Expert Game Designers Explain Social Augmented Reality Gaming And Virality

Game developers around the globe are looking to move beyond the farming and restaurant games and utilize new mechanics that help them increase virality and revenue. According to the NPD group/Gamasutra US retail video game industry sales in January 2010 decreased 13% from the same time last year. Social games have also suffered on the viral front due to Facebook’s changes and competition from large gaming companies with a lot of effort. To address some of the issues facing developers, CEO of e23 Games Joe Dunn and CEO of Flying Wisdom Studios Josh Rose presented at the SF Game Developer Workshop titled ‘How to Grow your Online Games for massive player engagement and revenue’ hosted by Sana Choudary and Japheth Dillman, to present on virality, feedback loops, and geo-located social augmented reality gaming. Read more after the jump.

Josh Rose kicked off the panel with discussion of 4 viral metrics he felt are essential to monitor, examining virality from a epidemiological lens. The 4 viral metrics are:

• Increase your vectors – more contact points
• Be highly contagious – better conversion
• Infection duration – keep them in the pool
• Reinfected – keep them in the pool longer

The key, Josh Rose explained is, to keep an assortment of rewards and make each game activity be an action that fuels one of the viral metrics. These activities can then be driven by a variety of feedback loops which are a combination of Fixed and Variable ratio schedules for the following categories:

• Payout
• Interval
• Investment

Thus you have 2 Payout types, 2 Interval Types, and 2 Investment types. 2 to the power of 3 = 8, hence 8 feedback loops. An example of a fixed payout, fixed interval and fixed investment would be visiting your friends farm where you get 10 exp points (reward) for every crop you water and can only water 5 farms (interval), each of which take 5 seconds (investment).

Joe Dunn’s discussion on social augmented reality gaming took more of a case study approach, giving the crowd insight into his experience growing their mobile Tagdis game in which users can use creative tools provided by the mobile app to apply graffiti to locations in real-time which then appear to other players looking at locations through their mobile phones who have the app. This mixed world entertainment is young and ripe, according to Dunn, who hinted at the number of opportunities awaiting in this nascent category of social gaming that’s just about ready for the mainstream. The money comes from selling virtual items that help enhance the graffiti experience.

In a nutshell, the state of mobile augmented reality:

• 605 AR apps in the store
• mostly browsers
• big potential market, hardware at inflection point

The keys to success are allowing users to play with any device, share locations, learn it quickly and come back often. There are a number of issues facing developers like GPS/Compass inaccuracies, lack of ability to play inside, problem playing downtown, network unpredictability, image recognition faultiness and more.

Overall the event is the first of many SF Developer Workshop’s to come which will be hosted bimonthly. The next one is in October. You can check out more details about this previous event here.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.