Social Media and Games, Level 1

This is a post many of you have read before, but I figured it would be good to revisit it because of the new direction of JoeyStrawn.com. Each Monday I will be focusing on Gamification, how it’s helping industries, how it’s being underutilized, how it CAN be used, etc. This is one of the first posts I wrote, introducing the subject earlier this year, so I figured it was a good place to start. Also, if you want a fantastic view of how marketing is obfuscating the idea of Gamification and how some feel it SHOULD be being used, read Julien Smith’s post on it from last week, you might think I’d have a problem with it, but he makes a LOT of great points. Read mine, then read his and them comment on how we can all work together for the good of business and the world alike. Enjoy!

A lot was written earlier this year postulating what trends 2011 would hold for social media. Terms like augmented reality, content curation, mobile technology, social commerce (F-commerce), group buying, and location marketing got thrown around a lot in that mix and while I think all (or most) of those will see an increase this year, I want to delve into an area that I see being a trend well beyond the year 2011.

Gaming.

Or Game Layer, Game Theory, Gamification or whatever else you want to call it. We are starting to see the trend of businesses, causes, and applications all applying basic gaming principles to garner success in the social space and I believe this is a model of thinking that will revolutionize a lot of how we do business in the future. I’ve looked around and while there are articles and books being written on how gaming will revolutionize business models and solve world hunger, no one is writing about how gaming can be integrated directly into the social media strategies we use and how it can improve our digital tactics.

Starting now, I’m going to write about that here on JoeyStrawn.com (once a week to be specific).

Press Start

So why gaming? Isn’t that just one of those sedentary devils causing childhood obesity and remote seclusion all across the world? How could gaming actually benefit businesses, specifically in the area of social media?

To understand what I mean by Gaming throughout the rest of these posts, I think it’s important that I define it as I see it. I’m not referring to specifically video games or card games or board games (although they do all fall into the definition). For our purposes here, Gaming will be defined as the following:

Gaming is the voluntary participation in a structured activity with the intent on reaching a desired end.

To quote Jane McGonigal from her fantastic book Reality Is Broken (Amazon link), “Gameplay isn’t just a pastime. It’s a twenty-first century way of working together to accomplish real change.”

Or, as David Edery and Ethan Mollick say in their book Changing the Game (Amazon), “Games are compelling because, at their best, they represent the very essence of what drives people to think, to cooperate, and to create.”

Yup, drink it in.

As hopefully made clear by the wording of the title of this post, this is Part 1 talking about the future of Gaming in Social Media. There is way too much to cover and way too many facets of this trend to explain in a single blog post. I’d need an entire book to write a concurrent accounting of how Gaming will affect social media in the coming years (*cough* Wiley & Sons *cough*).

Today I want to simply explain what games are and some interesting stats I’ve encountered along the way in my research.

Choose Your Player

Taking apart the definition of Gaming from earlier, we can see there are specific components necessary for something to be considered a “game”. Games must be voluntary, have a structured list of rules and be aimed towards a desired goal.

Voluntary Involvement – Very rarely do people exclaim “This is awesome!” when being forced to do something they obviously have no desire to be doing. Voluntary, active engagement is a must when it comes to creating and playing games. When I was a kid, my dad signed me up for Golf Camp two summers in a row. Golf Camp consisted of me waking up at 7 am and being forced to practice grips and swings for 5 hours. I don’t hold a grudge against my dad for the move, he just wanted me to appreciate the sport and possibly join him on the greens, but to this day I hate just about everything having to do with golf and it is the furthest thing in my mind when I think of the words “fun” or “game”.

Specific Stipulations – When was the last time you bought a board game from Parker Brothers and the only things in the box were a blank board and instructions that read “Do whatever the hell you want. Ages 9-99″? Games don’t work that way, there are always rules to follow and instructions to understand, even if those instructions are as cryptic as “Figure out the rules as you play” (like this game).

Pot O’ Gold – Another thing to keep in mind about games is that there is some sort of reward for your actions. Whether that be walking away with the Tecmo Bowl Cup or more intrinsic rewards likes seeing your character level up after a tough challenge, there’s always a reason for voluntarily agreeing to follow the rules set forth. The rewards don’t have to be fantastical or expensive either. Solitaire, due to it’s many versions and accessibility, is widely considered the most successful video game of all time and the reward for winning Solitaire is simply watching the cards bounce around and the opportunity to play again. Solitaire is a perfect example of a game that is simple to play but hard to master and mastering the game is reward enough for many people.

Game On……And On And On And On……..

Want to know how far games reach and the power of force behind it’s most dedicated fans? Here are a few numbers. Try and visualize what kind of progress and community you could build with this kind of support behind you or your brand.

• 3 billion hours are spent playing video games each week.
• 65% of American households play video games.
• The average gamer is 34 years old.
• Farmville currently has over 83 million active users.
• World of Warcraft earns an estimated $5 million every day from subscription fees alone.
• Gamers have collectively spent a total of 5.93 million years playing World of Warcraft.
• Angry Birds has been downloaded 140 million times since it’s creation in December of 2009.
• Angry Birds players alone log about 3.33 million hours of game time per day.
• Within 9 months of its release, players of Halo 3 had accumulated enough data to fill 1/50 of the entire collection of written works of humankind from the beginning of recorded history.

Pretty wicked.

Begin!

Not only do games permeate our society in hundreds of ways, we respond more favorably to failure when playing games, we exercise unused regions of our brains and solve problems on a much larger scale than what we experience in everyday life. Games can make us better problem solvers and story creators and they can make us more effective in social media as well.

But that’s something we’ll talk about in Level 2.

Thoughts?

Tags: facebook, Foursquare, game layer, Game Theory, gamification, gaming, reality is broken, social media, twitter, video games