Coding Horror: The Gamification
codinghorror.com
codinghorror.com
I prefer the threaded discussion style of kuro5hin back in the day where comments might be upvoted, but they stayed in the same temporal order they were posted in.
It's much more difficult to create the goal you want. Forum karma and votes need voting ring and vendetta detection to be even minimally useful. Pandering detection would be great, but it's a hard problem.
The only way to avoid pandering is to have a culture where: 1) People vote based on what they want to read, not what they agree with 2) People want to read things they don't agree with as much as things they agree with
Both of these are hard. HN is the closest general-ish forum I've ever found to this, but it's still very far from the ideal. There's still a lot of pandering that goes on. The pandering just isn't all you see, like it is in many other places.
StackOverflow is actually even closer, but this is because of the very narrow focus. People want to read the thing that gives the largest volume of correct information in a concise manner.
If weight of every voter's vote is evaluated by you (1), then the resulting weight would be tuned up for you.
(1) You don't have to manually evaluate every voter. You just vote yourself, and if voter's votes correlate with your votes, then that voter's rank goes up (from the point of view of your personal rating system).
Signatures started as a way to putting personality into your post, and they still are, but it's gone way overboard. Many forums put a reasonable limit on that stuff now. 2 lines, 100 characters, etc.
I never looked at StackExchange as a solution to that, though. Forums were for everything from chatting to problem solving, and are usually conveniently divided for such. StackExchange is just for problem solving.
Avatars are a quick and easy way to identify an author - and that in itself carries quite a bit of information. (I'd trust someone I knew to be a mechanic to post valid repair advice, vs. someone who posts all the time about their car breaking because of dumb things they did.)
The reputation the user had with me caused me to give their posts the benefit of the doubt. It was a very odd experience.
On HN, I almost never read the name of the person who posted something until I am about to vote on it. I enjoy trying to evaluate a post on its contribution to the topic, and not on the authority or popularity of the author.
That is, at the very basic level, what gamification is, its making an activity into an activity with specific measures of progress toward a goal, such that people can rank themselves (and we do).
This isn't a new or faddish idea, its an insight into how people act, and an attempt to use that bit of new understanding, as Atwood did, before being aware of the term, to engage users using what are called 'game mechanics' which are basically motivations outside of the actual reward structures of the activity. I suspect "engage your users" is moving into the much more targeted and practicable mode of "gamify your interface" rather than vice versa.
Furthermore, "gamification" by that definition often begets "gaming" the system. Because scoring, measuring, and mechanical details almost never perfectly match the spirit and original intent of the game, these edge cases cause dissonance and frequently disengagement. Examples: A baseball player hitting 17 foul balls waiting for a good pitch, basketball players causing fouls on purpose simply to stop the game clock, monks in Everquest using the "feign death" skill to split mobs that would be unbeatable as a group; these are real dynamics in successful game systems originally designed or evolved to be that way. In other areas, such as academic grading or pay-for-performance, the dissonance is significantly more profound.
People play foldit because it's fun, and that's what "gamification" should be about. The scoring metrics are merely a small piece of that.
Stack overflow's design isn't about making it fun, its about making the users collaborate into something that is easy and valuable to the population. The rules of a game in general aren't about making the games fun, they're about providing a framework for competition.
Sure, designers will continue to include game mechanics to enhance engagement, it just won't be this crazy concept that everyone obsesses about. It'll just be a tool you can use sometime if the situation seems right.
And I disagree about stackoverflow on both counts. I believe it is fun, and that competition is a nonessential component to the sites success. Some people do thrive on competition, others do not. The core of stackoverflow is the dialogue between askers and answerers. Maybe say "rewarding" instead of "fun." The scores and rules are a nice enhancement to the core experience-- they facilitate public recognition, sorting and organization, among other things. There has been competition and recognition on Wikipedia for a long time, and they have made no overt attempt to "gamify".
Another important thing that the stackoverflow game mechanics do is guide users to functionality they might not know about. What you call "driving" users I would call "leading." Hardcore completionist, achievement-oriented, and competitive users are, of course, driven. The rest, however, are not, and to them features like "badges" just bring attention to the wide variety of ways the site can be engaging. The FAQ is well-written and very useful. The "analytical" badge merely helps draw a little extra attention to it. vBulletin has a boilerplate FAQ that probably no one has read in years since it's the same on every single forum that uses the software.
"What we do have to think about [in the era of social networking] is human to human interaction," he said. And according to Spolsky, to do that, you have to think as an anthropologist does.
Coding Gamification: The Horror