Parking Wars: The Crack that is the “Possible Prize”

What do you do when people finish your game, but won’t stop playing? That’s precisely the situation Parking Wars‘ developer Area Code faced.

The Facebook version of Parking Wars was originally developed to promote the A&E Show by the same name. The goal: park your car, get to a million points and then go find something else to do. Problem? Around 70K people didn’t want to find something else to do. So, after a few months deliberations and development, they added new features. In addition to new levels (the highest at 100 million points), they also opened up a new badge system that awards players for accomplishing various feats of parkingness (not bad for a made up word).

Of course, all this is very interesting, particularly to my husband who is closing in on 4 million points, but what interests me more is why people - including me - kept playing in the first place. From a design perspective, it’s a fascinating question. It’s not at all unique, of course. It’s not uncommon for single player RPGs to allow players to go back into the world and hunt down monsters even after they’ve killed the big, bad boss. But this is Parking Wars we’re talking about. What’s so compelling here?

There were two types of Parking Wars post-win parkers:

• Those that continued the cycle of parking and collecting.
• Those that only checked their street to ticket people that were parked illegally.

(It just occurs to me how weird this post must read to someone that has never played the game. And if you haven’t, it’s the Facebook version we’re talking about here, not the one on A&E’s website. That’s Parking Warrior, a completely different game similar to Frogger.)

As people continued to play past 1 million, eventually some dropped out. They didn’t remove the app. Rather, they logged in regularly to see if people were parked on their street. In this case, it’s not a question of attachment to an avatar (or six) that kept people from deleting the game once they’d finished it. It was the accumulated capital and the attachment to the game overall. I finished Diablo ages ago, but just yesterday, I unpacked a box of my games to find one and repacked them again. I won’t pitch Diablo right now, if only because of the good memories I have with the game.

But it was also something else - Of those people that kept the app installed, but only ticketed people that parked on their streets, what was the hook?

My initial answer was the good ol’ standby of games - it’s always fun to screw over your friends as they try to reach a goal and particularly your professors. At SCAD where I teach, a good number of my students look forward to this every day and remind me personally every chance they get. The real hook, I think, is the possible prize. If you knew that periodically there might be a $20 bill behind a certain door, you’d be sure to open that door every single day.  Likewise, you check your street regularly (to the tune of $16K+ this morning), because your friends reward you just enough to keep you going back for more.  If that prize simultaneously screws over your friends in a tangible way they immediately get? That’s a recipe for success.

The game Rat Pack has some similarities - you can steal cards from your friends - but the impact, at least for me, was much less tangible. Yeah, I saw you stole that card and about 50 others, but the one-to-one correlation of potential damage done wasn’t as strong. By the time I logged in, and it was regularly enough, so many people had stolen cards that the effect of “hey, you screwed my set up!” was gone. I just had a pile of cards that I’d have to try to make a set out of. Also, it wasn’t as much fun stealing your stuff, because I actually gave you something in return.