In his critique of McGonigal’s “Play, don’t Replay!” campaign, Brendan Keogh said: “To the games evangelists, games become hammers and all the world starts to look like a nail.” While his central theme did not build on this point, it served as a starting point for this thought.

Choosing a medium for an intervention is not a simple choice, and should be somewhat iterative.  Any intervention should justify their choice of medium. It is a valid design approach to review the strengths of each available medium.  Only then, should one ask: why a game, and not a billboard, brochure, or elearning style app?

For example, consider two tools to help a 4th grader memorize multiplication tables: a set of flash cards, and a video game. Which one is more expensive to build, risky to design? What benefits would a game really bring, in light of the goal?  Why build a new game when there are many such games already? What significant problem could such a new game bring? Not much, argued math game designer Keith Devlin.

Games are justified when their unique abilities are mapped to the needs of the project.  But how can one decide when that’s the case? One way to start is to review “what can games do?”

OK, here is a random ambitious idea for immersive toy. I call it ToyWorld. It is a way to make ANY real-world toy come alive onscreen.

It requires a hardware accessory for a game console or PC. Imagine a plastic breadbox that is a 3D scanner (a motorized turntable, a button, and two USB webcams – COGS maybe $30). A child puts any toy inside and clicks “scan”. The toy model appears fully textured onscreen. Auto-rigging 3D software finds any limbs, puts bones in, so the plastic toy immediately starts running (slithering, flying) around a virtual world.

Child then designs the toy’s character. She clicks one of a few basic AIs: “good / bad / boss / minion.” The toy immediately starts acting like that role (e.g. attacking props, vs throwing them in the air). Child selects one of 4 generic settings: scifi, dinosaurs, barbie-style modern, medieval. A 3D environment with props (trees, buildings, paths) appears, and the toy begins running around the world, acting in character – bad guys recruit minions and take over planets…or castles, etc. Child places basic level items like gold coins, spikes, fences. The toy starts grabbing coins, avoiding spikes, running around fences.

The worlds get better, constantly. provide ever-deeper trees of AI and interactive behavior, using Minecraft’s model of constant updates. Pets appear. Weather. Aliens attack. Fires. Viking ships invade.

Players can share and play with EACH OTHER’s toys. Remotely. Angus can get Shoni’s “bad dinosaur” and stick him in his space world.

OK, it’s kind of ambitious. 🙂

Do you aim to deliver do-good messages in an entertaining medium (e.g. video games, Youtube videos)?   If so, I’m arguing that your campaign’s entertainment value is more important than your actual message.  Not equally important. More important. I feel it is surprisingly hard, expensive, and risky to engage an audience, and surprisingly easy, quick, and safe to deliver a simple message to an engaged audience. Does this sound imbalanced or wrong? See if this example convinces you.

Typical metro rail safety campaigns scold us (“STAY OFF THE TRACKS!!”) or aim to motivate us through fear of personal harm (“You’ll lose your legs if you play on tracks!”). However, one campaign has used a very different approach that achieved exceptional success: “Dumb Ways to Die” (dumbwaystodie.org). Before reading why the designers think this campaign is so successful (http://dumbwaystodie.org/why-dumb-ways-to-die-is-an-award-winning-campaign/), watch the “Dumb ways to die” video and form your own opinion.

What about that video, as an intervention, seemed most innovative to you?   I was first struck by the ironic, slightly mean-spirited concept. My guard was down, because I had never before seen such a snarky tone in any do-good campaign…until the last verse. Then, the catchy music slowed to a dramatic pause. My suspicion rose along with my attention…and yes, the message was finally delivered.  However, they kept it light, and gave me more entertaining elements, so I still liked it overall.  The video may not have been only delivering the stated message* but my point here is about the balance between entertainment and message-delivery: most of the video was purley entertaining. We are all experts at extracting a message embedded in an entertaining experience.  The designers recognize that.

The snarky tone is an example that suggests a broader point:

As intervention producers,  our do-good intention can limit and blind us to the best path to achieving our mission.

There are many barriers to such campaigns. One common barrier are the clients’ willingness to let the ends justify the means. Stakeholders in any important mission have emotional reasons for being involved, and these emotions can prevent a purely logical approach to campaign design.  Let’s say Sam the Metro Rails exec is our client. When a drunk teen is found, bloody and maimed on the rails, Sam may get that call.  To Sam, joking about rail death is tasteless at best. This is no laughing matter.

Stakeholders like Sam that hold the pursestrings want to make an effective campaign, but their design intuition may be exactly wrong.  It is intuitive for such stakeholders to try to scare the public into behavior change.Yet, as this campaign has shown, there are far more effective approaches waiting for us to discover.

For those of us who can overcome their instincts and be logical about their campaign design, I feel there are great gains in effacacy to be had.

End.

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References

Examining the Communication Effects of Health Campaigns A Case Study Using Find Thirty Every Day® in Western Australia. Justine E. Leavy, Adrian E. Bauman, Michael Rosenberg, Fiona C. Bull SAGE OpenMay 2014,4(2)DOI: 10.1177/2158244014533557.

* Secondly, the video does not beat a dead horse.  Everyone already knows playing on railroad tracks is dangerous.  Instead of aiming to remind us of something we know, this campaign adds a new reason not to play on the tracks: peer pressure.  The video makes risky rail behaviors (standing too near the edge of the train platform) as absurdly stupid-sounding as taking your helmet off in outer space.  By laughing at the squished cartoon guy on the tracks, we accept that being unsafe around trains would make people laugh at us for choosing such a dumb way to die. The fear of social scorn is a tremendously powerful deterrent, especially for teens (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08870449908410754).  When tempted to put a coin on the tracks, we choose not to, because we picture our friends thinking we’re a dummy, not losing fingers.

http://www.academia.edu/4174420/Attention_and_Rhetoric_Prolepsis_and_the_Problem_of_Meaning