E-commerce game design and planning methods (Part 1)

The era of content-based e-commerce has quietly arrived, and e-commerce games have gradually come into our sight. After reading the full text, I believe you will understand a thing or two about how to design and plan an e-commerce game with a sound ecosystem and good operation.

01. Background description of e-commerce games

In December 2018, we officially launched the overall research plan for e-commerce games and gamification. So far, we have established a relatively complete design methodology system and successfully implemented it to empower a variety of business needs. Between the two completely different fields of games and e-commerce, we continue to explore the possibility of integrating them, which is the original goal of e-commerce games and gamification.

Everything starts from the driving force of the times. At the moment when the traffic dividend has ended, we still have a strong reliance on user growth, but at the same time we also begin to pay attention to how to increase user stock. At this time, the unique user diffusion and stickiness improvement mechanism from electronic games has become an important template we want to learn from. How to reasonably and effectively increase user growth while continuously improving user stock has become the fundamental value embodiment of e-commerce games and gamification.

It is not difficult to see that if we project the e-commerce model onto the octagonal behavioral analysis, we will find that the user drive of e-commerce is extremely biased towards the black hat approach (i.e. short-term negative drive). This is determined by the innate genes of e-commerce. It is also based on this that we hope to empower the current e-commerce user environment through a more white hat design strategy (i.e. long-term positive drive).

Before considering the game design strategy, the first thing we thought about was how e-commerce games can empower the business, that is, how to generate the incremental and existing users we expect. At the same time, games are indeed subject to various constraints in the e-commerce environment, which means that their form needs to meet the following three points:

1. Strong e-commerce relevance: the game itself is for e-commerce purposes, and all its starting points are from the commercial side.
2. Strong social relevance: the game format is designed to better generate social fission, thereby gaining incremental and existing users.
3. Relative platform independence: the game carrier needs to be independent of the normal e-commerce shopping process, otherwise it will interfere with the efficiency of normal shopping.

Based on this goal, we have designed a healthy e-commerce game ecosystem, which we call a self-growing two-way funnel. To put it simply, as an embedded module, e-commerce games not only use the resources of the JD platform, but also have their own relatively independent growth system. Therefore, while the e-commerce platform is directing traffic to the game, each small game has the ability to grow independently. The result of this growth is that more players are retained and traffic is directed to shopping scenarios, thereby achieving a cyclical expansion of the funnel conversion.

Now let us try to conceptualize e-commerce and games, and look at the relationship between the two from a higher-level perspective. By borrowing our ancestors' Yin-Yang balance theory, we can see a harmonious structure in which e-commerce and games coexist. From here we can extract a key word that runs through the design of e-commerce games - that is, "balance". This word will be mentioned many times in subsequent chapters. Balance requires e-commerce games to remain in a healthy ecosystem, and their game essence will not be impacted by excessive e-commerce content, nor will the core needs of e-commerce be diluted by excessive game content.

Therefore, we need to be cautious when planning games to avoid the adverse effects of over-emphasizing one party. When e-commerce content impacts the core of the game, e-commerce games may transform into e-commerce gamification scenarios. So what is the relationship between games and gamification? Let us move on to Chapter 2.

02. E-commerce games and gamification

When talking about games, the concept of "gamification" is inevitably mentioned. You may see these three words in the project, "Ah, we are going to do a gamification project, bla bla", so some students may think that games and gamification are a package relationship. Then is the result of gamification really the creation of games?

The three major e-commerce companies we have all seen: growing vegetables, raising dogs, and Candy Crush Saga. Are they all games? Although we all call them game projects, there are slight differences if we distinguish them from the perspective of games and gamification.

The current development-type gameplay is more presented in the form of gamification. The development process mainly serves as a visual packaging of the user's progress. If we take away the vegetables in the farm and the dog in the development, the user behavior will still generate numerical progress and the subsequent resource exchange can be carried out normally. However, for the Candy Crush gameplay, if the Candy Crush module is taken away, the entire gameplay will no longer be valid. Therefore, strictly speaking, only Candy Crush is a game. This does not mean that development-type gameplay must be equivalent to gamification. If we improve the game logic in its mechanism, they will also be transformed into games. Therefore, games and gamification are actually a process of qualitative change caused by quantitative change.

To distinguish between games and gamification, we need to first understand their basic definitions. E-commerce games refer to games based on e-commerce environments. The subject is still games, but they need to meet the demands from the business side. It is not difficult to see that e-commerce games are based on gameplay as their core and connect to business demand points from the outside, empowering business needs without being included in them. In essence, they are the linkage between games and business. Gamification is the application of game principles and game elements to non-game scenarios. Therefore, gamification is not designed for games, but for applications with game characteristics that serve specific target areas. Gamification is more like a process, which is driven by business needs and applies game mechanisms or independent game closed loops. It can also be said that its essence is closer to an improved user incentive process that serves commercial operations.

Just now at the end of the first chapter, we mentioned the transformation of e-commerce games and gamification caused by excessive design. It is not difficult to understand that when the dynamic balance of demand is broken, our project will develop with different attributes. When the commercial elements in the game project are excessive and affect the independent operation logic of the game, the game will shift towards gamification. Similarly, when a large amount of sound game operation logic is added to the gamification project, it will be transformed in the direction of games.

It should be noted that both games and gamification are methods to enhance user experience. There is no inherent advantage or disadvantage between them, and everyone can use them with confidence. However, once the direction has been established, one should not repeatedly test the edge of crossing the line.

Here is a short story to deepen your understanding of games and gamification.

Here we have a comprehensive understanding of e-commerce games and gamification. Since we are mainly talking about the design strategies of e-commerce games this time, the explanation of gamification ends here and will not be repeated. Students who are interested are welcome to communicate after class. Now we will enter Chapter 3: Analysis of the characteristics of e-commerce games.

03. Analysis of the characteristics of e-commerce games

To make a game, you must first know the basic structure of the game.

Mcgonigal divides the game features into four aspects.

Goals are specific outcomes that players strive to achieve.

Rules place restrictions on how players can achieve their goals.

Feedback systems tell players how close they are to achieving their goals.

Voluntary participation requires that all those playing the game understand and are willing to accept the goals, rules, and feedback.

These four modules are indispensable for a game. A typical failure case is that one wants to make a game to increase user traffic, but the introduction of users depends entirely on spending money. The game itself cannot create a sense of purpose and voluntary participation in users. So the question is, what is the point of making this game? Wouldn’t it be better to do a simple interactive activity?

After understanding the basic concepts, we began to focus on the user experience process in the game.

In game design, the most important user state is called flow, which in psychology refers to a psychological state when a person is concentrating on a certain behavior. You can imagine the feeling of being immersed in the game, as if time has stopped.

A qualified game needs to be able to quickly put users into a flow state, either through magical gameplay or immersive scenes and story experiences.

Kristian Killi summarized a game loop based on the flow model to explain how players complete tasks in the flow state. The process is as follows.

Players put forward preset ideas, take on challenges, try them out with clear goals, get clear feedback, observe reflectively, summarize their experiences, generate solutions, and move on to the next goal.

This model explains the generation of flow, which is the combination of [goal-feedback-behavior].

If it seems complicated, it’s okay because we have summarized the core elements of this model.

We have summarized 5 core elements. To make it easier for everyone to understand, we take Honor of Kings as an example;

First, renewable goals, which means that when you complete a goal, you will find that there is a more challenging goal behind it, and your descendants will have endless success;

Second, adapt to the challenges of the user's level and give the appropriate difficulty according to the current ability. Too difficult or too easy will discourage users;

Third, the behavior is consistent with perception. If my finger points east, the corresponding operation should not point west.

Fourth, quick and clear feedback. Players need to know who they are, where they are, and where they are going at all times.

Fifth, the player’s own sense of control. When the game is out of the player’s control, it becomes haunted.

The flow model is very comprehensive, but we will find that the competitors or reference objects we really pay attention to are not those objects with a complete flow model. E-commerce games are essentially H5 mini-games. So what are H5 mini-games like? They are these glamorous and cheap things, simple but very magical. If we use the previous flow model to explain them, there will be a feeling of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. This is caused by the special attributes of the current mini-games.

The limitations of platform carriers and the need for rapid dissemination have resulted in the current mini-games being simple in content and small in size. They are light, soft and easy to knock over, just like dandelion seeds, which must be small and light enough to float around. You may have experienced some popular magical mini-games. If not, it is recommended that you open your WeChat games after class, go through the mini-game entrance, quickly experience them, and feel the roughness of the current mini-games.

Back to the topic, for us, mini-games have greater reference significance, so we need a flow model for mini-programs to explain them.

Here it comes. This is a more lightweight game flow model that we have summarized based on the KILLI model by traversing various popular games online.

The most significant difference from Killi's model is that we set the default attributes of mini-games to: low-threshold cognitive matching, fast-paced game strategy, simple interactive experience, and the player's inner flow loop becomes simpler. This is a simplified process.

Does this seem complicated? That’s okay, because we’ve got it sorted out for you.

Then, in conjunction with Jump Jump, let’s talk about the four elements of the flow cycle of mini games:

First, easy-to-understand game logic: In layman's terms, it means that you can understand it at a glance. This is an indicator of whether a small game rule is easy to understand;

Second, clear game goals: set a small goal first. Establishing a game goal as soon as possible means entering the flow state earlier.

Third, the magical iteration of simple interactive modes: single operations are simple, but completing the goal requires a combination of more and more precise basic operations. Jumping once is easy, but jumping 1,000 times is difficult.

Fourth, high-frequency perceived growth feedback: Let players know that they are getting stronger and don’t need to become bald;

Here, we introduce the basics of e-commerce game flow. We have introduced the comprehensive Killi flow model and the simplified flow model suitable for H5 games. The specific use needs to be judged according to the actual scenario. Next, we will learn more about the attributes of e-commerce games.

After talking about the core flow module of the game, let's talk about the social nature of the game, that is, the humanistic attribute. The humanistic attribute of the game includes two concepts, self and outside of self. It is very abstract, so let's take an example. I honed my skills in Jump Jump and finally jumped to 10,000 points. Then I shared it with my best friends and said, "I could have jumped to 20,000 points." Then I looked at the friend rankings and it was pretty good. I was currently ranked third, with two monsters ahead of me. This process includes 3 stages.

I practice gaming skills spontaneously, which is the self-realization of game players. Players demonstrate a high degree of subjectivity and rich creativity in the game, which stems from their pursuit of self-realization. In the process of pursuing self-realization, players will generate a strong driving force.

I shared this with a good friend. This is the connection between the self and a strong relationship chain. Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory believes that people need to establish and maintain certain interpersonal relationships with others in order to understand others or understand themselves through others, and at the same time have the opportunity to show their superiority and expertise.

The ranking list is a weak relationship chain, which is more important for e-commerce because explosive dissemination mostly relies on weak relationship chains. Granovetter's weak relationship theory and Milgram's chain, which we often call the six degrees of separation theory, both explain the importance of weak relationships for dissemination.

This is the humanistic nature of the game, which includes both the player's self-motivation and the extension of the social level.

The above are mainly some characteristics of the pure game side. Now, we try to combine the value of the e-commerce dimension with the basic concepts of the game, so as to obtain a two-sided e-commerce game concept foundation.

We can see that based on the characteristic composition of the game, we can also add e-commerce content, e-commerce goals, rules, feedback, and voluntary participation.

When we try to adopt the form of e-commerce games, we must clearly understand that the overall project is still based on the game as the core framework, and the embedding of the commercial module depends on the drive of the game module. You can imagine a hamburger, whose appearance is a game. The perception of the hamburger lies in the pattern of two slices of bread sandwiching a bunch of materials. The game module is these two pieces of bread and the piece of meat in the middle. It sets the tone for the entire hamburger, and the slice of cheese and lettuce inside are commercial embedded elements. If you take them out separately, they may not taste good, but they are still very harmonious in the hamburger. This is the effect of the interaction between the game module and the commercial module.

One feature of e-commerce games is that they are attached to e-commerce platforms. What are the benefits of this platform? We can refer to some cases of independent games and business linkage models, such as the previous linkage between KFC and Onmyoji. Users need to consume at KFC first, and then they can get an Onmyoji co-branded card with a QR code. Then they can scan the code after entering the game to get some rewards. This model is a typical game scene-user-business scene independent linkage form, that is, for the game and the business side, the user conversion is a different path, and the inevitable result of such a path difference is the lack of conversion efficiency. It is difficult to achieve unity and balance between the game and the business side, and e-commerce games make up for this very well, because our home court is online, and there are ready-made conditions for connecting games and business resources. User behavior can be uniformly converted into the needs of the game and the business side at the same time. For example, a user buys a virtual item in a cultivation game, and this item is named by a certain brand. At this time, the user's behavior not only meets the purchase needs of the game side, but also meets the brand exposure needs of the business side, which can be said to kill two birds with one stone. This is the characteristic of e-commerce games that cross boundaries.

In addition, another advantage of e-commerce games is the high efficiency of empowerment. Compared with the commercial linkage of some independent games, generally speaking, the linkage between games and business is a one-to-one relationship. If it is one-to-many, there will be a problem of unbalanced business needs. So, for example, when McDonald's linked with The King's Avatar, the fans of Love and Producer were not moved at all and even wanted to say NBCS. This situation is also perfectly resolved in e-commerce games, because our platform itself is connected to a large number of merchant resources and it is also the function of the platform to undertake the business demands of multiple brands at the same time. Therefore, an e-commerce game can fully access multiple levels of business resources. As long as they are screened and arranged according to priority, it can effectively empower users for multiple business needs. Taking simulation management as an example, the products that appear on the user's shopping list are all brands that need to be exposed. Then, according to priority, the products with high priority exposure are placed at the top and arranged in order of priority. In this way, while browsing the list, the user has met the needs of multi-brand exposure. Isn't it wonderful?

In addition, e-commerce games also have considerable advantages in the reusability of underlying resources. Since the commercial rewards we generally issue are in the category of Jingdou, coupons, and physical rewards, and these awarding interfaces can be reused, our game implementation will be much more agile than general game business linkage. We no longer need to develop new underlying interfaces separately based on our partners. Relatively speaking, we can focus more on how to improve the quality of the core game.

The operational attributes of mini-games are reflected in their life cycle. The life cycle of general mini-games is relatively short, which is determined by their platform attributes and the need to pursue short-term explosive growth. Therefore, many mini-games do not have a closed loop sufficient to maintain long-term game operations.

We hope that e-commerce games can achieve explosive growth in conjunction with activity nodes, and we also hope that they can serve as a stable way to convert user resources on a daily basis;

The solution that meets this setting is obvious. At each important activity node, a major version iteration is carried out to expand the gameplay, and small versions are continuously optimized during daily operations. This is very similar to the design ideas of many terminal games.

The above is our analysis of the characteristics of e-commerce games. You can review them in order and then enter Chapter 4: Gameplay Brainstorming Process.

04. Gameplay brainstorming process

I understand the principle, but how do I design the gameplay of the mini-games?

Because we don't have professional gaming staff, everyone has gone through the three-nothing process. There is no plan, no experience, and no corresponding references, but everyone has been exposed to games to some extent. After all, there is Wi-Fi in temples now. If you are really an insulator of games, then here it is recommended to open the WeChat mini-game and experience it in order according to the rankings. It really doesn't take much time.

Let’s get back to the topic. For those students who want to make games but are struggling with how to design the gameplay, we provide a quick game design brainstorming process. After reading it, you don’t have to worry about the gameplay you design being boring anymore.

In the previous chapter, we introduced the characteristic attributes of the game. Here we will break it down again from the perspective of game design and construction.

Game Elements - This is the modular basis for game implementation, another classification system proposed by Jesse Schell.

Game mechanics describe the goal of the game and how the player can achieve it.

The story setting is the series of events that unfold in the game.

Aesthetics is about how the game looks and feels.

Implementation technology refers to any raw materials that can be used to make a game, as well as their interactions, and is fundamentally an intermediate medium for the other three elements.

We call this approach innovative fusion of classic mini-games.

To explain briefly, many successful classic games have provided excellent design ideas. By deconstructing and analyzing these classic games, we can obtain a precipitated game paradigm. Game fusion is achieved by splitting different games, abstractly extracting the highlights of different games, and optimizing and combining them, so as to obtain innovative effects based on classic models.

Please note that innovation and integration are two very important words here;

Innovation means more than simply reusing models, and integration means more than mechanical assembly.

This requires us to understand the game model and make reasonable optimization and integration based on current user needs, business background and development conditions.

The innovative integration of mini-games requires game modules of different dimensions as raw materials. So first of all, we need to distinguish games from different dimensions. Here we classify different games into multiple dimensions through design concept maps.

You can see that the conceptual diagram here is a typical two-dimensional coordinate axis. Each axis represents the distribution of a game attribute from the weakest to the strongest. Then we put the games in the appropriate positions according to the corresponding attribute strengths.

Through this method, we can obtain game classifications in different dimensions according to the needs of the project.

After extracting game modes of different dimensions, we also need to consider the corresponding range of interaction paradigms. Interaction paradigms refer to reusable interaction modes with a broad user learning base.

Since our scenarios are mainly focused on mobile phones, it is not difficult to derive the corresponding available interaction paradigms:

Based on touch, that is, our gestures and clicks, which cover most of the interaction forms on mobile terminals;

Based on hearing, the most commonly used ones are language recognition and volume recognition;

Vision-based, that is, based on camera image transmission, but due to the large size of the video itself, it is always restrained as a game interaction;

Based on gravity sensing, that is, directional operation relying on gyroscope;

OK, now that we have gathered all the raw materials, let's start the practice of game fusion. Here we take multi-level game fusion as an example. Here we take Fruit Ninja as one of the fusions, and Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies as the other. Through the concept map, we can summarize their attribute differences. Fruit Ninja is a game with strong interactive operability, but the single game cycle is short and heavily dependent on the player's reaction speed;

On the other hand, there are games with strong storylines, where the cycle of a single game is relatively long and more strategic. Now we try to integrate both sides with the current mobile paradigm.

From this, we abstracted some basic gameplay attributes corresponding to each module. From Fruit Ninja, we can abstract some of its highlights. The metaphor system is very down-to-earth, the interaction mode is also very simple, the sound effect and vibration feedback after cutting the fruit are very comfortable, and combo cutting the fruit is even more exciting;

From the Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies part, we can abstract some other highlights, namely the impressive character portrayal, the gameplay that unlocks level by level, the various combinations of player strategies, and a very immersive story background.

Finally, by adding some basic paradigms from the mobile side, we get the initial fusion pool.

What we need to do here is to reshape the basic elements of the game based on the game's implementation foundation.

Here you can see that according to the classification, we have reorganized the game attributes that were abstracted before, and preliminarily formed an integrated gameplay architecture.

After that, we began to continuously refine and brainstorm further. For example, we began to refine the game mechanics. Regarding the difficulty unlocking mode, what form should be used, level unlocking or numerical unlocking, whether a rank mechanism is needed, etc. We will further diverge in each small direction, and finally find a gameplay form that suits the needs from the results of these directional divergences.

At this point, we have gained some preliminary gameplay.

OK, the above is the first half of this tutorial. I hope you can have a basic understanding of e-commerce games and their design process. In the second half, we will have a deeper understanding of each part of e-commerce game design. You are welcome to watch it again then~!

Author: JD Design Center JDC

Source: JD Design Center