What can The Battle for Middle-earth, Minecraft, and The Sims teach us about business? A lot, if you look at the success of the business models that propelled these and other online games to stardom. And such success is bult on emotion, experience, and energy.
Think about the endless, 24-hour-aa-day enthusiasm customers show for their favorite video games. Wouldn’t it be nice to capture some that in a bottle and apply it to your own business?
Now, one of the architects of the video game business has written a book about crossing that enthusiasm beyond the video game world.
That’s the word from Bing Gordon and Chloe Gordon, in their latest book, Everybody Wins: What Games Teach Us About Making Products People Love. Bing Gordon was cofounder and CEO of Electronic Arts, followed by a stint as chief product officer for Kleiner Perkins, and Chloe Gordon (Bing’s daughter) is a producer on films documenting the gaming industry.
Successfully designing such games require “Wow Moments” that add those tantalizing features that bring in customers, they state. There’s a pattern to successful games: an emotional response that comes from “artistic detail and great design variation.”
Accordingly, with new business or product ideas beyond games, there need to be a “Wow Test,” the Gordons write. “the Wow Test measures how effectively a team is crafting quality. When you map the emotional rhythm of an experience, you can see where it amazes and where it falls flat and determine how closely your game or product, is to your intentions.”
In his current role as venture capitalist partner at Kleiner Perkins, Bing Gordon relates how when he’s discussing a new idea with a business founder, he grabs a pen and stopwatch and records when he feels genuine emotion, when he catches himself “smiling, leaning in, fist pumping, or losing interest.”
The Gordons break out how the winning formulas seen in the gaming space can translate to the larger business world:
- Create “Wow Moments” for customers: “Start with unforgettable experiences of excitement,” the Gordons write. “A Wow Moment is when you first catch a Pokemon with a Poke Ball, take your first gryphon rise over the landscapes of World of Warcraft, or nail your first ground pound in Super Mario 64.” This is where the “Wow Test” comes into play, they advise. “I’ve seen hundreds of confident young founders walk in the front door to woo investors with a professionally polished pitch deck, only to fail to connect with a Wow Moment. I tell game teams, product teams, and founders to identify their Wow Moments before they even start building.”
- Motivate customers and users with “winning” results: Make player or user wins “frequent, clear, and earned,” the Gordons advise. “Great games have winners and winners. In life, the emotion of a loss is bigger than the emotion of a win. Games, producers, and organizations that run on positive-return economics outperform those that are zero-sum. Outlining paths to clear wins for team members, and then regarding each of those wins with praise and promotions is a far better motivator than an ‘employee of the month.’”
- Enable customers and users to invest and express: “Give users ways to express themselves and gain recognition,” the Gordons urge. In the gaming world, “players invest time and energy into the game and are rewarded with tools for self-expression, namely decorations.” Think Farmville, which gained 32 million users overnight. Social media platforms thrive on the invest and express philosophy.
- Ensure interactions are worth the time spent for customers and users: Make these interactions easy and intuitive for customers and users, they suggest. “In a gaming session, emotional economics trump financial ones. Regardless of the actual price, when a newcomer picks up a football game and finds the first session is more homework than action, she probably won’t play the game a second time, let alone buy it again the next year.”
- Build social interaction into the product: “Always build social connections directly into the product,” the Gordons advise. While gaming, for example, may seem about competition, it’s more about cooperation. “Competition is actually pretty demotivating for most people. Cooperation is stickier. It’s unusual to put a rubric around something as intangible as friendship. It’s not mathematically perfect, bit I really do believe that building around human relationships makes better and more successful games and stronger products. We lean on cooperation and social connectedness to increase motivation every day. Our products should be no different.” However, this is a message that has not sunk in across the business landscape. “I find, shockingly, that product makers don’t take social design as seriously as county clubs do.”