A Video Game Designer on What Keeps People Coming Back

Bing Gordon spent a decade as chief creative officer of Electronic Arts, the publisher behind many of your favorite video games, like The Sims, Need for Speed, FIFA and Battlefield. His daughter Chloe grew up gaming before doing her homework, and landed her first job at age four testing gameplay for EA. 

Together they wrote Everybody Wins: What Games Teach Us About Making Products People Love, and they join Jessi in the studio to talk about what great games know about human motivation: why people come back tomorrow, how to build a “wow” moment and why the number one driver of engagement is the people you play with. 

In this episode, Jessi, Bing and Chloe discuss:

• Why people fall in love with some products and not others, and how you can tell
• The two things that bring players back tomorrow: social connection and personal mastery
• Art vs. craft: how to iterate until a wow moment lands the way you intended
• The one-to-ten test: how to count your good days and design for more of them
• Social loops: why five small exchanges a day dramatically increase the odds someone returns
• Magic numbers: the thresholds, like 15 friends on Facebook or a 30-day streak on Duolingo, where people stick around
• Why “quantify everything” only works if you’re measuring the right thing, and what SNL’s music slot has to do with it
• Why short-term metrics are poor long-term predictors, and how to build a “golden gut”
• Growing up in a house where video games came before homework
• A game designer’s playbook for the AI future: build your guild, open closed doors and find quick wins

Follow Bing Gordon, Chloe Gordon and Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn.

Join us for Office Hours this week, live on Jessi’s LinkedIn page, on Wednesday at 3pm EST.