It is easy to acknowledge, today, all the chages that the social media tools are making on the market as a whole and the media in particular.We live in a world where a whole generation that grew up surrounded by video-games, internet and TV has come to take command.

Everything now works through interfaces that were deeply influenced by oour gaming background. So, banking, bloggin, commenting, buying look a lot like playing a game. And it is not a coincidence. It happens in part because we are playing animals. We look for engaging ways of doind thigs. We want to play all the time and we enjoy when it happens in various levels. It could be the thriller that PLAYS with our expectations, the game tha we PLAY, the music that (stupid as it’s lyrics may seem) make us have fun trying to reproduce a combination of sounds (woma-woma-nizer, woma-woma-womanizeeeer…).

We KNOW that things changed, we see the changes but most of us don’t have a clue about how to take advantage of all that. Most of us know that we need to “have a conversation” and not a monologue anymore. We need this and that. Cool! But how exactly are we going to do that? Whatever that “that” is?

So, this project aim is to develop a set of tools and framework techniques that will help the manager, the editor or whoever is ih charge in the hard task of engaging their audience.

I want to do that through a series of tasks.

1. Bibliography – Reviewing, quoting and commenting on relevant books. This will not be a conventional list of texts, because we don’t live a conventional life anymore. I am reading about social media, game design, architecture, interaction design and the list could go on and on. The keys to this research are spread across a vast landscape.

2. Cases – Well. Let’s look at who is doing what and how. What works and what doesn’t. And the examples could come from anywhere. Music, movies, TV shows, websites, newspapers, books, magazines… Your help is appreciated.

3. Field work – I plan to visit people and talk to them. Get their points of view and put them here. I want to visit organizations too, of course. And they will come from many places.

4. My thoughts and comments (of course) – Oh. I will just stop and say what is in my mind. I hope I will miss lots of points publicly and, please, let me know if you see that. As i said above, your help is appreciated. Deeply.

IN the next posts, I will try to explain what exactly I am trying to do. What is the play factor. Does it work, is it really usefull at all? Stay tuned.