When Social Elements Ruin Your Game
If you create too much focus on the social element of your game (fx having the best score), it can ruin the experience for the player. I saw this just recently:
Under a lecture at my university a guy just started playing Angry Birds on Google+.
He completed the level in first try, but didn’t get all the 3 stars, so he restarted to get all of them.
But once he did that, he noticed one of his friends had a really good score (~34,000).
Seeing that he wasn’t the very best made him try and beat the highscore… for a long, long time.
Actually he sad there for the entire lecture (55 minutes), and tried to beat the score.
At one point I started a stop watch to see how many tries he did in one minute, he did 6. If we remove the time he used to check his battery status (and shaking his fist at the sky), we could say he did this 45 minutes in all: 6*45 = 270 tries on level 1.
Do you think that he had a good experience, and that he will come back and play this game again? I doubt it!
So, if you’re adding social features to your game, watch out that they don’t go in the way of the overall experience!
Posted on November 24th, 2011 Filed under End of This Blog |