Mini Review: Would You Rather…? For Family

This game is among the most popular in Amazon’s US Skill Store, as evidenced by its over 3000 customer reviews with an average rating of 4.9 stars. Let’s find out what makes this conceptually simple game so successful!

Would you rather be bored or have fun?

• Game concept
  The game presents you a series of unrelated choices between 2 about equally attractive (or yucky) choices. Once you made your choice, Alexa tells you the percentage of players that chose likewise. The questions come in rounds of 10, of which you can play as many as you like. After having subjected myself to multiple rounds, a few of the questions was repeated, but according to the producer (Nidhi), there are more than 600 questions!
  The questions come in themes (or editions), which you can select at the beginning of each game, like Harry Potter edition, Disney edition or standard edition, the latter of which is very broad, and in my personal opinion the most fun. The game also features seasonal editions like recently Mother’s Day edition.
  The game specifically offers an ‘offline’ multi-player mode for up to four players, in which the players are asked in turns. In this case, each round takes 10 questions per player.

Conversation sample

• Narration / Moderation
  The game is moderated by a vivid and good-spirited Alexa, who feels free to express her approval or astonishment if you chose either a popular or an unpopular option.Even though she self-identifies as a bot (‘Even bots can get bored!’), she doesn’t sound robotic at all: Her comments are not so short as to sound transactional (Fictional example: ‘OK, a footlong tongue. 72% of players agree with you.’) and so variable as not to sound monotonic.
  The moderation is nicely complemented by sound effects such as a clapping audience or a fanfare.
• Ease of use
  The game mechanics is really user-friendly and easy to learn, so the game does fine by getting the game started right away without much of a tutorial.
  The only aspect where you have to get accustomed to the voice user interface is about which answers get understood: If the game can’t map you utterance to any of the two options, it just gives a short generic answer (‘Okay!’) and then moves on. My impression after several rounds is that longer responses are more likely to trigger the generic response than the ‘matched’ response.
  The game also understands the request to repeat, but maps non-polar answers like ‘both’, ‘either’, ‘I don’t know’ or ‘skip’ to the generic response.
• Engagement Factors
  The engagement factors are built into the game mechanics and the moderation, so instead of summarizing them here, I simply highlighted them in bold style.
  I love to think about how a game could be even more engaging, and I dearly hope that it doesn’t make me look foolish or arrogant in the face of such a masterpiece!
  So… Currently, the rounds of 10 questions provide some structure to the gaming experience, and maybe motivate players to finish their round. But instead of just moving on to the next round, the game could offer a brief summary or personality assessment like ‘Wow, you (or player X in multiplayer mode) have a great sense of what’s popular’ or ‘Interesting… Your choices really stick out!’.
  Another minor point with some more engagement potential is how much the questions can spark interesting discussions. Currently, the game isn’t intrinsically conductive of that, as it restarts from the beginning every time, even if the session times out just seconds before. An alternative could have been to enable jumping back into the recent session within a 5 to 15 minute time interval.
  The other aspect of sparking discussions is how interesting the questions are: The current questions (in Standard edition) range from super-light like ‘Would you rather have bad breath or smelly feet?’ to mildly controversial like ‘Would you rather not now how to read or write?’. Since this is a game for kids and families, it would be nice if the questions would actually be deep enough to spark some real self-reflection and discussion. Examples of what I have in mind are ‘Would you rather have someone else being blamed for your mistake, or take the blame yourself?’ or ‘Would you rather sleep in a prison bed or a park bench?’. Of course, an overly high proportion of such questions would make the game too heavy, but… I personally think that providing some value beyond entertainment would actually pay a dividend on engagement and retention.
• Retention factors
  Apart from being fun, the game has only one retention factor: Curiosity for other editions. The user is made aware of the different editions on the first interaction of each session, and it’s likely that users will want to try these out after the fun they had with their chosen edition. The game’s seasonal editions certainly help in that regard.
  Thinking about possible other retention mechanisms, there are not many that come to mind: Apart from questions answered, there are no meaningful metrics to spark ambition. And since the game has an ‘anonymous’ offline multi-player more, using a leaderboard and badges wouldn’t make much sense.
  One thing that comes to mind is participation: Players could be enabled and encouraged to submit their own questions, and if they are good, they would be integrated into the game. Having a voice game feature their own questions would likely excite and retent users.

Do you also have a fondness for this game? Where do you disagree with my analysis? What other engagement or retention factors come to your mind for this game? And what do you think about my idea to integrate more deep and controversial questions? I look forward to hearing from you!