Anywhere, any-time, high quality gaming, that fits nicely in our pocket, is yours to have .  The mobile entertainment industry was worth $33 billion last year, which is due in part to the success of smartphones like the iPhone and the plethora of Android devices like the HTC Thunderbolt.  These high powered computers were just waiting for people to turn them into gaming consoles.

An interesting infographic by Geekaphone:

Whole transcript is copied and pasted -

Former EA executive, KPCB sFund lead and all around inspiring person Bing Gordon led a talk today at the sFund Gamification Summit. In his talk Gordon broke down platitudes like “gamification is important” into key actionable takeaways on how succeed with gamification, takeaways that could be reformatted and applied to any company.

When asked why he went through the trouble of putting his guide to how to successfully gamify together for entrepreneurs, Bing told me, “Every startup CEO should understand gamification, because the gaming is the new normal,” referring to the fact that every one who had a Nintendo at 16 also has a brain that works in a way that’s more receptive to game elements. “We are overdeveloping the visual cortex of our customers,” he said.

Gamification is as important as social and mobile Gordon told me, which makes sense, as elements like rewarding people for behavior are pure human psychology. His talk was separated into a three-pronged approach, Acquire, Engage and Retain, “All your experiences are three part experiences,” he said.

The best way to acquire customers was to eliminate bounce, by creating a pleasant experience at first entry way, being said. “If you create cognitive dissonance in the first 5 seconds they bounce,” he said.  Designers should aim for creating a “touchable box” or something that people want to touch. He then referred to the game’s interface as being an engine, saying that a great UX/UI guy could save a company from having to throw out thousands of lines of code and could replace five engineers.

Baked in virality was also emphasized as a huge part of customer acquisition, and Gordon said that addition of Facebook profiles were responsible for 15 million versus 1 million monthly active users on Zynga Poker. Adding a friend bar meant 70 million MAUs versus two million on Farmville according to Gordon. “People come back more often when they have a date,” he said.

In terms of user engagement, Gordon advised CEOs that first impressions matter, “Your job is to create a “Wow” within the first session … The value of gamification is the mechanics second and the mind of gamers first.”

Things like virtual goods, showing numbers and giving badges are ways to positively reinforce users for playing your game. Letting them own part of the game by generating and submitting their own content was another way to solidify this emotional bond between creator and user.

Bing also emphasized the value of avatars in games, “Any kind of avatar that people buy into can dramatically change engagement.” It makes sense, people love things that give them a sense of identity. If a game, service or anything really can give them that, then they’re hooked.

Constraints, pre-announcements, and engendering social obligations to play a game were other things Gordon touched on that can contribute to customer retention. He said that the number one question on a game designer’s mind regarding a user should be “Will she come back?” and then “When?”

“We’re in an era where we can have billion dollar audiences,” he closed out the talk saying. There’s no harm in using a few tried and true devices to keep people coming back.

After three weeks here’s what data tells us  about the demographic distribution of  Seduction players -

There is marked preference for this game by males compared to females.Younger population ( 18-34 )in both genders are interested in Seduction.Now armed with this insight we can select the brands that fit this demographic distribution and make sure that there is a match between brand’s target market and game player distribution.This statistics will also help us target our marketing efforts in attracting the segment that’s not showing much interest and help strike the ” right balance ”

Games such as Mafia Wars and FarmVille, attract millions of active players. Mafia Wars, for example, is played by more than 25 million Facebook users each month.This huge audience, which includes a wide range of demographics, particularly women, is highly engaged and motivated to interact with brands, particularly those that reward them with virtual currency or progress their social game status.By using the same techniques as product placement marketing in movies, brands can be seamlessly woven into the fabric of a social gaming environment.

Genre of the game and player demographics are the deciding factors in matching a game’s story and/or player’s connection with a specific brand.FarmVille, for example, is the perfect place for food-related brands to get in front of a social gaming audience that stands in the tens of millions. Israeli chocolate brand, Elite Taami Nutz, did just that.

Saatchi & Saatchi BBR Tel Aviv and its digital subsidiary, Saatchi Interactive, developed a campaign in which FarmVille players were able to buy and grow Nutz branded peanuts.Non-profit brands are also finding success with in-game product placement. Water.org raised $13,000 in under a week through FishVille players purchasing a specially designed fish. Not only that, traffic to their website increased ten-fold during the campaign.

Movie promoters are also jumping on the social gaming bandwagon. A week-long, pre-launch campaign was run on Mafia Wars for gangster movie “Public Enemies” whereby players could undertake Public Enemies-themed “jobs” and unlock additional virtual items associated with the movie along with loot, clips and facts.Here Mafia Wars theme of gang violence was the driving factor to match the movie ( a product ) of similar theme.

In a game such as Seduction, genre is closer to humor and sex with flirtatious story lines.Our experiences suggest that this genre is enjoyed equally by both genders.Products where sexuality is used in advertising, certain values and attitudes towards sex are necessarily ‘sold’ along with a product. In advertising terms, this is called “the concept”.

The message may be that “innocence is sexy” (as used by Calvin Klein when it uses young people in provocative poses), or that link pain and violence with sexiness and glamour (as used by Versace), or that women enjoy being dominated, or that women come with a product (e.g. in the advertisement for Budweiser Beer), or that the use of a certain product is naughty but legal, or that use of a certain product will make the user more attractive to the opposite sex, and many other messages.

These messages are weaved into the story narratives through scenarios .Gaming experience is aided by the scenario graphics and seamlessly links player’s in-game activity with actual online purchase of a product.

Here’s my pitch -

CherryBelly provides an easy framework for brand managers and businesses to create their own Facebook games and help promote their stories & products..

Need a demo.Try out “Seduction“..

How does that pitch sound?

Comments are most welcome

But let’s get our attention back to actual gaming applications like “Mafia wars” and to my very own “Seduction“.. had to mention it ..can’t forget my baby .

In terms of genre,social media games are not much different from other entertainment mediums like movies  ( “Reservoir Dogs” or “When Harry Met Sally” ).The difference is that most of the social media games focus on a very limited set of genre and lack creativity in publishing story lines that cater to adults.

Most of them seem to be either fighting with aliens or plowing neighbors patch of fallow land ( “Farmville” ).I have nothing against these genres.They are very successful and have been designed to engage gamer’s attention for a long time.

But the market segment served by these genres is limited.Social media gaming industry is still new and hence we are witnessing this explosive growth.There is a very interesting statistics that I found here:

These numbers are impressive but there is still a huge untapped casual gaming market.A well chosen genre with excellent delivery of gaming experience  can attract lots of new gamers from under served market segments.

Important point to note in above statistics is that “more women play social network games” compared to men.Traditionally in console gaming industry,men dominated the market and still do,but more women play social media games.

“Seduction” is a humble effort to fix this anomaly

• Accessibility – Making the game easy to approach, understand and play.
• Interruptability – Taking advantage of asynch, spontaneous and irregular play sessions.
• Continuity – Providing continuous game world which attracts the player to come back.
• Discovery – Providing new experiences, content and surprises.
• Virality – Supporting viral growth in the player’s social network.
• Narrativity – Creating in-game and off-game narratives that elicit curiosity.
• Expression – Supporting self-discovery, customization and virtual spaces
• Sharing – Collaborating with friends by gifting and boosting
• Sociability – Supporting sociability among friends in the game dynamics
• Competition – Promoting playful social competition with others.

The common thread that runs through all these design considerations is the extent to which they encourage “customer engagement”. All game features consistently try to focus on giving experiences, activities, competitions, contest & sharing opportunities that foster player engagement and encourage them to come back for more. These design heuristic considerations don’t just limit customer engagement to in-game activities but also spawn hooks that tie the customers even off the game.

Games move up or down the leader board with metrics such as DAUs ( “daily active users” ) & MAUs( “monthly active users” ).All games are designed to ramp up these two metrics and keep them high to be the leader of the pack. It’s a very powerful mechanism to retain fleeting attention span of today’s customers suffering with information overload. Whoever cracks this Holy Grail is considered a winner.

It’s important to note that some of these heuristics are not just relevant to online gaming. Since 2010, there is trend towards “Gamification”.Gamification as applied in context of non-game applications encourage adoption of best practices.Gamification if applied to mundane tasks such as completing survey, filing out tax forms encourages users to engage in desired behaviors. Some examples of gamification (copied from here )–

• Employee training programs
• Wellness and other personal activities
• Financial services websites
• Online and in-person shopping
• Primary education
• Extreme sports
• Project management
• Enhancing loyalty programmes
• Social Networks
• Surveys
• Sustainability
• Call Center
• Market Research

Contd..

A combination of breakthrough technologies facilitate the collaboration between these enterprising groups of people and substantially reduce start-up costs.

Vishy..and his team of ninjas..three cheers to you guys!!

Over the years, there are three groups of technologies that were the backbone of operations and critical to our success -

a) Cloud computing

b) Online collaboration tools and source code management

c) Open source software frameworks

My views about cloud computing and the help I got from cloud computing, as an entrepreneur, in bootstrapping phase of  CherryBelly™ are succinctly captured in this Forbes.com article.

Here’s the excerpt:

With all the gloomy economic headlines in recent months, one can be forgiven for thinking we’re in a hopeless economic morass. But if you look beneath the surface of today’s technology shifts, you may also see potential for one of the biggest economic booms in a generation. How so?

As with all other economic booms, this boom will arise from the spunk and innovation of an emerging class of entrepreneurs, many being young and just out of (or still in) college, and others being veterans of workforce experiences relatively void of opportunities. In this next boom, another thing will be different as well – today’s entrepreneurs have an incredible resource available at their fingertips at minimal cost – cloud computing.

Unemployment is high right now, and there are many, many, many professionals who see the startup route as a more sustainable alternative to seeking full-time employment. There is now an incredible abundance of resources available on demand, for little upfront cost, to businesses.

We were looking for hosting solutions that were cheap, had capacity to scale with varying load (elasticity), and still be reliable. Vishy quickly came up with this idea of renting Joyent® cloud server instances.

Joyent offered a great promotional offer that was not hard on our pockets and was tailored for social media gaming titles.We have been using GoToMeeting® (from Citrix) as well as Skype for last several years. So those were the obvious choices for the team.

The capability to share desktops has given the team, dispersed in three continents,a powerful medium to share and collaborate like never before. I strongly believe that these tools give a better collaborative environment than two people sitting next to each other in a room,sharing the same computer.

Next in line were the open source frameworks. Open source community has been helping developers like us for decades. These communities have served a role of incubators for start-ups and innovations lead by breakthrough technologies and minimal start-up costs.Even Fortune 500 companies readily adopt the well tested frameworks following all proven architectural design patterns. These patterns make the software re-usable, reduce re-work, limit the number of inadvertent bugs, reducing development costs and faster time to market.

Spring, Hibernate, Drools, Codeigniter were selected for their maturity and prior extensive experience of the team in delivering integrated solution with these technologies. Subversion was mandatory to make sure all the artifacts were properly versioned, and have control over simultaneous changes in same set of artifacts.

Next .. analytics..

In a nutshell here are the bullet points of each of the game design heuristics that we considered -

• Accessibility – Making the game easy to approach, understand and play.
• Interruptability – Taking advantage of asynch, spontaneous and irregular play sessions.
• Continuity – Providing continuous game world which attracts the player to come back.
• Discovery – Providing new experiences, content and surprises.
• Virality – Supporting viral growth in the player’s social network.
• Narrativity – Creating in-game and off-game narratives that elicit curiosity.
• Expression – Supporting self-discovery, customization and virtual spaces
• Sharing – Collaborating with friends by gifting and boosting
• Sociability – Supporting sociability among friends in the game dynamics
• Competition – Promoting playful social competition with others.

All our efforts were directed towards crafting game features in ways that are unique to the game.SEDUCTION is our maiden effort.We welcome all feedback from our players and will continue to improve .All bouquets and brickbats are most welcome.

Try out the game and let us know about your experiences.

Next.. team building..

Copied and pasted verbatim from here:

In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, hard-coded by evolutionary processes or learned, which have been proposed to explain how people make decisions, come to judgments, and solve problems, typically when facing complex problems or incomplete information. These rules work well under most circumstances, but in certain cases lead to systematic errors or cognitive biases.

In philosophy, especially in Continental European philosophy, the adjective “heuristic” (or the designation “heuristic device”) is used when an entity X exists to enable understanding of, or knowledge concerning, some other entity Y. A good example is a model which, as it is never identical with what it models, is a heuristic device to enable understanding of what it models. Stories, metaphors, etc., can also be termed heuristic in that sense. A classic example is the notion of utopia as described in Plato’s best-known work, The Republic. This means that the “ideal city” as depicted in The Republic is not given as something to be pursued, or to present an orientation-point for development; rather, it shows how things would have to be connected, and how one thing would lead to another (often with highly problematic results), if one would opt for certain principles and carry them through rigorously.

But here we are more concerned about heuristics as it relates to human-computer interaction in the context of  browser based online game.

A proper Software Requirements Specification (SRS) models the heuristics of how a user will process the information being rendered on-screen. An SRS is ideally shared with the end-user well before the actual Software Design Specification (SDS) is written and the application is developed, so users’ feedback about their experience can be used to adapt the design of the application. This saves much time in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Unless heuristics are adequately considered, the project will likely suffer many implementation problems and setbacks.

We had one very vague  objective when we first started thinking about the design of the game.It was to make sure that we don’t follow the herd but make it as unique as possible.

It was easier said than done.Like any other tech startup,we had no SRS in place .We also faced the challenge of not knowing anything about our target audience,who may or may not have interest in online gaming.After days of painstaking efforts (thanks to Felice),we narrowed down our target audience to a subset of players that were active on other facebook games.Player population was segmented on the basis of some identifiable attributes.There were some segments in this population that were already super active on other facebook games.Some segments were underserved or had very little choices in existing set of games that matched their interests. Genre of the game was selected based on target segment and it was to be our USP(unique selling proposition).

contd..