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.

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 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.

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.

Raph Koster does an amazing job showing that, as happens with many other media, gaming can be more than just entertainment for you reptilian brain. Or else, more than just pointless distraction and give you fulfillment and self discovery. Just like art. He uses concepts from a broad array of fields going from neuroscience to semiotics and anthropology. He analyses art, dance, architecture and, well, games.

To do that, the book goes deep in what is fun and how our brain can be fed with that. Koster shows how we process information looking for challenges in a certain measure that they are not too difficult, but not to easy as well. And seemingly paradox of having a brain that has pleasure learning and, at the same time, is lazy enough to crave for easy stuff. The book is precious in the clever ways it defines so many crucial components of what is entertaining, challenging and, in the end, fun, and shed light on the reasons for our constant search for new entertainment. The key, Koster says, is in our thirst for new patterns to compress in our memory. We need more and more of them. We need the journey, not the destination.

Academically speaking, the book loses some traction when it becomes more of a manifesto, a call to the game designers of the world to make meaningful content, than the great analysis of the first chapters.

It is the zeitgeist…

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.

So I like to put some serious effort in not saying that everything is a game or that games are in everything. But ont thing I can say with no fear of being wrong: most of the success stories of the last decade had some component of the Play Factor.

eBay
Can’t you see how much of a game is it? I will go on the mechanics of these things in later posts, but the thing is: the rush of bidding and fighting for your great deal is nothing more than a game.

Social Networks
This is so obvious. In Facebook, My Space or Orkut you collect people, groups and even play with other people. There are strong gaming and playing components at the core of the social networks.

YouTube
When you watch, you press play and have fun. Then you browse and browse through tags. You comment and have the social rush of saying funny things and sending links and ideas for your friends. You set up your favorites and playing lists. Or else, you make your videos and share with people and waits patiently for comments.

Amazon
Search for a product. Read what other people say. Write your own review or else say how many stars you give to the product. Hey. They show that people that bought this one liked that other one. Cool, what are they saying about it. There’s is a bargain here. Cool, let’s grade the seller! The interface makes you play as you shop. That is why this is so addictive.

And there is more. Just look at how your most favorite websites work and you will see the Play Factor in them. The best sites and best media products have this component. And they have different concepts. Not evey people love to bid. Some only like to browse products. Not everyone feel well about colecting stamps in a social network environment. We look for the ones that fit with our tastes. That is why we love them.

Let’s look at the good old moment when an urban, hip and well informed couple wants to go out for dinner and have to decide where to go. Well, if you are in London, you could go to Yelp.

Choose a cuisine…

Then, betwen a plethora of options, choose a restaurant…

And take a look at what is people saying about the place.

Three straight forward steps. Simple, but have nothing special and sometimes not finding the right place could be frustrating.

Now. Let’s go back one step. Lets break it down in pieces. Well, we need to find a restaurant. We may define the kind of food, where and how much we are willing to spend. Three variables? There maybe more, but let’s stay with these ones for now.

Does it have to be this way? Is there any way we could do the same thing and make it, hum, sexier? Make it funny? Fun? Let’s see how Urbanspoon answered this question…

Cool. I know that if you are a passionate Iphone user, you may already know this app, but the point is: this is one of the most perfect examples of the Play Factor. But we can’t forget that an Iphone app is going to a specific kind of audience. So, the website of Urbanspoon is still a very conventional one, although tey have a version of the application there.

The UK version of Urbanspoon, very normal

So they have in mind that they need to be able to offer the right experience for the right customer.