Accountability FTW: an open letter to FourSquare
What makes a game a game?
The world — and by “world” I of course mean “everybody who’s at SXSW right now” — is all a-twitter about FourSquare, a website aiming to turn your social life into an adventure game complete with experience points and trophies (they call ‘em badges), and the self-proclaimed sequel to the ill-fated Dodgeball. While I am definitely #notatsxsw, the flood of SXSW tweets about #foursquare got me more than a little curious.
So I signed up, and of course my four bigshot social media maven friends (who are NOT #notatsxsw) were already on there. I poke around a bit, getting a feel for what would be the “action” of this game. The site is brand spanking new, so while the mechanics are largely in place, the content is not.
It takes me 2 minutes to realize you could rack up a ton of points just clicking “sure I done that” on lots of random tasks. My immediate reaction: this is a web-based button-masher. So of course, since my brash editorial brain craves a global audience, I took it right to Twitter:
As it happened, @foursquare was tracking mentions of #foursquare, and caught me in the act of my loudmouth editorializing. [will clean up all Twitter copy-pasting later]
@nthmost Sorry you hate foursquare (and fun. & puppies). I hope we can still be friends.
@foursquare I kid because I love. I just submitted a nice fat suggestion for you. (I do hate fun though. >:-| 5:02 PM Mar 14th from TweetDeck in reply to foursquare
@foursquare I actually just spent a lot of time looking at your site hoping to see a list of “what’s coming”… didn’t find it 5:04 PM Mar 14th from TweetDeck
@nthmost. Ha. We love you too. And no list of what’s “coming soon” because we ran out of time (I was fixing bugs at airport!). Soon tho! 5:10 PM Mar 14th from web
I honestly do love what they’re setting out to do. I just think it could be a much better game, if a game is what they want to be, by incorporating some really basic principles of what makes any game fun and addictive. Of course I briefly considered “well I’ll just make my OWN douchebag game!”, but that lasted all of 10 seconds as I realized I had no interest in starting a website defined as successful by having ever-increasing overhead and no income.
Hence, I headed over to the FourSquare suggestion box and wrote the following, complete with lovingly hand-crafted HTML for best readability (this is straight copy-paste):
More Fun with a Little Accountability
Accountability may not sound like Fun, but a little goes a long way in making a game more fun and addictive. How about sparking creativity by letting players optionally create simple tests to “prove” the task was done?
Examples:
- amount of the bill at the restaurant after ordering a specific meal
- color of the person’s hair that the player was supposed to meet
- name of the guy who owns that little hole-in-the-wall cafe
- second word in the last paragraph on page 31 of the King’s Quest III manual
In other words, tiny bits of data that would be really easy to get if you’re there doing it, and either impossible to get otherwise, or just a silly pain in the butt to remember to look up on the web just to get the points.
Format could be similar to a captcha. Task-creators should have the option of showing to the player that there will be a validation required, otherwise people might later click “I’ve done this” and find they’re missing the data they need, possibly being unable to get it again.
Certain badges could be comprised only of tasks that require proof. Since proofs would be totally optional, a feature like this would add a layer to the game rather than change the way the whole game works.
–Naomi Most, March 14, 2009
Tangential thoughts: This experience has caused me to evaluate my “voice” on Twitter and around the net. I’m happy with all of the above interactions. “People love a loose cannon”, as a family member once quipped at me over 12 years ago. But I have some thinking to do as to how best to capitalize upon this persona’s comfort with having strong, somewhat abrasive opinions.
Haven’t signed up, dunno if I ever will. There are a lot of compulsory* questions eg. phone # which put’s me off.
*wondering* Is there some marketing angle in the “validation”, whether I eat out? how much I spend? do I own a Ducati? (no, I do NOT!)
Just me being cynical….
There would probably be market value in those things, sure. But I think the “accountabilities” would be a lot more trivial than that.
For example, as a person on the Foursquare suggestion box commented on this post, one could imagine a comedy show in which a comedian said, “and hey if you’re on foursquare, punch in the following number for extra points for actually paying attention to my set!” Presumably following up with a special code.
You may as well be cynical about it already — there’s a ton of marketing value simply in knowing the “realms” of individual. E.g. someone like myself goes regularly to Ritual Coffee but never to Starbucks, and checks in at the climbing gym about 20 times more than she ever does at a movie theatre.