This week's thread

Earlier this week I spoke to Rami Ismail, an independent game developer and consultant who has spent his career thinking about how to hold a player's attention.

I was struck by his obsession with both psychology and technology, and it reminded me that the best marketers don't always work in marketing.

Here are the 3 key takeaways.

What I learned this week

How to engage your audience: video game style

With Rami Ismail.

1. Decide if you are building a retention machine or a telling a beautiful lie. The tools and mindset for one will break the other. Are you trying to maximise engagement metrics? Or are you trying to create something people genuinely care about?
2. Design your experience in loops of different sizes. Many experiences feel shallow because they're the same interaction repeated over and over, but a product with depth feels different at one second, five seconds, and thirty seconds. Ask yourself what happens in the first second someone sees your ad?
3. Treat progression as a promise inherent to your format, not a feature you can bolt on. Adding rewards to a thin experience just makes the machinery visible. In marketing language, loyalty schemes can't rescue a product people don't want.

Why marketers should care: Game developers have been solving the engagement challenge for fifty years. This conversation offers a vocabulary for creating worlds people choose to inhabit, rather than just machines designed to retain them.

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