Bots & ☕️ with Max Child

Intersection of messaging and gaming

Sar Haribhakti
Chatbots Magazine

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I think gaming community is one of most passionate communities out there. Just look at Pokemon Go! VR! AR!

Whenever a new technology comes around, gamers and nerds are usually the early adopters. I’m not sure yet if chatbots will be a category that impresses the gaming community enough to push them for mainstream adoption.

But, a chatbot called Streak Trivia bot seems to have garnered quite a bit of buzz. While I used to be a hardcore gamer, I have lost touch with gaming over the past couple years. I do not have strong opinions and thoughts on products built at the intersection of gaming and messaging.

I have heard good things about Streak Trivia bot. I felt compelled to consider learning more about it when Blake Robbins brought it up and when Rabi Gupta recommended folks who built it for my Coffee & ☕️ series.

I interviewed Max Child, one of the makers of Streak Trivia bot to understand how messaging products can be built in the gaming space.

Sar: Tell us a how you came up with the idea of making a game as a chatbot, what steps you took for prototyping the product and why you picked Facebook Messenger as the platform.

Max: We made a prototype version of the game as an iOS app, but constantly struggled with two things:

  1. It’s very difficult to overcome the “effort hurdle” required to download and install an app — even if people enjoyed it and told their friends, a small percentage would actually download and sign up.
  2. Apps have a slow development cycle. On iOS, we’d come up with a feature (or a bug fix), and, best case scenario, it would be in the hands of users in 2–4 weeks. Sometimes those weeks became months. It’s very hard to iterate on a product idea with that slow a cycle.

Messenger solves both of those problems. Installing is as easy as clicking on a link, and we can ship improvements and fixes on an hourly basis. While the interface is far more restrictive, it works very well for our vision of a massive, simultaneous, participatory experience.

We chose Facebook Messenger over other platforms because it’s nearly ubiquitous in the US/Western Europe (our game is at 1PT/4ET/8GMT, so pretty crazy times in Asia), and our game is not oriented towards business users, ruling out Slack. We may expand to other platforms but for now we plan to focus on one.

Sar: Your product creates a sense of urgency by starting the game at a fixed time and giving very little time to users to join the game and to respond to play the game. How and why did you make those decisions? How did you make sure that your users feel compelled to join in and not hold off on it since it might not be important enough?

Max: We like the idea of re-creating the feeling that you get from watching a live event with a large group of people. It seemed like the only way to do that was to hold the game at a fixed point in time, and hope that we could create an entertaining-enough experience to keep our users coming back.

As we’re just getting started, our goal is to create a core group of “superfan” users who love the game enough to show up on time every day. But as we expand our offerings, it’s likely that we won’t be so restrictive about punctuality.

I can’t know for sure if our users will keep playing, I can only work to make the game so much fun that they do!

Sar: What is your take on “bots are the new apps” narrative in the context of gaming products?

Max: I don’t like the word “bot,” as for many people it implies that our service will attempt to converse with you and pretend to be a human (which I am bearish on until we get the AI/natural language parts more figured out).

That aside, I am incredibly bullish on messaging-based software in all categories, including games. Messaging is an interface that every user understands intuitively, that is vastly easier to develop for and distribute on, and that allows for products that have collaboration and communication at their core. In fact, I believe that messaging will kick off the biggest software development boom since the invention of the World Wide Web. (See my post here for an elaboration on this view.)

So if by bots we are talking about software that runs in messaging threads, I think it’s possible, likely even, that bots will eclipse apps — that most of what apps do today will be carried out in messaging, and that bots will do things that apps could not!

Sar: I do not think developers are paying much attention to gaming as a potential use case for chatbots. Do you think so too? Why do you do think it is so?

Max: The first chat applications that “make sense” to users and developers are ones where message-based communication is at the core of a similar, existing product. In other words, any behavior that is popular on existing messaging services, like email or phone, translates easily in people’s minds to a text-based messaging interface. News services, personal assistants, and customer service/support are the first things people are making because there are obvious analogues in the email-and-phone-based world.

What is more interesting is the “next step” — what’s possible in messaging that wasn’t possible before? I think particularly interesting is any idea that focuses on communication and collaboration/participation. Our game is a first attempt at taking advantage of what’s different about messaging from apps, but I’m sure there will be many more.

Sar: What are the three big challenges you faced in designing your product? Can you share the solutions you came up with to solve them?

Max:

  1. Trivia question quality is a big issue for us, because everyone sees the exact same questions and gets very upset if there are mistakes! We tried to find sources of high-quality trivia questions on the internet and considered contracting someone to write for us, but didn’t find a good balance between price and quality. For now, we’re writing and editing the questions ourselves to maintain a high quality bar, but it’s a lot of work.
  2. The FB Messenger platform is young and constantly evolving, which is good, but sometimes we run into unexpected bugs. We are very diligent about communicating with the platform team about these and so far they have been very responsive.
  3. Growth is always a challenge — we’re trying to create incentives for our users to organically share and invite their friends, but we have certainly not cracked the “viral” code yet. Right now that incentive takes the form of showing users how their friends are performing in real time (hopefully stirring the competitive juices), but we know we need to do more.

Sar: As the bot platforms mature, what sort of games do you think could be build using chatbots? Do you think there will be too much focus on NLP?

Max: I think any game that orients around participation/collaboration and communication will do well, since that’s what’s “native” to the messaging platform. As to what are good ideas…I’m going to keep mum, since we might be working on them!

Not sure whether or not there will be too much focus on NLP in chat gaming, as I guess that depends on how good the NLP is.

Sar: What metrics do you use to measure engagement? What does your retention look like? How do you define engagement and think about viral growth?

Max: Our key metric is simultaneous players in our daily game, which is both simple to understand and core to our product. Everything is oriented around growing that number, and we’ve had over 100 players in our last few games. We’re very happy with our retention so far — something like 1/6 of our total signed-up users are actively participating in the daily game, which is incredible!

We track our metrics using dashbot.io, but we’re in the very early days of optimizing around those metrics, since our game is still relatively small.

In the long run, our goal is to maximize retention, since users that stick around and enjoy playing the game every day are our best advocates. We aim to make the game more compelling over time by enhancing the competitive aspects amongst groups of friends, rather than just against the world, as well as by improving the gameplay itself. For example, our recent addition of silly gifs and photos to our answer explanations has been a “game-changer” for users…and I say that only half-jokingly.

I found Max’s take on the lack of enough gaming applications of chatbots particularly interesting. He referred to the first generation of chatbots as those that just “make sense”. We are currently in a stage where the existing workflows of apps are getting converted to conversational workflows. He refers to the second generation of chatbots as the “next step”. I agree with him that use cases that have participation and collaboration at their core will be good fits for chatbots. This relates to the real power of chatbots in a multi-user thread. I have written in the past about these ideas —

The approach to bot-building does not necessarily apply to app-building. Besides social apps and apps with a social component, most apps are used by us on a one-to-one basis. We interact with one app whenever we want to for doing whatever we wanted to do. Sure, when you have a lot of people using the app independently and individually, the app developers get data effects to leverage for improving an experience. But, the experience is still in isolation. Think about how we use shopping and utility apps. The “bots are the new apps” mindset will lead us to craft bots that we use in isolation. Interacting with a bot one-to-one is not a pleasant experience in most use cases. A lot of great experiences can be crafted by building on top of an existing experience or workflow and summoning different bots for different use cases at varied times. This could be facilitated by organic discovery via leveraging social graphs and platform assistance.

My take on “bots are the new apps” mindset —

It simply instills a wrong mindset — Conversational products should not be made to replace apps. Apps stand for visual experiences. Bots, whether voice or textual, stand for conversational experiences. When we use “bots will be the new apps” mindset, we blindly try our best to convert visual workflows into conversational workflows to create new kinds of apps (chatty apps, if you will). This mindset will change. Eventually. We just need to wait it out. For a lot of use cases, conversational products are simply not feasible. At least not yet. Furthermore, regardless of how far we get with ML and NLP, some experiences are best suited to be visual. Textual and voice bots seem like good solutions for high-intent tasks like search and work-related tasks. Visual experiences are best suited for discovery-based, low-intent experiences.

It tends to ignore the reality that successful apps of our time — Popular apps weren’t built thinking “apps are the new websites”. They were built by unlocking the value of certain capabilities of a smartphone. Think Uber and GPS. Think Snapchat and camera. Similarly, successful bots wont be built thinking “bots are the new apps”. They will be certainly be built with a “bot-first” mindset by truly unlocking the value of deep learning, natural language processing and conversational interfaces.

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