When new visitors come to your game's front page, you usually want to catch their attention and get them to sign up, before they lose interest and leave forever.
You usually want to make the sign up process really easy and quick. The sign-up "wall" is where a lot of traffic bounces. And many admins report that the more you request from the user in the registration form, the less people stick around to complete it.
I stumbled upon a pure-text PBBG called
Improbable Island. It does the opposite of grabbing your attention. Instead, it slams you with a wall of text when you first visit.
I did a count, and it took me about 2700 words to get through the sign up process alone. That's right, the sign-up form, asking you for your name, email and password is 2700 words spread across multiple pages. My first impression was that this is the worst way to get anyone to sign up. You lose all your new players by boring them to death!
Imagine, instead, a game where you make the sign-up process as short and pain-free as possible. In fact, the ideal scenario, in my mind, is a game that lets you start playing, gets you interested, and only then asks you to choose a name and password.
I then read a Message of the Day post by the Improbable Island admin. It turns out he had some financial trouble related to health insurance, and he asked his player base for donations to help. It took less than 2 weeks for his players to raise the $1000 he needed. Wow.
I realized that the 2700 word sign-up process isn't a regular sign-up form at all. For one thing, it does a good job of filtering the user base: only the interested dedicated players get through and actually join the game. So the result is a lot of very loyal players.
But I also realized that I was looking at it the wrong way to begin with. Improbable island is a text-heavy PBBG, with elements reminiscent of old role playing MUDs. It's made up of pages upon pages of story telling and well-written prose. So in the end, when instead of a quick and easy sign-up form, the game presents you with a story that you have to read through, it's doing exactly what I described as my ideal scenario: throw you into the game first, and then ask you to register. Because in this case, ready the story *is* what the game is about.
Pretty clever.
