How FarmVille Designs for Engagement

If HackerNew wanted to become more like FarmVille (not that it should), the system could:<p>* give you karma just for stopping by each day<p>* give you karma for upvoting other's posts<p>* give you profiles you could customize by trading in karma<p>* show you what your friends were upvoting and their Karma<p>* show you how close you were to attaining moderator status<p>* allow you to give one virtual gift per day to your favorite contributors<p>* have your karma decline if you don't stop by in a week

Yes, but this method could also be applied to building better slot machines. The game itself requires very little skill or creative engagement on the part of the player. Farmville is evil game design; it takes advantage of human cognitive hooks and limitations for the purpose of profit.<p>Video games should expand upon what we are capable of. Reward structures and timed events are fine to a degree, but Zynga goes too far. This kind of manipulation needs to be addressed, especially as games become more and more thoroughly integrated with our society.

The problem with this kind of advice although interesting is that is takes something hugely popular and present it as the reason why farmville is working.<p>I am not so sure it's that simple. The real challenge imho is to show how to get critical mass. Not to talk about how you optimize once you have it.<p>Does anyone know exactly the reason why farmville became popular, cause somehow I think it's not about those 8 principles?

This was an awesome article. Can anyone point to more articles like this? I'm looking for ways make my web-app (a social discussion forum) more engaging.

This one is also good:<p><a href="http://www.gamesbrief.com/2009/09/six-secrets-of-farmvilles-success-and-33-million-people-agree/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gamesbrief.com/2009/09/six-secrets-of-farmvilles-...</a>

I don't use Facebook or Farmville, but it sounds like the strategy is to just give you little scraps of gameplay at well-spaced intervals so that you are never fully satisfied. That makes you keep coming back for more.<p>(HN and SO are similar in this way. You randomly get karma points, which mean people like you, and so you keep checking your threads page to see how much karma you've gotten since you've last looked. Same goes for replies. If there was no karma or no threads page, I bet HN wouldn't have any users.)

I've never played FarmVille, but one of the things I loved about Kingdom of Loathing (other than the general awesomeness) was that I could only do so much at a time - I didn't feel like I had to commit to it if I just had a few minutes. And the fact that each day you got more adventures, it really encouraged me to keep coming back.<p>Oddly, it was at the point where I had more adventures in a day than I had time to use (and therefore started loosing them) was the point that I started to loose interest.

If anyone has other thoughts on lessons to learn from FarmVille, let me know!