What makes a game fun?
The success of a game is how fun it is. There are so many different types of games today, some are very apparent like XBOX games that people spend hours perfecting, some are games that people are playing without even realizing, such as amassing the most Twitter followers, or gaining badges for checking into venues around the world. The latter examples shows how games can be applied to common tasks to make them more interesting.
Novel things to do while doing common activities is exciting to people. It gives them more to accomplish than they're used to, which adds to the productivity of their day. Games are addicting and fun when you can get something to brag about to others. You see a lot of clans, squads, and close friends appear on their own outside of some actual games and some built into the game as a community of friends. This huge social collaboration is a way to brag about your headshot skills in dust, or your badges for insanely awe inspiring taste for good food around the Marina district in San Francisco.
The best quality of a game is to induce obsession. Obsessions including people who visit a location or watch a sports game and MUST check-in to tell their friends and earn rewards to later brag with. Obsession to go up in ranking on a leaderboard of counterstrike clans by practicing daily whenever possible.
The obsession does not necessarily came from pure gameplay, but what the game allows you to do outside of that game. In StarCraft clans, you check message boards of friends, gaze lovingly at your #1 spot on the world's best clan leaderboard, and sometimes even enter in tournaments. For FanPulse you can talk to your friends about sports because you know what games they watched and got knowledge from it as well. You can check leaderboards, and brag about your fandom.
Just inserting a badging system into your app isn't the golden ticket of changing a regular utility or common everyday task into a game. I've seen some people try it, but sometimes it just comes off as lame! Gowalla was lame in putting their badges up, nobody really cared, but then they gave them a twist. They had history behind them, they were rare, it was like gambling when you checked in! You looked like a check-in fiend, but took that risk to find that special rare item that might be hiding after the check-in. Suddenly the game of getting badges was fun.
Amongst all the other incredibly important aspects of games, one of the keys to fun and ultimately success is the ability to earn bragging rights. Let's make things like eating out, following sports, and driving to work, fun =) Game on!
(photo taken of my two friends Iris and Sonny playing a game of Chess. Might be a good example of a game that doesn't necessarily have bragging rights, but also doesn't make money like Farmville)
