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Big Data: The Overlooked Opportunity in Games

Beyond their demonstrated effectiveness as a medium for communications and community-building, serious games have great potential to reveal variables that influence audience retention, engagement and loss as well as the impact of various demographic data on those influences. By examining player data, learning organizations and news organizations can gain new insight into the behaviors, motivations and needs of their target audiences.

Fundamentally, a game is a system built around a series of interactions. Sure, the conceit of the game, the storyline, the characters, the graphical treatment, and social components all have a huge influence on a game’s acceptance and popularity. But at the heart of a game’s attraction are its gameplay and its mechanics (aka, dynamics), i.e., the activities a player engages in while playing the game. Activities, of course, are a predetermined set of interactions between the player, the content of the game, and (in the case of multi-player and social games) other players.

As a player progresses through an online game, the choices she makes at each moment of interaction determine her experience of the game and, ultimately, the game’s outcome for her. The game’s internal infrastructure includes a mechanism for tracking her interactions so that the game responds appropriately to her input. Players who make different choices will get different responses from the system, have different experiences and, likely, different outcomes.

Within a game system, players generate data in two categories: gameplay (the log of player interactions) and demography. Generally, gameplay data enable game designers to tune a game, while demographic data inform marketing decisions.

In the world of serious games, where interactions are designed to yield a particular behavioral or cognitive outcome, player data are important in some key ways. They provide an assessment of a player’s overall performance. They point to areas of difficulty (diagnosis) for a player as she progresses through a game. They can also help to predict how a player will perform in similar activities, whether those activities are embedded in another game or take place in the real world.

When gameplay and demographic data from all players are aggregated, we have the opportunity to look for patterns. They might indicate patterns of interaction – desired or not, intended or not – with especially high occurrence rates. Those patterns may, for example, demonstrate the inclination of a particular demographic subset to make the same wrong choice within an activity.

For publishers of multiple games, data aggregation across all games and all players can be particularly informative. Perhaps players who respond positively to one game type are also frequent players of another game type. Players who are successful with one game mechanic or activity type may be completely unsuccessful with a second type.

Ultimately, the value of trapping, aggregating, and analyzing these kinds of data will be extremely significant. Serious game developers will gain a much better understanding of what “works” with their target audiences. Even better, players will have more successful and fulfilling game experiences.

 

Badges?! We don’t need no stinkin’… Oh, wait, maybe we do.

Are you using badges yet?

If not, you may be feeling the need to “refresh” users’ experience of your content by introducing a badge system. In all likelihood, one or more of your competitors has either introduced badges or is putting together a plan to do so. Just as with games, the conversation about badges is quickly shifting from “Should we…?” to “How do we…?” and “How soon can we…?”

Services like Foursquare and Facebook have reminded us that collecting and displaying badges for others to admire can be satisfying and fun, even as adults. By combining contests and challenges with geo-location data and social networking, these services enable us to receive points and gain status for checking in at various places. Not only are our network connections notified of our peregrinations, participating merchants can publically reward loyal customers and thereby encourage repeat visits from other patrons.

Badges are more than coupons, though. In the aggregate, they tell stories about us, about how we spend time, possibly where and with whom. More importantly, they indicate achievement, skills, affiliations, expertise, and participation. As artifacts of our activities, they also imply something about our determination, curiosity, perseverance and commitment (or, depending on what the badge commemorates, sloth and an ability to waste time).

A well-designed badge system (i.e., a series of inter-related badges) does several things at once:

• It articulates the path(s) to success
• It provides incentives that are meaningful to the target audience
• It rewards desired behaviors and achievements
• It represents the badgeholder’s status, competencies and attainments to the rest of the world
• It facilitates community attachment and reputation-building
• It encourages collaboration and teamwork
• It promotes mentorship and leadership
• It opens doors to new avenues of exploration and accomplishment

It’s no wonder, then, that organizations whose purpose is to educate and inform see badge systems as an important addition to traditional approaches to credentialing and certification. Through badge awards, issuers can reward and communicate much more about a recipient’s performance than a single grade or score could ever hope to convey.

Perhaps the most promising aspect of badge systems is the opportunities they provide for stimulating attainment of higher order thinking (analyzing, evaluating and creating). By building challenges into badge systems that require active application of skills and information in “higher order” activities, badges become reliable indicators of a badgeholder’s abilities to incorporate new knowledge in effective, even sophisticated, ways.

Over the next year or so, we can expect to see badges appear in some interesting venues, from community colleges, training providers, and membership organizations to news websites, social networks and political campaigns. Some of these initiatives will roll out in conjunction with a larger “gamification” strategy. Many will use badges as the on-ramp to the road to game-based communication.

The Mozilla Foundation is giving the badge movement additional gravitas. With support from the MacArthur Foundation, they are building an “Open Badge Infrastructure” (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges) so that badgeholders can display the badges they’ve earned across websites, regardless of when or from whom the badges were received.