Gamifying Events: Experience, Agency and Role playing
Gamifying Events: Experience, Agency and Role playing
Gamifying Events: Experience, Agency and Role playing
By Javier Velasquez
June 17, 2023
Summary
While my new year resolution was to create more content, there were two main events that have kept me from achieving that promise: my own wedding and an event me and my team designed with LNL Agency for Coca-Cola! How are they related? Well, actually I landed the second job thanks to what me and my wife designed for our wedding, and it was the learnings we got from doing the first that lead us to probably one of our most successful experiences in the field of life-event gamification.
He loved what we did with our wedding so much that he decided to relate to his client the key moments of our wedding, and that's how we ended up, after 3 months designing our wedding, in a two month journey designing this huge 3-day event! While people in the wedding joked that we should design events like that one for a living, Alex actually took it seriously and gave us a step forward to try this on a different environment.
We actually found out that it was best to avoid explaining the whole design process, keeping stuff like the balance of the game economy to ourselves, and converting a 60+ page game design document into 10 slides! If it were not for the trust Alex had in us, many of the ideas would have been stripped from the final experience.
Again, we started communicating everything from the invitations! We developed a simple web app for the game registration that had elements of the narrative, so people would know they would find a different experience a month before the event.
The things we did before the event were key to create the event experience: in other words, the game begins before the game starts.
Character building creates a game before the game.
It is a game on its own! Now, we are not dealing with role-play gamers, so it is important to find the sweet spot, and I think in both events we found it!
Reference
Velasquez, J. (2023, June 17). Gamifying events: Experience, agency and role playing. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gamifying-events-experience-agency-role-playing-javier-velasquez