The keynotes from the Gamification Summit

Posted on February 5, 2011 by Alexandre Maron

I have to admit. I did my research, went back to Brazil and made myself a promise to go further, extend my research, write a book about it.

But, well, I came back to work and the whole thing piled up. My company had a huge uphill battle of, after reinventing its websites, make the whole stuff available on cell phones. Aaaand, there was that little thing called the iPad. I saw it as a valuable mission and took it. And it was such a huge task that hijacked my whole life completely.

The other thing that happened was the sickness and death of my two dogs. And believe me, when you are a couple in your thirties with no kids, dogs are a HUGE deal. So i lost my maltese, Carl Sagan, and my lab, Charles Darwin, in a space of a few months.

So, while all this drama was evolving, the Play Factor became “funware” and then “gamification”. While I was doing my research, there was no book addressing the subject. None. Zit.

After I finished it in august 2009, three relevant books came out. And boy, were they interesting. The first one cama out in november 2009 and is called Total Engagemen, by Byron Reeves and J. Leighton Read. The other came out at the end of march 2010 and is more right to the point: Game-Based Marketing, by Gabe Zicherman and Joselin Linder. The third is the coolest one in my opinion, because it comes from the fast talking gamificator übbermaster Jane Mcgonigal: Reality is Broken. It came out this last january and is an expanded version of the ideas Mcgonigal suggested on her popular TED keynote.

Gabe Zicherman ended up being the curator of the Gamificaton Summit, the event that really shaped the idea as a whole new industry.

Because of a tight work schedule, I couldn’t attend to the event, but Fora.TV came on my rescue. I paid U$ 150 and had access to all keynotes. Today I finally finished watching everything. It’s good stuff, although we are still in the first stages of a gamification process. But what we can see is that it is really evolving and getting momentum. There are startups, legal issues, fresh ideas and developments all the time. The summit shows it perfectly. Kudos for Mr. Zicherman. I just wish I had focused on the subject to help it evolve more. Anyway, seeing the summit gave me new reasons to keep my head on the subject.

If you are interested in the subject i strongly encourage you to pay the fee for Fora.TV (it’s more expensive, now, after the event, but still worth every cent) and watch every keynote. This is serious stuff that will change every industry it touches in the next few years.

The shape of things to come: Crowdsourced journalism + ARG

Posted on September 3, 2009 by Alexandre Maron

Even unexpectedly, news stories can become a game. The TV show Fantástico, a weekly variety show with dramaturgy, humor sketches and journalism that airs every Sunday night in Brasil on TV Globo, ran a story about how a singer called Belchior, very popular in the 1970s, had vanished for months.

The arm of Globo?s journalism online, G1, ran the story (originally produced for the TV show) in digital form (sorry, link in portuguese). They transcribed part of the text from the video and it was online a few hours after it was seen on television. Immediately, readers from every part of the country started to send information about Belchior sightings. They had photos, stories and dates. “We didn?t expect that”, says Renato Franzini, executive-editor of G1. “In the morning, we had many messages telling us about sightings of the singer. We decided to put it all together and make it a new developing story.”

The editorial team made a map where it was possible to pinpoint a sighting and the date Belchior was seen there. This is an example of a challenge that was established for the audience (find Belchior) even though nobody in the TV show or the website, asked for the help of the audience. It emerged naturally. People started to post videos on You Tube parodying Britney Spears while Fantástico kept promoting the story with other artists talking about the singer.

The news story became suddenly something that looked a lot like an Alternate Reality Game. And people even started to think that it was some kind of promotion or viral.

After one week, the TV show ran a story showing that they had found the singer in a cabin in Uruguai, ending the search. The way the show handled the highly anticipated finding of the singer was an anticlimax at best, but the original concept is too good to be ignored. The mix of crowd sourced journalism and ARG is a very interesting tool in the new cross over between social media tools and media outlets.

The final laugh

Posted on June 28, 2009 by Alexandre Maron

whysoserious

We have a lot to learn with the ARG (Alternate Reality Games) puppetmasters (the guys that manipulate the events from behind the curtains) for our media products. And 42 Entertainment is the company to look up to. They won the Grand Prix Award at the Cannes Cyber Lions ceremony on June 24 for the Why So Serious campaign, for the movie Batman – The Dark Knight. Las year, they won the same prize for another campaign for Nine Inch Nails. And if they didn’t win this year, it would be a huge surprise.

More than a year before the launch of the movies on theaters, the fans of Batman were frantic over a seres of websites and events around an election in Gothan City and the crazy actions of an assassin clown.

It was 42 Entertainment‘s Why So Serious campaign running full power, although, almost stealthily. The crazy beauty of these ARG campaigns is the way they deceptively make noise indirectly, creating waves of excitement that generates spontaneous reactions from fans. They engage and start talking about it in forums, blogs and social networks. At some key moments, the fictional events suddenly transpire to real life and call attention of the conventional media outlets. There is something happening and they just can’t ignore.

A well run ARG-viral campaign like this makes waves with no press releases. It becomes a real world event on itself. It has to become news at some point. People spontaneously make it happen.

But when I say spontaneously, I am not saying that there is no manipulations. Oh no. That’s exactly the opposite. As Alfred Hitchcock said in interviews, he played his audience like an instrument. He put images, sound, music to get exact responses from his audience on theaters. He said he played his audience like a musican instrument.

It’s always stimulation. But we have to think about what what is the one we want to give. For media as entertainment, it is straight forward in a way (but as hard as always, I must say). You just have to work towards the right impact and feelings on your crowd.

But when we talk about journalism, there is something that just don’t add up. Journalist tend to talk about the purity of the profession. About how everything that we report has to have a sound reason, a foot on the public interest and common well. Using this principle, something that is not popular or that generates no interest, but is important, has to be there, no matter what. I agree with this necessity of reporting relevant news no matter how hard (or boring) they are.

But in reality, we know very well what happens. Important things that doesn’t excite people anymore, are relegated to less than stellar spaces. It’s like we are saying: “oh damn, i have to release this information, but it is not exciting anymore. So let’s put this note about Swine Flu on page 10, in the bottom”.

So, although journalists hate to admit, which is silly but that’s how life is, there is an entertainment level in their work that can’t be ignored. We should learn to embrace it and use it for good. Well, some of us do it already. A few even do it in a very good way.

The game of bidding

Posted on May 27, 2009 by Alexandre Maron

I was talking earlier about how Ebay (among others) made a business of turning auctions, highly addictive play like events, into an even sexier activity. Yesterday I saw an add at the underground here in London of a website called Swoopo. They took the Ebay concept to another level.

It works like this: people put objects for auction for insanely low prices and the bids go up in 10p increases. But to make a bid you pay 50p and a piece of this money goes to the seller. The bidder buys tokens (50 bids, 100 bids) that will use in auctions. The auctions happen in short periods of time and if someone makes a bid inside the last 20 seconds of the deadline of an auction it gets a time extension. This mechanic tends to get lower prices and the seller will make extra money from the bidding. So, the more interesting an item is, more bidding it should generate.

So, an auction becomes, more than ever, a strategy game where timing and pacing is very important. The creators turned the activity in a bona fide game. I don’t know if it will work. But the concept is amazing.

Wolverine: the leak

Posted on April 2, 2009 by Alexandre Maron

wolverine

Big story of the week for Hollywood execs is the fact that Wolverine’s movie leaked and anybody with a peer-to-peer software is able to download it. So here comes the execs with those good old stories. The copies will hurt ticket sales! We are doomed!! Things like that.

For me it is very simple. Wolverine is a big action estravaganza. People that chose to see a movie like this in a computer screen, in a terrible copy, with crappy sound and poor picture quality, taken with a camera from a movie theater in some obscure corner of the world, would not pay for a ticket anyway. This is people that don’t care about going to a theater. Plain and simple.

Or else. Could be a really curious fan that wants to see the movie as soon as possible and, surprise, will go to watch on a theater anyway. Crap! He will go again, one week later, watch it on Imax. And, oh!, will buy the special edition in august too. So, enough with the screams!

The thing is. All these fireworks just hide the really juicy fact in this curious case: it is not the final movie, but a high quality copy with unfinished effects and soundtrack. It is the kind of thing that journalists and executives have the chance to see all the time, but not the crowd that would go to a theater. Hell! I don’t download this kind of stuff and this time I even was curious to see how this copy looked.

People will download it just to see how an unfinished movie looks. Plain simple. This case has an edge, a challenge embedded.

This copy has something completely different. Works as a souvenir for the fans. People will download it and, if the movie rocks, since they couldn’t see the finished effects, they will run to theaters on may 1st. This is such an interesting situation that, if I wasn’t such a nice guy I would even think that Fox leaked this on purpose.

But if the movie is terrible. Well. Fox is in serious trouble, because that first week crowd may not appear in such big numbers, after bad reviews start popping everywhere on the internet. In the end, whoever makes good stuff can have good results from positive buzz. But your product better be good, dude, or you are in serious trouble. New world, different rules.

Power to designers

Posted on April 1, 2009 by Alexandre Maron

Design is an absolutely relevant part of any product. I feel that launching a media product without design is like going to an UFC competition without any training at all. You will have you ass kicked big time. Well, even with training you can get your ass kicked. But i digress.

Off course that bad content with good design is just a ruse. But it’s almost the same thing the other way around: good content with bad design is just content that will not be seen. Good design influences (or at least should) everything in your product. It is part of that idea of asking your audience to a dance.

But enough of me, for now. We will have plenty of time to talk further about design in the near future. Just take a look at this video from TED talks:

Not your usual game

Posted on March 14, 2009 by Alexandre Maron

bok_wood_blocks

We are more sophisticated by the minute. You don’t expect that with all the technology, all the interfaces surrounding us, all the stimulae we would keep doing things the same way, right?

We change and evolve. We look at old things and make them different and new. Let me give you an example: the good old building blocks. Everybody with a heart liked them as kids. They are colorful, have shapes, texture and we can move them around and build things. We can play with them and we can play games with them, if we develop the right rules.

Wood blocks. Beautiful and simple.

A few years ago, in a toy store at New York, I saw these blocks here: Cubeworld. Simple as they were, they blew my mind.

They were just an amazing idea. See? There is a game component, some rules about assembling. But the whole thing is more like a sandbox where you put things together and just ave fun with the result.

Really, really interesting. But, as I said, I saw it years ago. You couldn’t think that things would stop there, right? The MIT guys agree…

Now, think about the possibilities. Think about the fact that play is a lot more than just games, puzzles, sudoku and crosswords. Playing could be something more subtle, a small challenge that people don’t even realize that is happening but that is able to move them.

Look at the building blocks and open your mind for new ideas. Shuffle them and think again.

Update: The prototype showed here ended up in a company called Sifteo. Check it out.

If you don’t know how to play… Please, don’t

Posted on March 12, 2009 by Alexandre Maron

One of the first lessons some companies learned (or not) when playing with new media is that this is a different kind of beast where, instead of a monologue, you have a conversation (ok, I heard it som many times that this phrase annoys me). Even when you don’t want to.

A few years ago, GM launched a campaign asking internet users to make video ads about one of its cars, the Chevy Tahoe. Oh, you can imagine how excited they were. How modern to make such a campaign.

The, hum, “problem” with these kind of ideas is that when you give power to the people, it is difficult to take it back. The users started making ads about how the Chevy was a terrible car that was bad for the environment. L-o-t-s of ads. If you want to give control away. Give it and go with the flow. If you do it the wrong way, backlash is coming certainly. This was one history for the books about do’s and dont’s of the new era of advertising.

But it seems that some people don’t read these books. Or don’t have a good memory at all. Skol, a beer brand from INBEV in Brazil, launched a campaign that was supposed to be hip, modern, smart and oh! so cool. They hired two of the best comedians of the new generation in Brazil and made videos where these guys told jokes about Carnaval and made a call to everyone: send your jokes and stories and we will tell the best ones here.

One guy liked the idea and developed his videos. But not exactly what Skol’s marketing people had in mind. He made a video telling sad stories about drunk people driving and killing bystanders or just beating their relatives. But he told all of that as they were really funny stories, copying the aesthetic of Skol’s videos.

It became a huge hit instantly. And it didn’t take long before he was “gently” asked to take the videos out. He told the story in his blog and changed the video. He took off all the graphics linking his video to Skol but kept the text. The result is even stronger, if you have the context.

Even though you don’t understand portuguese, just take a look at the three videos and get the spirit of the story.

Here is the video from Rafinha Bastos.

This other one is from Danilo Gentili.

This is the video from Ronald Rios that talks about how drunk people can do bad things. He tells terrible stories as if they were really funny. Notice that he took all the graphics off, to break the visual link to Skol’s campaign.

What Skol’s guys didn’t seem to understand (like GM’s marketing guys didn’t see in 2006) is that the internet and social media doesn’t work their way. This is the first stop in our journey about knowing what game you are playing.

In the metaphor I am trying to develop in this research, you need to know if you are playing Game of Life, Risk or Monopoly. If you are playing with Legos or woodblocks. If you are painting together with a group in a room, or just looking at a naked model.

You need to understand the game you are playing, the play and then develop or read the rules. With that in mind, the next step is to call the right people, to the right place to play. When you start to understand that, things become more and more clear.

But you still have a long way to go.

(With thanks to Trabalho Sujo)

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