Broadcasts.com - "Level Up Your Community with Amy Jo Kims Principles of Game Thinking" (Community Signal)

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Level Up Your Community with Amy Jo Kims Principles of Game Thinking

Published: Aug. 17, 2020, 9:30 a.m.

Amy Jo Kim\u2018s work building social systems and online experiences for\xa0The Sims,\xa0Rock Band,\xa0Ultima Online, and the\xa0New York Times, to name a few, makes her an industry go-to when businesses and clients have questions about creating engaging experiences for gamers, shoppers, and more.

Amy Jo is the author of\xa0Community Building on the Web\xa0(2000) and\xa0Game Thinking\xa0(2018). While some think of her as a community professional because of her writing and others know her more for her work in games, Amy Jo sees her work as continuous and intertwined.

She was tackling questions around user incentives and gamification decades ago and even then she thought, \u201cis it too late for me to write a book?\u201d Let\u2019s all take that as a lesson that it\u2019s never too late to share what we\u2019ve learned and then, as she says: \u201cKeep going, keep getting better, keep developing new frameworks that give people value.\u201d

Patrick and Amy Jo also discuss:

Amy Jo\u2019s experience getting a community book published in 2000
Why simply just implementing \u201cPBL\u201d (points, badges, and leaderboards) likely won\u2019t take your community very far
Focusing on the \u201cmiddle\u201d of your community experience
How inclusivity and diversity factor into game thinking

Our Podcast is Made Possible By\u2026

If you enjoy our show, please know that it\u2019s only possible with the generous support of our sponsors:\xa0Vanilla, a one-stop shop for online community and\xa0Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community.

Big Quotes

Writing a community book in the late 1990s (3:40):\xa0\u201cThe thing that motivated me to write [Community Building on the Web] was \u2026 that, although this was a new medium, and we were dealing with tech-enabled communities, people are people and the dynamics that have always made communities rise or fall are pretty much the same, whether you\u2019re digital or not. \u2026 [In the late \u201990s], there was a lot of, as there is now, breathless hoopla about, \u2018Oh, it\u2019s completely new. We\u2019ve never seen anything like this.\u2019 Yet I felt that there was all this older wisdom about communities that was readily available to us if we wanted to learn from it.\u201d \u2013@amyjokim

Sharing your industry experience (6:00):\xa0\u201cIf you\u2019ve got something valuable to say, if you can say it in a compelling way people understand; [being] late/early doesn\u2019t matter so much. \u2026 Get the thing that you have to state out into the world so people can react to it. That\u2019s an incredibly powerful thing.\u201d \u2013@amyjokim

Be thoughtful about your gamification practices (20:42):\xa0\u201cIf you want to capture the magic of games in your product, it really has a lot more to do with building the right systems than sprinkling [points, badges, and leaderboards] on top.\u201d \u2013@amyjokim

Give your superusers the opportunity to make an impact (35:46):\xa0\u201cFind some way for your most dedicated customers to play a role in the community that gives them impact. People like swag, they like being paid, they like being praised. They like all of that, but there\u2019s nothing that can beat having an impact on a community you care about.\u201d \u2013@amyjokim

Making diversity part of your design process (41:04):\xa0\u201cIf you\u2019re building something new, and you want it to be inclusive, find people from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, different skin tones, different religions, whatever it is that you want to be inclusive about. Actively recruit early adopters from those groups and make sure that their voice is heard at the beginning and then throughout.\u201d \u2013@amyjokim

Onboarding is important, but\u2026 (47:36):\xa0\u201cThere are so many apps, communities, marketplaces, and services that fail because they [just] have great onboarding. They took to heart that onboarding is so important. \u2026 What about day five? What about day ten? There\u2019s nothing there. It\u2019s so common. The reason it\u2019s common is it\u2019s much easier to design pretty onboarding than to figure out your core loop. It\u2019s actually the hardest part. It\u2019s the part that\u2019s going to drive retention.\u201d \u2013@amyjokim

About Amy Jo Kim

Named by\xa0Fortune\xa0as one of the top 10 influential women in games,\xa0Amy Jo Kim\xa0is a game designer, community architect, and innovation coach. Her design credits include\xa0Rock Band,\xa0The Sims, eBay, Netflix, nytimes.com,\xa0Ultima Online,\xa0Covet Fashion,\xa0and Happify. Amy Jo has helped thousands of entrepreneurs and innovators bring their ideas to life through her coaching programs at\xa0gamethinking.io. She pioneered the practice of applying game design to digital services and is well known for her books,\xa0Community Building on the Web, from 2000, and\xa0Game Thinking, from 2018.

In addition to her coaching practice, Amy Jo teaches game thinking at Stanford University and the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where she co-founded the game design program. She holds a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Washington and a BA in Experimental Psychology from UCSD.