Business 2.0 recently laid out the "five commandments of gaming," written by Amy Jo Kim (shown) of design firm Shufflebrain to help illustrate how game-like content is helping community-oriented sites like eBay, Digg and Flickr stay sticky, and here's an abridged excerpt:

1. Collecting. Hoarding stuff is a fundamental instinct. That's why one of the first words to come out of a two-year-old's mouth is "Gimme."

2. Points. Earning points is a way to keep track of your nerd score. Points give users incentive to improve their standing and serve as a reward for new privileges, access or power. It's also a big motivation to compete for points when you find out someone has more than you.

3. Feedback. There are parallels between the gaming community and the Digg community. Like gaming, a reward system is used to keep people pecking away," says Digg VP of marketing Mike Maser. "One reason that Digg members are so passionate is because our site gives them a unique way to gain recognition. A user's contributions to the overall community are worthwhile, and it keeps people coming back for more."

4. Exchanges. Explicit and implicit exchanges, like taking turns in a chess match (explicit) or giving someone a virtual Facebook gift (implicit), encourage interactive behavior.

5. Customization. Letting your user have some control over preferences (ie. being able to personalize your MySpace page or Google homepage) increases their investment and creates barriers to exit. The more you let users try to exploit the system, the more interested they'll be in sticking around.

All of these game-like concepts play a strong role in virtual worlds, too -- special content collected in multiplayer games like MapleStory or Neopets; points, which for virtual worlds takes the shape of the currency earned from playing minigames or otherwise participating; Feedback, as with user ratings for personal pages on Habbo or earning Respekt through community feedback in Doppelganger's vSide; exchanges, like the goods-trading most worlds, like Entropia or Puzzle Pirates, allow you to do; and customization, just about a requirement for any world that offers avatars.

Kim is definitely on to something with this!

[Via Business 2.0, by way of Raph Koster's website]