Design the Gameful Game
Oct 16, 2010 at 5:51 pm by Natron Baxter
Here at Gameful, you’re not just playing the game.
You’re MAKING the game.
After all, what kind of crazy idea would it be to assemble hundreds of the worlds’ most innovative game designers and game thinkers… and NOT have them join superpowers to make the very best game experience possible?
The Design the Gameful Game group is where we’ll be joining forces to design the Gameful levels and the treat system. We’ll update this blog post with the very latest that we’re working on, so you always know just what design problem needs a moment of YOUR awesome time.
Here’s what’s on our plate now!
LEVEL DESIGN
Note: I you have not yet hatched your egg and leveled-up more than once, you might consider doing so before reading on.
The first win: Level 1
The oft-quoted rule of thumb for participation in online communities is that 1% are very active, 9% moderately so, and 90% lurk. If you define lurking as never doing anything on the site, then by having everyone complete level 1, our lurking percentage is driven to zero. Wow.
The tutorial: Levels 2 – 7
The tutorials ensure everyone knows how to use the key features of the community. And why the ‘return tomorrow’ challenge? Because we don’t want people to level-up all in one session.
Levels 8+
…But we don’t want leveling-up to be a grind, so we want you to help us design the remaining challenges so that every level feels like an awesome win. The more challenges we design together, the faster we can add them to the site.
YOUR CHALLENGE: Help design the next 10 levels of the Gameful Game. To put this challenge into perspective, we’ve already defined the highest Gameful Level, Level 100. To level up to 100, you must win a Gameful Award at the annual awards!
GO TO THE DESIGN THE GAMEFUL GAME GROUP.
Hi guys,
I have a sense that gameful.org is getting swamped with good ideas but the site structure isn’t in place to mesh all of it together effectively, and the team is probably busy with other brilliant things like the Superbetter launch
My four-and-a-half cents:
1. start a BUGDUMP page, where anyone can post bugs and difficulties they encounter. Also, ideas for improvements go here. Firstly, one enters the title (max. five words) and then a maybe 144-symbol description of the problem they see. then, they cannot leave without offering an idea for a SOLUTION. As people type their bugs and improvements, a word search starts, so that other dumps about the same topic show up. when that happens, they can just “like” or add their vote to the item, and add a (144-symbol ?) comment.
this idea is based on GTD: first get all the tensions and loose ends collected in one place.
1 1/2: identify the most pressing issues and turn these into a projects list.
2. find people in the community who have the web-development capacities needed to work on the site. they must have mentioned something relevant on their profiles. Talk to them and when they are reliable and motivated, give them access to (parts of) the backend of the site for a trial period.
3. offer these people a cool reward for doing several hours of work-play for gameful.org – inviting them to go for challenges / bugs they are inspired to work on. Like sending them a hot board game, tickets for an event, or some other tangible thing.
4. have a regular vip-meetup on skype for these people, facilitated using the http://www.holacracy.com meeting templates for role/responsability assignment, brainstorming and voting, etc. These are to be found on the holacracy site. This requires one person to be the facilitator and one to make minutes in a googledoc.
hope that helps…
its a big monster, we need ways to cut it up and feed it to the tribe.
cheerio
+1 to having a bug tracker. I just started a thread in the groups section to try and gather those issues. For me, a way of getting my feet wet in a project is to start helping with some low-hanging fruit like that (website fixes) while I get to know the community. It would be great to use something sort of bug tracker system and allow members to be site-helpers. Not sure how much work would be involved in giving people permissions on the site, but it would be worth trying – I bet this site will need more admins as it catches on.
Another idea for helping people level up would be to encourage in-person meetups in various locations – let folks organize one through the site, have a speaker or a hack session or a games night – anything that brings people together to strengthen the bond. Again, for me I am more likely to go from incredible interest all the way down to lurker/absentee account holder when there’s no way to build a stronger connection and forums are not enough to hold my interest. I need a tangible result, a gathering, building a game together, something to keep coming back and talking about more.
I’d love to see (and work on) ways to teach people how to make games. There is starting to be a plethora of “learn to code” sites – can we do that with games? Sign me up for that – as I’d love to get some games under my belt.
I am having trouble donating treats (invalid ID – also when I go to the person’s profile and click “Donate Treats” the Donate button does nothing). I have also not been successful in getting the Mayor to recognize my donation. A known issue or am I doing something wrong???
I just tried this again and it finally worked. Can it be that the UI is a little flaky? Using firefox 3.6.
One of the tasks is upload a photo, but I’m already using a image from my Gravatar account and the task still appear as incomplete.
There needs to be a help link. The site has become almost unusable to me because of bugs but there is no obvious place to report it or ask for help.
I have the same issue also : I have bugs, but can’t find where to report them.
I concur. I almost quit Gameful twice because I was so frustrated with a bug and had no obvious way to get help.
Bug: messages sent are sent twice.
Please just create the next level. I don’t care that much what it is. Just that there is one. You can always change it latter.
Please change the Treat system in terms of how it is logged. It is logged by username instead of displayed name. Makes it difficult to track who has donated and return the favour
OMG the design is supercute! I love how it zips along and I love the thought into getting started and encouraging connection. Would adding a user’s @twitter ID space on our profiles be useful to anyone else besides me?
Bug report:
I am having trouble answering to a post that has one answer already. The Reply button on the original post doesn’t seem to work.
I had to click view first and it works then, although it is not as intuitive
Will there be a conference of some sort in the future for Gameful?
Hi @jamesmadson, join the Hug Ur Gameful Monster (HUGM) group, we’ll be using this to meet and try out different platforms (the group is evolving) with the ultimate goal to have a virtual conference while the real life one is streamed in. Fist the group hug though
Hi @jamesmadson, join the Hug Ur Gameful Monster (HUGM) group, we’ll be using this to meet and try out different platforms (the group is evolving) with the ultimate goal to have a virtual conference while the real life one is streamed in. First the group hug though
~*
Are levels 2 – 7 detailed anywhere? You mentioned them, but I can’t fine them defined!
Can we have challenges between groups or compete in design challenges? Users can vote with points, winners get something put on the homepage (link to their profile, their ideas, their games, or their classifieds, etc.). At higher levels you can be team leaders and there can be team competitions? Just a thought
Do we get to change the colours of the Monsters?
can we get to change our monsters?
can we get to change our monsters
Hey Jason – Happy to have your feedback. We have a weekly release schedule – next release is this coming Sunday. We’ll have Get Satisfaction in place by then, which will help out. If you want you can gather ‘em up and send them to me. Cheers
Nathan,
Thanks, that sounds great — we use Get Satisfaction at my current workplace and they’re a decent solution to just this problem. By the way, are you guys looking for developers? There’s no jobs page, but I can see the site is still in its early stages so the team might be too small to grow anyway, and for all I know nobody there is getting paid yet
(not that I wouldn’t mind pitching in some hours each week for something as cool as gameful.org)
Jason
By the way, since I’m clearly not the only one who has run across this issue I’m in the group ‘Minor/UI bugs and improvements’, which currently has 42 posts. Once Get Satisfaction is in place, you’ll probably want to have them scrape that list of bugs/issues when they first jump on board.
Along the way I’ve found many little bugs and glitches that my software engineer and QA eyeballs just can’t help but see, but I haven’t found the right place to report issues to. There ought to be a ‘feedback’ or ‘report issues’ link somewhere in the main nav. Speaking of which, there is no bottom nav, only scary monsters–what’s up with that?
How do you complete the “Upload profile picture” Mayor’s task? I already had a picture uploaded by the time I got the task. I uploaded another one, but the task still does not show as Complete.
Is the Mayor trying to tell me something about my photo?!!
Hmmm may be a bug, does it work now? Good point, if there already is an avatar pic does that count as a completed task @redct?
It’s amazing that before even visiting the Gameful site, our design is so similar except for slightly different audiences.
Anyways, one aspect of the Gameful Game I’d love to see is that people who get further along in the “game” get to create “Idea Monsters” (Pick a better name) and the more a person contributes to evolving the idea, the more other users can feed it treats and help it evolve. You can create a whole game around that alone, but I think it would help people get visual feedback on the ideas they have and how much work is needed to grow their “Idea Monster” (Please, someone come up with a better name for this!)
What a great concept.
In terms of names, how about something playing off of the Chimera, the goat/lion/snake fire-breathing monster of Greek mythology that now connotes an impossible or foolish fantasy? Not sure this is better, but I thought I’d throw it out there.
I like the idea of mythological monsters.
Another way we could incorporate the “idea monster” would be that your ideas could become additional members of your individual horde, guild, team, etc that develop experience the more people add to your ideas (for example they like the post, write about it in the wiki, comment, share, donate points to the idea, share it on other social medias, etc). Anyways, I really like this concept.
We have some plans for that…
How can it be an infinite game if their is a level cap? It seems like a gotcha in the design parameters I’ve come to understand. Not that it needs to be addressed right away (as it will be a while before anyone reaches it) but I do think it’s worth being aware of.
I raise you 100 more levels! Not too worried about caps they can always be changed. I like the design.
This is going to give me something interesting to think of…
How do I add my profile pic?
see you found it
Let me know if you still need any help with this.
bb
it’s given on your profile drew
How can you tell your current level?
Click “My Profile” on the top toolbar.