.png)
<aside> đź’ˇ Note: This is only one interpretation of building strong game mechanics, please feel free to comment and share others!
</aside>
Extremely useful tool from Amy Jo Kim and Game Thinking to be able to understand the story that the player is telling themselves in their heads as they approach your game.
First, you’ll sketch out your customer’s end-to-end experience as a 4-stage Mastery Path—focusing on how their needs & goals change over time. This sets you up to design for skill-building—the essence of good game design. Using this tool, you’ll think through your customer’s experience as a visitor, a newcomer, a regular, and finally an expert or enthusiast— and design your core systems to move them along this path. Then you’ll focus on building a simple version of the “regular” experience—a skill-building Core Learning Loop—to test your product ideas on the right early customers—for your MVP.
I’ll bring this approach to life using Slack as an example, and show you how that team created a breakthrough enterprise hit with a coherent Mastery Path and a simple, compelling Learning Loop.
In case you don’t know—Slack started out as the bare-bones in-house communications tool for a distributed team building an innovative co-op multiplayer game. When that game failed financially, Stewart Butterfield—the team leader—pivoted and turned their in-house tool into a better, faster team communications product.
If you use Slack, how did you find out about it? Was it mandated and installed by IT? Or did you discover Slack through your friends and colleagues? Likely the latter— because Slack is designed for Social Discovery. It’s almost irresistible to pull your friends in to try it out. That’s how games pull people in—socially, through friends. Because with Slack—as with games—it’s more fun to play with people you know.
The first stage is discovery—that’s for visitors, people who haven’t yet signed up for your service, downloaded your app, or bought your product. At the Discovery stage, your potential customers need to learn what your value proposition is, and decide if it’s a good match.
Next comes Onboarding—that’s for newcomers who started to use your product. They need to learn the ropes, and start getting value out of the experience quickly. Good onboarding introduces your experience—and can keep your customers engaged and moving forward with small, achievable goals.
In Slack’s case, onboarding comes to life as a friendly, helpful bot who teaches you the ropes—not everything, just enough to get you started—and know where to go if you need more help. That’s right out of the gaming playbook—if you’ve ever played multiplayer console shooters or strategy games, you’ve encountered a training level or sequence where you’re interacting with a bot and learning the ropes—before being thrown into the multiplayer fray.
Now, that’s just smart game design—because it’s much less EMBARRASSING to try things and make mistakes in front of a friendly bot than in front of other, more experienced players. So even though Slack is basically multiplayer co-op, the training level is single-player interaction with a bot.
Good onboarding doesn’t stand alone - that would be like icing without the cake. Habit-building is “the cake”—the repeat experience—the Core Loop—the hook that keeps your regulars coming back.