I am presently on the hunt for trends and market data on eSports, competitive gaming that is. Not quite related to this search, I also have Jane McGonigal’ s excellent TED talk on how gaming can make a better world on my mind ever since I discovered it more than a month ago. So, when thinking about what to make of the information in the TED video, I came across Carnegie Mellon Professor and Schell Games CEO Jesse Schell’s Design outside the box talk at Design Innovate Communicate Entertain (DICE) summit 2010 (also featured as a TED talk as When games invade real life). More clearly than McGonigal, Schell outlines the general gaming mechanisms that, translated into the real world, will change product marketing and, in fact, life as we know it at least for the younger generation. And if he didn’t mean to make such a radical claim, I am making it now.

Jesse Schell’s presentation is just outstanding and I couldn’t agree more with his vision of how gaming principles are poised to creep into the real world. The talk apparently spawned quite a discussion mainly between the amazed followers of his arguments like me as well as people substantiating and clarifying his argumentation,  and the disbelievers (see comments on various websites). The difference between the two groups, I believe, mainly lies in people’s degree of personal experience with the motivating, not to say addictive potential of multi-player virtual games such as World of Warcraft (WoW), whose underlying mechanisms Schell projects into the real-world.

The core of these mechanisms, if you, unlike a million people already, don’t care to watch the full talk:

1. Quantify, that is, measure people’s actions such as consuming certain products, watching advertising or using public transportation for the commute;
2. Translate aggregated actions taken into an easy to understand score such as reward points;
3. Let people compare their current score with friends, family, and the rest of the world, providing instant recognition of actions taken and thus positive reinforcement, as well as even a grain of competition (especially for the male population);
4. Combine this with a monetization scheme such as advertisement.

As a marketing expert, you may notice the difference between the consumer needs that traditional marketing models such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs identify and this new kind of marketing that targets human behavioral mechanisms at a level even lower (or is it just cross-hierarchy?) and thus more effective than mere needs.

In fact, it’s not all new principles that Schell discovers here. Seen more from a business rather than a gaming perspective, it’s a widely known fact that business metrics (or key performance indicators), quantifications of all of a company’s business processes, make (or break) a successful company. Measure it and people will react–measure it right and people will improve is not even a context-specific effect but a universal law. Creating a game based on business metrics or whatever other metrics is just a small step from there.

In the past, I had the pleasure to work on the brink of real world and virtual games for quite some time. Furthermore, just last year, I took a real deep dive into Facebook games such as Mafia Wars and its various competitors and deviations — down to the numbers and algorithms layer. Together with significant experience in WoW, all this only deepens my conviction that Schell (and whoever he is basing his insights on) is up to something really important, really fundamental.

To me, it’s just about who applies these insights first in any particular branch of end consumer business, in education, in physcal training etc. The early movers will reap the greatest benefits and there is no way to stop the trend, I believe. In fact, the ball is already rolling for some time, most notably in the context of Facebook games or mobile apps such as Foursquare and Scvngr.

So what’s the conclusion of all this? It’s mandatory for any end consumer-facing organization to get started at least thinking about the implications of social games in the real world for their products and services. Let me know if you are such an organization and you would like some help getting started.

For more details on Jesse Schell’s talk and social games in the real world in general, see Adam Penenberg’s excellent and rather detailed article on the topic at FastCompany.

There’s also the amazing novel MetaGame by Sam Landstrom that spins the idea of game-motivated work and instant rewards via universal product placement one step further (at least). It’s not the most thrilling of novels out there. And it will be somewhat tough to follow for people that do not have a background in massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) such as World of Warcraft. With the right background, however, it’s an inspiring and thought-provoking read. I’ll follow up with why I think so and what the book is all about in a later post.

A blog is a major piece of work over time. So, being the pathologically analytical mind that I am, I can’t help asking myself: Is a blog useful? Is it necessary? What’s the purpose of this blog?

useful

A blog is useful for search engine optimization, engaging customers and customer potentials, communicating thought leadership and plainly, because it’s expected. Or so the web community as well as major consulting companies say (see the linked blog post).

Technopreneurs often seem to see their venture’s blog as simply a way to express themselves. As tech people, they (or should I say “we”) are most excited about the technology they get to touch.
(“Touch” because technopreneurs, instead of focusing on solving a consumer problem, often use technology for its coolness only until the next, even cooler tech comes along.)

So, technology is often what’s being discussed on tech venture blogs. Unfortunately, this isn’t really helping the venture as a business. Furthermore, it can be a red light for potential investors, clearly indicating to these where the founders’ (only) passion really lies.

Now this is the major trap to avoid for pure tech ventures. However, blue media labs is both a consulting company and, more predominently so far, a holding company for technology-rooted new media ventures. Therefore, a blog to be useful needs to

• satisy the update hunger of search engines as part of (do I want/need people to find the blue media labs site via a web search, though?),
• engage investors (which is more of an inter-personal task really though, isn’t it) and
• provide some comfort to users of our in-house ventures (not to say: avoid scaring them off).

That’s going to be a bit of a challenge.

necessary

As useful as a blog may be, it’s also a major time drain. Is it responsible time management to do
19 presence management chores every day? I don’t think so, and I am tempted to add a quick, opinionate discussion on this social presence management (you know, the being-on-twitter-all-the-time, answering-emails-instantly, and so on, my attitude towards which seems to be much more in line with Tim Ferris’). But I’ll keep that for a later post. Maybe.

Between full-time “presence management” and doing nothing, however, a blog seems like a decent compromise. Not absolutely necessary, but worth a try as a decently simple approach to corporate communication.

purpose

The purpose of the blue media labs website obviously is to communicate a service for investors
and illustrate some relevant experience. There’s also the initial, much simpler purpose of just providing some web presence at the internet address that an email reference such as marco@bluemedialabs.com naturally gives away.

In line with the website, the main purpose of the accompanying blog will be to share our line of thought, details of our current efforts and future plans to

• facilitate the acquisition of new clients,
• attract potential partners for our existing ventures as well as new joint ventures and
• serve as a sounding board and force us to re-think our efforts.

Content intended for the blog includes:

• selective extensions of the website’s updates section, which is a timeline of major steps blue media labs is taking,
• from time to time, some general background considerations about the space blue media labs operates in such as social media and social gaming,
• some meta information about our ventures such as their underlying rationale and our future plans for them.

It’s possible that we decide to add some tech content to the blogging section as well. When doing (or letting other do) the web development, which is a natural part of our efforts, too, tech questions frequently pop up. Sharing and preserving results of the research into these questions seems a worthwhile effort, too. However, such content is probably better placed at a location separate from the main blog. (How about techblog.bluemedialabs.com vs. blog.bluemedialabs.com? I think I have seen this distinction on other websites, too.)

Enough of a purpose for this blog? Reasonable in its time requirements? Not sure yet. At least I though about it for some time before getting started and that’s what matters most.

reset

As the founder of blue media labs, I started an independent personal blog almost a year ago at marcobremer.com (now redirects here for the time being). At the time, I thought it would be good to establish a personal brand over time. Not a bad idea. However, time showed that there wasn’t enough time to keep this personal blog updated.

Furthermore, there didn’t seem to be enough passion to keep discussing things from a rather personal perspective. After all, eventually I’d rather be known as somebody to go to with questions at the brink of web technology and business by a select few in the startup investment scene than become a public figure of Guy Kawasaki proportions. With everybody seeming to be on Twitter these days, trying to get others to follow every detail of their professional and personal life, is this a reasonable approach to web presence management? I assume so. At least, if everybody is doing the public-figure-instant-response-thing, what I’ll do is true blue ocean worth of a blue media labs (learn more about blue ocean strategy from the generalist blue ocean experts or from us for everything Internet).

Therefore, I will shut down my personal blog and reuse some of its contents here over time. I’ll then do my best to give some meaningful updates on this blog following the guidelines layed out above. Let’s see how this goes over time.

P.S. If you really do like to follow things, follow blue media labs on Twitter for the offical updates and announcements and me as the founder for all the rest of the infrequent web presence updates. That’s the planned news distribution at least.