Review: Akinator
Akinator is an astounding product, which is around since 2009 already. It has gained prominence on the mobile app and web browser platform, and has been adopted relatively early (October 2017) for Alexa. A particular achievement for this game is that it holds the implicit invocation ‘Alexa, read my mind!’. Let’s take a look at this genie’s voice magic!
For those that haven’t had their thoughts read yet: What is Akinator about?
Akinator is the name of a genie that tries to guess which character the user is thinking about. It does so by narrowing down the possible candidates through a series of yes-no (‘polar’) questions in the style of ‘20 questions’.
The success rate of Akinator is impressively high, at least in my samples. When it has enough information, it makes a first guess of the character, and if it doesn’t succeed, it asks some more questions before making another attempt. In my case, it guessed ‘Scar’ from Lion King and Aristotle right away, and Helmut Kohl at the second attempt.
For the sake of scientific inquiry, I gave Akinator randomly generated answers, and after guessing that I was thinking about Ludwig van Beethoven, Felix Mendelsohn, or Johannes Brahms, it asked some confused questions about my character’s hairstyle and origin and finally settled on ‘someone who is inappropriate for young audiences’.
Even though Akinator seems to be omniscient, he is forgiving of our patchy knowledge, and accepts answers like ‘I don’t know’ and ‘maybe’.
Alright, let’s continue this ‘scientific inquiry’. What’s your analysis of this game’s engagement?
What makes this game engaging is mainly the fact that you have to think about the right answers on Akinator’s questions, and the suspense of whether he finds out about your clever choice.
Apart from that, there are some engagement-related aspects where ‘Akinator’ is good, but not great. Let’s take a closer look at these:
- Alexa voice (← It’s linked to a glossary page!)
This is something that irritates me deeply: Why should Akinator, the distinctly oriental-looking male genie depicted above, speak in Alexa’s US-American voice? I admit, it requires some creativity to come up with an alternative, but what about something like this?
- Repetition
Akinator repeats every choice the user makes, with very little variation, as shown in the example on the left. While it makes to give a little confirmation, the monotony of the response is irritating (even though it occasionally uses a variation like ‘No. Well, well…’).
A better alternative could have been to give an enthusiastic confirmation for a ‘yes’ answer (‘Great!’), a neutral confirmation for a ‘no’ answer (‘I see…’) and something like ‘No problem!’ if the user doesn’t know. - Lack of a tutorial
The biggest and very obvious part of the user’s interaction is to answer with yes and no, but the game misses to educate the user about other options. You can guess (correctly) that you can answer with ‘I don’t know!’ or ‘Maybe’, but how would you know that you can also answer with ‘Probably not’, but not with ‘Go back’?
And what about retention factors?
As I said before, Akinator’s guessing abilities are really impressive, and some retention potential stems from the fact alone that you can think of a more obscure character and want to see if Akinator gets it. Or you might want to impress friends and family.
But this is about it — At least for the voice app. It makes exactly zero use of potential retention mechanisms, even though there are several that come to mind here:
- Providing metrics
Some metrics that a user might be interested in are questions it took to guess the character, number of correct guesses (at first, second and third attempt), knowledge about characters (percentage of questions you answered with yes or no), and times played - Leaderboard
For one of the above-mentioned metrics, or a composite score determined thereof, there could be a global ranking - Badges
There could be badges for tiers of the metrics, or maybe for usage patterns like daily streaks.
The mobile app is ahead in this regard: It tells you how often your character was chosen in total, and has an ‘Aki Award Board’ where you can proudly present your badges. I guess it might have made some sense to offer account linking, so that mobile power users users can improve their score on another medium.
Alright. So, what’s the conclusion?
I’ve pointed out some aspects in which this voice game’s engagement or retention might be improved upon — But in general I think this is an amazing game, because of its simple, but effective game mechanics and its great data basis.
Have you tried Akinator? What stood out to you? With which points do you agree, or have a different perspective on? I look forward to sharing thoughts with you!
