Contenu connexe Similaire à Game On: Gaming Mechanics (20) Plus de Resource/Ammirati (20) Game On: Gaming Mechanics 1. RESOURCE INTERACTIVE THINK ABLE GAME ON
2010
Game On: Game Mechanics Give Brands a New Power Play
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Gamification
Life has always been a contest—for survival, for Used wisely, gamification represents a perfect
example of the “O.P.E.N.” model for building
dominance, for power, for recognition. These days,
brand devotion among consumers. As we wrote
we also compete against our own boredom, seeking in our book, The Open Brand, being O.P.E.N.
diversion even during everyday activities like stopping means being:
for a latte or shopping for laundry detergent. Enter
game mechanics (aka “gamification”), the fast-growing On-demand—Delivers accessible,
array of activities that engage consumers online and self-directed and instantly gratifying
off through competitions, rewards, ego boosters and experiences.
virtual entertainments.
Personal—Facilitates meaningful
Foursquare now has over 3 million users who have posted over
interaction with individuals.
1OO million checkins.
—Softpedia, August 30th, 2010: RJMetrics, July 20th, 2010
More than 5OO million active users. 15O million of which
access Facebook through their mobile devices. Engaging—Deepens attachment
—Facebook.com Statistics, August, 2010 through relevant emotional
experiences.
Geolocation users are 38% more likely than the average US
online adult to say that friends and family ask their opinions
before making a purchase decision.
—Forrester, July 2010, Location-Based Social Networks Networked—Taps the exponential
potential of individual consumers and
online communities.
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Know Your Game Pieces
Here’s our game mechanics play book for winning
customer attention, affection, and loyalty.
Game mechanics come in countless flavors, but the building
blocks are the same:
Points Systems—Spur desirable actions (purchases,
referrals, reviews, check-ins, etc.) with points that can be
redeemed for rewards, status or service upgrades, badges or
Goals—The ultimate purpose for the games; goals are
often broken into more attainable missions (“earn super
user status!”) to encourage escalation to higher levels of play
other cool “must haves” (or for the virtual currency to buy those (and engagement).
things). Points systems are often at the heart of loyalty programs
such as frequent flyer programs.
Escalation—The stepping stones to higher levels
of status, recognition and rewards, escalation paths
Scoreboards (aka Leaderboards)—Public recognition
that showcases the top contributors, referrers, point-
leaders, etc., inspiring a competitive spirit that drives ongoing
seamlessly inspire greater loyalty and increased interaction.
engagement.
Avatars and virtual goods—Celebrations of the self
and self-expression, avatars and virtual goods allow
online players to re-create themselves in virtual worlds, and
Badges & Awards—Colorful status symbols users
earn to announce their contributions, activities, or
accomplishments.
surround themselves with digital reproductions of their favorite
things (from favorite brands).
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Play For Keeps
Brands that use game mechanics wisely offer more Gamification isn’t a one-size-fits-all playground. Getting it just
right is both an art and a science (plus a pinch of alchemy).
than momentary entertainment—they can inform,
inspire, enlighten and delight customers over the long The Art—Choosing and designing the right gaming features—
haul. They can turn average customers into loyal fans, whether points or badges, status levels or avatars—and fusing
and transform already loyal customers into avid brand them into a seamless extension of your brand.
evangelists, at the ready to answer questions, convert The Science—Functional implementation of the game
their social networks into customers, and tell the world mechanics to ensure reliability and responsiveness, and analytics
about new products and features. collection to support reporting, data mining and long-term
strategic planning.
The Alchemy—The spark of life that touches off a firestorm of
playful engagement, from FourSquare check-ins to Yelp reviews
to Second Life “private island” sales.
Get the recipe right, and your customers cheer. Get it wrong,
and they snore. As in most complex games, winning requires
strategy, and the ability to think a few moves ahead.
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Play For Keeps: The Key Steps
01 Plan first, play later—Great gamification demands great
advance work. Take the time to define the levels, rewards,
points system, goals, and other game components before you
03 Don’t toy with your brand—Off-brand game
mechanics can be worse than no gamification at all.
Game mechanics must be treated as *part* of your brand, not
start building your system. Think about how to keep customers an add-on for purely promotional purposes. Gaming elements
coming back for more (and different) experiences; how to inspire must be relevant, appropriate, and creatively matched to a
viral sharing and word-of-mouth; and how the game reflects and brand and its audiences, or the brand will be a big loser.
enhances your brand’s value proposition and your customers’
sense of brand stewardship.
04 Pick your team wisely—Partnering with the right
experts and providers can make all the difference.
02 Target with care—Your customers and prospects come
in many shapes, sizes, demographics and social graphs.
Target specific audiences with relevant experiences that fit their
Resource Interactive has frequently partnered with Bunchball,
an industry leader in game mechanics, because of their wealth
of experience in creating compelling and on-brand games that
lifestyles and interests, and be true to the uniqueness of your spark audience participation. Bunchball, in turn, enjoys working
customers or visitors (simply retrofitting the same game for with Resource because, as Bunchball founder Rajat Paharia put
multiple audiences won’t cut it). it, “We get to learn about new channels by working with them,
and we discover how to make a game and brand sing in that
space. It’s a really exciting type of partnership.”
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Who’s in the game?
Vail, Colorado’s EpicMix: Sport as Game
The ultimate on-demand experience in the O.P.E.N. Stat Shot: Mobile Web Rising
playbook is also the fastest rising media outlet since
According to Nielsen Media1, by early 2010, there were
the Internet: Mobile. Thanks to smartphones, gaming 60.7 million mobile Web users over the age of 13 in the
apps and location-based services such as FourSquare, U.S. (up 33% from 2008), with smartphones accounting for
Gowalla, MyTown and Facebook Places, brands have 18% of mobile devices in use (up from 13% in 2008). By
never been more portable. Brands that merge mobile mid- 2011, Nielsen predicted a U.S. smartphone user base
of 150 million, and growing fast. And smart brands will
with real-time and real-world are taking the game have an app for that.
experience to whole new heights.
2010 Nielsen Media Industry Fact Sheet, http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/
1
Vail, Colorado’s ski resorts launched the immersive EpicMix app press/nielsen-fact-sheet-2010.pdf
in 2010 to track the exploits of skiers and boarders through an
RFID code on their lift passes. Apres ski, users can relive their
day by viewing maps and stats of their runs, and collecting
unique pins for various exploits (and, of course, post it all to
Facebook and Twitter).
With the free EpicMix mobile, users can locate and chat with
other pals on the slopes, check real-time snow, traffic and
weather reports, and view their EpicMix maps, stats and pin
awards while they’re still on the mountain.
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Who’s in the game?
Cascadian Farms: Faux Berries, For-real Customers
The Personal piece of the O.P.E.N. brand comes to Stat Shot : Online Gaming Nips at the Heals
of Social Networking
life in the virtual world, where players can recreate
their playspace in their own image. The most richly Ten percent of U.S. Internet time is now spent on online
engaging game mechanics are those that take users games, according to Nielsen NetView. While social
out of their daily life completely, offering escapism, networking still reigns supreme at 43 percent, gaming
leapfrogged to the number two spot (overtaking personal
role-playing, and new worlds to explore. Bathing
emailing) in online engagement. Email dropped from 11.5
avatar-based participants in subtle (or even, not- percent to 8.3 percent of user’s online time, while gaming
so-subtle) brand messaging and experiential game showed an upward trend that’s likely to continue2.
mechanics can take customer loyalty to a whole new
Nielsen blogpost, August 2, 2010, http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_
2
level of virtual play. mobile/what-americans-do-online-social-media-and-games-dominate-activity/
Oregon’s organic Cascadian Farms found a growing market
for its virtual bounty among the faux farmers of Zynga’s hugely
popular FarmVille game. During the summer of 2010, gamers
used their FarmVille credits to plant more than 310 million virtual
organic Cascadian Farms blueberries.
More than a million FarmVille farmers also friended Cascadian’s
virtual organic gardener on Facebook, planting the seeds for a
more direct connection to the brand.
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Who’s in the game?
HP’s CampusKarma: School Plays
The final word in O.P.E.N. is “Networked,” a Rajat Paharia, Founder, Bunchball: Emotional Connections
in a Virtual World
driving force in the engagement strategy for HP’s
CampusKarma campaign. Resource Interactive and “Virtual goods have the same emotional impact as brands
Bunchball partnered to create the campaign, which in the real world,” notes Bunchball’s founder, Rajat Paharia.
was targeted at increasing the computer maker’s “[As a consumer], you’re paying for the intangibles of the
brand. Same as in the real world, those things matter.There’s
Facebook fan base, upping registration for the
the emotional angle to the virtual world: It’s a commitment
education sales portal HP Academy, and sparking to your status and your creativity. People have these multiple
community, dialogue and word-of-mouth. budgets in their heads – the identity budget is worth 10 times
more than anything else they’re budgeting for. So, they’re
The hugely successful campaign (which first ran for six weeks in willing to spend very real money in virtual games to enhance
late summer, 2010) offered cash scholarships and share-with-a- their sense of self.”
friend computer prizes, and enticed engagement with multiple,
point-earning activities and levels of play. CampusKarma
surpassed expectations by increasing the number of HP
Academy Facebook fans from 900 to more than 24,000 over a
3-month period, and engaging an active player base of 800
fans during the course of the campaign.
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RI: Gamification Futurecast
We’ve talked about some of the key trends and
opportunities we see for brand gamification in its 01 “Watch for automatic (passive) check-ins and
integrated brand experiences,” says RI’s Dan Shust,
who points to EpicMix as being on this new leading edge.
current state, but we wanted to close with some “Everything will be happening behind the scenes - you’ll sign
thoughts about where all of this is headed, and up once, and your game will follow you wherever you go. So,
you’ll earn points, badges and awards, go up levels, and climb
how we’re continuing to help our clients move the
the leaderboards without needing to log on or check in.” How
scoreboard. will this happen? “Consumers will be tracked invisibly as they
go through their day,” Shust explains, noting that not only will
their activities ring up game rewards automatically, but their
movements will also trigger location-based ads, customized
offers and other push-not-pull experiences.
02 Hand in hand with automatic gamification and brand
immersion, we’ll see privacy redefined. To avoid a
consumer rebellion against persistent tracking, brands will
need to provide more iterative and intuitive tools that allow
consumers to opt-in and opt-out on the fly, and also based on
customizable settings that make it easier for them to control
when, where and how they’re being tracked on a daily basis.
03 We also anticipate continued growth in social
entrepreneurism via gaming—it’s not just good for the
world, it’s a smart brand strategy. From virtual fundraisers for
disaster victims (as held by Zynga and others) to gamification
to inspire conservation (as Google’s PowerMeter scoreboard
does), games are increasingly becoming a vehicle for doing
good while having fun.
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The Final Word
JANE McGONIGAL, DIRECTOR OF GAMES RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE
“As a planet, we spend 3 billion hours a week
playing computer and videogames. That’s
a LOT of time—enough to change our lives,
and probably save the world (the real world)
while we’re at it.” As written by McGonigal in her Avantgame blog. McGonigal has proven
that games can be a serious business by sparking attention and inspiring
change with projects such as World Without Oil, in which participants
role-played (and documented with 1,500 videos, blogposts, voicemails
and images) how they would respond in a major global oil crisis.
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Want to know more?
Want to know more about how Resource Interactive
can help you play for keeps with your customers?
Connect with Dan.
Dan Shust
Executive Director,
RI:Lab
Email: dshust@resource.com
Phone: 614-621-2888
Twitter: @getshust
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