August 29th, 2007
An interesting point from Worlds in Motion’s interview with There.com’s Michael Wilson, namely their efforts to bring “player compulsion loops†to the worlds they have build for MTV.
“… Compulsion loops? “I’m going to point at World of Warcraft, because everybody knows they’re really good at this,” Wilson explains. “We study them all the time, because they do such a good job. There is something in their platform that compels you to go and do stuff; you want to do it, and keep doing it. Eight million people do that for World of Warcraft. So this whole compulsion element with the whole design of gameplay is part of a ‘secret sauce’ to make these worlds successful.”
He elaborates: “Giving people interesting things to do, achieving status, being able to display that status, whether that’s with exclusive merchandise or, say, a dog that nobody else can get. These are the sorts of things you can engineer to make the world more interesting and get people interested in spending time there; that’s where compulsion comes from. It’s a great adjunct to the social nature of the world; you’ve got people meeting each other and now ‘how good am I’ at various parts of this game, at making clothes or holding events, becomes a way to have your own status to start conversation…”
As game design and Internet socialization become even more tightly linked, look for many other companies and developers to track, evaluate, and accelerate their own compulsion loops.
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