FireStarter

SXSW: What is She Doing With That Sheep?

It’s all about the power of innuendo.

Yesterday’s memorable SXSW talk, the one that will be ringing in my mind for some time was “The New Frontier of Social Gaming,” delivered by Brian Reynolds from Zynga. What he’s working in is fascinating: the science of people having fun together on the internet.

Concepts like people playing together at different points in time, our need for patterns, how our non-commenting friends are compelling us to over-play games. Just an incredible amount of behavioral insight into how and why we play together, as well as a peek into his process.

It’s speakers like this that get me coming back to SXSW. Here are the notes from the session. Hope it gets you thinking about all the different applications as it did me. As always, let’s continue the conversation here in the comments or on Twitter @dfcbfirestarter

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What’s the most sharable word on facebook?

It’s “sex.”

The second most is “facebook.”

“like” is a distant third.

This talk about what makes social successful, presented by zynga, offered a treasure trove of data-driven insights about people’s behavior.

Aside from what we know, there have to be ways to represent what’s unique about you, it gets way more interesting.

For one, the people that just watch the updates and never play are who fuel people to play and pay: because of social capital. That’s what gets people to play social games too much. And when you want to play too much, that’s when you have to pay.

Another great story was with frontierville. It went viral because testing showed that people liked to move the sheep.

So they added in the option to post moving the sheep to your wall. The comments and clicks to the game skyrocketed, which resulted in those comments appearing at the top of everyone’s news feed. Even more clicks.

Why?

Because to adults, the icon of the woman and the sheep were in a sexually ambiguous position in the icon. All the comments Were along the lines of “what is she doing with that sheep?”

So they redesigned all of their frontierville icons to include innuendo that kids would never get, but gets incredibly high involvement from adults.

Socializing is everything to zynga, because it’s everything to the players. They want to share almost every game interaction, and zynga needs to enable that to be successful.

On games: Give people satisfying interactions. People like to fill five minutes of boredom. Give them satisfying experiences that fit.

Play asynchronously. Let people play together without having to play at the same time. There’s too much friction in forcing people to play the same game at the same time.

Have fun!

Okay, so what does that mean?

1- series of interesting choices

2- recognizing and learning patterns - our brains are made to do this. To a fault.

Turns out it’s not only distracting, but keeps your brain more active. (me: crossword anyone?)

3- surprise and delight: laughter

4- Prototype an idea: actually build it!

Play it over and over. Never stop revising.

Show it to more people, revise more.

Keep playing and revising!

5- Things to try: More choices. Let the player have fun.

Make choices matter more

6- Build in a story and make me the hero.

7- Hide patterns I can learn over time.

8- Create more surprise, suspense, and humor.

9- Add another social element, like cooperation.