We have been getting some good feedback about what we have shown so far but we get the feeling a lot of people still don’t understand the core of MyLifeRank. We believe with what we have posted so far, people are only understanding “why” and “how” but not “who”. So for this blog entry we will concentrate on the three target audience that MyLifeRank is specially catered to: the gamers, the social networkers and the self-improvers.
For Gamers:
Generally people play games because they are fun and the sense of accomplishments are rewarding and we decided those two elements are exactly what we need to motivate players on MyLifeRank. We are trying to make the gaming system robust enough so that players ranging from casual to hardcore can all enjoy MyLifeRank equally. The reason we feel we can do this is due to the fact that MyLifeRank will be the first “Real Life” RPG game or as we like to call it RLG. For those not-familiar with RPGs (Role Playing Game), they are games where players control a fictional character with special abilities and attributes. As the character does things in the game such as kill monsters or complete quests they gain experience points and level up. After leveling, the character gains new attributes, more special abilities and is able to complete more quests. There is really no end game for RPGs since it’s a virtual world that your fictional character lives in. Even if you reach the highest level or complete every single quest, there are still fun things in the game for you to do. MyLifeRank’s RLG is based on the same concept with a twist; players will not be playing fictional characters, the users will be playing a character based on their own lives. The characters will follow in the footsteps of what the player is doing in REAL LIFE. The quests that the characters are striving to complete are created by the player or by the players’ friends and family members. Cool huh? Just like in a RPG, RLG’s players will start every new player equally at level 1 with the same attribute points so that every player starts on the same playing field.
Players will receive experience points and attribute points for every achievement; experience points are varied and attribute points are not. Experience points are varied because for every achievement a player has, it has to be voted upon by friends otherwise the player gets no points at all. We like this system because we don’t want people to abuse the system by posting up hundreds of worthless achievements; we want hard working and great achievements to be posted! Every achievement can be voted from a scale of 1-10 stars and has a time limit of 7 days for votes. Friends can only vote once and the total experience points earned will be based on the number of players that vote and the score that they give. Levels are based on a predetermined amount of experience points, once a player crosses the threshold, they move up in level. Attributes on the other hand will not vary and will be based on a set amount per achievement. When an achievement is posted, the attribute it relates to will give X amount of points towards that attribute. To add in a bit more fun and challenge, achievements will not only be based on a player’s own goals but also goals and challenges created by friends, peers of the players and MyLifeRank’s system goals as well.
Some might be thinking if the characters are based on the player’s real life then why does everyone still start out the same way? Shouldn’t they start out differently? We also thought of the same problem. We originally wanted to start every player out differently based on their current standing in life but there were a few problems we thought of that at this point we are just not ready to tackle. First off, if we truly wanted to start people off differently, it would require us to collect an enormous amount of data from the player and we are not sure players are ready to give it up, nor would there be any way for us to be able to verify that information. Things such as education background, current job/salary, family history, medical history are just a few are things that players would require to give up and we would have to find a way to verify them….we feel things would just become difficult and messy. Another reason why we thought starting players off on a different level would be bad would because we feel some might be discouraged by it. Players signing on the site might find it unfair that they start say with a level 10 while others start out at 20 or 40 and would discourage them from even trying. After all MyLifeRank is supposed to motivate and we thought this would be a big problem. We decided that even though the RLG is based on real life, we would base it on what we consider a players true core including socialness, values and drive. We hope even if the player lacks in any of the three things, MyLifeRank will hopefully motivate them to improve thru our RLG.
For Social Networkers:
So we just talked about how MLR caters to the gamers, next up would be the social networkers. Nowadays it’s hard to find anyone that isn’t using some sort of social networking tool. The big ones of course are Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, but even the location based sites like FourSqaure, Gowalla, BrightKite and connection sites like Linkedin are considered social networking. Social networking is a very general term that basically can be summed up as a group of people aiming to build relationships with similar interest or backgrounds on the internet. Even bloggers with followers or internet forums can be considered social networking. There are countless forms of social networking that I haven’t even mentioned. You get our point, social networking is a big part of people's lives these days and MyLifeRank is of course built with social networking in mind. We built MyLifeRank with all the features most people are already familiar to limit any new learning curve, having a personal account with profile and background information, the ability to email and receive notifications, and the ability to search for friends and get status updates from them.
We added on the gaming info within the profile to show the players, level, rank, attributes, and medals, and navigation tabs show the players achievements, goals, challenges, in addition to friends and settings. We tried to make things flow as smoothly as possible. Under the achievement tab players are able to manually add in any achievements they have and they are able to see all the past achievements. Under the goals tab, players are able to create new goals for themselves or for others and have the ability to see what goals the player is currently working on and see the goals that the player has created. Challenges tab has almost the same features as goals, a player can create challenges for other people and can see current challenges and challenges the player has created in the past. The profile will also have a Recent Updates wall on the left side which shows all the new achievements, goals and challenges from the player’s friends or for important site messages.
One big difference with the Recent Updates wall and all the other status walls out there is there are no random or pointless status updates. Players do not have the ability to just type in whatever they feel like, it is only used for showing you what your friends have on their plate in terms of what goals they accepted or quit, or shows their results in some form or another. Players will have the ability to comment, vote and join status updates they see from their friends. Comments cause the usual praise or embarrassment from friends and we know people are used to the casual “like” button Facebook implemented, but voting is a very crucial thing for MyLifeRank players. Without votes players do not receive the experience points for their achievement so we wanted to stress for all players to vote. We don’t stress that the votes have to be high in score, in fact if the achievement is something ridiculous like “I threw a stone into the lake,” it should be voted very low. The voting system is in place to reward those with great achievements and punish those who don’t. A very cool thing about the join ability is that if a player sees his/her friend is attempting to do a goal the player likes, the player has the ability to join the goal. We believe this in itself will motivate players to get involved with goals they never would have in the first place.
For Self-Improvers:
Now on to the last target group for MyLifeRank, the self-improvers. We don’t know anyone in this world that is perfect. There is always something everyone is trying to improve on. The self-improvers might be the biggest target group we're going after because MyLifeRank is in fact what we like to call a social motivation site. The site is built to help people achieve their life goals. We built the site with gaming elements as well as social networking elements to help promote fun motivation and we believe it is much easier to achieve something with a group than by yourself. Of course if there are some things that a player finds easier doing by himself/herself we certainly won’t limit it, the player can use MyLifeRank as his/her life tracker. The whole system of adding and showing your achievements as well as status updates on new goals and challenges just adds in a type of social motivation that blogs and forums just can’t compete with. Add in the fact that you can instantly join your friends with their goal and vice versa, and see goals by peers sorted by location just make the whole experience even easier. Other social networking sites provide a means of connecting with other people via online communication and status updates, however, none of them provide the framework to support actually going out and doing things together like MyLifeRank does. We don’t believe there is a better system out there than MyLifeRank for social motivation.
As a bonus feature, MyLifeRank will store all your achievements and later on we will have a one page display that you can use to print out or show online all the things you accomplished within your life. Are you scratching your head thinking “why would we want this?” This is something our mutual friend came up with and we really like this idea. Why not have a feature where you can use your information on MyLifeRank as a reference for your character on job applications, service nominations, or anything else you would need it for. We won’t have this initially since there wouldn’t be enough information anyways, but down the road we like to have a “make reference” link somewhere in player’s profile that creates a one page document of all the past achievements nicely put in a reference list format. We would have options of sorting the achievements by attribute, date, etc. There would be options of posting pictures on there as well as all the other elements you would want to include in a reference letter. It can be printed or be passed on and shown to anyone with the link provided.
We think we achieved our goal of explaining the three target groups of MyLifeRank, the gamers, the social networkers and the self-improvers, now hopefully when the site is up and running, you guys can vote on how we did! :) We purposely left out location-based explanations from our previous entries about challenges, locations, app, etc…we will explain it in full detail on our next blog entry. Stay tuned!
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