Previously I wrote about the differences between gamification and games. Although applying game theory to an activity does not automatically means that the activity is a game, game theory does aid in engagement and relationship building.

Amy Kim from Shufflebrain generously shares her Gamification Workshop materials on slideshare, and it's a must-read for all of us who are interested in applying game theory.

There's a heavy emphasis on player journey, and what game theory does is to facilitate users moving in the journey. It is notable that this player journey is never a linear one. Even when a novice grows into an expert, it's logical that he can fall back to a regular [less than an expert] if he just stops playing as much. 

While gamification might sound like the perfect solution to our marketing challenges, it's not an one size fits all solution. What gamification really does is to facilitate the journey of engagement, not acquisition. So if you are planning for impulsive purchase behaviour, applying game theory wouldn't be suitable. But if you are planning to create long-lasting platform and to increase loyalty, game theory may really be something you might want to think about.

Perhaps what we should really learn from the game designers is how they craft a 'world' with details. Often, when we are designing user journeys, we may not be in control of how they play and why they play. That is where game mechanics could come in to place, adding in mechanics that facilitate and motivate playing. Not to mention - also adding in the really important 'fun' factor. 

Giving a glimpse into what the future of control could look like, Disney showed off their technological experiments that turn everyday objects into remote controls.

Disney's new sensor project - Touché - can give any surface or object a touch interface using touch sensing technology. With Touché, you can turn any object, even your own body, into touch interfaces. The video above shows how you can use merely hand gestures to start & stop music. 

While the project has yet announced any release date, it's never too late to start thinking about how the upcoming tech can integrate into & improve our daily lives. 

Objects can be given new purposes & functions. The technology can facilitate monitoring response as well. Here're some possible uses across different industries & functions:

1. Medical: In monitoring patients' response & behaviour.
2. Robotic: Facilitate machines' controls, allowing machines to respond with touch. For instance, a human droid can now differentiate a pat & a scratch, allowing them to respond differently.
3. Entertainment: Using different objects & even your own body as remote control for devices. For example, giving a new way to game by using objects as controllers.
4. Training: Intepreting gestures, behaviours & responses & provide different instructions to facilitate training. For instance, if paired with Augmented Reality technology,  Touché can train mechanical engineers more efficiently by giving more precise instructions.
5. Consumer Research: Track & record how consumers interact with objects in retail settings. If paired with 'Internet of Things' technology, marketers can track response & interaction real-time.
6. Experiential events: Interpreting & returning a wider range of responses to advance the Touch aspect of 5-senses.

We're all familiar with movie promotions. The blockbuster poster, PR buzz, partnerships & etc. To stand out from the rest & score at the box office, some movies have taken an approach a little different. 

42 Entertainment's alternate reality game (ARG) for 'The Dark Knight' is one of the best & most famous ARG campaigns. It's also for one of my favourite movies. Tapping on the already large fanbase for Batman, the Dark Knight's 'Why so Serious' campaign have players as supporters for the Joker. They investigate & discover secrets behind the upcoming film through web, mobile, scavenger hunts & etc. An ultimate blend of game-theory & transmedia storytelling.

The movie 'Chronicle' follows 3 high-school friends who gain superpowers, including the ability to fly. Taking inspiration from this, viral marketing agency Thinkmodo created a viral stunt with human-shaped RC planes flying around New York city to create the illusion of flying humans!

To promote the movie 'Contagion' (which was such a disappointment), Warner Bros Canada teamed up with microbiologists  to create billboards made entirely from bacteria (no kidding!). Acting like a petri dish, the bacteria infested board slowly revealed the movie title 'Contagion' - which is also about viruses & infection.

The first 'Paranormal Activity' movie was exclusive, so exclusive that fans have to demand for the movie to come to their town. No, just kidding. The campaign was built on the value of scarcity & focused on buzz creation in social media. As the movie got a million Eventful.com demands, Paramount decided to open it up for a nationwide release. What a great method for generating buzz during pre-screening!

The beginning of the movie 'District 9' (another one of my favourite films) felt like a documentary, making the District 9 world feel like reality. The communication strategy followed the same footsteps by bringing the District 9 world into reality through TV, radio & outdoor ads, which all mimic propaganda ads warning residents about non-human sighting. The messaging drove viewers to a site housing a wealth of content, alien 'rules' & 'career opportunities'. 

In transmedia storytelling, we often focus on depth. Comics can be a great for telling characters’ backstories, games allow fans to explore the fictional world, etc. With the deep fictional world created, how would you attract audiences? Would you create extra benefits (such as incentives) in hope that the additional layer will generate activity? If you said yes, would the audience you attracted be participating because they are genuinely interested or would their main reason for participation be the extra benefit you have imposed? What would entice audience to be genuinely interested in the content you’re creating? I believe that the best answer is Curiosity.

Curiosity drives the thirst for knowledge. It’s the feeling you get when you’re dying to know something. According to George Loewenstein’s ‘Information Gap Theory of Curiosity’, curiosity happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge. I believe it’s one of the most appropriate theories to apply for the context of transmedia storytelling. To take away the pain caused by the information gap, we need to fill it in. If you overheard your other half talking about something & you ask him/her about it, you’re curious because of the information gap.

Knowing that there’s something you didn’t know about creates the information gap. For the transmedia storytelling curators who want to utilize the information gap theory to drive curiosity, we need to first open these information gaps. In the book ‘Made To Stick’, the Heath brothers propose a couple of ways:

• Highlighting specific knowledge that they are missing – If you have continue reading on this post because you wanted to know more, perhaps you’ve fell for this. 
• Pose a question or puzzle that confront their knowledge – This is how trivia works; by posing a question & making you spend time finding out how to solve it because you feel the information gap. 
• Ask them to predict the outcome – Drama episodes always continue the never-ending storyline in the next episode so you stay curious & continue watching. 
• Give them a situation with unknown resolution – How many of us discussed about or even searched on Google if Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) finally met up with his family in the end of Inception film?

On top of these, I believe that we need to ensure a strong linkage between content across different channels/mediums. For instance, if the mystery in the web series can be answered in the comics, we have to ensure that the audience knows where to look at next. It can through search optimization, or purely simple hyperlinks. Also, it’s important to have something for audience looking for different levels of depth. For example, casual viewers may just watch the TV series, but those looking for more answers can explore the world through a video game.

More & more companies [including carriers] are turning their heads to the potentials of rural areas, as the mobile industry in the cities is becoming over-saturated.

As we all know, the differences in rural regions do affect technological growth, as literacy still pose a problem. Worldwide, there may be around 793 million illiterate people.

Computer scientist Hendrik Knoche recognizes the need to simplify & solve literacy problem before we can introduce more advanced technology to rural areas. The result, easySMS, lets users compose their own messages by highlighting single words from incoming messages, playing them aloud, and copying and pasting them into new messages. The application also contains a small dictionary of common words and phrases.

On the other hand, Skype will also be introducing the Mobile Partner Program for operators in markets with low 3G penetration. The program allows access to Skype services through minimum data usage, allowing those in low-3G areas to still be able to communicate with the rest of the world easily through voice & video.

Taking communications further, France telecom Orange is taking the initiative to introduce basic features of Facebook to users without a smartphone and 3G connectivity. The service is already available in Africa, with over 350,000 users within the first month of introduction.

In the next few years, mobile communication in rural regions will definitely be evolving, and that’s something worth to watch.

I'm not usually much of a TV watcher, as I rather spend my limited leisure time on movies & games instead. But recently, I was introduced to a short UK series, Black Mirror, which I was really impressed.

Black Mirror is a 3-episode series created by Charlie Brooker for Channel 4 last year. All 3 episodes are essentially commentary about how technology affects the society, personal lives & interpersonal relations in an exaggerated & dramatic fashion. The episodes are separate; having different setting & characters. 

The series begin with "The National Anthem", set in today's world where social media is changing news reporting & how messages are spread. It shows that while the world has access to much more information than ever, the transparency may not always be for the better, as the lack of control will soon create problems - illustrated in the episode as a form of media terrorism.

The second episode "15 Million Merits" is set in the far-future world full of vast warehouse where people work to ride on exercise bikes to generate kilowatts that power up the world full of screens. Imagine the film The Island, controlled by the media. Work is gamified, and workers earn credits to buy food, media content, pay penalty to skip brainwashing media content & decorate your virtual avatar. The only way out is to enter a star-search contest, but the entrance fee costs a bomb as well, what a scam. For me, I see the episode as an exaggeration of how we're consumed by today's media, as what io9 described as being "lulled into forgetting (our) own degradation". Perhaps, also a commentary on our chase for materialism and even recently, virtual materialism.

The final episode "The Entire History of You" is also set in the future, but much more similar to our world today. In this episode, all humans are implanted with "the grain", a tiny computer chip behind your ear that stores all your memories - what you saw & heard. Everyone is able to share their memories with one another by projecting what they've seen onto monitors, and even zoom in on details. The problems that Charlie Brooker chose to present are i) how humans would rely on the chip for their 'memories', as they no longer trust what they interpret & remember, ii) how humans rewind back & zoom into details, over-analyzing & focusing on the past rather than the future, and iii) lastly, privacy issues, as we no longer can totally protect our secrets. Looks like what a Facebook Timeline could look like in the future.

While game mechanics have long been applied to encourage behaviours – for instance, air mileage, the concept of gamification has only stepped into the spotlight in recent years. The trend is expected to rise, as Gartner predicts that “by 2015, more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes.”

As the word spreads, many are pondering what gamification is and how we can apply it to increase engagement & retention. It’s no doubt that one would ask if gamification is equivalent to games.

Let’s start with the definitions of both:

Game: In his book Les jeux et les hommes, French sociologist Roger Caillois define a game as an activity that has the following characteristics:

• Fun
• Separate – in time & place, as a separate environment/world.
• Uncertain – outcome is unforeseeable
• Non-productive – solely for the purpose of fun
• Governed by rules
• Fictitous – exist in a different reality

Not only would video games fit into Caillois’ definition, but board games & children games [to a certain extent] do as well.

Gamification: The use of game mechanics [such as achievement levels & leader boards] to enhance non-game context in order to engage & encourage desired behaviours. For instance, checking in at different locations unlocks badges on Foursquare, and on Nike+, we see a competitive leaderboard of other runners’ stats.

Matching this to Caillois’ definition of a game, a gamified activity may not fit in as a game:

• Governed by rules - Check
• Uncertain – it depends, but largely a no since most gamified activities lead to a desired behavior
• Fictitous & Separate – Uncheck, but there are exceptions; for instance, the running mobile app ‘Zombies, Run!’ creates a separate environment of a zombie apocalypse using augmented sound.
• Fun – Again, it largely depends. While checking in at various locations may be fun, how fun does gamified chores sound?
• Non-productive – Uncheck mostly.

Despite the incompatible fit with the traditional concept of games, it doesn’t mean that gamification is purely useless. People have been enjoying games for a long time. Now, more & more people are borrowing game elements to try & add in a bit of fun to and create better reasons for our daily lives & actions.

We usually see the projection mapping technique applied on buildings and cars. Now, for probably one of the first times, we're seeing projection mapping on a human for Samsung's latest dual-SIM card smartphone Galaxy Y Duos. Results? Pretty funky. If you remember the insane immersive movie experience for Sony PlayStation@Store, I wonder what would happen if you combine technology of these 2 spots.

It's been a long time since I grabbed my camera out of the drybox primarily for a shoot. Reasons why are a secret for now, but I'd like to share with you some pictures that I've taken nevertheless.

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urban-suburban-singapore-night-for-day-gdkaGovfEafEnznkcrse.zip (653 KB)

(download)

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urban-suburban-singapore-night-for-day-wntneghdqlhnbfhyscwc.zip (1 MB)

Google's Memories for the Future [Mirai e no kioku] is a website designed to help people rediscover lost memories of their homes & towns in the wake of the Mar 11 2011 earthquake & tsunami. 

Many people lost their lives, their homes, and all their precious memories collected over generations. Among the things lost were precious photos and videos — cherished images of family, friends, pets and once-in-a-lifetime events, buried in rubble or washed to sea. 

The site helps share their photos and videos, and provide Street View imagery collected before and after the disaster. 

(download)

Click here to download:

google-memories-for-the-future-rdneGesinfBGDHzcamBE.zip (201 KB)