People are more ambitious than I thought

What I realized after adding High Scores to my game

Photo by Senad Palic on Unsplash

I’ve made a wordle like game called Numbrle, two years ago. (You can get it for iOS and Android)

It got a good reception and people started playing it a lot. Time has passed faster than I thought and the game passed 100K+ downloads in Android and more than 50K downloads in iOS. 🙏

I’m a great believer in minimalism so I didn’t want to change much and add much when I get more players.

But what I knew was, people compare their Wordle results a lot in X. I thought a High Scores list would be a good idea for Numbrle too. Just for fun.

After I add High Scores, I realized, again, people are more ambitious than I thought. I guess some of them are not playing it for fun 😂. Maybe they play it to beat others’ scores? 🤔

Somebody gets a high rank, then quits. Somebody else comes and beats it. The first person comes back and plays a lot and beats the high score again.

That surprised me a lot because in this game you don’t earn anything. Not money, not success (in life at least).

They only like to beat others’ scores.

Why are people this ambitious? 🧐

Letting the competition to some extent:

Photo by Abed Ismail on Unsplash

Maybe we should focus on products that will show people’s ranks among other people? Some people have this obsession of competition.

This also comes with the responsibility to make sure they’re not hurting each other. As long as we preserve this responsibility, I see nothing wrong with competition especially when it comes to video games, apps or social media. It’s a good idea to make people spend this instinctual energy in digital world rather than real life.

But remember, when a lot of people wanted a Dislike button from Mark Zuckerberg in Facebook, Instagram, he didn’t add it to the app. I also think that it was the correct take.

Letting people have a Dislike button and showing the dislike count to everybody may have negative consequences, especially among younger audiences who care too much about what others think about them.

Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash

Competition may become toxic if it gathers around negative aspects. And it also brings the trolls, who wants to be disliked the most. They also start a competition among themselves trying to be the most disliked one 😂.

This is also like a reverse evolution which is interesting, because they don’t want to get better. They actually try to be the one that people hate the most. They feel content when it happens. I’ve seen examples of this in different mediums.

The future will be weird.

Weirder.

No flying cars.