Games
This article is a part of “A Unified Language for the Design of Information Systems.”
Games generally refer to structured forms of play which usually have rules, challenges, and rewards. They also tend to have boards, cards, dice, and clear end points. Games on information systems are slightly different in the sense that there can be many win conditions in the form of what the user wants to get out of the platform, and the games can last as long as the platform is running. A better way to conceive of games on online platforms might be in terms of system-wide incentive structures that shape user interaction on the platform.
Below are ways that designers can incorporate games into their information systems.
Reputation
Reputation scores both help users evaluate content added by another person to a network, where users with high reputation scores are seen as more trustworthy or powerful. Reputation scores also encourage people to interact with the community to increase their scores (a short term increase in dopamine), that increases quality output by system participants.
An example of this system is Quora, where user profiles display the accumulation of people who follow and share a user’s work. The more followers, the more it shows others trust what the user says on the site. Reputation can be used to incentivize users to provide long-term high quality content and commitment to a community.
Leaderboard
Leaderboards are a specific incentivizer when the desired dynamic between people is competitive instead of collaborative. On Reddit, the community is designed around individuals all putting up high quality content. However, there is little competition in terms of what posts are upvoted across communities. How is a person supposed to compare the content in r/aww versus r/tifu? Leaderboards are meant to be used when the objects that users create in a community are comparable to each other.
An example of this is games such as Call of Duty, where all the users in a community are playing with the same goal. Whether it’s kills, or fastest times, or number of items collected, leaderboards simultaneously force designers to be explicit about the goal of their platforms, and creates a strong incentive to create more cycles of object creation on the platform.
Karma
On Reddit, each individual post that a person adds to the platform can gain them upvotes. Upvotes and downvotes are mechanics to create short-term incentives for posting high quality content. Karma is the cumulative amount of upvotes and downvotes that a user accumulates. There is karma broken down by posts, which means the points that a user’s posts have gotten. Then there is comment karma, which comes from points accumulated from comments the user made on others’ posts. Karma is an incentive system created to make it so users will be incentivized to continue to provide long-term high quality content. As users amass more karma, it makes it easier for following posts and comments to reach the front page, which in turns amasses more karma.
Followers
On Instagram people can search for posts based on topics that they like, and if they like posts that a certain person produces, they can follow this person to receive more content from them. People who have lots of Followers can gain notoriety on the platform, expand their personal brands, and often gain perks off-platform. This incentive system encourages people on Instagram to post continuous high-quality content.
Ratings
Uber and Lyft employ individual game mechanics in the form of ratings of how each driver was. These individual scores accumulate in the form of an overall score which impacts the number of rides the driver gets and what ratings those riders have. This incentive structure encourages drivers to be fast and courteous to each rider to get the most money for themselves in the long term.
