by Steve Gray – Creative Director – Stickee
I’ve heard a lot of my peers talking about their product design influences from other established sectors, normally being the ones they came from prior to their digital careers, which include amongst others, different marketing disciplines, publishing, music and film. For the record I went straight into working within the digital realm from uni so have no such background.
It might be through my own lack of understanding or foresight but I find some of these product influences a rather shallow way of looking at the possibilities of using a digital medium. I’m not suggesting that generic learning from these industries is a bad thing, on the contrary I believe a digital company can learn lots of things from any successful business in any sector but if we are talking about relevance to our thinking, our productions and the connections with our client’s audiences I believe some of the best examples come from the computer games industry.
The commercial computer games industry has now been around for just over 30 years, similar to how long I’ve been on the planet. My first experience with gaming was on a vintage ‘bat and ball’ Binatone TV System. This was not just mine, but many people’s first human-computer interaction. Although slightly crude, the early games of these days established the commercial viability of the sector. The companies that invested in the development of computers purely for gaming and entertainment purposes soon became household names. With newer consoles came more power which led to better graphics, depth and gameplay. However you feel about gaming, it was the first commercial sector to successfully fuse creative, computer arts and computer science in the making of a product.
A games development house is in many ways similar to that of a digital agency. It is a service (people) orientated business that shows its results in an intangible digital product. They also have similar considerations to us in the design of such a product including understanding audience, creativity, usability, information architecture, innovation of technology, good design etc.. and have the potential in their medium to combine different types of media .
So what can we learn from games? I believe the most important lesson to be learnt is that of purpose. Since the introduction of the very first games, the game designer has constantly had to ask themselves ‘Why would the user bother doing this?’ You can see how this works by taking a simple example of an old game like Super Mario Brothers, first released in 1985 for the NES. What’s the point of collecting a coin? …If you collect 100 you’ll get an extra life. So what the point of an extra life? …well it increases the chance of you getting further in the game and getting a high score. Why would they want to get to the end of the game? …because that is how you save the princess! And why would they care about the score? …because they’ll have a table of highest scores at the end, encouraging them to be competitive with themselves and others. Game mechanics often have an answer to everything.
Tying this reward ethos into the games purpose is something almost every successful game does. It is simple to achieve but puts meaning back into the very activity of playing the game. Without this linked method of thinking all gamers would be playing in parks and climbing trees like their mothers wanted them to. Applying this methodology into campaign creative can drastically change the user experience from a ‘just following the direction of the traffic’ into ‘I feel like I’ve achieved something..thanks brand X’.
We can learn different lessons from the different game genres. Certain genres of game cleverly combine characters and narrative with purpose, many of which allow you to personalise your identity and make choices in the flow of the narrative. Personalisation, narrative and character are three important ways to encourage an emotional connection with a campaign and can be seen in successful examples of emotive campaigns such as the Metropolitan Police campaign to combat knife crime ‘choose a different ending‘ by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO. The powerful psychology used in this campaign by experimenting with either a righteous or evil path had already been used 7 years ago within games such as Fable for Xbox. There is little need to use specific examples in demonstrating the benefits of certain game genres. Modern role playing games (RPG’s) for example are more or less expected to engage a user for over 50 hours.
I also like to learn lessons from the industry’s mistakes. There was a time in gaming where they, like us, were concerned with file sizes. It forced the industry to be technically creative with their offerings and to make edits on things that didn’t work. With the rapid progression of console power came the abuse of its capabilities. Some studios started to become more obsessed about getting as much onto the media as possible to the detriment of the gameplay, whether it was polygon count or lots of pointless full motion video. With the popularity of social gaming and mobile devices game developers are getting back into the spirit of a true user experience…the lesson to be learnt from this is not to use technology for technology’s sake and just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
So if gaming is such a great digital influence why don’t we just port games online. Well that’s being done and with some success too, particularly in the viral market. In fact a couple of former Stickee guys set up a company called Nitrome doing exactly that, have produced some lovely retro pixel web games and have deservedly been successful.
Although online allows you to do most of the things that can be done in games the fact still remains that a game is a game and a campaign is a different animal. A game is a selfish medium that, despite what gaming company’s trying to make some ad revenue say, doesn’t really like to share its space with brands or messaging. Users playing games online have had their expectations set by console games and therefore demand an uninterrupted, message free experience after they start to play. Also used incorrectly the very benefits I was identifying in game mechanic can add a level of complexity that isn’t necessarily suitable for most brands. Campaign success more than often comes from simplicity and clarity.
Gaming has helped to shape the way both I and our business thinks for the better. It has made a direct contribution into the definition of our ethos and our core values; Emotive, Engaging and Meaningful. Values which all successful games seem to have considered. If you have never tried to play computer games, why not give it a go and whilst doing so think about how some of your experience can be translated into a simple online creative.
I still have an affection for games but choose not to start playing the kind of games that demand the investment of a small part of my life. Instead I thought I’d move onto films for a quick entertainment fix but watched one of the 24 series and then bought the 7 series box set…maybe I should go back to gaming as I don’t think an article entitled ‘How Lessons From Jack Bauer Can Help Digital Thinking’ has the same relevance to it.
