By Martin Gittins

Social media, a term that didn’t exist 5 years ago, is now a key channel for brands to connect with their customers, and for people to communicate with friends and peers. As the medium evolves, social media is moving beyond the currency of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ and adding new ways of motivating participation, new measures of engagement, and new ways of rewarding success.

The most obvious way that rewards and motivation are filtering into the social media landscape is through the introduction of game-like elements, such as points scoring, unlocking achievements and abilities (leveling up), and then measures of success such as high score tables, leaderboards, badges etc.

A great example of such ‘gamification’ is Nike+. This takes the usually solitary pastime of running and turns it into a social experience as well as a motivation tool, by recording data from your runs and then uploading them to the Nike+ site from a range of devices, including iPhone and iPod.

Track and field

With Nike+, as well as allowing you to record your runs and track your running history, you can set goals for distance or time, and reach levels based on total distance covered. You can also tweet or update your Facebook status with details of your activity, set challenges to your friends, and join public challenges. The iPhone app and the new Nike+ SportWatch GPS also allow mapping of your runs using GPS data.

I am a huge fan of Nike+ one – here’s my profile – and like many other users find that the positive feedback loop it creates encourages me to run more, set goals, and ultimately perform better. The game-like elements help to make users more proactive and provide a support network for ongoing encouragement as well as celebrating achievements.

Live interaction

Another great example of socialized gaming that has recently launched is Heineken Star Player. This iPhone app allows users to play in real-time alongside Champions League football matches, and try and predict when a goal will be scored to win points. There are also other opportunities to score points by guessing the outcome of free kicks and corners, plus quiz questions and badges to unlock. It provides a new angle to watching a football match with friends and an added level of interest.

There is the inevitable connection with Facebook and Twitter to provide the social connection, and the opportunity to build mini-leagues of friends, alongside the global league of all users. The Heineken branding is ever-present but fairly low-key. Whilst points don’t represent anything other than your score that can be compared against other users, future versions may translate points into a virtual currency which can be used to redeem against Heineken merchandise. There’s certainly a lot further this approach can go.

Gamification

Star Player manages to avoid the biggest problem of adding game elements to social networking, which is that they add the reward mechanisms of games but with no real underlying gameplay, or compelling raison d’etre. In Gamification and Its Discontents, Steven Poole highlights the problems in adding a thin game layer over real life, in that it can provide a virtual presenteeism rather than any real degree of engagement:

“Isn’t the idea of being ‘mayor’ of your local Starbucks or indie equivalent, as is possible in Foursquare, rather strange? You don’t become mayor in real life just by turning up at the town hall more than anyone else.”

Poole also discusses a new social game that has recently used, Chromaroma, which is based on users’ travelling habits around London. By using the journey data from users’ Oyster card (the contactless ticketing technology used on buses and the Underground in London), and now also Barclays Cycle Hire travel data, it aims to add a game-like dimension to commuting around London. Users, once signed up, choose to be on the Blue, Green, Red or Yellow team, with the aim of taking ownership of certain stations or lines, based on where they start or complete their journeys.

But does anyone really play Chromaroma? I joined, and it seems rather pointless, if you’ll excuse the pun. In its current incarnation I don’t believe it is compelling enough to change the way users travel across London, nor does it turn the city into some kind of consensual game-space the way that, something like Streetwars or NikeGrid did. Earning points for completing a travel journey is unlikely to change anyone’s travel habits, and so rewarding users for doing what they do anyway is rather meaningless. Perhaps Chromaroma will morph into a more narrative, alternate reality game more akin to Perplexcity than the rather lack-lustre ‘check-in’ based Foursquare model.

Light and shadow

Gamification, or ‘pointsification’, as Margaret Robertson of Hide and Seek insists it should be called, does not create a full game experience because there are no meaningful consequences from the choices the player makes on the game itself. In other words, if you don’t go for a run, Nike+ will still be waiting there for you when you do.

“Games give their players meaningful choices that meaningfully impact on the world of the game. Deciding to run two miles today rather than one, or drink two liters of Coke instead of four are just choices of quantity.”

A game should be a series of unfolding series of actions that have consequences, positive and negative. If the choices you make don’t affect the game at all then the process is all one-way rather than being fully interactive.

“Games offer fail conditions as well as win conditions. They are able to deliver the high levels of emotional engagement they’re famed for because they’re also adept at delivering the lows of loss, humiliation and frustration. The world of user experience design from which the concept of gamification has arisen has spent the last twenty years erasing loss, humiliation and frustration from its flows. A world of badges and points only offers upwards escalation, and without the pain of loss and failure, these mean far less. And when this upward escalation is based only on accumulation of points, rather than on expressions of my choices and my skills, then this further strips out the sense of agency and competence, so crucial to the emotional and neurological buzz we get from gaming.”

Side channel marketing

Robertson is rightly critical of such a restrictive view of gaming because it can obscure the deeper potential that games may offer not only social media but also customer loyalty and brand engagement. Games like Heineken Star Player show the way that social games can provide an interactive side-channel, a powerful opportunity for brands and for business to integrate with users’ live.

There is also massive potential for games to play a much bigger part in B2B incentives and reward programs, to move beyond the simple game-like elements of rewards, points and achievements to a more dynamic and engaging experience full of choices and consequences. These can be used support not just competitive play based on sales performance or other indicators, but also co-operative play such as team-building, training and knowledge sharing.

About the author

Martin Gittins is a director at London-based interactive design studio InterfaceDigital, and also IncentiveDirect, creator of online reward and incentive systems.