Welcome back, Gamers and Players.

Today we’ll continue our discussion about Governance of Gaming. Specifically about how, why and when to control players.

First of all, what’s the biggest and most frequent problem you have with players? Ok, probably it is engagement… but what about the second in row?
Cheating. Yes it is.
Check out this post before continue to read (it show how cheating can be useful used in a good gamification strategy).

Controlling players, indeed, it’s not about force them to do (or do not) something: it’s about keep behaviour and motivation at right level, avoiding early leaving of the game, loss of engagement and bad feeling/feedback that could impact on former players.

Controlling player’s reactions can be done by huge number of ways.
First of all, remember what I like to call the “Golden Rule of Performance“.
I theorize this statement some time ago, back when I used to sing on live performance. In any “performing” situation, every time, audience will split between three positions.

• The Enthusiastic (“whoa, that was amazing! Well done man!“).
• The Cryptocritics (“yeah, sound fine, I’ve enjoyed, but…“).
• The Screw-it-up Man! (“umph, I don’t like, it has been very bad“).

The interesting point I notice is that regardless of work’s (or live, or game) quality, all this three positions will show up every time.
Saying it differently: even if you’re making the best game in the world, the best you can achieve is a  simple difference of proportion (%) between these three reactions (suppose “60-30-10″ for a good game. If you’ve made a bad games, indeed, proportion may be “10-15-75″).

How this statement can be useful to controlling player’s behaviour and reactions? Because you can, with a minimum waste of work, a portfolio of 3 possible approach to players, from the enthusiastic one to most critical.

Preparing specific answers and strategies for any of the previous position is a useful tools to help keep engaged customer, to simplify customer relationship by a standard module and response, and to have a solid framework to collect player’s feedback.

Customer engagement and motivation, however, is a big issue, not easy to define and solve in few lines. Your customer relation skills and knowledge should take place within this process, also as marketing and public relation skills.

You maybe are interested about others question within this argument: when is useful try to control players, or why you need to do this.
In fact, I cheated in the beginning of this post: there is no answers within gamification to this question. Gamification itself is the answer! Creating a game means exactly to create ad-hoc rules to control actions, outcome and target of the player… you really don’t need any additional control.