Walls Quest is actually one of my own projects which I have developed at Imagemakers on behalf of Chester Renaissance and takes the form of a smartphone app. Like many tourist apps it acts as a guide to the Walls and augments the visitor’s experience with audio, video, photo and text information but it takes a step further by ‘gamifying’ the experience. Walls Quest dares people to accept challenges at each location in a quest to become a master of the walls. The challenges differ at each location in their type and also difficulty; from taking your own photos of the famous East Gate clock to posing as a gladiator in the Roman amphitheatre and sharing it on Facebook. Brave visitors gain points for each completing challenges and can see their progress against others on the main leaderboard. They also find out that along the way they can unlock Guild Shields for completed hidden challenges and win rewards hidden in the app such as extra games and a bloopers video reel.

Anyone who is familiar with Foursquare, Gowalla and other such location-based services will recognise the structure of badges, rewards and points but as far as we know this is the first time the methods have been adopted for motivating people to engage with the history of a city. By engaging people in a quest they have fun and get to compete in a controlled environment which encourages people to continue through all the challenges, this motivation is missing from nearly all traditional guides. Whilst having fun with the challenges people will learn how the Romans, Normans and Georgians all used the Walls at Chester for different reasons; how King Charles watched his troops defeated against the Parliamentarians; the impact Queen Aethelfled had on the city; how the Guilds of Chester are still relevant to today and many, many more facts and slices of history.

I have used techniques from gaming in other apps but this is definitely the most ambitious so far. It is now available on both Apple iOS and Android and you can find out more http://www.explorethewalls.com

So how do you build for location? How do you respond to your location? It’s a little cliché and goofy to compare planning a game to planning a battle but with both, your outcome is directly connected to the context in which the event takes place. And so, I give to you, young grasshopper, time-tested wisdom on what to look for as you build real world games.

————————-

1. (Way) Purpose:

The most important thing is first to determine exactly what it is you’re trying to achieve with your game and what will constitute a success for you. What you want will shape how you build your game- and you want to be VERY specific about your goals.

Here are some suggestions of goals that work:

1. You want over 500 competitors to engage outdoors for very public and visible marketing.

2. You want to support a particular lesson plan. You want at least 5 teachers and their classes to be able to talk about the game together and write projects about it.

3. You want to engage at least 300 undergrads from a certain college or group of colleges during an event or season as part one of their student activities

4. You want something that is disruptive and generates buzz and media. How many people play, what they learn and how long they play is less relevant than how much press you get.

Here are some goals that really don’t work:

1. You want people to play and have fun

2. You want lots of people to be engaged and excited about it

3. You want to reach out to a tech-savvy demographic

The goals above are specific asks with action items that you can take to tailor the game to achieve your goal. The goals below are broad, over-simplified and generic so they lend you no structure in how to proceed with your game. You’re setting yourself up to be stressed-out and disappointed. Location-based gaming is a very surgical gaming tool. People will go exactly where you ask them. They will do exactly what you ask them to do. You should be extremely clear what you want that to be and what will constitute a success for you.

(Above: People participating in the Boston Swing Challenge)

2. (Heaven) Weather:

Weather is a very BIG little thing when it comes to location games so don’t underestimate it. Rain or snow can totally change your game just as a sunny day in spring can keep people outside for any length of time playing a game.

A good exercise is to spend a few minutes sitting at a café window and watch people from your region (or the region where you’re building). When it’s cold, do they look happy about it? (like in NH) or when it’s cold, do they bundle and hide? (like in Boston, Mass.) People in Portland, Oregon don’t seem to notice rain while if it rains in San Diego, Californians think the world is ending. Play off of people’s natural likes and dislikes and work with the weather rather than against it.

(Above: Players taking part in the Museum of Fine Arts SCVNGR trek)

3. (Earth) Gameboard:

A basic rule when building a location game is that the traveling- to-doing-stuff ratio should be really slim, like 2 to 1. For instance: 10 minutes walking, 5 minutes doing a challenge or something cool. Not 20 minutes walking or driving to answer 1 question that takes 30 seconds or could be answered on Google.

Keep a close eye to the capabilities of your gameboard. Lots of colleges around? College sports bowl game! Family neighborhood? School vacation game! If you’re running your game somewhere that people will naturally be busy and traveling through (like a train station or a science museum) run a timed, event game. If you have somewhere that people are sitting and waiting, (like an exhibit line or a sit-down restaurant), you can run something a little more casual where people can play when they feel like it.

Don’t run a tech-based game if there’s poor reception or no wifi. Make sure your players are playing in a place where they’ll feel welcome, not where they’ll get yelled at.

For a location-based game, always remember that your gameboard is the real world- NOT online. Don’t have challenges in a location game that players could answer by Google. People will resent being asked to traipse through the streets to play a game that they could have played in their living room.

4. (Generals) Community Leaders:

Being part of a big group outside is really fun. Playing alone outside in the real world is not quite as much fun. Groups are really what make games work (teams, friends, clubs) so you need leaders to help you approach those groups.

Pinpoint community influencers who will bring groups with them. School groups, church groups, universities, tweetups, sports teams, dance teams, events and companies will all enjoy having something new and fun to do with their group. To kick off your game, always personally invite existing groups and enlist the leaders of those player groups to help you. Don’t blanket market and expect people to show up by themselves to play. Once your game starts to get its own momentum and buzz, informal groups like friends and families will follow suit.

(Above: The Doppelganger Challenge in the MFA SCVNGR Trek)

5. (Law) Game Management:

It’s really key that people come to a location-based game expecting to play with the technology to play and a general idea of the rules. It is extremely difficult to catch passers-by and this is why: Step 1 in a game is to figure out the rules but when people play games, one of these three things is the case:

• People already know the rules from childhood. (football, baseball, tag);

• People learn in a closed environment from other people who already know how to play (board games, card games);

• People are at home, by themselves and can learn the game slowly without anyone bothering them and without feeling too stupid. (video games, computer games, mobile non-location games).

In a location-based game, often we surprise people when we ask them to play. (“Welcome to the museum! Would you like to try our game-based tour?) In this case, this game has totally new rules and the player has to learn them publicly and on-the-spot.

Sometimes the first thing people have to do is to admit that they don’t have the technology needed to play, which is a total bummer. Next, even if they do have the technology, they might not be savvy in running it. Also a total bummer. These things all need to be dealt with before the game player starts to play.

As a builder, you need to be proactive in showing people how to play your game before they even arrive. Make sure people know exactly what hardware is needed. Give them incentives to show up with the hardware pre- installed. Make sure there’s someone there to explain to them how to play or to answer questions. Signage is great. Directions cards are also great. Don’t leave people alone to be awkward with the game, you have to scaffold the learning so that it’s not a shock to them and they don’t feel stupid or have to say  things like “oh, I have a dumb phone” or “I’m not a techie”. This makes people defensive from the get-go and they won’t want to play.

—————————-

In short: Going into a location-based game, you want to study and work with your environment. Notice what time of year it is, if there are students, if you have an internet connection, if there’s a lot of tourism and build WITH and not against those factors. It seems obvious, but it’s often neglected (and TEST, Test, Test, Test. Did I mention test?)

To close up, people always like to hear of types of games that succeeded and failed- and why. For your viewing pleasure, here are some examples (names have been omitted to protect the innocent) of games that were not as successful as people would like, and the reasons why:

A game where the distance between question 1 and question 2 was 9 miles! (Gameboard Fail)

A game across 5 lovely neighborhoods of Boston… in February.
(Weather Fail)

A competitive location-based game with 350 locations.
(Gameboard Fail)

A game that advertised only with social media and then attempted to capture any visitor’s attention at a desk as they came in to the museum. (Leadership Fail)

A beautiful location game via Facebook that asked people to do a very complicated series of things that nobody (myself included) entirely understood how to do or why. (Management Fail)

As well as some location-based games that totally succeeded because they addressed all of the 5 environmental factors:

SCVNGR: Buffalo Wild Wings TableGate:
http://mashable.com/2011/06/01/scvngr-buffalo-wild-wings-campaign/

The Luce Foundation:  Ghosts of a Chance:
http://ghostsofachance.com/

Foursquare: The Neiman Marcus Challenge:
http://streetfightmag.com/2011/10/18/neiman-marcus-takes-a-holistic-approach-to-foursquare-promotion/

DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum: Soundscapes by Halsey Burgund:
http://www.decordova.org/art/exhibition/platform-3-halsey-burgund-scapes

Go forth, young grasshopper, and build wonderful games!! (and test them.) Have fun playing!

–

Find out more about Kellian Adams Pletcher here…

Game Mechanics? You know: points, levelling-up, challenges et cetera. Jeff Nolan (of Get Satisfaction) provides a more complete list of 18 items if you are interested. Incidentally be careful when talking about game mechanics – my wife was totally bemused when I was explaining the ins and outs of the topic – after 5 eye-glazed minutes, she said “that’s all well and good but what’s that got to do with gay mechanics?”

So far, so happy. Then I read the book Gamification by Design and after a struggle to reach the end, I had fallen out of love (you can read my review in the ¡DT! Library). It failed to convince me that anyone would do anything moderately useful in the process.

And now the creative agencies have caught onto the concept and the hype machine is really kicking off – use Gamification to enhance your brand (become friendly with your Mars Bar by playing a (virtual) game with it). It was the same with virtual reality and it was the same with augmented reality, and where did that get us?

Perhaps we should be talking about gamified reality, but therein lies the myth. The game mechanics that we now want to apply to life just about all came from life. Badges and achievements: think scouts, think OBE and MBE, or exchange the points you have accumulated in life for a knighthood! 5 star rating system: think Which? Magazine or Juke Box Jury (music rating from long before the iStore). I could go on, but why not play a little game? Go to Nolan’s list and come up with a real life example for each category.

So the truth of the matter is that when we started creating computer games, we applied “lification” (my term for stuff from real life applied to games) to make them more interesting. What Gamification proponents are really getting excited about is applying lification to, er… life. Cool.

The real reason good games are popular because they are fun, challenging and novel. They also put you in control – you make things happen; you may make mistakes but in the end you succeed. I only came across the term “agency” recently (Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy)) but this is exactly what many feel they lack in the real world. Nowhere is this more true than in politics and our voting system, and that is what inspired me to write this piece.

So having pooh-poohed the whole notion of Gamification, I am now going to do a U-turn and discuss how we can gamify democracy. But of course, I really mean: could we make it more engaging and increase our sense of agency? And here I think the other thing that is overlooked by the “gamifaction“ (proponents of Gamification) is that if you just apply the gaming methods to old constructs, then it will invariably fail from the start: think Tetris – the board game.

I was going to concentrate on 3 areas – voting, political parties (the gangs in the title) and the second house (for us in the UK, the House of Lords) and some game-like ideas that might be tried out. But I am going to dismiss the first two quickly, because even I don’t find my argument convincing.

When we think of voting we take it for granted that we mean “one man, one vote”. But is this the best way? Maybe we should start at 0.1 of a vote, maybe at an earlier age (14?) and then increase the value depending on how we use it. Don’t vote and the value goes down. Do good things and get bonus votes. 65% voted in the last general election and in local elections this may drop to 30% or lower. Would gamified voting make a difference?  It certainly means you couldn’t count by hand.

Or does it even make a difference whether you vote for Gang A or Gang B? In the past, Gang A say, represented the workers and Gang B the rich. Now they become indistinguishable as they try to second guess what you the voter is likely to favour (or less likely not to vote for). If policies made Gang A unelectable in the past, they become Gang A+ by adopting Gang B policies. Once in power, you can change your mind anyway – it’s all a game. Unfortunately it’s not one that, by any stretch of the imagination, brings us joy.

O.k. So what about the House of Lords? As mentioned previously, you get there as part of the big game called Life: collecting points, carrying out assignments and being awarded badges. But what’s this (or any other second house) for? We are told it keeps the other (important) house in check, and they do a fine job sorting out the finer points of law in committees. But in order to prevent difficulties, governments will adjust the balance in their favour by giving gongs to gang members.

But let’s face it – it’s a relic of former times when the Lords were, er… Lords. It still is, but diluted with mainly elderly and long-serving MPs, a selection of the wealthy and a sprinkling of bishops. There are probably not that many that we would choose, if election was an option. And it is an option: has been for the last hundred years. What if, however, we could form the second house from people who played another game – one with clearly-defined rules where you were awarded the prize by achievements and completing assignments – not because of who you know or donated money to?

The difficulty on the face of it is who decides what these achievements and assignments are? It stumped me for a while until I thought what if this is not just a single level but the top tier of a game that starts at a local level and goes up (maybe street / neighbourhood / town / county / region / national). Then, strangely enough, the game mechanics (again see Nolan’s list) all start to fall into place – succeed on your street, and level-up to the neighbourhood. Even if you didn’t go higher (or want to) you would still feel that you were making a contribution to where you live (sounding dangerously like Big Society, but don’t let that put you off – that was just a ruse by Gang B to appeal to voters of Gang A).

If you do move higher up, you would have gained the experience at the lower levels to contribute more effectively at the higher levels, and you would only be kept at a higher level by the support of those below you (they would keep your vitality topped up!). And this would work right the way up through the chain.

Examples of challenges at local levels could be:

• Neighbourhood watch
• Running a book club/extending library service
• Helping solve the problems of digital exclusion (e.g. for the elderly)
• Improving parks and green areas
• Working with local school
• Using your professional knowledge in a local way
• Compost recycling
• Excess fruit and produce redistribution

Areas could both compete against other areas, and help each other when methods were found to be successful. Note that most of these things are not going to be party-political, and the great thing about challenges is that they could come from the ground up as well as from the top down. In fact, they are more likely to come from the former.

By concentrating on positive issues and real projects, they would have a different emphasis from the traditional residents group (or at least ours, which spends 50% of the time talking about dog poo, and the rest finding ways to stop people doing things [mainly letting their dogs poo).

There is also real potential for a genuine social network, and fun to be had in building maps (win a trophy for creating your 3D street on Google Earth) and infographics (the “canvas” says Nolan), adding avatars, displaying your trophies, and once again this scales up level by level.

You had a chance to change our voting system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote_referendum,_2011) but you didn’t. You could have a crack at changing the political system – from joining a gang to becoming a Guy Fawkes, but you won’t. What I am suggesting, I really believe, has legs, and as you know the walk of a thousand miles starts with setting up the Facebook page. Welcome to the House of Lords Games.

Written by Richard Vahrman – Find out more about Richard here…

Quest to Learn is an example of trying to apply the lessons from games to the real-world – in this case education.

Mission critical at Quest is a translation of the underlying form of games into a powerful pedagogical model for its 6-12th graders. Games work as rule-based learning systems, creating worlds in which players actively participate, use strategic thinking to make choices, solve complex problems, seek content knowledge, receive constant feedback, and consider the point of view of others. As is the case with many of the games played by young people today, Quest is designed to enable students to “take on” the identities and behaviors of explorers, mathematicians, historians, writers, and evolutionary biologists as they work through a dynamic, challenge-based curriculum with content-rich questing to learn at its core. (Taken from the Q2L website)

So would you send your children to a school based on gamification? Find out more about the idea and how it’s doing on the Quest to Learn website.

www.q2l.com

In a nice twist on the story a new app encourages you to keep at the fitness with a little more incentive than just the dream of a perfect bod. When you sign-up to Gym-Pact you actually receive financial rewards for keeping to your gym routine, but if you don’t then it takes money directly from your bank account. Here’s the Gym-Pact promotional video to explain:

So positive reinforcement of receiving rewards when you go to the gym and the negative reinforcement of losing it when you don’t – would you sign up? You can also set up a group so you can start to compete with each other how often you workout.

I wonder about how effective financial rewards are in the long-term, or if it crosses the age groups. It reminds me of the proposal to pay kids to go to school. It may get them to school but they will only be going for the money and not actually wanting to achieve the main ambition (of learning). Remove the reward and the incentive goes altogether. Of course, the strong argument is that this is really only what happens when you get a job anyway.

If you sign-up and start using Gym-Pact then leave a comment and let us know how you’re getting along.

* For honesty’s sake I cannot pretend that this is me. I brake out in hives just thinking about the gym, but I moles who leak this info to me.

Jane McGonigal is probably the person most recognised as leading the current ‘gamification’ movement and in this book she outlines why she thinks that gaming can help in nearly every area of life.

The book is written very clearly and is peppered with examples that show how people are using game theory in a variety of different situations. Jane know that what she is saying will be alien to most people and confronts the issue that often people’s initial reaction to hearing facts about how many people play video games is ‘how can we stop them?’ Her view is that trying to stop people playing games is akin to trying to stop young people in the sixties listening to rock music. The fact that so many people are choosing to spend so much time in game worlds is a sign of something important, and to Jane it is a sign that reality is broken.

“The truth is this: in today’s society, computer and video games and fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not.”

The insights from this book are not technological but much more based in psychology; how can we change the way we approach problems and overcome this block that games are only for recreation and instead try to create a better society through games.

I have also included a video from Jane talking about how you can be more productive through using game techniques here …

Review by Paul Davies

Buy ‘Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World’ from Amazon

People enjoy computer games – therefore if you turn non-game things into games, everyone will be happy. That’s the idea, and that’s what this book is trying to tell you. But (and I guess you saw that BUT coming) the argument is not convincing. The authors describe in depth (and then in more depth) the techniques that games use (e.g points, levels, badges, power-ups) and then gives examples of non-game games that use these techniques. But (!) imho they are not very good examples.

Take for, instance, Four Square: does it make me want to use (play?) it because it gives me quirky badges? Ok, to be fair I am not your typical gamer – I liked Lemmings and SimCity – but my thoughts on gamification are that it can be a powerful tool to engage people who are not your typical gamers, and I think this is where the book fails. The last 2 chapters, a tutorial on programming a points/badge website, are out of place here and would have been happier on the associated website.

Curiously, I expect books about games and gaming to be enjoyable reading; the reality is that they are all too often rather dull (A Theory of Fun being a notable exception). I’d give the book 3 stars because it really made me start to think about what systems and processes could really benefit from gamification (see my main post on here), though I think that would have happened if I had read a good article on the subject.

Buy Gamification By Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile from Amazon here…

Review by Richard Vahrman

I read about this book in Jane McGonical’s Reality is Broken and sought it out on Ebay. Published in the mid-seventies, this book is half a guide to communal games you can play [in parks, beaches and other spaces] but the other half presents essays outlining the relevance and importance of gaming.

The book is more than just a list of games, in itself it embodies a deeper story of the counterculture movement happening in San Francisco in the seventies. One of the essays within is contributed by Stewart Brand, a counterculture pioneer who produced the Whole Earth Catalogue in the late sixties, whose vision was to provide people access to ‘tools’ with which people could realise their own visions of living, shape their environment and share their adventures with others. Anyone who has read the recent Steve Jobs book by Walter Isaacson would remember Brand’s name as being a huge inspiration for Jobs’ philosophy which influenced his groundbreaking career.

The essays within the book are:

It Began with World War IV by Andrew Fluegalman

Creating the Play Community by Bernie De Koven

Theory of Game Change by Stewart Brand

The Game of Games by George Leonard

Each essay thinks about how games can capture peoples imagination and bring them together with fun but also looks deeper into how this can be used as a tool for change and for creating better systems. In this respect this book really has led the way for the current ‘gamification’ movement and I would urge you to hunt around Ebay and your local bookshops to find this book.

Gamification is fairly new and whilst there is a lot of talk about it in blogs and forums not many authoritative books have been written on the subject. We certainly didn’t want to recommend any that we haven’t actually read so we’re asking for your opinions and reviews of any you have read which make a case for (or against) gamification.

Most people would not argue that conserving the energy we use is a good thing. However, the reality is that saving and being prudent is dull. It’s just not something that gets most of us excited. We know it’s better for the world and it will actually save us money too. Logically it make perfect sense but emotionally it’s very hard to motivate yourself.

Mechanically our brains handle this conflicting data in very different ways. Our logic and reasoning takes place in the most modern part of our brain, the pre-frontal cortex (the grey matter that Mr Poirot is so fond of), but our emotions come from an older part of the brain, the mid-brain. Whilst we are one entity, the parts of our brain act independently with the cortex handling the rational decisions and the mid-brain responsible for our emotions. If you have ever experienced really wanting to buy something even though you know you can’t really afford it then you have felt the battle between the two areas of your brain. Advertisers know that the emotional brain will influence your behaviour more than the rational part of the brain and play to this, after all that’s why a Happy Meal is not just called ‘a smaller meal for children’). For more on emotional advertising you can read Neuromarketing’s blog post on the subject.

So how can you make saving energy fun and engaging for our emotional brain? Well, some have looked to ‘gamification’ for the answer.

The Wattson energy monitor
Energy monitors are a perfect example of a product that plays on the rational. If we can see how much energy we are using then we will consider our energy efficiency and do our best to cut down. Perfectly logical, except that it doesn’t work. Everyone I know has one, used it for a month or so and it now sits idle in the corner of the room. Now on the face of it the Wattson energy monitor, designed by DIY Kyoto, is no different. OK, it does look a lot nicer but it still just tells you how much energy you are using (data that plays to our rational brain). However, it’s the software that comes with it (ingeniously called Holmes) which uses an element of game mechanics which makes it interesting.

The Holmes software allows you to link to other Wattson owners to compare your energy use. Much like the energy bills from OPOWER mentioned in a previous ¡DT! article this awakens our competitive streak and the need to do better than the Jones’s. Would you save more energy and strive for lower bills if you felt your neighbours were doing better than you?

–

Energy Monitor iPhone App
There are now lots of iPhone apps which let you see your home energy data. However, I came across a lovely little iPhone app which is a little braver and asks you to take part in energy challenges. Segmented into energy sections such as ‘Space Heating’, ‘Lighting’ and ‘Transport’ it asks you to take steps to being more energy efficient. Tasks such as:

Turn the heating in living areas down to 20ºC, hallways and bedrooms should be cooler – ideally 15-18ºC.

Tick that particular task off within the app to increase your personal energy score. Once you have passed a certain level it opens up a quiz which you can take for more credits. OK, the quiz is a little more like a test than a fun thing to do but I like that this is starting to play a little more to the notion of having fun whilst doing good.

Note: I haven’t included a link as since it seems to have disappeared from my phone and also from the app store. If you find it, do please let me know.

–

WWF 60+ App
The World Wildlife Fund have taken the idea of gamifying for change even further. Made to promote and enhance Earth Hour, the app asks people to sign-up to pledges to do their bit for the planet. The app presents you with a set of acts that you try to complete with the idea of tring to increase your achievements. It encourages you to share these achievements with your social network friends to help bring a healthy dose of competition and you collect badges as you go along.

The app was developed by Leo Burnett and you can see how they were influenced by the social-location services such as Foursquare and Gowalla. You can still download the app from the App Store to take part in Earth Hour 2012 on 31st March.

–

Our Green Trail
Finally, Our Green Trail was a project developed for the Boston Children’s Museum by Nina Simon and colleagues. The website invited people to create their own green home within an online environment. The challenge is to improve your home in the game and turn it into a truly green abode. However, you don’t carry out these improvements by interacting online but instead by carrying out activities in the real world, around your own home. Like the WWF 60+ app you are encouraged to take action with challenges such as:

Be a kitchen energy monitor
Be a kitchen energy monitor for the week and remind grown-ups to put a lid on it! This uses energy more efficiently. Also remember to use burners and pots that are the same size. Burners that are too large for the pot waste energy because all the heat that should be going to a pan is instead going into the air. (Estimated Time: 15-20 mins)

The site has all the mechanics that define gamification; challenges, award points, sharing, levelling-up, competition and uses them in a really enjoyable way. A lovely touch is that not only can you recruit other families to create a whole village within the website but you can then share your energy ideas and work together to make it a communal and fun experience. You can read more about this project and others from Nina Simon in her wonderful book ‘The Participatory Museum’ which you can read for free on her website.