Next up in my series of newbie musings about Steem: Why does Steem feel like a game?
Well, yeah, of course it is. Just like any social network, Steem is loaded with gamified elements: rewards, upvotes, downvotes, you name it. And that's just what's built into the blockchain. We also have user-provided gamification in the form of tribes, contests, bounties, and more. Pretty much everything we do on Steem is incentivized or disincentivized in one way or another.
And of course, gamification is something that's built into pretty much any online social network you can think of. Whether it's likes, reactions, votes, comments, or "thanks" systems, you see elements of games not just in the "big" social sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, but even in small sites, like forums, review sites, and so on.
As I've alluded to in a previous post, Steem is a bit different from all the other content discovery sites, and all the other social networks, in that (among other things) there are financial rewards. That ups the stakes a little bit.
There are also some concrete goals built into Steem that make it seem even more game-like than most online social sites.
As I perceive it, at least, Steem gives you a (short) series of increasingly elusive goals to reach, with a number of options on how to reach them.
If you think about it:
@steemitboard tells you you've accomplished something (in case you doubted it). Hooray!I used to work in the video game industry. When I look at this ladder of progress, with its exponentially more difficult goals, I can only wish that I had designed a game system so simple, yet so elegant and effective.
But there are a couple of things that strike me as particularly interesting about this.
One is the advancement of social status that naturally follows your SP level, and which I alluded to above. Let's face it: it's pretty hard to accumulate, say, 50,000SP without having interacted with a good number of other Steemians along the way, and without creating a pretty extensive social graph for yourself. That's not built into the blockchain, either; that's just something that happens as you play the "game". But it's another kind of reward for playing, in and of itself. I can't imagine that it's not by design.
The other thing that's pretty fascinating is that there are a bunch of different ways to ascend the ladder.
Let me start by saying that the idea of "winning" is not something I would normally associate with social networks. But with Steem's ladder of achievements in mind, there is a sense that I could "win" in some way.
Of course, what "winning Steem" means depends on what you want out of Steem. If you just want to share some photos, or do some blogging, and have a bit of an audience while you do it, then you most likely have already won.
If you have a competitive nature, though, it's difficult not to want to become a whale someday (or at least an orca). For many people, the idea of being well-known within your niche, and having the economic influence to give out serious financial rewards to other Steemians is pretty appealing. There's nothing wrong with that; in fact, that goal is kind of programmed into the blockchain.
So let's say you want to hit whale or orca level. How can you do that? There are a bunch of ways, and you can choose one or use a combination:
To me, this is the real genius in the design of Steem. You have some goals built into the system--both within and outside of the blockchain. You have a lot of ways to achieve them--again, both within and outside the blockchain.
I couldn't have designed a better game.
Knowing all this, what does "winning" mean to me? Do I want to "win" at all, or just use Steem for the pure joy of it? Honestly, I'm not sure. I think I need to spend more time on Steem before I can answer that.
How about you? What do you want out of Steem? Do you feel like you need to "win"? Do you feel that Steem is "winnable" at all? Am I totally off base in my thinking? Let's chat about it in the comments.
