A while back on the old forums, I had a discussion thread on how to gamify Wayfarer further. I’ll share my thoughts on it again & welcome any other ideas.
I’ll explain some bits firstly though.
What is gamification?
Gamification is adding game mechanics into nongame environments, like a website, online community, learning management system or business’ intranet to increase participation.
If you use Reddit, they’ve recently added badges for doing actions. You also see it on social media pages where you get Top Contributors or may even get it at work where you can reward others points for helping to get tasks done. All arbitrary and essentially pointless but it keeps people engaged.
Swarm & Foursquare
Both apps (at one time, the same app) which have since 2009 allowed users to “check in” to locations ranging from coffee shops, cheese shops and zoos.
When you check in to a location the most within a certain time, you become Mayor of that location. Check in to enough BBQ Joints, and you get a badge.
You also compete against your friends to see who gets the most coins from checking in that week too.
Foursquare X Wayfarer
Foursquare has a bad reputation in the Wayfarer community because of the unchecked imports that have been added to Pokémon GO, leading to poor Wayspots that would usually be ineligible populating the map.
However, within Foursquare each location has a category (or several) and there are Foursquare Super Users (think Wayfarers doing reviews) who moderate new edits to things like titles or opening times, so the ineligible items could have easily been filtered before being imported.
So, the idea?
Wayfarer also contains categories, and typically a Wayspot will end up with at least one when it goes live.*
My idea is to add in Category badges on your Wayfarer Profile, just like the Swarm badges.
When you review something and it ends up going live on the map, you’ll get a tick towards whichever category/categories it ends up with.
So if I review “Old Mout Cafe” and it goes live with the category of “Cafe/Coffee Place” then I get a tick on my badge and then it becomes Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum/Onyx the more I review get on to the map.
When the Niantic Sign In finally works, I assume it’s not long until your Wayfarer Profile is connected as per this blog post from 2022 mentions - Revamping Niantic Profile: Manage your Niantic ID – Niantic Labs but compared to the others, it’s missing something for Wayfarer.
My idea would be that you could choose an earned badge as your favourite. So say I’d got a Silver badge for Cafe/Coffee Place, I could mark that as my favourite badge and it then shows that (where team name and level show on other sections) I’m a L2 Coffee Connoisseur or maybe a L4 Park Ranger for reviewing lots of national parks.
This could even lead to gear/avatars (with agreement of game team) with even something basic like emoji tees ( for park, for cafe, for a surf spot etc.) for Pokémon GO and the same as avatars for Ingress (we already have toast and a van so why not?)
Anyways, just a few thoughts. Happy to hear thoughts or your ideas.
*Yes, this does mean Ingress will need to add in category selection.