I haven’t been updating this blog much in the last couple of weeks because I’ve been doing the final writing push for my dissertation. After spending 12+ hours a day writing the dissertation, it is hard to sit down and write more for a blog. But now that is done, and Emilee and I took the whole weekend off of work. And we spent most of the weekend playing the new Boom Blox Bash Party game for the Nintendo Wii.
One of the interesting things about this new game is that it supports user-contributed content: anyone can use the built-in level creator to create new levels and upload them to a central content server. You can also download and play levels that others have created. As expected, I found a few really fun levels and a bunch of not-so-good levels. Fortunately, the Boom Blox online system allows users to rate levels with 1-5 stars, and you can sort the levels by rating when looking for new levels.
This is a great example of how this user-contributed content is becoming pervasive. Even games like Boom Blox have a user-contributed content portion of the game. And I think that this feature could have benefited from hiring someone who studies incentive-centered design. There is a basic contribution question here: why should users contribute levels? And more importantly, what types of levels should users contribute? So far, the creators of the game have been rewarding complex Rube Goldberg type levels by highlighting them on YouTube. It would be interesting to think about different ways that the game can reward other types of levels; for example, it could pick the highest rated levels of each type currently in the game and make them available as a downloadable “level pack.” This might encourage users to create interesting new levels to extend the game’s current gameplay.
Another ICD issue is the rating system. Right now, after playing an online level, the user is asked to rate it with 1-5 stars. But, why should the user provide a rating? And, more importantly, what metric should he or she employ? A level might get 5 stars on “cool” but 1 on “playability”. By thinking about what behavior you want people to do, you can design the system to elicit that behavior. For example, you might want people to rate levels based on how much fun they are to play over and over. Do elicit that type of rating, the designers might allow people to save levels from online (which is currently supported) and automatically sort them by the rating I gave it by default. Levels I give 5 stars are shown first, then 4 stars and on down. This way, levels I have an incentive to rate highly the levels I want to play again (to make them easy to find), and rate poorly the levels I don’t.
This is actually an example of the side effect mechanism I’ve talked about before. Users have a private reason to rate levels — to make it easier to find the ones they want to play again. And the incentive to rate levels is aligned with the goals of the consumers, who want to use the ratings to know what levels are best to play.
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