Don't be a douchebag: Best practices for game mechanics in your web app | Hacker News Reader

Don't be a douchebag: Best practices for game mechanics in your web app

blog.meatinthesky.com

14 pointsbrandnewlow12 comments

Why should you "avoid leaderboards"? No explanation under that bullet point. I like leaderboards that let me see how I've done in real games against my friends (XBox Live Arcade has a great implementation of this). What's wrong with using them in an app?

I get into this in some level of detail in the presentation, but the PVP mechanic of leaderboards inhibits new players/users because it's another barrier to entry. Remember why Digg killed their leaderboard - you end up with a hypercompetitive top slice. Lastly, unlike with "real" games, there's not an easy way to cordon off and on-ramp newbies.

Why not just show how you compare against your friends by default and have an option to change the filter to global?

Yeah, that's the sort of leaderboard that I like. Not the global ones.

Also, it should be pretty easy to make it newb friendly: Just don't make any of the stats lifetime stats. Monthly or Weekly should be good.

My wife and I are both hard-core gamers. We play games for all they're worth, often inventing new challenges, and on a few occasions impressing either the game designers or the relevant game communities. We both recently picked up a viral Facebook game, did some analysis and testing to create a near-optimal design, and quickly moved to the top of our local leaderboard. Most of our friends quit playing soon after.

One of the major problems with leaderboards is that they can discourage those who don't have the time, resources, or sk1llz to compete with the top of the (local or global) food chain. Restricting leaderboards to "just your friends" only resolves the issue if everyone on your local list plays at a similar level of seriousness.

There's some discussion on that on the website for the book Building Reputations:

"Leaderboards Considered Harmful" http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2008/12/leaderboards_...

It depends on whether you want your users to compete against each other or not.

Take in example reddit trying to avoid becoming digg and hacker news trying to avoid becoming reddit, what is everyone trying to avoid? Competition for points and essentially leaderboards.

However for something like games leaderboards are essential as they can provide an incentive to keep playing.

A qualification:

> However for something like games leaderboards are essential as they can provide an incentive for achievement-oriented players to keep playing.

Leaderboards will do nothing for other types of players, and may actively repel some (explorers who are given too "transparent" a view into the system through an itemized leaderboard score.)

HackerNews has leaderboards though. http://news.ycombinator.com/lists

Though interestingly there's no longer a link to the leaderboard on the top bar.

I didn't really find enough value in the slides to justify the time consuming 36 clicks to get through them. I'm sure it may have been a great talk, but what do we get out of the page, exactly?

Is video or at least audio available anywhere?

The takeaways are in the last few slides (the text is on SS if you scroll down).

Sadly, this BarCamp didn't record anything. :(

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