How to operate products in a “gamified” way?

When it comes to playing games, everyone must be familiar with it. People often have a misunderstanding about games: games are something that can harm people, waste time and experience, and require in-game spending. However, few people know that games themselves have positive significance and can serve as a reference for product developers.

In life, have you often seen the following scenes:

• My younger brother was addicted to playing games. When it was time for dinner, no matter how the family members called him, he would not move. My mother, grandparents took turns to say, "Playing games is useless. Games really harm people."
• The child was addicted to games and unwilling to do homework, and his grades plummeted. The parents angrily scolded him: "No playing games, go back to your room and study."

There are countless such life scenarios, and the vast majority of parents believe that games are harmful! Games erode people's minds! After reading the book "Games Change the World", my view on games has greatly changed. I would like to take this opportunity to share with you my thoughts after reading this article - Games change the world! Games help us do a good job in product operation !

1. People’s misunderstanding of games

As the case shows, in the eyes of most people, games do more harm than good.

Playing games is not only a waste of time, but also harmful to health (affecting vision, nerves, cervical spine, weight, etc.); playing games can easily make people degenerate (become unwilling to work), easily addicted to "forget about food and sleep" (unwilling to eat, bathe, sleep), and easily lose their love for work and life...

This is a common view of the game, full of bigotry and prejudice.

2. The significance of the game

Everything in the world has its own advantages and disadvantages. We cannot generalize and dismiss the game with one blow. On the contrary, games are of great significance in promoting the development of history, science and technology, culture and humanity. How do you understand this?

1. Games have promoted the development of human history

The book mentions a little story - about 3,000 years ago, a great famine occurred across Lydia. At first people accepted their fate and hoped for a good harvest, but the situation did not improve, so the Lydians invented a remedy to solve the famine problem.

They first spent a whole day playing games, just so that the tribe would not feel the craving for food... The next day, they ate and refrained from playing games. This practice kept the Lydians going for eighteen years, during which time they invented dice, jackpots, and all the other common games.

The game helped the Lydians survive the famine, and the history and civilization of the entire nation took a step forward.

2. Games make people feel happy

Every year on Double Eleven, the threshold for supporting activities such as Zhong Die Mao Mao and Kan Yi Dao is very high and the activity process is complicated. Users clearly know that they won’t get much money by participating in the game, and that taking part in the activity is equivalent to attracting people and traffic to the platform, but why do people still enjoy playing it so much?

It is precisely because in the process of stacking cats, everyone is free to form a team and fight for a common interest (PK the opponent and get a bonus). In the process of pulling people, they will PK scores with the opponent's team in real time. The game makes the teammates full of desire to win.

When everyone strives for the common good, people are more likely to feel happy and satisfied.

3. Games make work more fun

Monotonous and boring work can easily wear out people's minds and make people feel bored. If you add gaming elements to your work, people can immerse themselves in the gaming atmosphere and get their work done at the same time. In this process, work seems to become secondary, and it becomes interesting.

4. Games can help people relieve stress

Why do contemporary young people always like to talk about "escape from reality"? Contemporary young people are under too much pressure in reality - mortgages, car loans, marriage, raising parents and children, etc. When so many pressures come together, how can they escape from reality for a short time?

Games open another window for young people. When you are immersed in the game and participate in one great cause after another that the game gives you, the sense of pride that the game gives you can make you forget your current worries and pressure. If you only focus on your career in the game, the game will become a great way to relieve stress.

3. 4 defining characteristics of gamification

Games have played a significant role in promoting human progress. This may explain why all walks of life now like to incorporate gamification plots in operations and designs? for example:

• Why do convenience stores design stamp collection games on a daily basis?
• Why do teachers like to incorporate games into their classes?
• Why are there so many fun games designed in front of the cinema entrance while you are waiting for the movie to start?
• Why is the roadside ring tossing game so popular?

Because games can easily allow users to quickly enter the flow state and make users addicted. What's the secret to making games addictive? What triggers the game to form a closed-loop mechanism?

If you carefully study the gameplay of popular games on the market, you will find that most popular games have four decisive characteristics - goals, rules, feedback system, and voluntary participation.

1. Objectives

A goal is a specific outcome that players strive to achieve. It grabs players’ attention and constantly adjusts their engagement. Goals provide players with a sense of purpose.

With a clear purpose for the game, players will know in which direction to attack all subsequent actions. This is like a business KPI, and the KPI value is the goal the team hopes to achieve. The goal of the game is to form teams freely to stack cats and share the 10 billion yuan prize money on Double Eleven.

2. Rules

Rules place constraints on how players achieve their goals. They eliminate or limit the most obvious ways to achieve their goals, pushing players to explore previously unknown possibilities. Rules can unleash players' creativity and cultivate their strategic thinking.

There is no order without rules, and the same goes for games. There must be clear rules of the game, and all players must compete and collaborate based on the same rules to achieve their goals, otherwise the game will be a mess.

3. Feedback system

Feedback system, used to tell players how far they are from achieving their goals, which is reflected in the form of points, levels, scores, progress bars, etc.

The most basic and simplest form of a feedback system is to let players recognize an objective result: "When..., the game is over." For players, real-time feedback is a promise: the goal is definitely achievable, and it gives people the motivation to continue playing.

The more immediate the feedback, the faster the player will respond.

4. Voluntary participation

Participation is voluntary and requires that all those playing the game understand and are willing to accept the goals, rules, and feedback. Understanding is the common foundation for building multiplayer games, and the freedom to join and leave at will is to ensure that players regard the deliberately designed high-pressure challenges in the game as safe and enjoyable activities.

4. Taking WeChat Reading as an example, analyze the application of gamification in product operation

Since games play such an important role, can gamification be applied to product or operational work? The answer is beyond doubt! How to incorporate gamification into operations and products?

Taking WeChat Reading product as an example, this article explains how WeChat Reading APP integrates gamification elements into the product. Reading is a boring thing, and many people never read a book again after graduation. How can we make reading, which is so hard and tiring, interesting through gamification? At the same time, it also makes readers become self-disciplined?

1. Product Goals

The slogan of WeChat Reading is "Let reading no longer be lonely", which aims to allow users to share and communicate with others at any time during boring reading.

In response to this, WeChat Reading has designed product features such as "Reading Rankings", "X People Reading Today", "X Friends Reading", "Share Views", and "Team Reading". The purpose is to eliminate your loneliness when reading anytime and anywhere, and create a lively feeling that your friends are always around you.

Functional designs such as reading rankings and what friends are reading can easily stimulate readers' desire to win - set a flag this week, compete with your friends' reading time, and occupy the first place on more friends' WeChat reading pages. Beating your friends in reading time is like completing a great war and giving reading a higher goal to fight for.

2. Product Rules

If there is a reading month ranking list, there will be ranking rules and reward rules.

According to the ranking rules, WeChat reading time = "reading time" + "listening time". In order to occupy more users' reading lists every Monday, many friends often resort to cheating methods - for example, most of the reading time is spent on listening to books.

In fact, the user may fall asleep while listening to a book, but the software is still listening to the book and recording the user's reading time.

In terms of reward rules, originally you could get 1 book coin for every hour of reading, and a maximum of 5 book coins per week; now it has been adjusted to 1 day unlimited card, 2 day unlimited card, 3 day unlimited card for every 1 hour, 3 hours, and 5 hours of reading respectively, with a maximum of 3 days. In the process of getting the unlimited card, you need to watch a 15-second advertisement first.

Although the reward rules are becoming more and more complicated, they guarantee both user experience and commercial revenue, and users do not feel disgusted, which proves that the rules work!

3. Product feedback system

During the reading process, when you read for a long time, the page will have feedback, such as:

• "You have been reading for 1 hour and 40 minutes, take a break"
• "You will need another 4 hours and 47 minutes to finish reading this book"
• "You have read 20% of the book. It will take you 20 hours and 48 minutes to finish reading the whole book."

Timely reading feedback can stimulate users' interest in continuing to read, and the message feedback is full of humanistic care, which undoubtedly adds points to the product.

4. Product Voluntary Participation Mechanism

The greatest value of a book is not limited to how practical the content it conveys, but lies in the impressions of each reader after reading it. There are a thousand Hamlets among a thousand people, and each Hamlet brings different inspiration and influence to our thoughts.

Book reviews are an endless treasure beyond the books themselves, and they bring surprises to people every day. In the WeChat Reading APP, users can directly and at any time post book reviews, view other readers' popular highlights, and read other readers' book reviews.

The book review is open to all readers on the Internet to voluntarily participate in the creation of book reviews. Readers can also reply to any reader's reading notes at will. Although readers are thousands of miles apart, there is a warm feeling of being close to each other. This is the power of gamification.

The following book reviews:

• The convenience store launched a stamp collection game, hoping that the user's "consumption journey" will become interesting and that the user will continue to visit next time;
• Teachers like to combine small games in their courses, hoping that students can learn through playing and remember the main knowledge points of the course in a more interesting way;
• Before the movie starts, the small games in front of the door can not only entertain users and make them forget the annoyance of waiting for the movie to start, but also add a new business model to the cinema.

People are born to love playing games, and the scenarios listed above capture people's playful nature.

Use gamification to attract people's attention and shift the focus of events. If you have ever had the above feelings, it proves that the game has worked on you. You can continue to pay attention to the subsequent situation and performance of the game and summarize your experience.

As a product operation practitioner, it is recommended to add gamification methods to daily work and product design, which will definitely promote certain data changes. If you don’t believe it, why don’t you try it?

Author: Kaka

Source: Kaka's Product Notes