115 - Gaming as a Trend 🎮📈
Hey there, gamer !
Last week I wrote about the Metaverse and said I’d write about the rising trend of Gaming as a Trend - so here we go!
If you’re not a gamer, get with the times - this one’s gonna show you why y’all shouldn’t be sleeping on gaming as a future trend.
Gaming as a collection of trends
I haven’t had any gaming content here for the longest time, but I think I’ve clarified my thoughts around why I think it’s so important for the future, and why it brings together so many other trends together in a neat little package.
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Firstly, gaming is design. Design thinking has been around for a very long time, with the IDEO design thinking team popularising it for business purposes in the 1990s/2000s. If you think about building a game, the designer needs to work out a fun, core loop for a games so that people will come back. Imagine pinball - you shoot a ball into a number of interactive random elements, and try to keep it going for as long as possible. You get points, your ball drops, and then you play again! A highly engaging loop - this was ‘nudge theory’ long before we even thought about it. That’s how you get people to come back to your game.
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Gaming is storytelling. Sure, you can play Pong and Minesweeper ‘til the cows come home, but if you’ve ever played a modern RPG like Fallout or Bioshock or Dishonored, you’ll know that there are some fantastic stories that come from games. Multi-layered worlds, compelling characters, complex plot points - it’s a smorgasbord of fun for those who wish to play in them. Not only that, but the world responds to how the player has shaped it - there’s a level of impact that the player has, making the game much more compelling and engaging - there is agency in the world, and stories are told with those actions in mind. That’s amazing.
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I talked about this last week, but the new hotness - the metaverse - has roots in MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). Examples of this are Maplestory, Runescape, even Habbo Hotel! You can create an avatar of yourself, you can explore the world, you can buy/sell stuff, make your avatar wear fun clothes, upgrade them, buy new skills - the list is endless. (You also get to go Server 1 on Perion in Maplestory and spam ‘@@@@@@@@@@@@@S>SCROLLS FOR ATK GLOVES@@@@@@@@@@@@’).
People are already on games like DotA or COD or Genshin Impact as their ‘third place’ or ‘digital space’, sitting in Discord calls with their friends playing a game - and it’s accessible virtually anywhere you have access to the internet. Trying to supplant these with a whole new ‘metaverse’ will, in my opinion, be a challenge.
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On that note, gaming is so damn flexible. Like I’ve said, you have anytime, anywhere access to the world. It can be asynchronous if you want it to be (take it at your own pace), and you can use many different devices, depending on the game (Sound familiar Mr. Omni-Channel Experience?). It can be a single player experience if you want to explore something by yourself, or you can join a group, a guild, a wider alliance - it’s all up to you! Let the game help you work within its bounds :)
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Lastly, and probably most importantly - gaming is fun. It’s literally the purpose of a game. If it’s not fun, it’s probably not a great game, and people aren’t going to want to play it. We’ve played games for centuries, and humans will always find entertainment in some sort of interactive set of rules cooked up in the crucible of imagination. Kids make up games if they don’t have games to play, and their imaginations can run wild with things that they they have on hand. Hell, even Squid Game uses kids games as the basis of the competition because they’re so easy to pick up worldwide (v smart decision btw).
So What?
There are so many concepts from gaming that are bleeding out to the real world whether we like it or not - so what does that mean?
Some takeaways:
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Design is everything - how are you caring about your clients / customers? What will be the ‘core loop’ of your experience that makes people come back?
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Communication and storytelling of insights is much more important than the data itself, and if you can provide a level of interactivity with it as well, even better! Giving agency to your ‘players’ means that they’ll feel more sense of ownership of their experience.
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Have a purpose for joining what you’re building. If FB has a metaverse, why would I want to go there? Do I really want to do more social network stuff, just in a different looking channel? Is it better than me being able to log in to Fortnite and watch a concert? Am I going to have to flip through different platforms and realities to get to what I want?
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Flexibility is just a given now. If you’re only thinking of making something for the web, you gotta be making it for mobile as well. It needs to easily sync between devices, it needs to pick up from where you’ve left off somewhere else. Latency needs to be extremely good for real-time use cases as well!
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What you design doesn’t necessarily have to be fun, but if you can help inject a bit of ‘play’ into your experience, do it! Why not?
Predictions
A number of predictions from Vince to be proved wrong:
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Gaming will be the genesis of the metaverse (rather than anything built by a social media platform), and people’s identities will be intensely wrapped up in what they’ve been able to achieve online (which…is already happening - but definitely more than before). See Status Games for further discussion on this.
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More game-related concepts will be used by companies to design customer experiences. E.g. having clear rules that are set out up front, tutorialisation of experiences (learning how to play the game), a well-laid out goal for people to aim for, and a comparison of how you’ve done vs. others (leaderboard). Design techniques related to getting people back to ‘play’ more will become much more important (see Behavioural Design for more discussion).
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‘Gamification’ using badges and achievements is not going to be that effective in the future, because they’re too common, and worthless. It may work with NFT’s of some sort (though I’m bearish on their usage in this way). Regardless, you need to have achievements of skill (which, essentially, are like university degrees) rather than participation awards; people know you’re pandering to them and aren’t going to respond to things that are that easy to achieve.
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People will be able to define their own achievements and have them be recognised in some manner - again, giving the player control over their own experience. Though…it could get pretty weird…look at these ones from The Stanley Parable:
Commitment: Play The Stanley Parable on Tuesday for 24 hours
Go Outside: Wait 5 years before opening the game
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Products aren’t one-off purchases - they are continuing experiences that change over time. Patches, changelogs, and player discussion / input allows more control over how the product / service is consumed, and changes it in a more dynamic way. Iterate and iterate and iterate. Change things based on the analytics you see, release new content, keep it novel! Imagine updateable fashion, or automatic upgrades for your sneakers. I see Tesla as a prototype for this right now - pushing updates to your car over the Internet is something that we would never have thought possible before - unlock new ways to use your existing goods!
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Gatekeepers are gamekeepers - governments will try to take control to make the rules, and change the rules to their liking. Metaverses needed governance too - just depends who’s going to rule over it in the end. Or maybe there’ll be ‘Internet Countries’ where all the different subcultures can live and play.
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The physical, in-person experience will not be subsumed. The Wall-E future of addiction to screens or the Lions of Comarre, Matrix-like future is not the way. Everything has a niche, and though we’re swinging the pendulum further out towards virtual reality, I’m sure we’ll swing back towards the meatspace. At the end of the day, humans have evolved as social creatures - being in the presence of other human beings is really freakin’ important.
Game on!
Let me know if you have any feedback for the newsletter!
✔️Real Life Recommendations
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Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings - yes, yes, I know you knew I would recommend this - so I won’t say too much about it. Seeing a whole host of Asian characters and actors reminds me when I was little of the love I had of martial arts films and tv shows, trying to copy their movements and fighting imaginary bad guys and monsters. It’s a action-packed movie imbued with a deep diasporic Asian identity that I love. Go watch it - it’s on Disney+ now!
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Voyage by ABBA - yep, it’s a whole new ALBUM from ABBA. It’s super fun to listen to, and has the classic ABBA vibes. The singles “I Still Have Faith In You” is the classic ABBA ballad with lovely vibes, and the extremely nostalgic “Don’t Shut Me Down” which comfortably fits in with any of their existing discography. Super cute to hear them again!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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The Metaverse is already here - it’s Minecraft - I think this take is a little too prescriptive, but I agree with it’s main points that there are already metaverses that exist - and a lot of the ideas come from gaming.
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The Debonair Restauranteur who inspired the first Chinese-American cookbook - Atlas Obscura always coming with the goods. A great story of a Chinese immigrant who set up a restaurant and influenced Chinese food in America forever.
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Jobs that Marry Together the Most - a fun bit of data analysis - which jobs marry which jobs the most? Honestly in my exploration of the data it looks like teachers marry everywhere else outside of their own jobs, whereas health professionals don’t want anything to do with anyone else. A weird one for me was finding that ‘locomotive engineers and operators’ mostly marry…registered nurses??