Game of Life

As the "social web" embeds a layer of additional data on our day-to-day lives, playfulness and competition are assuming larger roles in driving behaviors, connections and discovery.

A table comparing the different features of various social location applications

A number of competitive social location applications have emerged in recent years—the most recent from Facebook—which reward users’ checkins and other location-based behaviors. Source: TechCrunch.

Playfulness has expanded beyond the traditional realms of gaming and learning into many new social applications on the Web, on our mobile devices, and through linkages between interactive media and traditional media such as television, and even beyond into health care, transportation and other new areas. This has been driven in part by the desire to appeal to younger consumers of content and technology, and also to find new ways of persuading and engaging social usage of technology in ways that engender positive behaviors and outcomes through harnessing of our natural inclinations toward both competition and cooperation. Leading edge manifestations of this trend including augmented reality (AR), alternate reality gaming (ARG), geo-cache games, location-based social media and the reward and point-based accomplishments associated with these interactions.

Signals:

So-called mobile social location applications, such as Foursquare, Gowalla and the newer SCVNGR encourage users to “check in” to locations as a means of notifying others nearby. By rewarding check-ins with badges or other awards, these services encourage both individual users and groups of users to coordinate behaviors or compete for rewards, including promotion offered by businesses. Foursquare had an estimated 2.8 million registered users in August, 2010.
Using the driver’s sense of play, Toyota designed the visual feedback system for its Prius hybrids to engage the driver with his or her interaction with the vehicle and its energy consumption. It’s instrument console makes drivers aware of how their driving behaviour affects energy consumption, and has been noted to encourage friendly competition among owners. Ford has expanded this to provide positive visual feedback of leaves growing in one instrument display as driving patterns become more fuel efficient.
A number of emerging health and wellness applications are harnessing gaming dynamics to encourage healthy behavior through competition. Nike’s + system for runners now allows group sharing of running data to instill an element of play in social groups of casual runners.

Implications:

Use of playful interfaces, gaming dynamics and reward systems is opening up increasing overlap among disciplines such as game design, medical research, and behavioral economics, cross-pollinating ideas from other disciplines into technology and media.
Adding casual gaming elements to technology and media has expanded user populations from traditional “core” technology adopters to broader “shoulder” markets such as women, youth and seniors. Nintendo has been particularly successful doing this through its Wii and DS gaming platforms.

Countertrends:

Using playfulness in technology and media as described in this trend does not have a long track record, and may be simply a phase of commercial innovation that declines as users become more sophisticated. Even as services such as Foursquare’s base grows, there is evidence that many registered users fail to stay with these applications over time.

Extrapolations:

Playful interfaces could follow their push into areas such as automotive design and health care into other “serious” industries and areas, such as law enforcement, enterprise software, government and beyond as a generation familiar with and embracing of these game dynamics ages.