#zyngasxsw brimming with behavioral observations

What’s the most sharable word on facebook?

It’s “sex.”

The second most is “facebook.”

“like” is a distant third.

In the talk about what makes social successful, presented by zynga, offered a treasure trove of data-driven insights about peoples behavior.

Aside from what we know, that there has to be ways to represent what’s unique about you, it gets way more interesting.

For one, the people that just watch the updates and never play are who fuel people to play and pay: because of social capital. That’s what gets people to play social games too much. And when you want to play too much, that’s when you have to pay.

Another great story was with frontierville. It went viral because testing showed that people liked to move the sheep.

So they added in the option to post moving the sheep to your wall. The comments and clicks to the game skyrocketed. That resulted in appearing at the top of everyones news feed. Even more clicks.

Why?

Because to adults, the icon of the woman and the sheep were in a sexually ambiguous position in the icon. All the comments Were along the lines of “what is she doing with that sheep?”

So they redesigned all of their frontierville icons to include innuendo that kids would never get, but gets incredibly high involvement from adults.

Socializing is everything to zynga, because it’s everything to the players. They want to share almost every game interaction, and zynga needs to enable that to be successful.

On games: Give people satisfying interactions. People like to fill five minutes of boredom. Give them satisfying experiences that fit.

Play asynchronously. Let people play together without having to play at the same time. There’s too much friction in forcing people to play the same game at the same time.

Have fun!

Okay, so what does that mean?

1- series of interesting choices

2- recognizing and learning patterns Our brains are made to do this. To a fault.

Turns out it’s not only distracting, but keeps your brain more active. (me: crossword anyone?)

3- surprise and delight: laughter

Prototype an idea: actually build it!

Play it over and over. Never stop revising.

Show it to more people, revise more.

Keep playing and revising!

Things to try: More choices. Let the player have fun.

Make choices matter more

Build in a story and make me the hero.

Hide patterns I can learn over time.

Create more surprise, suspense, and humor.

Add another social element, like cooperation.