Frendr - Gamified Friendship
Gamification is all the rage. There are gamified productivity apps (Habitica, Flora) gamified language learning apps (Duolingo), communication (Snapchat) even gamified dating (not as gamified as the others but apps like Tinder and Bumble have game-like elements) So, this got me thinking, what if we could gamify friendships?
There are a couple of qualities that make gamification apps successful. Great gamification apps have: 1) Leveling up. Similar to Pokémon and in RPGs, you need to gather experience (EXP) through various tasks in order to level up and the higher level you get the harder it becomes to level up, therefore one needs to invest more time and effort to continue improvement. 2) Tasks, achievements and badges. Having goals and then rewards for completing these goals is what keeps people going back to the game (e.g. in Duolingo you can get “badges” by maintaining steaks, using the app over the weekend, sharing the app, etc.). What makes achievements even better is when the tasks themselves have levels, like there are different tiers for the badges, the first achievements are relatively easy to complete but the “final” forms of the challenges are very difficult. 3) A social element. Pokémon was successful because in order to be the very best you had to trade your Pokémon, thus needing to link yourself to your friends so one could win the game. Further a social element enables an almost peer pressure type of influencing factor people want to continue using the app, because that’s what gamified apps are all about, making people incorporate them into their daily lives until they barely notice the game at all.
I introduce: Frendr™
I came up with this idea the summer of 2019 where I was in summer work training with loads of Frolleagues (friend/colleagues). I was with these people for 40-hours a week of actual work, then we lived together, and hung out together (my employer provided housing during this time, and since we were temporarily relocated to a new city, we, well, didn’t have any other friends). It became apparent that we were all slowly becoming very good friends and I joked “It’s because we are gaining so many friend experience points by spending all this time together”. And while it was a joke, it was true (at the core of every joke there is a truth after all), the more hours you spend with people the closer you become. And the entrepreneur in me thought: well dang, that could be a game.
So the basic layout of the application is that you have your profile: mine would be Captain_Traphik of course, and then you “frend” people on Frendr. I think that linking to Facebook might be the best way to go about this. Once you friend someone then you establish something called a “frendship” which acts almost like a separate profile; there is a frendship profile picture (a picture you are both tagged in, or an awkward mashup of your two individual profiles, but then are you really fiends if you aren’t tagged in a pic together?). On the Frendship profile you see all the details of your frendship (we’ll get into the semantics a bit later): Your Frend EXP, your badges, how long you have been frends, frends memories, and frend highlights. On your homepage, you can see all the people you share frendships with, you can organize your frendships by highest level, oldest, newest, most activity, etc. I think it would also be great if you can organize your frends by how you know them in different folders, for example a folder of College frends, hometown frends, work frends, volleyball frends, Book club frends, etc.
Now…how is the app gamified? Back to the 3 main aspects of good gamification applications: Leveling Up, Achievements, and Sociability. We will start with leveling up. Let’s say you just meet someone and you add them on Frendr, you are level 1 frends, aka acquaintances (I’ll get to the ranking levels later). It takes only 50 EXP points to get to the next level. How does one gain experience points then? At this stage I don’t have the exact numbers or mathematics, but I’ll speak in general terms. Here are the ways I can foresee Frends gaining experience: 1) Time Points: first and foremost, time is the best way to level up your frendships – every hour is equal to 20 EXP points, but ever additional hour increases linearly for combo bonus. It’s a function of 20n + 10(n-1). So, 1 hour is 20 EXP, 2 hours is 50 EXP, 3 hours is 80 EXP, 4 hours is 110 EXP, and so on. A ten hour hang out sesh would thus result in 290 EXP. This is the reason as to why I became such close friends with my friends over that summer training session. 2) by doing activities together. There is a list of different automatic activities each worth different experience points: for example getting drinks is 100 EXP, Dinner 200 EXP, going to an Aquarium 500 EXP, International Vacation 10000 EXP. The best part about this is that these activities compound with time, so if you go to it it’s a three hour hang at the aquarium and then an hour for dinner that’s 500 (Aquarium) + 100 (Dinner) + 110 (4 hours). 710 EXP right there!!! 3) Intimacy points – these points are similar to activity points but are more geared toward emotion rather than activity. For example, having a DMC can be equal to 500 points, helping out post break-up 1000 point, a meaningful text of appreciation 200 points. You’re rewarded for being close to your friends! 4) Social Media and Communication – this is where linking your various social media accounts come into play, the more you communicate and the more you tag each other results in more Frend Points. Tagged photo - 50 EXP, Retweet – 50 EXP, text message 5 EXP, snap 5 EXP. Better communication = more points. And then 5) Badge Acquisition and Achievements – but this is what the next paragraph will be about. But below I included an model of EXP needed to advance to the next Frender Levels:
Level
EXP to Next Level
1
50
2
100
3
150
4
200
250
10
1500
15
2500
20
5000
25
10000
30
25000
40
50000
50
100000
75
250000
100
1000000
It would be great if for each frendship there are challenges and tasks you can complete to together in order to boost your frendship levels. Some of the basic tasks will be “Road Trip” or “Hike” or “Aquarium”. Once you complete a task you get points for the task usually corresponding to how hard the task is (on the task page of the app it will show you how many points you get for completing a task). Let’s use the “RoadTrip” task as an example. You go to the task menu and see that the mission “Road Trip” is worth 5000 EXP. You open the task and see requirements “you and your frend must go on a 2-hour minimum road trip to somewhere cool and play road trip music and talk”. You and your frend decide you want those points, so you take a road trip to see a waterfall or something. You do that, complete the task receive the points and Get the “Roadtrippers” badge on your profile. But then you see that there are multiple tiers to the badge! That “2 Hour Road Trip” is only the first of 5 road trip badges – “5 Hour Road Trip” “10 Hour Road trip” “Overnight Road trip” and “Multiday Road Trip” (“omg” you may say “multiday road trip is worth 500,000 EXP”). This way you and your frend can set frendship goals and rack up loads of point and get more badges! There are other badges for various non-task related accomplishments as well – for example “Constant Contact” where the two of you text for 3 weeks straight (20,000 EXP), “Anniversary!”, a yearlong of frendship (3,650 EXP), “Support System” (5,000 EXP), for all the mental health related mental health intimacy points. Tasks and Badges are the fastest way to build friends.
The Social Element of this is apparent. You need to be social on this app and must constantly check in with your frends. The design of the app will also allow you to see your frends other frendships and their accomplishments (that way you can see your competition!). And because Frendr is connected to your other social media accounts, it becomes linked in automatically to what you are doing with your friends online anyway.
The thing about Frendr that makes it dynamic is that there are consequences. Did you ever play Tamagotchi? Those little pets where if you fail to feed them or give them attention they die? There’s an element to that here as well: Negative EXP. Repeated days of no contact will result in minus points, also increasing in gravity with repeated offence. If you are not long distance friends (a setting you can turn on your frendship profile) then not hanging out for extended periods of time will result in serious consequences: 8 months of no contact is not being a good frend! You can also factor in negative points like you can include activity points or intimacy points – for example a fight could be -500 points or cheating on a significant other with your frend would be -20,000. With enough negative points, you can even reduce in levels, which is absolutely not what we want here!
Every 10 levels you gain different title rankings for your frendship; this way you can tell others exactly how close you are with your frend. It’s also a great way to set goals in your frendship, e.g. “Let’s try to be great friends by Summer time!”. Here is the chart:
Levels
Frendship type*
1-5 Acquaintance
6-9 New Frend
10-14 Recent Frends
15-29 Frends (most profiles will stay here for a while, it takes effort to become Good Frends)
30-39 Good Frends
40-49 Close Frends
50-59 Great Frends
60-69 Amazing Frends
70-79 True Frends
80 - 89 BFFs (Best Frends Forever)
90 – 100 INFINITY FRENDS
*Notice there is no Best Frend.Tthis is because your Best Frend is the person who you have the most frendship points with and they are ranked as your #1 friend on profile.
One question you may be asking: how do you deal with friends you have already had? The solution to this is you add an “Old frend” and then rank them somewhere between two of your other frendships already uploaded on Frendr and then that frend will start off with the average of their two scores! Simple fix!
So that is how the app will start off! I think one of the first updates we can have is something called frendgroops, that act like a frendship, but with more than 2 people, so anywhere from 3 – 8 people, and there is an algorithm that makes the frendgroop profile a metric of the combined frendships, and then there can be group achievements and things in regular frendships but on a greater scale, things like “groop dinner” and “full group attended party”. But watch out one bad egg in a group can affect your overall experience points, so you if they aren’t playing along you might need to cut them out of the groop on the app.
As you’ve been reading this I’m sure you’ve been scatchin’ your head: What would this do in the real world? Make real friendships better of course! The gamification of the app will force you to be a little bit more focused on your IRL friendships and will force you to maintain your friendships with the people have in your life. Plus, in gaining badges and completing tasks you will be having a lot of fun with people in the real world! Another advantage of this app is that you can a) quantify who your best friend is through empirical evidence and b) know how to describe your friends based off ranking (“Oh we are close friends”, “We’re Amazing friends now but we are soon to be close friends”). It will make friendships so much more interactive!
So that’s my app idea! I think Frendr will be a great way to gamify the role friendship plays in our lives and it will reinforce how we interact with one another. Gamification is taking over and making lives better so we might as well do that with our IRL social relationships!
…
…
…
P.S. This is satire, I do not believe this would be a good app.
Comments