Happy new year!
2013 was a fantastic year for gamification and the Gamification Co team. To start off the new year right, we would like to show you some of our top posts from the last year. Check back daily for our top posts in enterprise, education, health, op-eds, and staff pieces.
Starting off the new year, we’d like to share some of the top articles for gamification in enterprise.
Would you believe in the participatory power of TV if we told you NBC/Universal raised their Suits Recruits game’s user base from 40,000 to 400,000 in just 3 years?
NBC/Universal was an early gamification pioneer, using the techniques to drive unprecedented engagement with fans across a wide range of properties and brands. Now, after several years of implementing these techniques, the company’s USA Network continues to set the standard for major media brands. In this GSummit SF 2013 talk, NBC/Universal SVP Jesse Redniss shares the insights, challenges and keys to success for their blockbuster fan engagement programs.
Want more GSummit videos? Be sure to also subscribe to our YouTube channel to get the latest videos from GSummit SF 2013 as they’re released. You can also download a copy of this presentation by downloading it here.
The successor to the Xbox 360 was just announced about an hour ago and we finally have a name for Microsoft’s next generation console: Xbox One
Many features about the Xbox One looked really impressive, especially the new high-fidelity Xbox Kinect sensor and voice commands but the most significant take-away for gamifiers is the presence of a TV tuner and a nifty little feature called “snap-mode.”
For people who still watch regular broadcast television, it has become very common to actually watch TV while simultaneously using your laptop, phone, or tablet. Savvy networks like USA/NBC have picked up on this and created gamified mobile companion applications to engage with users as they both watch TV and browse on the net. There are compelling case-studies that outline the efficacy of this concept, coined the second screen, but I have not really seen any other kinds of engagement tactics for viewers. However, I found inspiration for new possible ways from the gamer community, and more specifically, the Dota 2 community.
Coca-Cola has really been innovating with their marketing campaigns worldwide. We saw one Coke vending machine challenge mall visitors to dance for free Coke in South Korea. And another Coke machine challenged commuters to be James Bond in Europe to promote the release of Skyfall. Apparently, Coke isn’t done with using gamification for marketing as the Harvard Business Review blog shed some light on their Chok campaign — an initiative Coca-Cola claims to be the best Hong Kong marketing campaign they’ve accomplished in 35 years.
Have you ever watched a mystery show and found yourself yelling at the television set “come on guys, the clue is right there!”? Have you ever solved the mystery within the first 10 minutes, only to find out at the end that you were right the entire time? How many times have you thought you should be the ones solving the case?
Well, now you can be.
Following the success of the Emmy-nominated game Hashtag Killer, PSYCH The S#cial Sector is a multiplatform game that allows fans of the series Psych to upload video content, play games, examine evidence, and post to a theory wall for the entire 8-week duration of the mystery.
IndieCade is a festival celebrating the works of independent game designers from all over the world and this past weekend was Indiecade’s inaugural appearance on the east coast at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. Attending this game festival from a gamification angle, I was looking for new and exciting ways to engage with an audience.
One of the main events was the game Renga by UK-based WallFour, who specialize in live, large-scale collaborative crowdgames. In other words, when I read that Renga was going to be a feature-length game for 100 people with laser pointers, I was sold.
Its amazing that the sole act of watching TV has been replaced with watching TV while on your phone/laptop/tablet. And thus the concept of the “second screen” is born. We’ve become such distracted and consumption driven individuals that no one medium of entertainment is enough for our brains. While this may sound like a negative thing at first, nobody really understood the inherent synergy that exists between these two devices if they’re being used to consume the same media together. That is…until Jesse Redniss saw this opportunity and became one of the earliest pioneers of gamification for television media.
