This weeks Friday Five is about making your business idea stickier. If you think about it, games and playing are a fundamental part of our behaviour and almost all succesfull business ideas use some elements of gaming, whether it’s the product, the marketing, the customer relations or maybe even the financing?
Examples:
Facebook is about collecting friends.
MySpace lets you customize your character (the website)
Youtube has elements of competition with the most viewed/best rated function.
Flickr and Lastfm have elements of luck and randomness when they introduce you to people you might find of similar taste.
eBay has a rewards system, that builds the trust inbetween users.
.. so think patterns, goals, feedbacksystems, interfaces…
You can start by thinking about the things that make you want to play a game, see the definition and elements for game design from wikipedia or consult this action list from game scholar Aki Järvinen.
Accelerating / Decelerating • Aiming & Shooting • Allocating • Arranging • Attacking / Defending • Bidding • Browsing • Building • Buying / Selling • Catching • Choosing • Composing • Conquering • Contracting • Controlling • Conversing • Discarding • Enclosing • Expressing • Herding • Information-seeking • Jumping • Manoeuvring • Motion • Moving • Operating • Performing • Placing • Point-to-point Movement • Powering • Sequencing • Sprinting / Slowing • Storytelling • Submitting • Substituting • Taking • Trading • Transforming • Upgrading / Downgrading • Voting
So todays question in short - what elements of gaming could you add to your business idea?
