Do you need game mechanics to want to make money?

[elfs]

I'm doing research into the whole gamification process for IndieFlix. We're coming up with the various behaviors we want to incentivize and, more importantly, the obscure capabilities of the website that we want to educate our users about. The real purpose of gamification is to encourage a user to explore the website, discover what rewards can be found, and so on. If we want reviews, rewarding people for being avid reviewers is a good strategy; even better, an initial reward for being a reviewer encourages further discovery of the reviewing process. That's what gaming does-- it gives feedback to the user about doing interesting things.

Here's one thing, though: Devhub does this with their site builder. But DevHub is a site dedicated to building small business sites. DevHub recently added game mechanics to their site builder, leading me to conclude that they were having trouble either (a) convincing people to maintain their purportedly money-making websites, thus encouranging money-making and DevHub's cut, or (b) their site builder isn't all that well made and leading people by documentation wasn't enough.

I generally don't "get" game mechanics. I find the whole badges/ points/ rewards mechanism pointless: at best, they're meta-representations of my personal success and security. Real friendships and real income are the only meaningful representatives. The idea that we need to incentivize people with game mechanics to find friendships or make money confounds the hell out of me.

Comments

[elfs.livejournal.com]

As opposed to SCVNGR, which let everyone see theirs. (http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/25/scvngr-game-mechanics/)

[mouser.livejournal.com]

My girl friend plays "CafeWorld" (so I have to...) and as an experiment I tried FarmVille and "Treasure Island" - all by Zynga. They *are* different, but as someone that's been a game dev (not currently) I can see that there is a lot of idea repetition - just different stats and new art. I suspect SCVNGR is less detailed but MUCH more broad then the Zynga version.

It's also an excellent spring board for those that want to design their own games.