What should result in quality time for the family or for friends, will most of the times end in crying, quitting, a tense situation after playing and certainly no clear winner: Board games

Uno, Monopoly, Risk, Settlers of Catan are all examples of popular board games that most of the people have heard about or at least played once in their lives. Although, the social aspect of playing it ‘offline’ is very valuable for the users, there is always one scare resource that limits the availability of the players that are needed to start up a game: time. Nowadays people are busier than ever and multitasking is a pre to keep yourself going and being successful. App developers have tried to bring these games to the electronic devices, which differs on success. One of the heard problems is that games are becoming dull over time and after the ‘novelty ‘and ‘introduction’ phase of the app it is very hard to keep interesting for users, especially when the users start to getting annoyed by advertisements, bugs or keep getting the same question every time. Every company wants to earn some money, every app has some bugs, but the problem of keep getting the same question every time has found his remedy: consumer co-creation.

The solution

There is a fairly new application that is called Trivia Crack which makes it possible to play and compete with friends online. The game that is played is a spin-off of the very popular Trivial Pursuit and is available as app on the most popular operating systems or platforms: iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Facebook and the Amazon App Store. The app is currently available in 10 different languages. Trivia Crack has been downloaded more than 130 million times and has been for 66 successive days been the most popular free download in Apple’s App store. However, what differentiates Trivia Crack from similar applications, especially when you realise that there were a lot applications who already tried to penetrate the app market, but failed due to various reasons.

Users function as active co-creators with beneficiary effect for themselves as well as for others. In Trivia Crack a large portion of all the questions that are available in the game are created by the users themselves through the’Trivia Crack Question Factory’. Users can create their own questions that are revised by others or by employees of Trivia Crack. However, only the questions that are positively rated by at least 100 other users will get into the final set of questions that are available in Trivia Crack. Since the app is available in 10 different languages, the questions that are added to Trivia Crack’s Question Factory are only submitted in one language. Therefore users can also contribute when they operate as translator for an already existing question in another language. Users should be mostly motivated by intrinsic motivation to become part of the Trivia Crack community. What Trivia Crack did very well is that each co-creator gets extra extrinsically motivation by receiving some recognition/glory and in-game rewards such as power-ups. After each question the original creator and the translator are mentioned by the user that is currently playing his/her game. Since it is possible to link the application with Facebook, the co-creators are featured with their full name and current profile picture when another users answers a question.

Overall, I am very positive about the current application of Trivia Crack. It is very fun to play, the content is increasing in size and novelty each day and the Trivia Crack community adds an extra element to the total experience of the game. However, the extensive review process can also backfire and becomes a negative functionality of Trivia Crack. If your submissions repeatedly get rejected and not end up in the final set, your motivation of playing Trivia Crack and especially being a co-creator will diminish. Next to that, the application should keep innovating and changing to keep the game challenging and interesting. Especially since the company is using the freemium revenue model, the benefits of playing the game for free should outweigh the repetitive advertisements shown after each round or buying the game to have it advertisements free. ($2.99 at the AppStore)

References

*http://androidworld.nl/games/trivia-crack-spel/

*www.triviacrack.com

* https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/trivia-crack/id651510680?mt=8