The AusGamers Achievement System

“The AusGamers Achievements System was designed from the ground up to grab the attention of users and expose them to other areas of the site...”

• We wanted to experiment with behavioural economics and how it drives user behaviour on websites.
• Achievements gelled nicely with the community and the site content.
• Great feedback from users and increased user engagement.

the situation
At Mammoth, we’re not just interested in writing great code. We’re interested in understanding how and why people engage with software and technology, delving into the mysteries in human psychology that drive behaviour.
After a fantastic presentation at the Games Developers Conference on Behavioural Economics, we became very interested in how this area could inform our own products and help us create new systems targeted to encourage specific types of user interaction. One of the ways we wanted to do this was something that we’d seen a lot of in video games, but it wasn’t widely used in websites - achievements.

the solution
The AusGamers Achievements System was designed from the ground up to grab the attention of users and expose them to other areas of the site that they might not be exposed to or aware of. As a large number of visitors drift in to only perform specific actions – for example, to read a review or to watch a video – they often drift off immediately after their action is completed.

We wanted the Achievement System to give them a subtle nudge towards hanging around on the site a little bit longer. If you watch a video, you’ll get a cool little eye-catching pop-up in the bottom corner of the browser which informs you you’ve gotten an achievement. If you click on that, you are quickly exposed to a variety of other behaviour-driving actions in the form of other achievements that can be earned around the site.

From a software development perspective, it was important that the system we created was flexible and scalable, and would allow us to add new achievements all the time and build on the system easily. The system is completely database-driven, allowing developers to add new achievements simply by creating entries in the database and then defining triggers in code through a simple one-line API call.

Achievements based on complex conditions can also be created and scheduled to run so they don’t interfere with the performance of the site or the experience of the user.

results
The Achievements system is still in development and we’re still recording the results to generate hard data. At a high level, we have seen an uptick in user registrations – users creating accounts to save their earned achievements – which is a great start. An unexpected side-effect has been contact from international users who are frustrated that they can’t sign up to participate in the fun (as we limit accounts to Australians only).

We’ve also seen encouraging comments from our regular users, who are mostly hardcore gamers. They’ve offered a variety of suggestions on new achievements to add, which has been extremely useful both in terms of ideas but also just to confirm our thoughts that behaviour economics is an area worthy of much more exploration when it comes to software design and development.