In the first part of my wrap up of this year’s Develop in Brighton Conference, I looked at the sessions which stole the headlines: ‘InstantAction CEO: Game retail ‘headed for a disaster’’, ‘Develop: BioWare's Zeschuk Calls AAA Development 'A Poor Goal' Today’, ‘Develop 2010: Tim Schafer Keynote’, ‘Develop 2010: Unity on how games are everywhere’, ‘Exclusive: Mark Rein’s indie apology’ and ‘Ed Vaizey: ‘I’m a committed champion of the games industry’’. For Part II, rather than pick out some of the key themes across the remaining conference sessions that I attended, I wish instead to focus on one presentation in particular that I found interesting, entertaining and inspirational in equal good measure.
Gabe Zichermann, CEO of beamME, author of Game-Based Marketing and blogger behind funwareblog.com delivered a fantastic presentation on the afternoon of the first day of the conference entitled ‘Yesterday’s Games Designers: Tomorrow’s Social Tech Innovators’ on the subject of gamification. I realize that in Part I of this blog piece I mentioned that David Helgason of Unity Technologies also spoke about gamification and so the subject is clearly a hot topic so forgive me for taking the opportunity here to define what is meant by the term.
Gamification (or Funware to use Zichermann’s self-coined term) refers to the application of game mechanics in non-game contexts, the purpose of which is to drive participation and engagement amongst users. As such gamification is gaining momentum as a marketing tool, however fun must remain at the core of what gamification is. A great example to illustrate the point is Foursquare which uses simple game mechanics – a score system and externalized rewards in the form of badges, but applied to the process of people checking-in at locations in the real world. “It’s super-simple. So simple that many of you probably don’t think about it as a game” said Zichermann.
However simplicity needn’t be a key component of gamification. Web usability design believes in reducing the number of clicks that a user needs to make before completing a transaction, for example, in order to cut down the drop-off rate. Gamification on the other hand believes in another philosophy – just make the clicks fun. To illustrate this Zichermann used the example of Swoopo, an online auction site which has proven that people are prepared to invest effort if they believe that the rewards are worthwhile and that the experience is fun.
Making experiences fun is very much the remit of game designers. In fact Zichermann described game designers as happiness consultants. It is not going to be long, suggests Zichermann, before brands warm to the idea of gamification and when they do, corporations will be poaching game designers from the Games (with a capital ‘G’) industry, as it has been estimated that more than 10,000 new jobs could be created in this area. So whilst this might provide huge opportunity for game designers to work across different industries, where does this leave the Games industry? On the one hand, a population more susceptible to game mechanics might be encouraged to participate in traditional gaming, whether social, casual, mobile or hardcore. However on the other hand skilled game designers may very well be lured away from the Games industry by corporate salaries to the detriment of the quality of gameplay in traditional games, and if everyday activities feel like a game because of leaderboards, points systems and rewards, the last thing you’re likely to want to do with your evening having topped the work leaderboard for sales, scored an extra 100 points for taking the low-congestion route home and earned a healthy eater badge for the ratio of vegetables to cakes in your supermarket shopping basket, is power-up the Xbox.
