Being a ‘product’ person, I decided on A, but it turned out to be a trick question. Kathy’s answer was D – themselves! You want people to say that they are good. Now this might seem a little bit strange, to focus on making your user / customer / player feel like a superstar. But it’s a subtly different way of thinking that has an unsubtly large impact.

As you might guess, this is all too obvious in games. If a game is too easy, you’ll feel like you didn’t achieve much and you won’t get any satisfaction. If a game is too hard, well, you feel pretty rubbish and if you’re me, abandon it. But with just the right amount of difficulty, you’ll feel like you’re improving, think you’re awesome and love the game.

One of the uses for our 5 computers is games and I like to try (at least once) the games my partner plays. The two that he spent the most time on over the last few years were World of Warcraft and Heroes of Newerth – and they were vastly different experiences for me. With WoW, it takes you by the hand and gently leads you from one level to the next. Before you know it you’re at Level 5 and wanting to do just one more quest. On the other hand, with Heroes, the best advice I got was to attack, but if you get hurt, run away as fast as possible (hardly heroic!). But running wasn’t quite my forte and I spent most of my time waiting for my hero to come back to life in the pool. To put it simply, WoW made me feel like I was good at games and Heroes made me feel like I sucked. Easy to guess which one I played longer…

With game and software design, it’s not only important to get the level of difficulty right, but also to help people improve. This could be through tips, by highlighting improving stats, or even by just giving them something achievable to aim for and celebrating when they do. But don’t underestimate the power of making people feel good.

There are people who play to hone their skills, so they can make big bucks in a ‘real casino’. Others enjoy socialising with friends, or love the satisfaction of beating someone else in a tournament. But for some, the game dynamics of Blackjack or Roulette are satisfying enough – and a look at behavioural game psychology explains why.

There are various ways players are rewarded in games and one of the most effective ways to keep players playing is through variable ratio schedules. Sounds impressive, but all it really means is that rewards are given more or less randomly (the variable part) according to how often you do an action (the ratio part). The classic example is the slot machine, where you put in money constantly, but don’t know when it will hit. Roulette is similar, particularly if you play the same numbers, as your number will come up if you bet consistently, but you don’t know when. And if you’re playing Blackjack using basic strategy or some pre-determined method, you’re also hitting a spot on the variable ratio scale.

So even without money, the very mechanics of the game reinforces repetitive behaviour.

Even if you only visit Facebook sporadically, you can’t have missed the bright, eye-catching posts about chickens, trees and mystery eggs. And despite Facebook’s constant evolution of the platform to stop this kind of spam, I suspect many Facebookers haven’t worked out or bothered to turn these messages off.

So why do games on social networks follow the trend of offline and then online businesses? Why do companies go for spam to acquire customers, rather than a Seth Godin permission marketing approach? I suspect the answer is that creating something worth spreading takes too long and is too hard. It’s much easier to fill the social networking streams with flyers, because even though you’ll annoy some, the brand awareness gained and the percentage of people who try it out of curiosity might (if you’re an early-mover with a big budget) just produce a runaway fad. But eventually, someone will put in the effort, whether it’s an established game company or some indie Flash developer, and then the farms will be foreclosed.