trendpreneur

Designers in the games industry have long since known the value of microrewards — the entire massively multiplayer genre is built around the concept. The lowdown: keep your users striving towards the next goal, something that’s achievable and desirable but not too easy. If you follow the MMO approach, make sure there’s always a carrot around the next bend; always something to strive towards, and the illusion of freedom as to which goals you pursue.

Xbox Live gamerscores are a great example of how an achievement system can be built in as a fundamental part of a community, as well as adding longevity to products; gamers get points for various accomplishments within a game, which can be as simple as completing a level or as hard as getting a perfect score without dying. Encouraging gamers to have more points than their friends leads people to seek out easy achievements to pad their scores as well as hard achievements to show off. A title that might have been played through once suddenly gets played through three times just to get more points.

On the other hand, after a certain point, a user’s gamerscore becomes fairly meaningless. There’s nothing you can do with the points, and once your score is large enough to show you’re a hardcore gamer, there’s little motivation to squeezing every last point out of your games (unless you’re the completist type). So, a great start but lacking some longevity.

Not every system starts with microrewards and achievements built in. World of Warcraft is an example of this; the latest patch, added this week, incorporated an Xbox-style system for in-game feats. You could easily argue that as an MMO, WoW had its own microreward system solidly in place already, and this is true to a large extent; beyond the obvious goals such as ‘get to the next level’ and ‘kill ten rats’, WoW’s endgame has plenty of microrewards to strive towards — as long as you don’t think too hard about the big picture.

For example, farming honor points in battlegrounds can net you a new piece of gear every few days — it’s a long grind to get a full set of gear this way, but if you take it one item at a time, it’s definitely doable. Repeating daily quests, a system with clear boundaries, not only results in gold and other rewards but also reputation towards a larger goal. Even the raiding system, where you team up with 9 or 24 others to face dungeon bosses, results in sub-rewards towards your overarcing goals (“kill every boss in game”, “get the best gear possible”, etc); player-enforced loot points, items of loot themselves, and tokens which drop from heroic and raid dungeons all motivate players to show up and raid.

With all these little rewards just for playing the game, and players inventing their own goals every day, why did WoW need an achievement system? Because a lot of players had beaten the game (inasmuch as you can ever ‘beat’ a MMO) and had lost interest, or were close to doing so. They’d achieved their personal goals, maybe even frittered some time away on vanity pursuits such as obtaining rare items from the old world, and had, quite simply, run out of things to do.

The new achievement system, especially its timing, changes that. By launching it a month before the new expansion, bored players have a reason to log in; there are plenty of achievements that can be done before Wrath of the Lich King hits, and by the time you’ve finished them all, chances are it’ll be pretty close to the expansion. People who had previously been debating whether to keep playing have been logging back in, and will be buying the expansion where before they were undecided; it’s a great marketing move.

Plus, once the expansion’s well underway, there’s now a whole set of defined off-the-beaten-track goals to work towards after you’re finished levelling and into the swing of endgame. From exploration and collecting to killing bosses with artificially hard constraints, it should keep players busier longer than if such a system wasn’t in place, even though the achievement points mean nothing at the moment; the promise of eventually being able to have a special tabard is enough for some people, plus the fact that the harder achievements have meta-rewards such as mounts and titles. It’s doubtful whether the hardest-core of the hardcore will truly be entertained for long by all these goals, as they’ll mostly steamroll through them, whereas casuals without the ability to easily visit old-world raids or kill the endgame’s end bosses are somewhat left behind — but that pleases the hardcore raiders, as finally there are things they can do that not everyone else can.

Stepping away from WoW, we see microrewards and user ranking systems in plenty of places; sometimes public, sometimes private. From karma points to a friend count, there are many ways to add user metrics and systems that encourage users to participate and increase them. Perhaps more social systems could benefit from a game-design approach; how about getting points if you post a certain number of messages a day, a different coloured name if you have more than a certain number of friends, and extra privileges if a certain number of users vote your contributions useful? Some microrewards can even be transplanted straight from games, such as exploring an entire site, logging in daily or completing a particularly difficult challenge.

Think about games, and what you enjoy about the microreward systems you’ve encountered; then switch gears and think about how you can reinvigorate a social network, a website or even your company by adding mini goals and achievements in. You might be surprised at what you come up with!

To read more ramblings about WoW, check out Ready Check, my weekly column on WoW Insider.