Crowd gaming – game & play mechanisms for building crowd involvement in an urban space

Dr Małgorzata Karpińska-Krakowiak

Department of International Marketing and Retailing

Agenda • Crowd involvement as a challenge

• Theoretical background to involvement

• Play vs games – moderators of involvement

• GAME: as an innovative mechanism in building crowd involvement

• PLAY: involvement & community building at the events in an urban space

• Seminar task: let’s play a game…

Challenge: how to involve people on a large scale

Why it’s so hard to involve masses?

• Mistrustful, suspicious, unwilling to put some extra effort

• Overabundance of information decreases attention and makes it harder to undertake actions

• Public choice theory: RATIONAL IGNORANCE

Rational ignorance

• we want to be rational and ignore entering certain processes because participation would be an overinvestment

• occurs when the cost of educating oneself on an issue exceeds the potential benefit that the knowledge would provide

• example: general elections

Gunning, P. (2002). Understanding democracy: An introduction to public choice. http://www.fortunecity.com/meltingpot/barclay/212/votehtm/ cont.htm

Buchanan, J., Gordon, T. (1962). The calculus of consent: Logical foundations of a constitutional democracy. University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor

How to overcome rational ignorance?

Theoretical background to ”involvement”

Involvement

Group

Social Identity Theory

Self-Cathegorisation Theory

Identification of an individual with a group (group involvement)

'what is appropriate for me as a member of this category in this

context?’

deindividuation paradigm: when people in groups are anonymous to outgroup, they are more likely to express actions that are

punishable by the outgroup

Individual

'what is appropriate for me in this context?'

a state of motivation, arousal, interest or activation

perceived importance of sth.

personal relevance - refer to the relationship between a person and a particular stimulus

e.g.: product involvement, purchase decision involvement, idea involvement, event

involvement

Behaviour (e.g. Participation)

City of Lodz

Play vs games – moderators of crowd involvement

Play/ game - definition

• PLAY is a free activity, outside “ordinary” life , “not serious”

• its own boundaries of time and space

• formal/ informal rules; its own orderly manner

• make-believe - magic circle of play

Huizinga, J. (1955), Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Beacon Press (Boston)

Involvement – play/ games

• Important social role

• Carried out in a group

• Communities, social groupings and interaction among players

• Caillois: "becomes a factor in establishing contact and collective involvement" [Caillois, R. (1961), Man, Play and Games, The Free Press p. 45]

Involvement – play/games

• Address the issue of rational ignorance

• Competition + reward + fun + collaboration

• Involve mass number of people in different (even serious) processes without thinking and rationalizing about them

Involvement - play/ games

• Act playfully against different conventions

• Multiplayer presence -> mitigating awkwardness and social pressure

• Pervasive games can take the pleasure of game to ordinary life

GAME as an innovative mechanism in building crowd involvement

Gamification • Introducing game mechanisms to

drive crowd involvement and participation

gamification

ARG – Alternate Reality Game

What is ARG

• Transmedia storytelling - telling & producing a story on+offline

• Gaming that feels like real life, only MORE (Jane McGonigal)

• Interactive drama

• Several weeks/ months

• Lots of players

• Solve a mystery/ problem (impossible to accomplish alone)

ARG for FMCG brands Thirst for victory

(Euro 2012)

Arg for films • Batman – the Dark Knight

Why so serious?

Results:

• Over 10,ooo,ooo players from 75 countries

• 1,300 films and 5,000 photos made and uploaded on YT

• „The Dark Knight” first weekend earnings = 158.4 mln USD

ARG for durable products

• The Art of the Heist - Audi

Results: 500 000 players 4 000 test drives 1 000 cars sold (in 90 days of this campaign)

Key terms & aspects of ARG

• The puppet master

• The curtain

• The rabbithole

• Pervasive:

– „I am a small part of a bigger whole”

– no classic magic circle: This Is Not The Game (TINAG)

Game design techniques to facilitate involvement

Game design techniques to facilitate involvement

Staffan Bjork, Jussi Holopainen (2005), Patterns in Game Design

Collaboration +

• Social dilemmas (e.g. prisoner’s dilemma – if both confess, they both go to jail for 5 years; if only one of them confesses, he goes free and the other goes to jail for 20 years)

– players tend to compete against each other even though cooperation would be beneficial for all players involved

Game design techniques to facilitate social interaction

• Red queen dilemma - of having to become better or more powerful in a game, simply to maintain the same level of influence in the game

Game design techniques to facilitate social interaction

• Delayed reciprocity - there is a time delay in social exchange situations

• Social status - the extent to which the player is admired, esteemed or approved by the other players of the game

• Uncommited alliances

Game design techniques to facilitate social interaction

PLAY: involvement & community building

at the events in an urban space

Up Helly Aa Fire Festival, Scotland

The Carnival of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Carnival of Venice, Italy The Battle of the Oranges, Ivrea, Italy

Ultra Music Festival, Miami, Florida

Saint Patrick’s Day Festival, Dublin, Ireland

Songkran Water Festival, Thailand

Gay Pride Parade, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Play

crowd involvement

Extraordinary /special setting

Out of ordinary

Noise

Mass number of participants

Moderators

communitas

Ultimate form of involvement

Crowd vs communitas

• Communitas (Victor Turner)

– liminal experience – individuals striped from their usual identity

– relatively structureless

– based on relations of equality and solidarity

– opposed to the normative social structure

Communitas

• informal relationship between individuals

• temporary retreat from the structure

• getting rid of the hierarchy in favor of direct relationships

• homogeneous and spontaneous anti-social structure

• rituals & symbolic actions

communitas • communitas can be found in

contemporary forms of social life

• to demonstrate „being part of a bigger whole”

• communitas are spontaneous and temporal

• afterwords… everybody returns to the hierarchy of the structure

Glastonbury Festival

Mass number of participants

Travesre City Film Festival

Out of oridinary

Special setting

Noise

Instead of summary…

Your personal checklist: Decide, what sort of behaviour you want to promote

Is there a possibility to achieve epic victory? How to name it so

it won’t be boring?

Challenge: short & long term. Do they promote effort and

achievements?

Do you offer something for every player?

How dynamic is your game? Does it provide a correct flow of

tension and narrative?

Define clear objectives of the game

Do you provide constant feedback? Do you inform about

progress, achievements etc.?

Is your game fun?

Do you have an opportunity to create a sense of communitas?

related reading: COMMUNITAS: Turner, V. (1969), The ritual process. Structure and Anti-structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter INVOLVEMENT/ IDENTIFICATION/ CROWD DYNAMICS: Tajfel, H. (1978), Differentiation Between Social Groups. London: Academic Press. Tajfel, H. (1982), Social Identity and Intergroup Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Paris, Maison des Sciences de l'Homme. Tajfel, H. and Turner, J. (1986), The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behaviour. S. Worchel and W. G. Austin (Eds.) Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Chicago: Nelson-Hall Turner, J., Hogg, M., Oakes, P., Reicher, S., & Wetherell, M. (1987), Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory. Oxford: Blackwell Turner, J., Oakes, P., Haslam, S. & McGarty, C. (1994), Self and collective: Cognition and social context. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20: 454-63 RATIONAL IGNORANCE/ PUBLIC CHOICE: Buchanan, J., Gordon, T. (1962), The calculus of consent: Logical foundations of a constitutional democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Gunning, P. (2002), Understanding democracy: An introduction to public choice. Accessed April 2012, retrieved from http://www.fortunecity.com/meltingpot/barclay/212/votehtm/ cont.htm GAMES/ PLAY/ ARG: Huizinga, J. (1955), Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Boston: Beacon Press Caillois, R. (1961), Man, Play and Games. The Free Press Suits, B. (1990), Grasshopper: Games, life and utopia. Canada: Broadview Press Ltd. Montola, M. (2011), A ludological view on the pervasive mixed-reality game research paradigm. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 15:3–12 Bjork, S., & Holopainen, J. (2005), Patterns in Game Design. Charles River Media (2010) Gamification 101: An Introduction to the Use of Game Dynamics to Influence Behavior. Accessed April 2012, retrieved from http://www.bunchball.com/gamification101 Dena, Ch. (2008), Emerging Participating Practices: Player-Created Tiers in ARGs. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 14: 41-57 Stacey, S. (2007), The Puppetmaster Player Communication Dynamic in Alternate Reality Gaming and Chaotic Fiction. Accessed April 2012, retrieved from http://www.bunchball.com/gamification101http://www.unfiction.com/compendium/2007/12/15/the-puppetmaster-player-communication-dynamic-in-alternate-reality-gaming-and-chaotic-fiction/ Szulborski, D. (2005), Through the Rabbit Hole: A Beginner’s Guide to Playing Alternate Reality Games. US: New Fiction Publishing Thompson, B. (2007), Understanding Your Audience. Accessed April 2012, retrieved from http://www.giantmice.com/features/understanding-audience/

Thank you for your attention

Dr Małgorzata Karpińska-Krakowiak Department of International Marketing University of Lodz

mkarpinska@uni.lodz.pl +48 692 783 791