Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
ware. A system of achievements, which leads to real promotion, can be used in the
project's management and, of course, in commerce. Loyal customers can be rewar-
ded with virtual prizes and points that later can be transformed into a discount. Re-
tail networks have been publicizing such promotions for years, motivating customers
to buy specific products to collect special promotional stickers, and so on; however,
now it can be demonstrated visually via a mobile application with game-like mechan-
ics.
Remember that many non-entertainment applications can be "gamificated" to ex-
press functionality better and to have some effect on a user's behavior. There is also
a term,
serious game
, that defines this wide class of applications. A very good ex-
ample is the hybrid vehicle, Honda Insight, introduced in 2010. It had an Ecological
Drive Assist System created to stimulate a more ecological style of driving a car. To
attain such an objective, the system used a kind of mini game. By driving economic-
ally, a driver gets special points, which are displayed as leaves on virtual plants since
the goal is to let them grow.
All the examples in this section are a little bit about selfishness. Users make some
useful things for themselves, but there is a class of "gamificated" applications re-
ferred to as games with a purpose, dedicated to certain public interests. For ex-
ample, some products help scientists resolve problems by splitting them up into a
bunch of small and simple pieces that an ordinary person can deal with. This sounds
similar to volunteer computing when people provided the calculating powers of their
computers to a third party (the most famous example is the
SETI@home
project),
but there is an important difference. The games with a purpose intend that gaming
skills of real people are used rather than CPU time. There are some tasks where
creative thinking of humans is required to solve problems or generate ideas. It is no
secret that humans have better imagination than machines. This is a type of crowd-
sourcing where thousands of people all over the world work on one project or in one
domain; the only difference is that an interface in the form of a game and objectives
turn into abstract metaphors that can be used as the elements of a gameplay. As a
rule, the goal looks like an unusual puzzle, requiring the player to search for some
consistent patterns, recombining elements, and so on. A strong emphasis is made
on unique human abilities such as intuition, a thing that none of the computers have.
The best example is the unique online puzzle,
Foldit
(
http://fold.it/portal/
), dedicated
to protein folding. Players operate with the structure of proteins; the goal and virtual
representation of elements are abstract enough, so a lot of people without a specific
scientific background can take part in puzzle solving. The purpose of the project it-
