Rules & Rankings in Social Systems

Introducing visible points and progressive levels is one way to make a system feel game-like. But points & levels are meaningless without a clear set of rules that outline how points are earned, and what it takes to attain new levels of achievement.

Rules are a foundational element in game design: they setup the fundamental challenge of the game, and give direction and focus to the players. The same applies to social systems that track points and levels. For example, here are Amazon’s rules for earning Reviewer points and becoming a ‘Top Reviewer’. Clearly, you ‘win this game’ by publishing reviews that other people find useful — which is a smart social game for Amazon to be running. Similarly, eBay’s Feedback Forum includes clearly-outlined rules about giving and recieving feedback and earning new achievement levels. Dig deeper and you’ll find eBay’s policies for dealing with feedback abuse— which are basically people’s attempts to game the system.

Making the rules explicit makes the ‘game’ of earning points and levels easier to understand — AND inevitably opens up the ‘meta-game’ of trying to earn points in alternate ways (e.g. cheating). As long as there are games with rules, there’ll be people who test the boundaries of the rules — and the greater the percieved value of ‘winning the game,’ the harder people will try to subvert the rules to their own ends. Google is a great example of this ongoing dynamic. If you think of PageRank (Google’s search results ranking scheme) as a complex linking game, then each search result is an ordered list of sites that are ‘winning the game.’ As Google’s popularity grew and appearing at the top of a Google results list became more valuable, people started gaming the system in various ways - which caused Google to change the rules of the ‘game’ in order to identify and subvert cheating. Although Google doesn’t publish their rules, people still play the Google meta-game to gain exposure and publicity for their sites.

Achieving a high ranking in Google search results is a form of competition for scarce resources — which is another powerful way to makes a system feel game-like. Ranked lists like Google search results and the Amazon Top-Reviewers list stimulate competition among participants, and reinforce the rules of play. They also provide the ‘seeds of culture’ by advertising what qualities are valued within an environment. Orkut, for example, publishes three Leader Boards (the gaming term for ‘ranked lists of winners’) that correspond to social statistics that the system is tracking. This gives people a concrete game to play — as evidenced by the emails I’ve recieved from several folks on Orkut, begging me to take actions that will help them increase their standing in these lists.

I’m sure you can think of other examples where rules and compeition add a game-like flavor to social software (e.g. Technorati), and I’d love to hear about ‘em! My main goal here is to underline the power that a simple ranking system with some well-defined rules can have on the social and cultural dynamics within a networked environment. I’ll conclude these musings tomorrow with some thoughts about the game-like nature of exploration and discovery in a networked social environment.