On Tuesday, 210 people played PeopleHunt at an event in London. We were watching from here in Dublin to make sure everything ran smoothly like all good customer care manuals suggest. Initially we saw some awesome behaviour - people were swapping hunt ids, guessing each other and hunting for new people to talk to that were outside their normal peer group.
Our graph was overwhelmed with data, so much so that we had to redesign it mid game in order to accommodate all the connections happening. Things were looking great!
But after forty five minutes, when intense usage normally tapers off, we saw the levels of usage continue to persist. Even from here in Dublin, it seemed a bit odd. Perhaps people were just taking advantage of the opportunity to finally meet and connect with people in their organization... I mean, one person can meet 40 people in 40 minutes, right? One person per 60 seconds? It's
possible....
However when one particular player hit a high enough score to suggest that he had spoken to 90 people, we were forced to look closer - not even Adrian in his wildest dreams could manage to approach and have a conversation with 90 people in such a short space of time.
When we took a harder look at the numbers, we saw that we were in the presence of
'killers' - not the PeopleHunt type, but the type of player that just wants to win, and will do anything to do so. It turns out there was an iPad2 up for grabs, and our rules say the person with the highest points, wins, so they were doing whatever they could to get their hands on it.
We realised that because of some recent, seemingly inconsequential design changes, i.e being able to guess a person more than once, we had removed a safety barrier that had forced people to mutually swap hunt ids, and mutually guess before getting points. Without it, you can get points by guessing another person, without them returning the guess. The winning players (as in not just one guy, but the top 10 players) had, we presume, stopped talking to people and were just putting in random numbers and guessing, without finding, talking or even knowing who the other players were!
Although our rules don't explicitly say that the winner is the one that talks to the most people, obviously the goal of the game is to talk to new people, and so in order to reward the players who actually met new people and went to the effort of asking for their number, we decided to create another leaderboard, also on the fly, for the number of mutual guesses. The winner then became the person who had done both - highest correct guesses and highest number of hunt ids swapped through face to face interaction. Talk about quick response time, huh? Don't mess with us, killers!
Who knew that game mechanics were so POWERFUL. If we can tailor them so that killers are happy killing while also interacting with new people, we have it nailed.
A round of applause to Christy who won the iPad2, and a sly grin to our other winner Gavin, who showed us how to improve our product!
