are motivated to exceed a certain level or complete certain tasks to gain access to additional areas of play - covered with clouds until access is granted.

Offline I produced a program for a Culinary school, giving each student a folder with empty labelled tabs corresponding to different levels or different classes (including recipes etc) motivating, educating and illustrating the depth and breath of the class offerings and schedules. The key inclusion here are the empty labelled tabs that compel most students to complete additional courses to 'fill the folder'.

Same goes for Pokemon cards, prizes in cereal and jigsaw puzzles.

Reinforcing the same principles online to drive community involvement makes sense.