Of secret sauces

Dennis Crowley, Foursquare founder, in a recent interview with O’Reilly Radar:

The game mechanics [in Foursquare] are the secret sauce. They keep people engaged long enough to see the interesting things that happen when they participate frequently. It’s kind of like with Twitter. If you drop someone in Twitter and don’t give them a reason to participate, they get bored of it really quickly. But, if you spend 10 days with Twitter, you fall in love with it. Foursquare is similar. Spend an afternoon with it, you’ll say: “This is awful. I get nothing out of it.” But as you start to get friends on it and as you check-in at different places, you realize complexities emerge. You see how people are using it and the content they’ve added. The game mechanics hold peoples’ hands through the first 10 to 20 days of the service.

I’m posting this as a follow-up to my post last week about achievements and Foursquare. It’s interesting to compare Foursquare’s “game mechanics” with achievements/trophies. Maybe one of the purposes of achievements is to “hold peoples’ hands” through the first 10 to 20 minutes of playing a video game?

—Adam