SCVNGR: Game Layer VS. Social Layer

According to foreign media reports, the keynote speaker for today's Texas Music Festival (SXSW) is Seth Priebatsch, founder and chief executive of the location-based gaming startup SCVNGR.

Last week SCVNGR launched a service called LevelUp (thelevelup.com) that combines the retention mechanics of location games with the big offers offered by sites such as Groupon.

Game layer VS. Social layer

Throughout the speech, Puri Bash looked energetic and explored how many of the game mechanics in the virtual world would be used in the real world to create a so-called "game floor." "It's a whole new thing that's not yet set in. The past decade has been a decade of social networking: it has brought the relationships between friends, family and colleagues online, and that's what Facebook does. Is a 'connected' business. "Pribash said the" game floor "is different and does an" influential "business because" it affects where we go, what we do and how we do it do."

Game VS. School

Next, Purberry outlines the game-related principles: hierarchy, rules, rewards, active players, and more. He said it is like a school mechanism, but there is a problem with participation in schools: people are tired of schooling.

Purui Bashi explained that the school scoring system we are all familiar with, your score is always the possibility of decline, such as one day you play well, the score will be changed from A to B. Puri Bashi said it was terrible. "It's a game mechanic, and the mechanics of the game let people lose games that you do not want them to lose." His solution is to provide a "developmental momentum," not for each individual task and test score, each of the "experience value" from scratch, and then let them work hard to "experience" to a higher Level.

The next topic of Puri Bashi is also familiar to students and gamers: cheating. For students, the cheating factor is not cheating itself, but the risk of being caught cheating. Under the traditional system, it is the confrontation between the teacher and the student. The students rack their brains to "cheat without noticing the teacher." However, Princeton University adopted a very effective solution. At Princeton, there is no teacher or assistant exam on the exam. When you walk into the classroom, the papers are on your desk and you put the papers in a box after you have done the exams. The only rule is that you have to sign a code of good faith and collusion is a bad thing - in other words, all students should supervise each other without cheating. This practice has caused the phenomenon of cheating at Princeton University to drop from 400 to 2 each year.

Questions and rewards

One of the more interesting topics Pretorbash talks about is the current problems with geo-based services like SCVNGR, Foursquare and Gowalla. Prebisch used a pie chart to show how many people used the service (quite a few, only a small slice of the pie). He said the rules for these services are too restrictive (users must check in at places), limiting the number of people they can participate in and limiting the window of time the service takes the user's attention.

For the rewards program, Purui Bashi said: Reward has proved to be a very effective way to enhance user engagement and activity. However, reward systems are not perfect because users may expect bonuses to be ubiquitous, and people often fail to sign them without incentives.

Community games and community discovery

Purui Bashi last talked about what he called "community games and community discovery" and demonstrated it. Each audience in the keynote speech hall is assigned a colored card, with a few cards of different colors and randomly distributed cards. He asked audiences to exchange cards with their neighbors so that the cards for each row of seats were the same color. He set aside 180 seconds, but everyone completed the task in 120 seconds.

Purui Bashi explained that this shows how much people can do under decentralized leadership, as well as with local solutions to global problems. But somehow, Purberry did not say how the "game floor" would help to achieve that goal.