AliceWorld

AliceWorld WordPress Plugin

Website gamification and stickiness in one integrated package.

Current version – 0.0.8

Initial design and build progress report

The story of this plugin started when I was looking for ways to gamify my bands website, https://thealicesyndrome.com . I wanted to create an enticing content area for fans to come and enjoy, with the added benefits of membership enabled additional options.

The first plugin to attract my attention was a simple UFO plugin, which floated an image of a UFO randomly across the page. I thought, what if the UFO was a teaser image? and how about if the user click on it, they could access a hidden page on the site? This was the beginning of the AliceWorld plugin. A set of tools that allow you to add gamification to your site. Drawing customers into chosen content areas, enhancing loyalty by providing additional services and features they love to come back to.

Update: 31/12/25

AliceWorld is starting to move forward. I have started work on an anonymous trust network solution, AnonNet, and Aliceworld will be one of a set of themed entrance lobbies to the anonnet.

Attractors, Distractors, Perceptors, and Encouragers.

These are the concepts behind AliceWorld. Our aim was to make our site sticky. To create a place our users enjoy coming back to. Without us making a big deal about it. Of course, we have a membership system, and we want our users to join.

So this is where the Attractors come in. These are a variety of features that can be used to attract site visitors into the hidden walled garden of AliceWorld. The general idea is to place throughout the site secret doors, some with challenges, to “secret” parts of the website.

Attractors

Our first attractor, is a global component, it’s an image that randomly appears on every page. The image can be changed to your own needs, and if the user clicks on the image, it will take them to page of your choosing. Currently, we use it as the entrance to our main AliceWorld home page. In the future, we will add the option for it to load a pop-up modal, so the user can accept the page load or perhaps be given a clue to find the treasure?

The next Attractor on our list is The Fly plugin, which we intend to turn into a fly swatting game which can be loaded on a single page, and again, once all the fly’s have been swatted a pop-up will appear to invite them to visit a secret page or take a reward. We intend to make this very customisable, so that it can easily be turned into a catch the monkey type game. We’d also like this to run multiple individual instances – to have the ability to have a catch the elephant game on one page whist having a stop the bombs game on another. We have also thought about randomising which page it appears on. As well as having the ability to have a game where to win, you have to select the correct floating image.

The third type of Attractor on our radar are hidden Easter eggs. These are static images which offer the user a reward if clicked. With these types of items, which are usually completely obvious, and no challenge, we feel they need to be able to be targeted at specific user profiles. For example, appearing to a user after they have browsed four pages in a row.

Once inside AliceWorld, it’s all about Distractors and Perceptors.

Distractors

Distractors are things people can do in order to relax and distract themselves from the worries of the day: Games, light quizzes, treasure hunts, give-aways, Easter egg hunts, etc. in order to provide as rich a variety of features as possible, we hope to integrate with other plugins, but we also feel that we need to include highly customisable options, such as the ability to choose alternative images for the main characters in games (if you are a cat loving site, you might like to have cat’s floating around your site, for example, rather than the stock icon of that feature).

Perceptors

Perceptors are about education, they can also be about selling, and building loyalty. They are more serious items you place within your site which actually add value to the lives of your loyal users. We have a lot of ambitions relating to perceptors. We would like to include the ability to create your own content related quizzes, with the ability to award points, certificates and prizes.

Part of the inspiration with this ambition was our first integration – the Psychological First Aid Test plugin. IF you install this plugin, which is simply the quiz, we will detect it and you can then enable our integration, which adds training content to the quiz, and hopefully soon, the ability for those scoring a pass to download a certificate. We think this plugin is ideally designed for us to add multiple tests plus the ability for admin to build their own tests.

Secrecy

Secrecy is another feature of AliceWorld. If we are going to make pages hidden gems only people who actually visit the site are going to find, then we need to hide those pages from Internet search, perhaps from our own server’s search, and also, maybe we want to make sure that only people actually on your site can access those pages? This is where our secrecy options come in. Here, you can select any pages or posts that you want to hide from the outside world, without making them only available to logged-in members.

Encouragers

Encouragers are not so much site features, but rather, they are aspects of the site which encourage continued active participation. For example, there can be a reward/points system, which due to it’s nature, only members are able to participate in. There’s also levels of access to AliceWorld. You can make different content areas available to different user groups. The user interface itself is part of the encouragement system.

Putting it all together

The overall plan for the AliceWorld we hope to create, is a structure of one public level, and four members only levels. Each level is split between the Distraction Palace zone, and the Perception Den zone. Each zone on each level will have hidden rooms, only accessible through secret Attractor based entrances, or on completion of a Distractor or Perceptor challenge.

Members will be able to collect points, badges, prizes, offers and certificates. The public will be restricted to prizes, offers and certificates. Members will gain access to the higher level zones based on their points score and other factors. However, we don’t intend to make things to difficult or complicated. We just want to create a place where people can come and have fun, maybe learn something.

Minimum Launch Build Requirement

We think that in order to populate our AliceWorld, we will need to be able to create around 50 rooms across the five levels we have planned. At the time of writing, we can build one Perception room! Of course, anyone could always use a quiz plugin to create a “room”, so the situation is not that bad. However, we want to produce a plugin with both off-the-shelf features, to enable rapid setup. Plus the ability to create and design your own rooms, either using tools we provide, or other plugins, such as Quiz Master.

For the first release of AliceWorld we will only fillout the public level. So this gives us a target of this: three Attractors, Five Distraction Palace rooms and five Perception Den rooms.

Membership

Right now, we have an Alice Club mailing list, which includes access to a password protected club page. This means we could start building our first level of membership zones based on this page without needing to worry about users actually logging into the site. As far as that side of things goes, we are investigating our options…

Documentation

It’s our intention to fully document the AliceWorld plugin.

While it’s under development I will keep an update of progress here at https://venutius.com/aliceworld