The Game Layer 2

The unsettling part about games is they tend to get dull over time. Games have a lifespan. So adding game components to a brand bring the challenge of constant refresh.

Through careful curation some game-based brands are managing to sustain and grow play. One hears a lot about Nike +. And how they've managed to continually reinvent the mechanics of competititon and notification.

In theory, there are 4 basic tactics to sustain affection for your brand-based game mechanic 1) Challenge 2) Conflict/Choices 3) A feedback loop and 4) Rewards and Goals.

CHALLENGE. Think about coupons as a marketing device. Synonymous with hot rollers and fuzzy slippers. But Old Navy found an interesting new wrinkle in the game layer. Their idea was to hide coupons on their site. Some, remarkably good. ($60 or $100 off!). The trick was that you really had to scour the site to find them. Additionally, the highly valuable coupons were limited in number. They go live at about 2 a.m. meaning people really had to camp out to capture the top notch coupons. Another company game-layered their sign-up form by recording the shortest time it had been accomplished in (16 seconds) then challenged users to beat that record. There's also a set completion phenomena. Basically an impulse baked into our DNA salad that compels us to finish a task with a set completion element.

CONFLICT/CHOICES.

Dribbble is a show and tell website for creatives. The concept is spartanly simple: Take a screenshot of whatever you are working on right now and send it in. Everyone starts as a spectator. This is sort of like being a "read only" member. Spectators can upload screen shots to their profile. And if other players find them interesting enough, they may get drafted as a "player". Players can contribute. But have a maximum of 24 uploads per month that do NOT roll over. The rankings are crowdsourced. So it is to every player's advantage to be very cautious about what they choose to upload. Here limited choice compels the player to be parsimonious about how often to upload. Upload too often, and you burn all your chances to climb the rankings for a month.

FEEDBACK LOOP

Fitbit is a clip-on digital pedometer that automatically updates whenever you pass within 15 feet of a wifi station in your home. It can track your physical activity, health objectives, even how well you're sleeping. Scroll through it's statistical record keeping and get all the up-to-the minute playback on your progress you'd expect. But then there's something you wouldn't expect. A LED digital flower that lengthens in stem and leaf as you exercise more. Almost dumbly sweet yet very addictive, the flower is something you nurture through your own exercise. Your activity linked in a tight feedback loop to a symbol of thriving and growing.

REWARDS & GOALS

Rewards are the most expected game reinforcement strategy. When consumers play our brand game, we give them stuff as bribery for involvement. But stuff is only one layer. Interestingly, it is also the least motivating. Status, access and power all tend to rank higher in motivating engagement than the "complimentary tote bag". They also cost far less. The price of entry here tends to be in crafting an experience that feels and plays like a game.

AVW

Like a lot of people, I think I was relatively convinced native mobile Apps would give way mobile web when HTML 5 got to town. This year was the first time I noticed a shift in that conventional wisdom. Partly propelled by the runaway success of native apps. Consider the evidence:

-8 Billion apps have been downloaded to date.

-50 Billion app downloads are predicted by end 2012

-Angry Birds made $1 million dollars in 24 hours.

-65 million Americans are currently using smartphones

HTML 5 brings the promise of broader reach, cheaper development and ease of distribution. But as we port more of our lives to the cloud, the question of constant connectivity comes into play. In a no apps world, there isn't a heck of lot you can do without connection.

Apps, on the other hand, have the benefit of being "always on". At least for now, they also offer a depth of engagement that oustrips mobile web. Additionally, and perhaps most significantly, gaming's meteoric growth has been fueled by the use of native apps. And it's unlikely gaming will detach from being app-based in the near term.

If I had to sum up the sentiment, I think it would be that native apps and web will probably comingle rather than compete. The big players (Facebook, Twitter Foursquare) seem committed to cross-platform development. The growth of apps is not only immense. But consumers seem to have carved the concept of apps into their neural pathways with such force, that it seems unlikely app use will sharply fall prey to mobile web.

Yobongo? Si.

Our thanks to Adam for this app recco. Yobongo is a location based group chat app available currently only for iOS. On the surface, it's uber-creepy. Log on and be instantly joined to 10 random strangers who just happen to close by in a group chat pod. I'm reminded of Demetri Martin's obervation concerning social networks: "Social networking sites are loaded with sexual predators; more importantly they're loaded with sexual prey." But on closer analysis, there are some pretty nifty non-stalker uses. "Can anyone reccomend a good restaurant on the lower east side?" for example (matched to a group of people who actually are in that area) would seem to have promising results. Yobongo is currently available for use in the bay area, New York and Austin. But is already planning against rapid growth. Yobongo co-founder Caleb Elston is in development on an "affinity algorithm" that will match the user with similarly minded people in the chat room. Essentially grouping you with like-minded people from the outset. No word on when/if Yobongo is headed to Android.

Group Messaging. Why now?

ReadWriteWeb's take on Group Messaging (i.e. Beluga)

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/group_messaging_why_now.php

The Gamification Pile-On

Gigaom weighs in on Gamification. Good stuff.

http://gigaom.com/2011/03/17/crowdtwist-real-rewards-help-gamification-take-flight/

The Web Back Channel

It's tempting to view ipads, smartphones and the like as the direct competitor to cable and satellite TV industry. Some are unplugging altogether and relying on Netflix, Hulu +, etc. as primary entertainment hubs. I think we're conditioned to concept on these portals as competitive and independent entities. But an increasingly common behavior is to combine these technologies in tandem. Richard Bullwinkle of Rovi calls this the "Web Back Channel." TV, Bullwinkle contends, has always been social. And can still function as a base layer that we build upon. This year's academy awards saw widespread behavioral split between watching the broadcast, while tweeting via tablet or smartphone. Networks and manufacturers are rushing apps to consumer that will grease the skids for this kind of mass adoption. But I think this also suggests some riveting possibilities for our industry. Such as commercials that continue on your iPad. Or live channels of communication that open on your lap to answer questions about a commercial the consumer just saw. Just the hype around a hybridized TV/tablet communication could be worth significant investment.

Klout Computing

Social Media Analytics is a relatively new field that attempts to measure (and make useful) the vast storehouse of data generated by social media websites. Websites like Klout assign a "Kloutscore" which measures the quality of the influencer. Kloutscores are a mix of data points from Twitter (such as following counts, follower counts, retweets, list memberships etc.) and Facebook (such as comments, likes, # of friends in your network). Up till now rating social influencers, especially for brands, has been more subjective than science. Kloutscores change that by generating a score on a 0-100 scale. Scores can be improved by way of more social engagement. And the web is already saturated with helpful tips on improving your Kloutscore. Once again we see the "game layer" at work. Klout also segments area of influence by individual. Giving the area of influence for the influencer. The only perfect Kloutscore? You guessed it. Justin Bieber.

Cool New App O' The Day: Beluga

Team Dentsu turned me on to this app. But I will be using it guaranteed. Created by a team of ex-Googlers, "Beluga" is a cross-platform push notification, texting app that allows you to simply form groups or "pods". Basically, private texting to a set group of friends. Anyone who's ever tried to organize a group event in NYC knows the annoyance of texting 25 different people. Beluga solves this by creating a text-like chat room, so members of the pod can zero in on bar or dinner plans, meet up at a certain spot at a crowded event or concert, etc. It's cool, intuitive and vastly life-simplifying. I'm a fan.

The Game Layer

Probably the dominant and emergent theme at SXSW (and one you will be hearing way too much about soon) is "The Game Layer". Our own Adam Puchalsky notes: " If social media was the emerging focus of the 2000s, gaming will be the focus of the ‘10s."

What is it? Succintly, it is the principles of gaming not merely imitating the real world through virtual reality. But living in and over the real world—gaming let out of the box.

Think about it as the descendent of the social layer. If digital socialization was the last chapter, game mechanics operating in the real world will be the next chapter.

The Game Layer high priest is Seth Priebatsch who secured funding from Google to launch SCVNGR (http://scvngr.com/). SCVNGR is a location based app available on iOS and Android that literally makes a game out of everywhere you go. Check-in is only the most basic act of game-playing on SCVNGR. Today's game challenge (for example) is to snap a photo of the places you visit and post them to SCVNGR.

The reward structure is no different than most games. Badges, points etc. But the tectonic shift Priebatsch suggests goes well beyond badges.

His conclusion is pretty simple: Game mechanics in the real world are the most innovative tools for motivating human interaction. Though I suspect what he means by "interaction" is actually "behavior". Which, I'll concede, has a more sinister ring to it.

So what's priming this? Augmented Reality. Smartphone adoption. Increased bandwidth. 4Square. Facebook's supernova expansion. All of the above really. But one watershed event this year gets more talk than anything is one that we (as marketers) can really understand: Sales.

Released this past November, Call of Duty: Black Ops sold over 7 million copies in it's first 24 hours generating $360 million in sales. Stack that against the biggest movie opening of all time ("Twilight") of $72 million. CoD shot to $650 million in 5 days. And topped a $1 billion in a year's time. To date, 600 million hours have been logged playing CoD. And the modern warfare franchise has generated over $3 billion in sales. Gaming is now a larger industry than Hollywood.

It's pretty simple math. But look beyond the math and what you see is one startling conclusion: Adding a game layer to something can motivate and change human behavior.

It's not without it's pitfalls. Adding badges to a crappy user experience is no miracle elixir. But understanding that game mechanics (well conceived and designed) can be more motivating to a consumer than giving them free swag in exchange for consideration, is a pretty huge thought.

The implications beyond marketing are significant as well. Imagine our grading system in schools being replaced by a system of leveling up. Gone is the idea of "failing" and "dropping" in status. Here is the idea of education sped by a rewards system closer to the style of "World of Warcraft".

Gaming is a tested trigger. For a whole new generation of consumers, this is what incents them. Clearly there will be bad and good practitioners of game mechanics in advertising. But, by any assessment, gaming will emerge as a constant refrain in our industry for the next few years.

LINK: Seth Priebatsch's TED talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_top_of_the_world.html

Another SXSW wrapped. For only the second time (last year was the first) the interactive festival eclipsed even the sacred music festival in attendance. Even some techblog writers admitted this was their first south-by. Missed the Pee-Wee Herman keynote address. So won't have those keen insights to share. But lots of other stuff coming. Stay tuned.