On Saturday, I attended GameCamp, an informal gathering of 225 game players and designers. On arrival, everyone was given a Lego Minifigure (which is what they call Lego men nowadays, apparently), sealed in a packet. There were 20 different characters, and no clue on the outside as to which one you’d got.
On the front of the packet were three rules. First, you had to open your packet (which was surprisingly tough to rip apart given the toys are for five year olds) and assemble your man. Then, you were allowed to swap any bits of your character with anyone else at any time. Finally, the winner would be the person who most looked like their Lego character by the end of the day.
What a great idea! It was a brilliant ice-breaker, and made it easy for everyone to talk to each other, which helped to create a good atmosphere for the informal discussion sessions.
It seemed appropriate that a day that was all about gaming should start off by “gamifying” networking between participants. There’s been a lot of talk lately about gamification, the idea that non-gaming activities can be enhanced with interactive elements and scoring.
Foursquare is one example of this: it rewards people for going somewhere often and gives them bragging rights if they go there more often than other people. It adds a competitive edge to telling your friends where you are, and could motivate people to spend a bit more time in places they should (like the gym and the library) and a bit less time in places they shouldn’t. Trust me, you don’t want to be the mayor of your local KFC.
Epic Win is a to-do list app that charted highly on Apple’s store some time ago because of the way it enables you to score points for completing your work and your chores. It takes that satisfying feeling of striking something off your to-do list and enhances it with graphics and scores that show you’re making progress.
Of course, we can’t expect everything in life to be a rollercoaster of fun. One of the simultaneous closing sessions of GameCamp discussed the difference between having fun and having a satisfying or transformative experience, such as watching Schindler’s List or learning a foreign language. Art more often makes you think than laugh, and most real achievements in life require a level of effort way beyond any game. It’s satisfying to learn violin or climb a mountain, but it’s not exactly fun all the way.
That said, in the marketing and PR industries, we should always ask ourselves: where is the fun in this campaign? Can we add more? Will adding gameplay entice more people to join in? At Catalysis, we increasingly work on interactive campaigns, such as Facebook apps and Flash games. Similar messages might have been communicated ten years ago with a bylined article or an advert, but the interactivity helps to make the ideas approachable, sticky, and fun.
What do you think about gamification in marketing? Is it all hype, or is it the future? In line with the theme of this blog post, there’s a small prize for the best answer in the comments below.