A Game Called “Life”
As the world becomes more advanced and more complex so do the games in life. If we look back games have been a part of man kind ever sense man was able to hunt for animals. A simple game such as target practice gave humans better survival skills, it also led us to think of more abstract ideas that involve war/hunting to make us a more dominant breed. Today, many of the games we play are very involved and are immensely related to the learning and decision making that all humans go through throughout life. With the increases studies of these games, the humans that participate in them will continuously rise the standard of “real life” decisions because these games will allow humans to see the results of their decisions before they actually make these decisions in “real life”.
Every Game Is Serious
In Abt, C.C.’s book Serious Games, he first explains that the world is becoming more advanced and educated, it is only human nature to want to learn. C.C. goes on to say that in the “real world” important decision making is only done in small numbers (when compared to the population). He states that with the use of games important decision making, it can be re simulated and brought to all people. People that may want to become heavily involved, people who are curious or people that may want to get their feet wet in the important decision making process. “The wide use of ‘game’ as a metaphor for many social, economic, political and military activities shows how much we assume about the formal similarity between games and real-life activities.”
“The game’s analytic component sees in certain aspects of life–family, love, friendship, education, profession, commerce, war, politics, partying–common formal or structural characteristics identical to those of games.” Through all these the outcome is shown through the gamers impression but the impressions are never permanent because they are still a “game”. The author goes on to say that the goals of these games matter less than the action itself, how one plays the game in order to achieve the goal is what really matters. He also says that there are no excuses in these games except for the occasional excuse of “bad luck”.
As said before it is human nature to want to learn and with these new found games they possess a “hunger for experience beyond his own.” They hold experience with practice, “Without the experimentation possible in imaginative life, how could one try out the roles of the admired but inaccessible? How could one win and lose a battle and learn what works and what does not? How could one explore the many branching’s in the maze of fate?” Without the uses of games I believe one cannot answer these questions.
C.C. says that everything can be considered a game, “political and social situations, Elections, International relations, personal arguments, almost all business activity,…all of these are played with resources of power, skill, knowledge, or luck they always have the common characteristics of reciprocal decisions among independent actors with at least partly conflicting objectives.” He even argues that playing games inside the classroom can be proven to be effective. Making the learning processes into a game is proven to be more interesting, keeping the students attention, making them more prone to participation which would only lead them to success.
We Want MMOG’s
In We Live Here by Andrew Hinton he discusses mainly three dimensional games that are played online between other “real life” users. He says that the beginning of these game started with the game called Quake. While he played Quake back in the late 1990’s he was talking to one of the other players “over a public channel within the game, and was joking how they seemed to know the map so much better than he did. One of them replied: ‘Ha-ha, yeah… we live here!’” Those words stuck with him and led him to believe that maybe we truly do live there. He goes on to say that Quake created for humans a “third place” world for humans. Now that the third place world has been created, there is a need to satisfy that “third place” world just as much as our first (our home) and second (our workplace) worlds.
Following Quake the next major MMOG that he talks about is World of Warcraft. He says that WOW, “represents the future of real-time collaborative teams and leadership in an always-on, diversity-intensive, real-time environment. [The game] is a glimpse into our future.” The game is a game of leadership and it has become so popular that “People are even starting to put such credentials on their resumes.”
Following WOW there is Second Life. Second Life is in online three dimensional community where people create avatars and live a virtual second life. Unlike WOW Second Life has almost no limitations. Here the creators “merely created the right conditions for achieving what their users needed to get done, and they ‘got our of the way’”, letting users create everything they needed in second life on their own.
All three of these MMOG’s and the ones that are still to come so popular because “it’s the real human connections between players that keep them invested.” We now live in a third place world of games and it is now a must for us as humans to create and improve the architecture of these worlds so that our “third world” becomes a better place to be, along with our first and second worlds.
Marketing the Experience
Just as we need to keep our audience’s attention when it comes to purchasing, learning or decision making, this is the same when it comes to attention through experience. In the article, “welcome to the experienced economy”, Pine and Gilmore discuss the importance of marketing through experience. The authors give examples through restaurants like the Hard Rock Cafe or The Rainforest Cafe by explaining that even though you are only paying for the food you get at the restaurants you are still receive these great experiences. It is important to engage the person by making the experience memorable or personal to them and then they will want to come back.
Marketing for a restaurant is not much different from marketing for game or an online MMOG game. One needs to give their users of audience a reason to comeback. For a restaurant it may be to enjoy music drinks and the ball-game with your family and friends, where as for a military game it may be for survival purposes (the more one practices the game the more likely they are to survive) and in an MMOG it is the online community of people.
Abt, C.C., (1970). The reunion of action and thought, Serious Games, 3-14.
Hinton, A. (2006). We live here: Games, third places, and the information architecture of the future. 1-8
Pine, B.J., & Gilmore, J.H. (1998). Welcome to the experience economy. Harvard Business Review. 98-105
Excerpt from Stephenson, Snow crash. 18-27, 34-45
