Yesterday I kind of hyperbolically said that Jetpack Joyride was seductive, and I scolded game designers for too often failing to create free-to-play games that charm you into buying items, rather than nagging you about it.

I haven’t said much about how I think that seduction ought to happen, although I did point out that, like the history of the Indus Valley civilisation, the organisation of items sold in game should reflect the organisation of our whole collective existence - you have to offer something of value to the world before getting anything back. But that doesn’t tell us much about seduction.

Ze Frank’s recent video unwittingly taught me a lot about how this seduction can work, although the intended meaning of the video was about being less anxious.

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

What does this video show us about how to sell items to engaged players?

Near the start of the video he offers a really cool prize for the first person to solve his riddle. This piqued my interest because I’ve always enjoyed riddles and yet I’ve always been terrible at solving them. I knew I wasn’t going to win the prize, and so it became this beautiful, unobtainable thing. Then two minutes later he told me I could buy that thing. I was in his shop as soon as my crappy seven-year-old MacBook would get me there.

That’s how you seduce me into spending money. Tell me I can have a cool thing if I work hard and use great skill to achieve something very difficult, and then after a bit of time has passed, tell me I can also buy the thing. Price the thing in order to balance the difficulty of the task and the number of prizewinners there will be with the value of the item itself, and those who get the item as a result of an epic win will still feel proud, while those who merely observe that epic win happening to someone else are not demotivated to buy due to the price.

I never would have thought that videobloggers would end up being so illustrative as I try to figure out how to make good free-to-play games, and maybe that’s part of the point - game developers should be more like videobloggers and less like RyanAir.