I'm designing a game for my forum. Not very sure about my strategy...

Question

I have a small community of members inside a forum. For the sake of entertainment, I a planning to introduce a small game based on reputations. The idea is that send updates to a user (X) about another user (Y) based on how much X ranks Y. This is just a fun game, but the way I thought of implementing it was in one of the following ways:

Ask X to rank two users. The one he ranks higher gets more points Ask X to order a set of users. Thereafter, the ordering decides how much score each user gets.

I am a pure programmer and am not sure if the above methods will interest my users. Does anyone suggest a better approach (which is also easily implementable at the same time... hard is ok too). Essentially, what I am looking for is principles that would help me design a game that gains more attraction... Any suggestions?

Answer 1

This doesn't really sound like a game. It's just a reputation system, which without any further context is essentially just going to capture a snapshot of popularity. I don't think anybody will find it entertaining, and at worst, it will divide people.

Your question suggests that you're hoping to implement a game to drive attraction to your site while your comment below the question implies it's more of a reputation system to tell users which other users are worth listening to or not. The former is more for entertainment and not to be taken seriously to the point where people get unhappy at losing, while the latter works better the more seriously it is taken. In my opinion these two goals are antagonistic to each other and you would be better served by separating the ideas entirely.

EDIT based on comments:

It sounds like you want a trust network. Basically that's a graph of nodes (ie. people) each with weights based both on a value assigned by an adjacent node and the actual weight of that node. Some further reading around the issue:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_metric
• http://www.trustlet.org/wiki
• http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html
• http://www.booshnews.com/2010/02/18/google%E2%80%99s-pagerank-algorithm-traced-back-to-the-1940s/

Hopefully some of that will help clarify your thoughts.