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Readings and musings

Notes on Zao Yang Talk on Gamification

6/11/2012

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I randomly heard that Zao was giving a talk at the UCLA life sciences area about gamification, and I was able to watch it remotely and take some notes. The talk was part of UCLA's "Managing Invention" series, and it was titled, "Hooked on Gaming: Applications for Education, Scientific Knowledge and Marketing."

I met Zao at BetterWorks, and he's one of the smartest guys I know -- quick, action-oriented, and no-BS. He's the founder of MyMiniLife which became FarmVille and the engine behind most of Zynga's social games after it acquired his company.

Notes on the talk are below.

FarmVille story
  • Was working on MyMiniLife on side while doing CS grad degree at UCLA
  • Goal was virtual self-expression through online artwork + interactions w/ others
  • Was turned down by 8 angels
  • Dropped out of grad school
  • Wasn't getting traction for a while
  • Got 2 part-time jobs in Bay Area to bootstrap company
  • Finally got some distribution and traction
  • Raised first round
  • Scaled 1st product to 4M registered users
  • They were the cust serv dept
  • Realized ppl thought of this as a game, wanted simulation + game mechanics
  • Took 5 weeks to re-skin it (FarmVille was just first re-skin); basically pivoting
  • Grew 20-30% per week after
  • Had a bidding war between multiple companies, 4 acquisition + 1 investment offers
Consumer internet trends
  • Consumer internet so fast that core competency is UX, product design, tech execution, not IP protection
  • Consumer internet going more towards bite-sized consumption
  • WWW first started as publishing medium
  • Became bite-sized publishing w/ social feedback
  • Second era from social communities
Virality
  • figured out how to do bite-sized gaming
  • Most play FarmVille at work
  • Virality
  • Broadcast (1 to 1), multicast (1 to many), unicast (one to all)
  • Built in gifting
  • Used newsfeed
  • "Lonely cow" published and others click to help you
  • Different incentives for ppl to interact
  • Virtual goods not gotten unless through others

Psychological tricks

  • appointment gaming
  • psychological bias towards commitment
  • "get in the door" in sales
  • giving you a bunch of virtual currency in the game and telling you to plant seeds and wait
  • you invest it in something and then get reward
  • mechanics map directly to brain reward mechanisms
  • humans have tendency to complete task
  • progression/progress bar
  • hidden/next levels
  • concept of gifting/reciprocity
  • guilt tripping
  • reward mechanisms in brain light up on tweets 
Execution
  • at the time there were lots of farm games
  • just about execution
  • how cute the character, how big the eyes, camera angle, perspective, onboarding user experience
  • hipstamatic had all instagram features but was too complicated and mimicked old features of filter cameras
  • game mechanics
  • social mechanics
  • art style
  • user experience
  • farmville was not the first social app
  • they launched in 2009
  • FB platform launched in 2007
  • a lot centered around experimentation
  • lots of product pivoting in consumer startups
  • certain element of taste and judgment
  • he plays around w/ a lot of apps to understand new/returning user experiences
  • in early days it's extremely manual
  • nuances are lightweight, 1-click feedback mechamism for publishers
Female appeal
  • most social media consumers are women
  • nurturing crops, animals appeal to women
  • males want to challenge and kill each other, competitive
  • females equally competitive in diff. way
  • nice shoes and handbag are decorating yourself by comparing against other females by posing

Gaming
  • gaming companies: playfish, outfit7, zynga, pocketgems, machinezone
  • 4 aspects of gamification: (not just about adding points and leaderboards and badges)
  • 1. figure out what aspirational item of community is
  • in social community, there's always aspirational item
  • youtube: fame
  • facebook: popularity
  • quora: respect
  • 2. seed it with the right community
  • don't get viral off the bat
  • when yelp started, there were 4-5 major competitors, better funded; others did national campaign
  • yelp was UGC site, just wanting SF restaurants to start
  • cultivate community, throw parties and events, reward members
  • do it geography by geography
  • 3. design ego statistics around it
  • for some, badges and points
  • want stats to fit community
  • want 2-3 stats that are the aspirational items for top guys
  • from 100 ppl, 80 will be lurkers, 19 will comment, 1 will post
  • must design around that 1% that posts
  • to create a lot of social feedback, reputational items, lightweight mechanics to provide it to them
  • 4. figure out social feedback loops
  • little feedback mechanisms to publishers: likes, upvote, downvote, comments, endorsing, tagging
  • in social communities, incentive is not economic
  • mostly amateur pro's who want to share expertise
  • incentive cannot be economics
  • encourage and design around intrinsic motivation
Pinterest
  • pinterest pivoted like 6 times because he knows # of investors that said no
  • pinterest was flat for a long time because none of their friends wanted to use it
  • ben silverman went to design conference, a bunch of designers really loved it
  • loved aesthetics and UI
  • from core community then ballooned
BetterWorks
  • reward and recognition software
  • perks
  • in retrospect didn't understand B2B software
  • underestimated sales & marketing side of it, headed by paige craig
  • realized it couldn't scale in early May and laid off half the company in early May
  • # of lessons from it
  • was able to raise money effectively
  • money caused a lack of discipline
  • ironic part of it
  • in 1st company, raised a total of $380K, not a lot when paying salaries
  • were able to raise $2.5M in 1 week and $8M in another week
  • didn't prove out the model before they scaled
  • should've proven out the model earlier
  • should've figured out sales side before scaled
  • MyMiniLife wasn't easy either
  • learned different lessons, brought closer to earth
2 types of pivots
  • soft pivot from hearing customer feedback about which area to go into
  • hard pivot which is completely new idea
  • exploring both options
What he looks for in investments
  • #1 thing that dictates success is "running back" analogy: very persistent and can pivot and roll w/ punches
  • correlates w/ success
  • no one knows the actual stories of the startups
  • very deep domain expertise
  • ability to recruit people
  • steve jobs' reality distortion field: allows you to attract ppl to the cause
  • problem w/ that is you have 2 types who can do it: delusional and actual operators
  • most w/in their domain can execute
  • problem w/ startup is it's emotionally challenging; your social circles won't accept it
  • family was calling him weekly to change; embarrassment of failure; most underestimate pressure from these
  • higher order bit is if want to do startup or not, not whether have great idea
  • all the companies pivoted a lot
  • Sony started as rice cooker co
  • Toyota wasn't car company
Voice recognition
  • valley of disappointment w/ voice recognition techniques
  • certain verticals and communities will take to it but most not
  • still early stages of voice
  • key to voice is the HCI part, not the actual POS recognition
  • Dragon and Nuance have done well there
  • dialog manager
  • how you interact w/ device in smooth manner
  • can you make a game out of voice? not quite there
  • MMO/RPGs
  • probably not for mobile devices
Education applications
  • should be possible but execution hard
  • can produce games teaching math concepts, but less scalable
  • needs to be different format
  • not sure how
  • social community around ppl curating edu content; put reputation points and authority and aspirational levels w/in diff areas (math, etc.)

importance of curation
  • research on experts showed 10K hours/5 years, etc. but this research is old
  • life cycle from academic research, to being well known, to magazine publication, to Malcolm Gladwell book is long time
  • Dumbing down content, thinking of it in diff. way
  • Create a community modeling and speeding this process up

Gathering market data using gamification
  • Carnegie Mellon prof/grad student story: machine vision, image recognition were too hard for machines to process and needed correction from humans
  • Approach was creating a game around posting an image and allowing ppl to recognize objects and interact
  • facilitated image classification and recognition
  • Google acquired the tech
  • Can incentivize social community
  • really depends on the nuances, what community, how seeded
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