Today and tomorrow, the annual PICNIC festival will be held in Amsterdam, full of inspiration about technology, internet, apps and society. If you want to be immersed in a dose of technology optimism, then this is definitely the place to be. With a critical eye, I share in this article the most important insights and ideas that I took home from the first day at the event.
Never 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 oman telegram data 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.