Web 2.0 Expo: Using Online Gaming Tricks To Increase Audience EngagementWeb 2.0 Expo: Using Online Gaming Tricks To Increase Audience Engagement

Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and other sites that we don't think of as games nonetheless use the principles of gaming to keep their audience engaged, said online game developer Charles Forman at a presentation at Web 2.0 Expo. Other site publishers can use gaming techniques to keep their audiences involved and loyal, said Forman, who is founder and CEO of the social gaming site Iminlikewithyou."If people are spending a lot of time on your site, you're doing something right," Forman said, saying that the average user spends 45.3 minutes per session on Iminlikewithyou.

He outlined several techniques that real-time gaming sites use to keep people engaged, some of which are being used by a wide variety of non-gaming sites to keep their audience involved. These include giving out points to users, "leveling up" after accumulating a certain number of points to become a more advanced player, and going on "quests" to finish tasks and collect game items to win points and level up.

"Games are very good at getting people to do things," Forman said. "Games are very good at getting people to do things they wouldn't normally do."

In Korea, where broadband penetration is deep and online games are very popular, people play online games to meet other people and socialize. They do it for dating, because they're bored or have time to kill, and to socialize with new people or with friends.

Online games are a sort of "third place," he said. The "first place" is a person's home, where they feel comfortable but spend very little of their waking time. The "second place" is work, where people spend most of their waking time but where attendance is mandatory. The "third place" is a place that people can go to socialize, and have fun with existing friends or to meet people. You go to a third place by choice, and leave when you want. At a third place, there's the concept of a "regular."

Real-life examples of third places are bars, parks, cafes, or arcades. Internet examples are chatrooms, forums, and dating sites. Meetup.com is an interesting hybrid of physical and virtual third places, Forman said.

Games involve "leveling up," where your character becomes more powerful or skilled. Analogies exist on social networking sites: The number of Diggs your links get, or the number of followers you have on the Tumblr blogging site. "When you meet people who are avid Tumblr users, the first question is, 'How many followers do you have?' "

Many sites that aren't normally thought of as games actually are, Forman said: Digg, social networks with followers, and dating sites (the object of that game is sex).

These sites have concepts in common with each other, and with games: Real-time feedback; rewards, such as T-shirts; objectives being achieved through quests; and leveling up. They provide instructions, letting users know precisely what they should be doing.

With a game, a quest might consist of going out and collecting magic tokens. On a social site like LinkedIn, the analogy of a quest is a task like finishing your profile, or finding connections on the service -- your reward for finishing the quest (which isn't called a quest) is that you don't have to see the nag screen bugging you to do it anymore.

At a site like iminlikewithyou, the game isn't an end in itself. Most of the games aren't hugely compelling by themselves. The object is real-time interaction with other players through chat. Similarly, on a blog like Gawker.com, some of the blog entries are short and skeletal -- they're just launching points for conversation, no more than the first item in a discussion thread.

Forums and social networks consist of like-minded people who would be friends in real life, Forman said. For example, Digg is made up of young men ages 15-25 who like gadgets. Digg ought to make it easier for their members to contact each other if they are online at the same time.

Similarly for Web utilities: Google ought to allow people running the same search simultaneously to contact each other.

But applying game principles has problems: For one, the number of users logged in to a site at any given time might be quite low, even for popular sites. Users might get discouraged if they discover only a few people on a site at the same time as they are. Reliability is a big issue; if a game breaks in mid-play, some players will leave and never come back. Scalability also is an issue, as is anti-social behavior -- "griefers" who exist to harass other users.

But some games manage to escape griefers. Players on the game MapleStory, for instance, are quite civil, despite their age. "The people on MapleStory are 14-year-old kids -- and 14-year-old kids are filled with hate," Forman said, adding that he believes that MapleStory escapes griefing because users invest a lot of time in leveling up their characters, and MapleStory maintains a zero tolerance policy toward griefers -- griefers are kicked out and they lose their time investment.