Epic Win puts Play Factor in your life (and in your iPhone)

Posted on September 18, 2010 by Alexandre Maron

Apps that help you control your life with tasks are common. There are dozens of them on the App Store and Cydia.

But they are boring as hell (well, i love EverNote anyway). So two guys called Tak Funk and Rex Crowle created an application that added a layer of fun over task managing. It’s aptly named Epic Win and using it, for a nerd like me, is a blast.

You can use the apps tasks and create new ones. There are feasts of Strength, Stamina, Intellect, Spirit or Social. The whole interface is delliciously designed and it has many cute animations and movements.

The first tasks are cleverly designed to make you navigate in the app and understand it’s concepts and functionalities. And everything gives you some kind of reward. Let’s see if, over time, the whole concept is balanced enough to go further and become a hit.

On Edge magazine, there is a story about the app and a review.

Games shaping behavior

Posted on July 14, 2010 by Alexandre Maron

It´s no accident that game designers are looking with lusty eyes to social and behavioral shaping. They have been developing and refining clever techniques to manipulate us for decades now. If you look at some of the most intriguing games from the last few years, they make a huge effort to drive you in some way without you noticing that your are being influenced in doing exactly that specific action. You think that the decision is your own. But if you replay a game and try different things the design emerges and the magic, sometimes, is gone.

Too bad.

Fast Company has a story about how game designers are creating titles that try to influence you in doing good things for you and for the world. It is not new, let´s be clear. But they are getting better at it and more people are turning their attention to this subject. So we will clearly see this trend getting stronger in the next months and years.

An interface to manage your life

Posted on July 11, 2010 by Alexandre Maron

It is a matter of perspective. Life is not a game per se, but if you apply the right metaphor, look from a specific angle, you could make it look more like one, and have some good results from thar.

Imagine, for a second, that you ask yourself a series of questions about your life and establish a series of goals completed and to be completed. College? Check. First million dollars? Working on it. How far are you to that objective. Oh, 43%. Nice.

With the right framework of questions, you could in a first attempt, visualize your life in terms of the stats of a game character. Your age against the general life expectancy. Your income and savings against the first million. Your health status against what a person at your age, in your country.

The tricky part could be how to update all these stats. Some of them could be perfectly automatic. Some would rely on your ability to update, only. Think about it as FourSquare or Goall meets real life and go deeper that just location. And it is kinda happening now. If you have a look at Get Glue’s App for iPhone, you will see that they are trying to make you check in in media products like books, TV shows and such.

You could manage your life in a whole different way. You could establish financial and even emotional goals and look how far or close you are to them. And you could visualize everything in an interesting and exciting way. I am working on how to do that…

Why would you use regular stairs?

Posted on October 13, 2009 by Alexandre Maron

In many many places people have a decision to make: escalators or regular stairs?

Oh, we know that using regular stairs is a good option to keep you healthy. But it’s tiresome too, right? So, people tend to use the escalators instead. Let them be happy with their decision.

Or else.

Wat if using the regular stairs was, well, fun? Then it would look a lot like this.

Wired is trying to play

Posted on September 7, 2009 by Alexandre Maron

A few weeks ago, inspired by a story they ran about people that purposely disappear and start new lives, Wired proposed a game with its readers: Find Evan Ratliff, the writer of that article.

Now, they have another proposal: help a guy (called Terminal Man by the magazine) on his adventure traveling on JetBlue planes every day for a month. There are rules: he can’t use hotels, he has to fly every day (unless something like a hurricane stops him from doing that), he can only use carry on luggage and so on. And the readers will decide where he should go next.

Again, Play Factor is not just creating games like these. But these games are manifestations of the Play Factor principle, of course. The magazine is trying to motivate its readers and to that end, they are really trying to create rich narratives and inviting the audience to go with them.

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.

Pandemia: the game of world domination

Posted on May 3, 2009 by Alexandre Maron

This is not the central point of my research, but I will always talk about how we use interfaces that reminds us of games. These are more metaphors and not always pratical or workable concepts.

Have a look at how everyone, everyone that matters, at least, used mashups with maps and shiny graphics to keep track of how the Swine Flu (ridiculously renamed Novel Flu H1N1 by WHO, CDC whatever).

Playing the April Fool’s day game

Posted on April 2, 2009 by Alexandre Maron

Didn’t you look for jokes yesterday? I love April Fool’s Day. I just browse everywhere looking for practical jokes in media outlets that are, most of the time, serious.

The Guardian (that dropped the paper in favor of turning into a Tweetercentric site) made a list of some cons spotted through the internet.

And I have my personal list:

Eye-Camera, from Kodak

Google launches Cadie, an intelligent system that will help them in the near future in keeping the company as the most innovative. Well, there’s a learning curve…

Amazon announces the REAL cloud computing. They are taking computer up-up-and awayyy!!

CrunchGear became part of a line of cereals (crunch, got it?) of General Mills!!

Kodak shows its pretty Eye-Camera. Wow!! What a gadget!

Gmail shows it’s new amazing functionality: auto-pilot. The, hum, intelligent system answers your messages for you! As an example, they show how it would answer the classic nigerian prince spam.

screenshots

And there is obviously a lot more around. Life is playground.

Play Factor

are you engaging?

Category Archives: The World as a Playground