During a recent meeting with the creator of a new social networking app, it was revealed to us that within the higher ranks of Foursquare, gamification was now looked upon as ‘so 2009’ and they were moving away from it. This would appear to fall in line with Foursquare’s new makeover – even though gamification is still there, it’s not at the forefront of their app any longer. So if a leading user of gamification – and one that has seen its user numbers sore because of it, should drop it’s game elements, does this mean gamification doesn’t work after all?
FourSquare and Gamification
Foursquare’s check-in and reward policy was initially a fantastic move, encouraging people to post their locations and being rewarded with virtual badges that allow them to gain a certain level of social status within that location. So, everyone gets excited and battles for the right to be ‘Mayor’ of their nearest Starbucks, but what happens then? Nothing. You have the ‘Mayor’ title, someone comes and takes it away from you, you battle to get it back and so on and so on until you both realise that being ‘Mayor’ has absolutely no importance to it at all. Herein lies Foursquare’s problem and it’s move away from such practices. Foursquare have designed game elements that are initially attractive to play, but very quickly lose all value and become somewhat dull.
What can they do about it?
The problem FourSquare has is as a social networking app, it has an infinite timeline. People will just go on using it – it has no end. Games do. There are winners and losers. There is no point in playing a game where you win, only to find out the next day that you have no longer won because someone has drank more coffee than you. In order for Foursquare to keep on using game elements it must evolve these elements.
Virtual Badges
Foursquare harnessed the use of virtual badges better than anyone, but once again, it’s a good idea with only a limited life-span. What is more, it was so successful, everybody copied it. Virtual badges have saturated gamification strategies and it’s just become lazy. What is needed are more real-life rewards. This shouldn’t be too difficult for the likes of Foursquare, just by checking-in, users are advertising the services of a company. Surely deals for discounts and membership points could be awarded for checking-in/advertising via word of mouth?
Restrictive Campaigns
Recently, Foursquare, in tandem with HBO created a campaign entitled ‘Game of Cones’. The premise being that users had to check-in to their local ice-cream parlours in order to receive Game of Thrones-styled badges. The problem was that the campaign failed to produce large user numbers participating. The problem? Foursquare was only allowing user to check-in to shops already in their top-ten index. This meant there was no room for ‘fun’ elements such as funny shop name’s or even unusual flavoured ice-creams being shared across it’s social netwrok platform. The game was too straight-lined, too obvious and too unimaginative. Gamification doesn’t need to be so restrictive and in this case should have complemented the campaign as opposed to run it.
Ultimately, the success of gamification in Foursquare and now it’s demise have come from it’s over-exposure. Simply put, when the focus of a campaign/project or app is relatively short, gamification works at its best – because there is always a finality. When used for something with a rolling lifespan, gamification needs to be implemented in stages and with a final deadline in mind, at which point the gamification is evolved, or starts over.
At Research Through Gaming, our game elements are perfectly placed for what they do because our games are played once by the respondent over an average time of 30 minutes. It makes a short exercise fun and more engaging without any fear of becoming stale.
So is gamification ‘so 2009’? No, but its strengths must be recognised and its implementation carefully planned.