Rate our startup: Lifegamed | Hacker News Reader

Rate our startup: Lifegamed

lifegamed.com

8 pointsfapi197410 comments

I took a second or two at the landing page and was unable to see an example game without signing up for an account. Perhaps you could provide a peek at an example game without requiring a signup?

Right. Without signing up, there's no way I can get any indication of what this is really like. So, I didn't sign up.

Why do I need to sign up to create a game anyway? Couldn't I go through the process and then sign-up to save it? That way, I could play with the interface and get an idea of what I'm actually signing up for.

Totally agree that this needs re-doing. One way we were thinking of doing this is by putting the active games closer to the top, and letting people look at some of the tasks being accomplished.

One thing you could do in 5 minutes is put a screenshot of what a logged-in user will see when looking at one of their games. At least then there would be something a visitor could interact with. I was curious what percent of the home page a visitor could interact with, so I added up all the things you could possibly click and whether a visitor could get anywhere with them. Turns out a visitor can interact with 0% of your home page. There is not a single thing a visitor can click on your home page that doesn't take them to a log-in screen.

This is an interesting concept that I think needs more structure. It suffers the same problem that FourSquare did initially, there's nothing stopping people from gaming the system. It's also not obvious what you're supposed to do or how it works. The same framework could be simplified and used to allow people to make leaderboards for whatever they want. That could be interesting and is a concept people would easily grasp. You could also have games where people submit photos or videos or whatever the game requires and have others vote on them, which would be the score. Just some ideas that I had while perusing the site. I can see that there's value here but it hasn't been unlocked yet. Also, how would you monetize this?

We wrestled with the structure issue - giving people the freedom to build takes away the ease of conveying what it is. As far as gaming the system, we envision 3 levels of proof: honor system if it's a game between you and your friends, photos and video as the next layer up, and ultimately assigning "superplayers" to referee and approve certain tasks. Revenue model one of: let people charge to play the games they create, let people resell virtual items or currency, or allow commercially sponsored games.

I think charging people to create games and letting anyone play for free is probably preferable to letting people charge users. Virtual currency is a great way to do this although you may consider doing it inside Facebook to accelerate that process. Making your own currency is tough unless you plug into a platform like Viximo. Commercial sponsors for content requires pretty enormous scale to be viable, the first 2 are probably better options.

This is our beta release of Lifegamed, a platform that lets you make games out of everyday activities. Our initial web-based release lets any user create a game, define the points, define the characters, define virtual items, and much more.

Ultimately, we want to distill all of the many game mechanics out there and put them in users' hands to see what kinds of games they create for themselves and their friends.

Is this like 4square?

Partly! We see it as extracting some of the mechanics of 4square, some of the mechanics of WOW, etc, and then letting people build their own games.

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