First the students were offered two rewards if we, the parents, watch them without the students - a pencil and a chance in a drawing for some books. Simple enough, but to make sure we watch them a secret word was included in each video. We had to watch the videos, write down the secret words, and then give the words to our daughter to unscramble. Once unscrambled, written on the form and brought to class she gets her reward.

I was impressed with how clever this was - the scavenger hunt for the word inside each video, the puzzle to engage the student, and the reward to get them to follow through. A great way to get us to spend the 20 minutes, and a great case study for other schools, as well as content required by compliance in a corporate setting. Or Dharma.

So what do I mean by gaming reality? Games are powerful. And to be more specific, the elements of games when thoughtfully applied. Game designers have a toolbox of elements or ‘game mechanics’ to engage people — narrative, level-ups, points, data-rich information dashboards, replayability, game clocks, antagonists, social competition, ranks, reputation, achievements, missions, quests, progressive and adaptive levels of difficulty, real-time feedback, scavenger hunts, easter eggs, gear, gold, ‘rares’ and so on — and the elements in this toolbox can be applied to everyday life.

How can they be applied? One way, as my Co-Baxter likes to point out, is overlaying elements of games on top of activities where people are already playing a game or doing an activity that can be gamed, but don’t realize it. Take driving a car or running as examples. Honda uses a game mechanic on their dashboard called Eco-Assist(tm) to nudge people into driving in an environmentally friendly way. The nudge is accomplished thusly:

A sophisticated feedback system uses both ambient color behind the speedometer to indicate efficiency [1] as you drive and an Eco Guide display to provide feedback on your braking and acceleration to help you drive more efficiently [1]. A cumulative Eco Score scoring system provides ongoing support.

Despite the incredibly non-fun, non-game corporate gobbledy gook description, the interface isn’t bad, and has shades of our Garden project.

An exercise-related example is Nike+, which uses challenges, competition and a dashboard to get people to “Set a goal, track your progress and find the motivation to become an even better runner.” Good stuff, this, and I’ll be sure to use it to train if I’m fortunate enough to make the Annapurna Circuit trek before it’s too late.

In these examples driving & running are both acting as game controllers. In our work at NB, we are exploring a bevy of behaviors at school and work that can be turned into game controllers and combined with other game elements to increase engagement. I won’t list them all here (don’t want to give away too much of our thinking), but some mundane but (we believe) powerful examples are keeping a clean email inbox (reduction of corporate email storage costs), timely reporting of billable hours and expenses, regular attention to health and wellness programs and maintenance medications, school attendance, and homework completion.

Let’s shift gears from application of games at school and work and have a look at this amazing example of using games to clean up the environment, courtesy of the Pervasive Games blog: Estonian volunteers of Teeme Ära 2008 cleaned up their whole country in a single day.

Game on indeed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hat Tip for ‘elements of fun’ to Carl Haggarty’s awesome post about increasing citizen engagement with applied gaming in government, World of GovCraft

And thanks dad, for describing this crazy venture as using games to do ‘important work’.

PS I must say that I am flattered that my quote ‘you don’t need virtual worlds when you can game reality’ made it into the EVOKE press release that appeared on the Somali Research & Education Network website. It’s fun to be global, especially when working from my humble abode on an old MacBook in Missouri.

PSS Here’s Jane’s awesome 20-minute TED talk themed ‘Design like you give a damn’, Gaming Can Make a Better World:

So have a look at Total Engagement of the Massively Multiplayer Workforce for Natron Baxter’s first take.

P.S. They even have a chapter titled “Play is Not the Opposite of Work,” which echoes our mantra “Fun is Not the Enemy of Work.” How cool is that?

As some of you are aware, I have been helping with the design and development of an Alternate Reality Game about pandemic flu called Coral Cross. In light of the recent outbreak of swine flu we’ve had to adjust our approach. I’m excited to write we are continuing our work, shifting from an “alternate reality game” to a “reality game” - and are exploring methods of engagement and very-near-future-forecasting that can be applied in real-time to this emerging health crisis. The landing page now reads:

“Coral Cross was designed as the world’s first global flu pandemic alternate reality game. However, just weeks before the scheduled launch, an extraordinary coincidence occurred: an actual global outbreak of swine flu made the fictional premise redundant.

The flu crisis is now real. And so is Coral Cross.

On behalf of the Hawaii Department of Health, the design team at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies is now adapting the game to provide a unique site for real-time futures exploration. Coral Cross will help people actively respond to the risks of the current influenza threat (as well as future challenges), keep informed, share stories and concerns, and maintain vigilance as the situation unfolds.”

For some more background, read This is not a game by Stuart Candy.

Moleskine 04: Further refinements of the interface. Drawing on right shows affordances and triple encoding of played cards: color, location and context.

In addition to sharing the design process and concepts, I also hope that this will serve as a forum for feedback and suggestions, not just from peers and colleagues, but also from thought experiment participants. All comments, critiques and suggestions are welcome in the comments section of this post.

[Before you get bored with all this text, there are lots of pictures down below.]

Project Overview

Client: Institute for the Future
Game Concept & Design: Jane McGonigal
Scenario Development: Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Scenario Research: Signtific & IFTF Staff
Chief Signtist: Mathias Crawford
Signtific Team: Jane McGonigal, Mathias Crawford, Natalie Villalobos, Cesar Castro, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Technical Architect: Afraaz Ali @ Appnovation
Drupal Web Development: Appnovation
Timeline: December 2008 - February 2009 (approx. 8 weeks)
Hard Deadline: Webstock keynote address, February 18, 2009
Public Launch: February 18, 2009
First Day Stats: 1,414 cards played / 202 players from 5 continents / 2,295 unique visitors
URL: http://lab.signtific.org

Principles

1. serious science
2. does not appear to be a game
3. play fast
4. tweet-length to make contributions less daunting and easier to riff
5. scan card text fast
6. reload page obsessively to watch score
7. 100s of simultaneous players
8. conference key note announcements to launch
9. players can play as many cards as they like
10. video introduction
11. content managed by game masters
12. cards can be embedded on blogs
13. cards have their own urls
14. experiments have limited timeframe
15. publicly available in read-only mode afterward
16. game masters can ban players and remove all their cards
17. game masters can highlight cards
18. optimized for google analytics and seo
19. javascript support required, degrading ajax is not
20. let content stand on its own
21. avoid popularity and digg effects

Description
[You may want to skip ahead to the mind maps and wireframes at the bottom of this post, and then refer back to this text description. My words may fail where my diagrams succeed. You may also refer to this blog post titled "I Want: Signtific Lab" by Nikki Pugh, which provides a clear, concise description of the site.]

The core concepts for the game are thought experiments, cards and players. Each thought experiment is a provocative question about a research-backed possible future or trend. (For an example, see Facts Behind Free Space, which provides background for the first thought experiment.) The context for the question is set with a movie explaining the scenario. The players then respond to the question by playing “cards” with their ideas on what might happen as a result of the scenario/question. Each “card” is a short, Twitter-length response. At the first level players are able to play 2 card types: Dark Imagination and Positive Imagination. After the first level a chain reaction is created where players can play 4 card types in response to the previous cards: Momentum, Antagonism, Adaptation and Investigation. As cards are played, players earn forecasting points and can monitor their progress on their dashboard, which also provides feedback on the ratio of card types (strengths) played. The combination of forecasting points and strengths serve as a feedback loop to keep players engaged. At the end of the thought experiment, researchers are able to mine the cards to uncover interesting ideas and outliers, information which can be used by futurists to create forecasts for a particular technology.

From the Moleskine: Original Notes & Concepts

Moleskine 01: Notes and sketches from the first meeting with Jane in December 2008.

Moleskine 02: More notes from the first meeting.

Moleskine 03: Starting to get a sense of the interface at the turn of the new year. Scribbles contributed by Phoebe, age 2.

Moleskine 04: Further refinements of the interface. Drawing on right shows affordances and triple encoding of played cards: color, location and context.

Mind Maps
The following models were created using NovaMind Platinum. NovaMind, in my opinion, is an excellent modeling tool when you want to develop maps rapidly (in minutes) and keep them simple. These models were instrumental in communicating the core concepts to the development team, so they could develop the domain model and underlying architecture before the rest of the design was completed.

Mind Maps for the core concepts of the site: Experiment, Trial, Card and Player Profile.

Wireframes
The following wireframes were created using OmniGraffle. OmniGraffle, like NovaMind, is hands-down the best tool for rapidly creating wireframes. Again, in minutes, not hours. The large library of user interface design stencils and the smart-guides that are displayed as you move elements make OG a must-have. (In the interest of full disclosure, I’m ashamed to admit that until recently I was a PC guy and struggled with Visio, the cramped usability of PC notebooks, and the annoyances of Windows. If you’re doing interaction design on a PC in Visio or PowerPoint, do yourself a favor and STOP RIGHT NOW. Microsoft should just shrivel up and die - just leave us with C#, XBOX and MS Office.)

The wireframes were circulated for feedback. Once reviewed and discussed, they were passed to the development team so they could implement the user interface blocks, nodes and rough out the themes, and also to visual design to create the comps.

Wireframe 01: The experiment page with the video, initial provocation and ability to play two card types.

Wireframe 02: Showing the AJAX drawer open.

Wireframe 03: Showing the second level, once a card has been played.

Wireframe 04: Details for the card and AJAX response drawer.

Wireframe 05: The player profile / dashboard showing score, favorites and cards played.

Visual Design Comps

Comp 01: This is the original comp for the landing page which routes players to different experiments. Credit: Big Wide Sky.

Comp 02: This is the original comp for the experiment page with the video and initial provocation. Credit: Big Wide Sky.

Comp 03: This is the original comp for the card page. Credit: Big Wide Sky.

Implementation & Playtests

The site was implemented in Drupal by Appnovation. We had two rounds of playtests, which tested the usability of the design, as well as the concept itself: is good content generated by the design. As a result of the playtests we identified a few bugs in the implementation, some missing features, and some usability flaws.

Issues Identified:

1. Insufficient affordance on the card tray
2. Insufficient feedback when a card is played
3. Trays hidden at 1024×768
4. Forecasting points are hidden
5. No indicator when a card has follow-ups: drill-in only to hit back when no follow-ups
6. Truncated tweets a distraction
7. Text difficult to read on some displays
8. Top navigation is crowded
9. Listing of cards needed in one place
10. Display issues in Internet Explorer (shock surprise: YOU SUCK INTERNET EXPLORER)

Each of these issues were addressed for the final version of the site, as you can see in the screenshots below. And props to the Appnovation theme-team for their serious CSS Jedi skills on the display issues.

Screenshot 01: In this screenshot of the experiment home page, you can see the adjustments that were made as a result of testing. The text is higher contrast, the forecasting points are persistent in top right on all pages, the tray affordances are pronounced and visible at 1024×768, and the top navigation has been broken up into two sections: primary nav in the top right, and secondary nav in the “more future” menu. Taken 19 FEB 2009 1024×768 Mac OSX Firefox 3.

Screenshot 02: In this screenshot of the card page, you can see the additional adjustments that were made to this page. The first list of follow-up cards is visible at 1024, the phrase HAS FOLLOW-UP CARDS! is included and the entire tweet text is displayed. We purposely use the binary HAS FOLLOW-UP CARD! instead of an account to avoid players gravitating to popular content - we want each item to stand on its own and be read by all. Also note the primary nav includes a real-time card feed, which provides an RSS listing of all cards played. Taken 19 FEB 2009 1024×768 Mac OSX Firefox 3.

Additional Features

• Ability to favorite cards for easy access on dashboard.
• Leaderboard showing the top 100 in forecasting points.
• RSS feed of cards marked super-interesting by Lab Guides.
• Complete Drupal CMS for managing content, including blocking players and editing/deleting content.

Additional Features for Lab Guides
The game is not completely self-contained. There are a handful of Lab Guides who monitor the site for exciting content and “stoke the fire” of engagement. Features provided in-game are a super-interesting flag, which allows Lab Guides to feature content. Lab Guides can also delete offensive content on the spot. We use Twitter to broadcast tinyurls to interesting content, and live blog game progress and achievements. The Lab Guides use Google Reader to monitor cards in real-time, and tag them to create hands that can be used in blog post storylines at a later date.

Analytics
In addition to Google Analytics, we also use StatCounter for real-time monitoring of the site. Two of my favorite features in StatCounter are the Recent Visitor Map and the Recent Visitor Activity, which automatically performs reverse IP lookup for visitors, so if their IP is associated with a particular company or organization, it is included in the report. Here’s a screenshot of the Recent Visitor Map, which shows the global reach of Signtific Lab on the first day.

Recent Visitor Map on Signtific Lab on 18 FEB 2009.

Conclusion
I hope this post provides sufficient background on the design of Signtific Lab, a process that was completed in a very short timeframe. I am fortunate to have worked with such a talented group of individuals on this project. It is far from perfect, but it successfully meets the objectives of generating interesting content and keeping players engaged.

All comments, critiques and suggestions are welcome in the comments section of this post.