[Crowd Leader] Ville Miettinen: Play the game of life

As every parent knows, children are expert game designers. The average 8-year old can turn any boring task into an epic adventure. Going for a walk becomes a quest to fight a fire-breathing dragon (an especially time consuming battle when the walk is to school in the morning). The supermarket is a labyrinth, with fabulous treasure hidden in the chocolate aisle.

Sadly, as adults, we have to live in the real world. Companies may encourage workers to “be creative”, but pretending your office-floor is made of lava is generally a bad career move (unless you work for Google where it’s probably company policy). However, the recent rise of “real-life gaming” may mean that soon we’ll all be rediscovering our inner child.

Swedes just want to have fun

Like children, game designers take fun seriously. In his book The Theory of Fun For Game Design, gaming expert Raph Koster defines fun as: “the feedback the brain gives us when we are absorbing patterns for learning purposes.”

Computer games are “learning patterns” that stimulate so much fun feedback that they become addictive (sometimes with fatal results). Games are fun; fun gets people hooked. So, how about using game techniques to get people more engaged in real-world activities?

Following this logic, in 2009 Volkswagen Sweden launched Thefuntheory. Part ad-campaign, part civic initiative, Thefuntheory proposed that “fun is the easiest way to change people’s behavior for the better.” The project ran a series of fun-experiments around Stockholm. These included the World’s Deepest Bin, which had people fighting to pick-up litter, and the Bottle Bank Arcade, which caused a sudden 5000% increase in recycling.

Ultimately, Thefuntheory was a (very successful) marketing campaign as opposed to a serious piece of game design. It’s hard to tell how much of the project’s success was down to novelty value. If every bin in Stockholm sounded like it was 1000 meters deep, would the fun of throwing rubbish in them quickly wear off? As a game developer would say: further testing is required. Still, like the bus stop initiative in San Francisco, Thefuntheory definitely shows how a little gaming can help the behavior-change medicine go down.

Something’s hatching

It may have started in a Stockholm trashcan, but “real-life gaming” is now a trend with real startups and investment. Take the California-based company GreenGoose. This “real-world gaming platform” raised $500,000 in a recent funding round (that’s a lot of golden eggs).

Like Thefuntheory, GreenGoose is focused on managing behavior. It works like this: customers get a set of wireless sensors that attach to everyday objects and collect data. A sensor on your toothbrush detects how often you brush your teeth. An exercise sensor in your back-pocket times your workout. Sensor data is instantly uploaded and displayed online. Repeated good behavior earns users “lifestyle points” (there’s no mention of what punishment you get if you stay on the couch drinking soda).

The wow-factor of GreenGoose’s wireless technology has certainly got people talking. However, the company has been surprisingly silent about the gaming side of the platform. Will there be social networking? Will there be real rewards? Most crucially, will it actually be fun?

Some people predict that eventually real-life games will become integrated into every aspect of daily life; that gamification could even start to blur the distinction between the virtual world and reality. Even now, real-life gaming has an impressively futuristic toolkit: wireless, 3D, motion sensors, pressure sensors, robotics. I guess the challenge for today’s developers is to take all that technology and use it to think like children – seeing games everywhere.