Since starting StyleHop I have spent a lot of time thinking about online games and we have been fortunate to have a couple of really talented gamers helping us develop fashion games women will love.  We have a couple of fashion games out now (Fashion Cents and Hot Tops Boutique) that are good but our next game, FriendTrend, scheduled to launch in April is going to be great.

So what makes a great online game?

1. Delight – That intangible, magical something you feel when you first encounter a game.
2. Originality – There has to be something unique, right?  But it can’t be too different.  It needs to feel familiar yet fresh.  A tough balancing act for game producers.
3. Hook – There’s a rhythm created that keeps you playing….over and over and over again.
4. Click, Click – We are learning this one….the more you get that mouse moving, the more you keep the brain engaged.

Let’s crowd-source the last six.  What do you think makes a great online game?

As we build StyleHop and create exciting, fashion applications, we have been encouraged by the interest shown by developers to create their own casual games using the StyleHop platform. With the help of NYU students* in Dr. Jean Claude Franchitti’s IT Projects class, I am pleased to announce the development and release of the  StyleHop API.

The StyleHop API  allows developers to leverage existing community-driven fashion review, social shopping, and recommendation features on StyleHop in their casual games and applications.  Using any programming language that “talk” REST, developers using the API have access to hundreds of thousands of filterable style ranking output either as JSON or XML.

Concurrent with this new API release, we are holding a create-a-game contest for the developer community to develop lightweight, social fashion games.   Think poker, solitaire, and other lightweight games, only in fashion.  Think mashup of fashion ecommerce and casual gaming.  If you need inspiration, check out our vibrant college community and our Fashion Cents game on Facebook.

You can develop using any language and on any platform (mobile, Facebook, Open Social, etc.).  The only rules are as follows:

- return a 5-star style rating for every style you use in your game

- use StyleHop data via the API

- apply for an API key and submit game idea by February 12

If you want to join the contest, or you want to try out the API, signup for an API key here.  The top three winners will receive equity grants in StyleHop Corp and will also  have a chance to demo their application at a meetup scheduled early March.

- Froilan

*kudos to Andy Kung, Aditya Sureka, Ivan Wah, and Vipul Gupta

A good article in Business Week, Will Work for Praise, on motivating content creators with evidence that status is more powerful than cash for getting users to create content.
From my perspective there are a whole host of ways to encourage users to participate and engage in a site through content creation.  I met with Tim Chang, principal at Norwest Venture Partners a few weeks ago.  We were talking about game development and how effectively tapping into the seven deadly sins play a huge role in game engagement.   Community engagement is no different.  We need to give our users a reason to play games, write reviews and help create the StyleHop community.  For all these, tapping into base desire is critical.

What many startups miss is that while the promise of status is a powerful and important motivator, it’s not the only one.  We are developing our community with a mix of incentives that tap into desires for status, greed (read discounts) as well as positive influencers like contributing to our mission of democratizing fashion.

Focusing only on status and creating mavens is a natural mistake of many fashion sites…..the mavens and wannabe-mavens are the first ones to come to your site and they are the most enthusiastic.  However, this is a trap.  You can’t forget that big destination sites need to help everyday folks solve problems – that’s job one.  While mavens can help support this goal with original content, their deep interest in being heard can often times overwhelm broader goals.  Many social shopping sites are peaking out on traffic because they are leaning too much on helping the maven’s build status – There are too many sites where we go and feel like we are being bombarded by experts.  It’s like that great boutique you want to love but you don’t go in because the sales people are too pushy.

Fashion shopping destination sites need to make shopping for fashion easier if they want a mainstream audience.