Get game designers into your project

[Arzina333]

polish something that isn't fun with a game
In a panel session of Vodefone Firestarters, five speakers will discuss the benefits of games. Panel members are Toby Barnes of AKQA, Bonnie Shaw of Awesome Foundation DC and Lucas Tieleman of Repudo.com, with Ronald Olsthoorn as chair of the panel. Toby Barnes in particular has a strong opinion on this. In his role at AKQA, he has been involved in various game and marketing projects for major brands. Based on his experience, he sees that marketers too often want to build a game around something “to make it fun”. He sees that as a strategy for failure. It will never work to polish something that is inherently not fun with a game.

Games are often about challenge and not making it easy
Barnes notes that games aren’t just about fun, they’re often about challenge. A good game therefore makes things progressively more complicated, with more and more challenge. If you want to add a game to your existing brand experience, you have to get that right. Often you’ll find that you don’t want a game with a big challenge, but rather better usability to improve your customer experience. This is the case, for example, with brands that want to improve the experience in their stores.


Games should be about fun and game designers are ideally spain phone data suited to design fun into the basic experience. He is very explicit: his company will never design a Farmville for Pepsi. He would sit down with such a brand to see what experience they want to offer. Game designers can then convert such an experience into a game. Barnes thinks Nike's fuel band is a successful example of a game experience around a brand. That is also a game in principle, but no one talks about it as a game. It is also designed with the athletes in mind, with the question: how can we make the individual athlete better?

Barnes sees a lot of added value from the two game designers employed by his marketing company. They can also offer a lot of added value in non-game related projects when designing fun in an experience or service.