Points For Toothbrushing: The Gaming Speech Everyone Is Talking About | Hacker News Reader

Points For Toothbrushing: The Gaming Speech Everyone Is Talking About

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57 pointslouislouis39 comments

The talk is a really good one: thought provoking, and worth the watch. I really don't think he's right about his grand vision of where the technology is headed, though. The point system attracts a certain percentage of the population, its true. But most people just don't get obsessed by points. Only gamers really get really obsessed by the them, and not even all gamers do. E.g. The credit card industry has been using the point rewards system forever, and it does drive sales, but if it were really the be all end all, all credit cards would have point rewards systems.

I think that Jesse Schell, while a really smart, insightful guy, has trouble seeing the universe from outside the perspective of a hardcore gamer. E.g., he sounded pretty shocked that the wii did so well. I remember when the video of the Nintendo execs playing tennis was going around, and a lot of hardcore gamers failed to see the appeal. Everyone else was just like, man, that looks insanely fun. If you can't intuitively see the appeal of products that have a lot of mass appeal, it's kind of hard to predict where the technology is going to go.

Not saying I would be any better at predicting things. I just don't see his predictions quite adding up.

If you take the presentation literally, yes it was overblown. However, I think he made a few very insightful points:

1) Understanding psychological factors is extremely powerful, and probably even more important than good game design. i.e. WoW isn't successful because of art design and gameplay, it's successful because some people find "the grind" very addicting. Farmville isn't successful because a videogame about farm animals is fun, it's successful because it integrates with your Facebook friends.

1b) Discovering, understanding and exploiting new psychological factors is extremely profitable.

2) The rest of the world has a lot to learn from game design on how to optimize products to take advantage of these factors.

I agree with you that gamers are hooked on the point systems more than everyone else, but I disagree that it's a binary system. Like alcohol, nicotine, and gambling, it probably affects everyone to differing degrees.

The definition of gamers has had to change a lot over the last decade. When I was a kid, only nerdy kids played games. Now those gamers are fathers. Now mothers and grandmothers play farmville / scrabble / bejeweled. Even if you're right that this only affects gamers, the percentage of the population that are classified gamers is growing.

With hundreds of millions of potential customers, even small changes are extremely profitable.

Take Starbucks. If they convince one new customer to make starbucks part of their morning routine, that has an expected value of like $1000/year. I heard they started offering coupons to people in the morning, that are only valid if they come back later that day. If Starbucks figures out to apply the Farmville secret sauce, watch out.

I disgaree that only gamers get caught up in points. There are 80 million people (very few of which identify as gamers) who find value in the number of "points" hey have on their virtual farm. 40% of those people will log in on Monday to see how high their score is, and blow some time improving it.

Context can have a huge affect on what motivates people.

This is absolutely correct - the average FB gamer is a middle-aged female. Farmville is a substitute for soaps and being superior to members of your peer group (just like tennis, car, golf score, the plays you see, etc...)

Here's a rebuttal that I've seen linked all over the place, especially by game designers, anxious that their lofty dreams of high art will fall by the wayside to creating simple carrots on sticks.

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2010/2/22/external-rewards-and-je...

For context, Sirlin is the "Playing to Win" guy. He's pretty much the patron saint of games that reward real player skill instead of rewarding "wasting a lot of time doing the same thing over and over".

Unfortunately, I have yet to be convinced that there's a significant market for Sirlin's approach compared to the "click button for victory" style. So if someone can find an upside or benefit to the latter, all the better.

One such reason is the life-cycle of fads. Farmville and its ilk are not building the long-term brand equity that companies (or artists!) need to become stable. Their success just represents clever use of a new social medium, but the same thing that made them spread virally so quickly will cause people to abandon them quickly as well. Once the majority of Farmville players become ex-players and telling everyone how much of a waste of time it is, the engagement will fall off a cliff. Sure, Zynga will try to string people out with new games, but there is diminishing returns for something that offers players little more than addiction. Doesn't matter though because it's an epic money grab anyway.

The people out there making real games are no doubt feeling a twinge of jealousy at the insane profits Zynga is raking in right now. However this is just what happens with new market opportunities. Look at how Atari caused the crash of the home video game industry in the early 80s by following a similar strategy to Zynga (I remember playing ET as a child and just wondering what the hell the point even was).

So far, the best market that I've come up with is that the influence and attention of intelligent and powerful people is a much scarcer resource than money. So if you develop games for influence rather than wealth, you can have higher ideals. Otherwise, you're stuck pandering to the lazy majority.

I've seen this rebuttal popping up as well, which was reasonably good: http://www.iftf.org/node/3384

It's surprisingly true that "everyone" is talking about this speech, among people who care about games, either pro or con. Seems to have captured a particular utopian/dystopian vision that's a nice conduit for debate.

The most important takeaway for me is that people have a hard time telling the difference between the perceived value and the real value of things. So if you can't increase the real value of things, go and increase their perceived value instead.

And so moving forward brands are going to tap into this a lot more. They have been doing this to a certain degree but by marrying the online world with reality there is a greater opportunity to do this. An example of this is the mafia wars idea where I am beating my real friends in a game. There is also the part where they can make the perceived value more apparent. So a good example of this is the point system; buy 5 subs and get the sixth one free.

So when you put the two effects together marketers and brands can really benefit from the great increase in perceived value. An example would be where something you normally do (like brushing your teeth) can have a much greater perceived value when the brands show you that (a) you are doing better than your peers and (b) doing it multiple times helps you level up (and possibly get free stuff in the future).

I used to brush my teeth reliably, but half-halfheartedly, not being the slightest bit attentive. Then I put $4,000 into my mouth in a few months, and my viewpoint shifted completely. Now I pay attention when I brush.

Just curious -- what does $4k get you? A couple of root canals & crowns?

Mostly several miserable afternoons with a drill whining in my mouth, wishing I were still at work. Motivations varies from person to person, but a personal investment, not necessarily of money, is the key.

P.S. the 4K was just my part; insurance paid the bulk of it.

$3K (plus insurance) got me a couple root canals, 3 crowns, and a night guard a couple years. Probably the best $3k I ever spent. Now I floss nightly. (I also chew more sugarless gum during the day.) But I've stopped wearing the night guard.

Money is the original point system.

I think the idea more than anything is that such a system would encourage (force?) people to be more engaged in their advertisements (like the high 5 example he gave).

In this way, having a more integrated point system is a very natural extension of everything that happens today. The only difference is that because everything is so connected, people will be much more aware of it, and the advertising will be much more effective.

The question is if this is a good thing...

Unfortunately, if you are brushing your teeth, you are not really making progress. You are just slowing down the decay of the status quo. So if you reward yourself with points for brushing teeth, you are still kidding yourself.

On the other hand, maybe a game with decaying experience points would be a good idea. If you don't do anything, you lose experience - evil. Could be gamers wouldn't like it, or else it would have been tried.

Note to self: I have to find better names for the articles I post :)

FYI: I've posted this 2 days, ago, but to me getting points is a game, so I'll just learn from louislouis

Heh, here is my link - 1.5 days before this one - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1149402

You know, when I tried to post this earlier it referred me back to your post from 2 days ago. I was gona comment on it with something like 'oh shame this didn't make frontpage HN cos its really good'. Instead I resubmitted and bypassed the url-duplication filter by adding www to it.

"Instead I resubmitted and bypassed the url-duplication filter by adding www to it."

Why?

I thought it was a really good video and other HNers should see it. The 2 day old post only had 2 points and would never have gotten any more traction.

5 days ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1142424

8 days ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138142

lol oops, guess I missed them posts.

Why doesn't the dad give his daughter points when he's proud of her? When society has a bunch of different points systems like that, social points from each individual ought to be one kind of points system. It could help make trust networks, too.

I don't think you can substitute love with points.

Though given how many relationships break up over World of Warcraft, maybe points are better than love. (I don't know how many relationships break up over WoW, but I could imagine it's a few).

Don't think of it as substitution. Think of it as telling the computer (and thus the world). It also provides a log, so the next time you're happy or mad at them, the computer can remind you of a good thing they did.

Or can you?

Are some things necessarily unquantifiable? Or is it just that people haven't found the right metrics yet?

Related: Bot Mediated Reality: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1028565

I watch in amusement as the rest of the world discovers that computer games are fun.

All it really took were better UI's, and networking.

Here's a different way to use games to motivate people:

http://www.google.com/buzz/amichail/PduXBSByfSD/Game-driven-...

IMO that talk is beenz-level bullshit. Ask yourself this - would you use this? I sure wouldn't. And designing for other people is one of the key pitfalls of tech.

You know why I brush my teeth? It's because I want my teeth to be clean and I want to keep all of them and not have bad breath. I don't need points. Or, if you must, I already got the "clean, healthy, attractive" points already.

I don't need some arbitrary xbox achievements for brushing my teeth, thanks, I already got the points from the lowest level computer there is - reality.

Right, and I wouldn't play FarmVille either but, according to the talk, more people do that than have Twitter accounts.

Given that, and the other similar points the presenter makes, I don't find it at all unbelievable that a large percentage of the population would indeed brush their teeth for points.

It's not even like you're trying to get the others to brush their teeth, you're simply adding onto their experience.

And if the technology gets cheap enough that the toothbrush they buy has it built-in anyway all the better.

Not everyone will, but companies don't need everyone of their users to do so to make it worth it.

It's hard to imagine setting up a toothbrush to connect to my wifi router, but imagine we do continue our technological pace for another 30 years. Maybe not that far fetched.

Of course we could also hit a wall and these 'games' will march into our lives and then suddenly abruptly we stop caring.

Interesting talk, fun to think so pie in the sky.

more people [play FarmVille] than have Twitter accounts

but will they in a year? Two years?

FarmVille seems to be an incredible fad to me; finally people can play a game with their real friends' names.

But in the end I have to wonder about what the possible value of such games is. Surely not too many people with any purchasing power are wasting time tending to an imaginary cow or whatever.

Here's the thing about fads, there's always a new one to take its place.

Usually a little different and sometimes a little better in ways, but still a fad that pretty much does the same thing.

People might get bored with the farmville rewards, but I'm sure something will take its place.

And even if the userbase falls by 50% or even 75% in 2 years, that's still a freaking huge number of users.

I don't believe you. What if the points could be redeemed for coupons or something? It's helping you do something that you would have done anyway.

Coupons? For what? More toothpaste? I buy six-month-supplies as is.

And the whole thing seems to depend on this internal acceptance that what corporation A says is good for me, I should do. I would hazard a guess that there are plenty of people who will not just swallow that whole. OK, there may be plenty that do .. but the types of people who market to them are scum.

I got 243 points for using HN!

Alas, now it's only 240.

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