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.

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…

This is how it works. At some point you just let it go, and send the work to the university. But if you really have something good in your hands, should go back and revise, expand, evolve your work. That is the point here. I am coming back, revising it point by point, questioning it, and getting ready to release it in digital and open form.

I am working right now with the mobile operations of the company i work for, Editora Globo. I can´t disclose some projects for obvious reasons. But i can assure that some of the concepts i believe in will guide how some of my projects will end up looking like.

The last one is open to the public now, the iPad project for Época, the weekly news magazine from Globo in Brazil. We released the first version of the app and our plan is to evolve for a full fledged digital magazine that will change over time.

It will have more and more Play Factors added as it gets new features and the journalists, deisgners and advertising agencies create content for the platform. Our goal is to make it as flexible as possible.

Anyway, the point is: I am back. Check back here or just subscribe to the RSS feed and we will talk about how game design concepts can help the world to make better media. Before the breakfast.

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…