With Urustar I’m trying to build game which could communicate ideas, opinions and points of view. I don’t want to be limited to a platform, though, nor to do only videogames. As a game designer my focus is on games, on mechanics and about how to use them to deliver messages. Another thing I’m trying to do is to apply game design to other design activities, such as IxD and UX design.
This small preamble is set because quite often, doing my job, clients are asking what they get in return for the investment on a game. It is fairly obvious, when you are not talking about classical retail games, that a way to measure if the message a game bears has been successfully delivered is mostly needed. But it’s not so easy. Sure, if you use the web as a main platform, you can analyze traffic, but this will tell you a very few things about how people is using your game.
But there is a way you can set some indexes up and use them to monitor the activity of an ARG or a webgame player. This way is to strategically build achievements. Today every game has an achievement system, which appears to be extremely popular among gamers. I guess that, if you structure them correctly, they could serve as powerful means to monitor users, to see the way they socialize and interact. And, guess what? The very same concept could be used in designing web apps.
It may not be real ROI (which is difficult to calculate, at least in a quantitative way), but it could help for sure.
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