Rediscovering Play
First, a little background.I’ve been fortunate enough to know my career path from a very early age. Many years before (or after, depending on your perspective) the glitz and glamour of Mad Men’s Don Draper, the power and mystique of effective advertising was evident to me. I noticed its ability to affect behavior and perspective in me when perfectly-placed Power Rangers action figure commercials would cause me to physically tremble in desire. The shining plastic, the swooping motions, and the familiar sound effects completely dazzled me, creating a perfect storm of engagement and compulsion in my juvenile quicket. Between ritualistic parental pestering and nights laid awake dreaming about how different my life would be with these toys in hand (or on shelf, more realistically), I simply had to have that toy. Those toys. All of them.
Bandai had spoken to something deep within me, and I wasn’t alone. Those commercials fueled annual merchandise sales of more than $100 million annually in the early ’90s. Often at the moment of highest engagement, at commercial breaks between or even inside episodes, the adventure on screen would seamlessly transition into ads. So stylistically similar, the experience was almost completely contiguous with one key exception. Suddenly, there were children on the screen, so much like us, that werecontrolling the Power Rangers. The message here was clear. Kids with Power Rangers toys have the power and privilege to create adventures of their own. With only your own imagination (and your parent’s purchase, of course), you could be heroically elevated enough to join your idols as equals.
It’s easy to forget that childhood is a powerless time. The more you learn about the world, the easier it becomes to feel small and unexceptional within it. As I got older, I remained most attracted to the experiences that made me feel like a hero. Again, like many in my generation, I was completely enamored with the world of Pokémon. The call to action was as simple as can be: ”Gotta catch ‘em all!” Across media and medium, the series featured an often-nameless hero with modest origins and a sprawling journey ahead of him. Like Power Rangers before it, Pokémon created a structure in which anyone could be heroically elevated. To become a “Pokémon Master,” all you needed to have was the perseverance of participation. That and, you know, the products.
We all want to be a part of something that is larger than life. In recent years, the video games that were once regarded as advanced toys (and therefore the domain of children) are finding acceptance and even reverence in our culture. From the blockbuster masterpiece of Bioshock to the simple and addictive interactivity of Wii Sports and Angry Birds, we’re learning that games have something to offer everyone. It couldn’t have come at a better time. This rediscovery of “play” is taking place in tandem with a revolution in consumer electronics. Our devices are inviting us to interact with them more directly than ever before - in touch, speech, and bodily motion. With the real and virtual worlds verging on one another, this moment in time is ripe for the creation of completely new experiences that embody the best of what games have to offer.
Kill Screen: Tailoring Experience - Constructing Legend and Legacy
Positioned at the junction of video game journalism and philosophy, the intrepid adventurers at Kill Screen pride themselves on an acute understanding of exactly what it means to “tailor experiences”. Their publication is quite possibly the most sprawling intellectual undertaking in video game journalism to date. Naturally, I was excited to pick brains, meld minds, and generally “level up” my understanding when their founder (Jamin Warren) stopped in for a show & tell during my last day at Big Spaceship. Soon, we at the ‘Ship found ourselves embroiled in a larger conversation about the role of play in the modern world. From it, I gleaned a sharpened perspective on the future of video games and a challenge to take an active position in shaping it.
The smart phone explosion puts internet-enabled screens into more pockets every year, creating an incredible challenge and opportunity for the interactive design community. With seemingly endless flexibility and modularity in tools and toys alike, the iPhone and its ilk have created a virtual hammerspace in our pockets. The fringe between universes at the edge of your smartphone screen loftily promises “augmentation” and “gamification” of your reality.
These much-hyped concepts pledge to structure your real-world experience with patterns, rewards, and resultant social glory. Sites like foursquare, Klout, and SCVNGR are gamification’s noble pioneers. Already, the backlash has already begun in earnest; the bulk of which seems to be rooted in “badge fatigue.” The networked masses have tired of checking in, “liking” pages, and allowing their social channels to become empty vessels for thinly veiled branded messaging. How did gamification lose its way? Its earliest manifestations strayed into the realm of tedious and mediocre realm of passivity that they were designed to combat. To get an understanding of what can be done better, I examined the prevailing thought on the potential of gamification against Kill Screen’s matured definition of the true meaning of play.
Undercurrent’s Aaron Dignan believes that the future of work itself should include elements of play. That the real world deserves the same sense of individual and measurable achievement accompanied by leveling up and scoring loot in the virtual world. What we lack, he says, is a structured system of constant resistance and feedback. Feeling aimless, we become bored and lose our drive for self-improvement. What he proposes is that by funneling recurrent duties and tasks into quests and levels, we can measure our progression on a linear scale. In a perfect state of flow, challenge matches ability in perfect parity, spurring a cycle of skill activation into motion. This simple joy and validation, Dignan says, is all of the reward “carrot” that is necessary for a properly gamified system to work.
Dignan’s philosophy gels with Kill Screen’s fundamental understanding of what makes an authentic play experience valuable. The best games don’t present us with a narrative - they place us inside of it and prompt us to drive. If good games entertain, great games immerse. For brief pockets of time, we allow them to tell us our own story. And like any great legend, we are compelled to share. Finding a complete play-through of Incubattle posted to YouTube became one of Kill Screen’s proudest moments.
Facebook’s latest mutation, the Timeline, displays this emerging understanding on an even grander scale. It encourages its users to frame the entire expanse of their lives into sagas, chapters, and milestones. They’ve changed the game. The new Facebook wants to tell your complete story in tracks listened, articles read, recipes prepared, events attended, and friendships forged. For some or perhaps even many, their social networking page will outlive them and serve as immortalizing record. Against the weight of that proposition, passive engagements like purchase-touting status updates or like-button clicks become trivial clutter.
The virtual play space is opening to a larger cultural audience than ever before, and the challenge to preserve the value of authentic play has never been more pressing. We’ve learned that game dynamics could be powerful tool to increase engagement, but are easily mishandled. Somewhere along the line, “gameification” became entirely characterized by triviality in meaningless trophies, bribe-like rewards, and an incessant demand to noisily share. It stopped resembling a game altogether.
Experiences that are truly playful activate skill while telling a story that is eminently worthy of spreading. As a curated publication, Kill Screen aims to be equal parts authoritative and reflective on why it is that we play. Their pursuit highlights that there is a wealth of wisdom, beauty, and artistry in video gaming that “gamified” experiences have yet to match. We’re just getting started.
Like any great quest, the stakes are high, the opportunity is legendary, and the only direction to move is forward.
