SXSW Dispatch, Part 4: Playing Around at SXSW

Some people go to SXSW to learn. Some people go to SXSW to play. And some people go SXSW to learn about play.

We fit squarely into the last category, (no really, we got the Panel Nerd badge on foursquare to prove it!) but this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to regular readers. After all, we’ve been talking about inserting games into everyday tasks for quite a while on The Awesome Blog. Since pretty we’re familiar with this concept, let’s dive right into a slew of great examples from Kickstarter.com’s Andy Baio.

Baio described a number of situations in which gaming mechanics were used to motivate employees, staff, or volunteers. For instance, Target started giving their cashiers grades based on the speed of their checkouts (as illustrated here). Best of all, the rating system was so easy (G=Green, Y=Yellow, and R=Red) that even a caveman could… oh, never mind. And, low and behold, as soon as cashiers realized they could improve their grades by speeding up their transactions, a lot of friendly competition broke out among them. (Target rarely uses the scores to evaluate the employees, except in especially bad situations.) The Panic software company instituted a more complex scoring system for their employees (pictured above), ranking them on everything from revenue generation to customer responsiveness, but the central ideas were the same: accountability, instant feedback, and the ability to compare yourself to your peers. The Obama campaign even used this kind of system to motivate their volunteer canvassers, ranking them on a leaderboard based on how many people they had contacted. That seems to have worked out well for them, I’d say.

But, the fun and games aren’t confined to the workplace. As we mentioned in our earlier post, gaming can be great way for brands to help ease their consumers through the more mundane tasks in their day. For instance, like it or not, most of us need to be fluent in Microsoft Office programs to get through our workdays. At the same time, we often don’t have a clue as to what most of those little icons on the toolbar actually do. So, Microsoft took it upon themselves to create Ribbon Hero – yes, really. The “game” is little more than a training module that assigns you points for completing various challenges (i.e. using the lesser-known tools), but it sure as heck beats reading the manual, right? Even hybrid cars have found a way to make efficient driving more game-like (since we all know it’s way more fun to drive recklessly), such as the Ford Fusion Hybrid’s SmartGauge pictured to the right. When you drive more fuel-efficiently, the vine continues to grow, and… well, that’s it. But, it was enough to make Wired’s reviewers gush, “It turns hypermiling into a videogame… We almost cheered whenever another leaf appeared.”

So, what is it about these gaming mechanisms that make us so predictable? Are they playing on some deep-seated psychological needs that we simple humans just can’t resist? Um, yeah, basically. But it’s not as sinister as it sounds; in essence, we’re just talking about different forms of incentivization. What you’re incentivizing people to do is your own business, Mr. Wall Street CEO. In the meantime, Baio groups these mechanisms into four main categories:

• Feedback (Points, Metrics, Levels) – Ways for the consumer to track his or her progress in real-time. However, keep in mind that generating points for points’ sake can become monotonous, and often distracts the user away from the bigger task behind the game. (This is actually why foursquare may be moving away from points. We’ll get to them, really!)
• Goals (Missions, Challenges, Quests) – Giving the consumer a clear goal or a well-defined challenge helps them know when they are close to completing the task. If you were 90% of the way there, you wouldn’t stop, right?
• Recognition (Awards, Achievements, Collectibles) – Well you certainly wouldn’t stop at 90% if you knew you were getting a gold star at the end!
• Community (Competition*, Collaboration, Reciprocity) – This is something that has really changed with the advent of the internet. It’s never been easier to engage in gaming as part of a community, whether it’s competing against a larger population or collaborating with them.

However, there’s a reason for that little asterisk after “competition.” In his experience, Baio has found that leaderboards can be a little too effective in stimulating competition. Oftentimes, participants jockeying for the top few positions become hyper-competitive to the point that the rest of the community feels excluded. (I’d say this image is a nice illustration of the phenomenon.) Instead, Baio suggests tapping the other end of the social spectrum: collaboration. As evidenced by the enormous success of Farmville (which we’ve covered before), making some tasks dependent on collaboration and reciprocity ends up uniting the community around a common goal, and generally establishes positive behaviors as the norm. That is, if you consider 8 hours of virtual farming to be a positive behavior…

More SXSW coverage is right around the corner!