Who are these people who are playing your
game, or engaging in your game of fightsight.
And, I don't just mean what do they look like in the game.
They seem to be a bunch of orcs and
elves and other strange monsters riding on war bears.
What I mean is, what do you know about the players?
That starts with the standard kinds of measures, like demographics,
age groups, and where they live and so forth, income level.
All those kinds of metrics that you might want
to get in any standard kind of marketing survey.
And psychographics.
What do you know about their behavior?
What kinds of things do they like to buy?
What kinds of things do they like to do?
All of those are useful in understanding the players for gamification, just
as they're useful in any other kind of marketing, or other activity, where.
You're trying to do something involving certain populations of
people, and you need to typically segment, and not
try to be all things to all people, because
different sub communities will have different sorts of needs.
That's all the starting point, and that will be more or less
feasible or normal to do based on the nature of the application.
If it's a standard marketing type external gamification situation,
then that kind of data may already be there.
If it's one of the other categories, then maybe it's not as useful.
But in any situation you can figure out what types of people are they here.
Knowing that the players in this particular
system are a group of your employees,
as opposed to a group of your customers, for example, makes a big difference.
So starting point is general things that you know about your players.
But the real important aspect to learn
in describing your players, is what motivates them.
What can you say, as a starting point, about
the different kinds of motivations that your players have.
Because again, as I've said many times,
gamification, very directly, and, and frequently involves motivation.
So here we see a chat room log from World of Warcraft.
Just the illustrate some of the different kinds of things
that will motivate players, even in one massively multi-player online
game, and we can see it just by the different
things people are asking for here in the chat room.
So this person here the lingo may not mean anything to you if you're not
a wow player, but this person here
is looking for a couple other specific skills.
A fighter that does damage, and a healer for, and what's called an instance run.
They're trying to defeat the bosses or monsters,
in this specific dungeon in World of Warcraft.
So that's a group that's coming together to try
to beat a dungeon, and they need some help.
This person here is looking for what's called an enchanter.
Somebody who has specific craft skills,
because the person posting wants to improve
the quality of their gear, their armor or their weapons, and they need help.
They need someone who can cast spells on them.
So they're using the chat room to go and find an enchanters.
That's something about improving the quality of what you
have on your character, which may then be useful
for dungeons, or it may be useful because they
want to show off to other people or something else.
And this also shows that some people are involved in the Crafting system.
Those enchanters have spent time and money in the game, to build up skills
in casting those specific kind of spells,
a different kind of activity within the game.
This person here is trying to sell something for 450 gold.
The game has an auction house where you can buy and
sell, but this person is going and trying to do it directly.
Trying to make money, engaged in economic activity in the world.
Again, a different type of activity than the previous ones.
And all of these different activities relate to different
examples of things that people may want to accomplish.
This one here is a group that's trying to get an achievement.
So, they're going to go through a dungeon, but the
point is not really to defeat the monsters in the dungeon.
The point is to get this achievement that the game has set up.
If you conquer a certain dungeon in a certain way, you get a reward.
You get a recognition that you get that achievement.
And so that's the objective of that group that's going on there.
Lots of different things happening, all within the same game, a key to why World
of Warcraft is so successful, and a lesson that we can take to apply to gamification.
