1

Ask for a show of hands.

2

When I said “gamer”, you probably thought of this. But this kind of gamer is far from the only kind there is.

3

Not all games look like Call of Duty or other first person shooters. When we talk about video games, we’re also talking about casual games like solitaire, creative narrative games like Journey, and building games like Minecraft.

4

Recent statistics from the Entertainment Software Association show that the average game player is 35 years old, not 18. And that women make up 44% of video game players. In many cases,

5

Even if you don’t play video games, chances are pretty goo that you play other kinds of games—like board games and card games, for instance.

6

And increasingly, games are blurring boundaries between computer and real world, online and offline. The Come out and Play festival, for instance, focuses entirely on games that are played on the streets of the city. While the games may be augmented with mobile technology, the real action happens on the streets, not the screen.

7

Here’s one example. This is a photo we took of players on a scavenger hunt in the city of Rochester. They were using a tool called SCVNGR that allowed them to receive and follow clues using text messaging. (I’ll talk more about the seven-week game that this was a part of in a few minutes.)

8

These are the kinds of achievements that I’m interested in unlocking. I don’t make games that make people want to sit in front of their computer or television, I make games that make them want to leave the house and explore.

9

I’m not the only one making games intended to help people explore—the Digital Tourism Think Tank put out a report last year discussing the rise of gaming and gamification in tourism, describing a variety of games and applications that have been developed for tourism.

10

Gaming is what you do at a casnino. Games are systems with rules, structures, conflict, win conditions,

11

Gamification is the use of game-like elements—for instance, points and leaderboards—in non-game contexts like school and work. Adding game-related elements *can* make those activites more enjoyable, but it can also backfire. The difference is in thoughtful design.

12

The problem with gamification is that everybody now wants it, but the people who want it don’t seem to know exactly what it is. A year or two ago, it was THE buzzword, and people who knew very little about what makes games work well were promising to magically transform applications through gamification.

(Taxonomy of the Lean Startup Anti-Pivotby Tristan Kromer:http://www.slideshare.net/Deridian/taxonomy-of-the-lean-startup-antipivot)

13

In 2014, however, Gartner put gamification in their “trough of disillusionment”—a recognition that the inflated expectations period was ending, and that people are realizing gamification isn’t as easy as some of the “gurus” made it sound.

14

Because if adding game elements were enough to make things fun, we’d just slap buttons like this on everything.

15

When we don’t put thought into the reasons the game mechanics are there, and particularly into the motivation of our target audience, we end up with games that are about as much fun as the infamous “Skinner Box” used for behavior modification of rats. Does it work? To an extent, if the rat has no choice. Would the rat choose this option if he had a choice? Of course not.

16

This is a cash register at the American department store Target. Do you think a system like this would make being a cashier more fun, or just more stressful?

17

http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/a-quick-buck-by-copy-and-paste/http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/gamification-by-design-response-to-oreilly/

So….what feelings of competence do we want to focus on?

18

If we go back to the Target example, this probably is fun for the cashiers who are already really good at it—because the scores serve as a way to recognize and reinforce their existing competency.

Good games don’t just ALLOW failure, they ENCOURAGE it.

19

All of these books should be required reading for anyone who wants to implement games or gamification as part of their communication or marketing strategy.

20

21

My interest in games and tourism was spurred in part by my first semester teaching in Dubrovnik, back in the spring of 2013. When I walked the walls of the city for the first time with my then 16-year-old son, he posted this picture to Facebook, with the accompanying caption. It got me thinking about the way that the spaces we inhabit shape the way we create things—our campus in Rochester, NY is very modern and linear, in contrast to the richness and complexity of texture and architecture in Dubrovnik.

22

At the end of our semester in Croatia, I took my son on a week-long visit to Italy, and he planned our itinerary. He chose cities strictly based on their presence in the game Assassin’s Creed, which I was skeptical about, but decided to allow since they were cities I wanted to visit as well. (Accuracy note: Trento is not in Assassin’s Creed, but we stopped there because I was invited to give a talk at the university there!)

23

It turned out that he knewmore about most of the places we visited than I did, despite my having been the one reading websites and guidebooks. Some of the knowledge came from the game itself, other knowledge came from his being curious about those places and following up on the information in the game. (This is a photo of him listening to a specific piece of game theme music while in the same location that the game shows during that scene.)

24

This spring, at the Reboot Develop conference in Dubrovnik, I had a chance to talk with Patrice Desilets, the lead designer for Assassin’s Creed, who told me that kind of historical and geographical knowledge was something they were really hoping to provide through the game—he was delighted to hear a story about how well it had worked!

25

One of our stops on the trip was San Gimignano in Tuscany. At the first stop inside the city gates, we found this treasure hunt game, which includes a map and an activity book for kids.

26

It was clear that this game would make the city far more interesting to kids who would otherwise be bored by the city’s architecture and history—and that games like this could be a great addition to almost any destination.

27

Here’s another example. Does anyone here play Google’s augmented reality game Ingress?

28

Ingress is played worldwide. Wherever you are, there are probably people who are battling for the portals around you without you being aware of it. Here’s the closest portal to where we currently are—and look at how many other portals there are here in Rovinj. Blue portals are owned by the resistance faction, who believe that they are protecting humanity from the creators of the portals, who they think want to enslave humanity. Green portals are owned by the enlightened faction, who believe that the energy coming from portals can be harnessed to help humanity. Gray portals are currently unclaimed. In cities with many active players (like Zagreb), portals can change hands many times a day.

Because the game rewards discovering and claiming new portals, Ingress players tend to explore cities extensively when they travel, often visiting parts of the city that are mostly inhabited by locals rather than

29

Just from yesterday to today there have been changes in who owns the portals around here. I’m guessing there might be some resistance players here at the conference, since this part of town turned blue overnight.

30

When I travel to new cities, I use Ingress to help me explore. I find places that are off the beaten path, like the wonderful graffiti street art in Zagreb.

31

While my interest in teaching and developing games for tourism is relativelyrecent, my history in game development is actually quite relevant. Back in 2009, RIT worked with the local newspaper in Rochester to develop a city wide, seven-week alternate reality game called Picture the Impossible.

32

As part of the design process, we focused in on the VERBS that we wanted to associated with our game play. A big part of the goal of the game was for people to learn more about the city of Rochester and its history, and to explore parts of the city they hadn’t spent much time in.

33

Picture the Impossible videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBFD2B08D79CE1334

34

14 tied for first place, having gotten EVERY point available in the game

35

Surprisingly diverse demographics for an alternate reality game.

36

Picture the Impossible was a game. Just Press Play, which we built for our students, was gamification. An achievement system where they could

37

You can see the similarities in our goals to what we did for Picture the Impossible. But this time we didn’t have set goals and milestones—instead, it was an always-on system that was intended to give students ideas aboutactivities that might be fun and useful to engage in, to help them reflect on and remember the things they’d done, and to highlight areas where they might have room for growth.

38

We flipped the QR code idea on its head. Rather than students needing devices to scan in codes in order to get achievements, we gave game admins a tool to scan in the players’ codes, which they carried with them as stickers or keychains.

39

We had collectible cards associated with the achievements, as well, so that they could build a collection of tangible reminders of the things they’d done.

40

The graphic in the top right corner showed players how their achievementswere distributed, so that they could see areas where they excelled, or where they had room to grow.

41

Based on my game development experience, and my growing interest in applying that to tourism here in Croatia, I applied for (and received) a Fulbright grant to develop a new program in games and tourism at RIT Croatia’s campus in Dubrovnik, which is in many ways a perfect natural laboratory for testing game design ideas. That program will start this spring, with the first offering of a new class on Games & Tourism, and a production studio class in which students will develop a game focused specifically on Dubrovnik.

42

43

44

45