So for the last two weeks i’ve been studying Farmville from a product standpoint for a new site that i’ll be working on.    They use very clever behavioral psychology tricks to get the user mentally and emotionally invested in the game.  Once they’ve become invested, they’re pretty much hooked and willing to spend hours building their virtual farms and gathering neighbors who help them farm.  I’ll try and cover everything i’ve learned from studying the game mechanics of each phase.  However, i’m only a level 5 farmer, but I’ve talked to several people who are at higher levels to understand what other dynamics keep pulling them in.  Most of my learnings have been gleamed from reading ‘Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion’ by Robert B.Cialdini.  It’s a great read which I think that every entrepreneur should review.  It’ll help you understand ways to keep the user on your site and emotionally invested in your product.

The first hook I’ll talk about is commitment.  There are studies that show “Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment” (from Influence Ch.3).    Farmville’s first use of this technique is a very subtle status bar at the top of the screen (view the png in the browser to see it enlarged)

It’s very subtle, but if you look at the copy, it says you become a dedicated farmer.  I find the wording to be very interesting.  It’s not that you only become a farmer, but a dedicated one.  Psychologically, once you’ve committed to be a dedicated farmer, i’ll bet you’re more likely to continue to build your farm.   Once you do complete it, you’ve committed yourself to the game psychologically.  The next thing you know you’re probably a level 51 farmer who’s spent hundreds of dollars on gasoline for your tractor.

If you think about it from Zynga’s point of view, they could have easily asked for this information at other points or on another interaction in the game.  Instead, they’ve decided to wrap it into the game design, always reminding you to become a dedicated farmer, and always of course entirely voluntary. As covered in the book, there can’t be an excessive reward for the voluntary action that you take.  A person is less committed to an idea if there’s monetary compensation, as they believe it’s an ‘out’ for what they’re doing.  Instead, if there is a reward, it’s typically a reward that is more or less insignificant in the scenario.  In Farmville’s case you’re actually not rewarded anything for completing the status bar.

Practical Use for Product Designers

In any of your products, you need your users to voluntarily commit to be dedicated users.   An even stronger commitment would be to share there commitment with their facebook friends and twitter followers. Once they’ve openly committed to becoming a user, the will most likely continue to be a dedicated user since they’ve already committed to doing so.

So I can’t sleep….. i’ve been reading about game design for the past two weeks and want to build my application already and am waiting on my designer to get back to me.  We’ve been going back and forth about what our application should look like and do and finally what Eric Reis and Steve Blank talk about finally clicked in my brain.

I don’t know shit.  It’s not that I literally don’t know shit.  It’s just that all I have are assumptions.  I assume that my users will want to do this.  i assume that my users will want to do that.  I really don’t know what they will do in a real world situation.  In the game design book ‘Rules of Play’, they talk about getting your game out to game testers as early as possible because you need to figure out what works.  If it’s all in your head, then it’s impossible to see whether or not it works.  It also doesn’t make sense to just build a game then test it after it’s all built.  You need to test the game constantly to test whether or not it’s playable and if people understand what you’re trying to do.

Another way to think about it is this way.  If you had to bet your life on whether or not a feature worked, would you?  Would you risk your first born on a feature?  Probably not.  BUT, if I told you that you had the option of testing that feature out compare to the current model to see if it would work, wouldn’t you want to test it first?  No one really knows wtf they’re talking about,  even entrepreneurs who’ve done it before.  They may have some insight, but that insight still needs to be tested and validated.

This is the whole concept of customer development. Don’t wait till the end to get it in front of some customers.  Create an assumption, ask people about it, test out the theory.  If it sticks, move on and build a prototype to get out in front of ppl.  Just keep iterating and testing it front of people as you go.  Eventually you’ll get something that makes sense and has a market fit.