Players manage Kiwi acts Tiki Taane, I Am Giant, Street Chant or Princess Chelsea, choosing where to tour, which producer to work with and how to best hype their artists. Scandals must be managed and egos soothed, all the while listening to your artist’s streaming music.

The game is available on the Apple AppStore or online at www.indiemusicmanager.com.

“I never thought I’d become a character in a video game so for me it’s a real buzz,” says Tiki Taane. “It’s a new way to explore homegrown music and try your hand at managing an artist through all the challenges that the rock’n’roll scene presents. It was really cool to see the game progress and have an input to some of the game’s creative.”

Ben Howe, Chairman of Independent Music NZ and a NZ Music Commission Board Member, was part of the design team. “It is great to see the gaming industry and the music industry collaborating on this project. With the music industry changing so quickly and grappling with digital sales, this is a very forward thinking project,” he says.

The game was funded through NZ On Air’s digital funding. “Indie Music Manager breaks new ground for us,” says NZ On Air Chief Executive, Jane Wrightson. “A game is an innovative way to support New Zealand music, engage new audiences and promote music discovery.”

Stephen Knightly from InGame says anyone can play the game – as long as they’re a fan of Kiwi music. “To succeed in the game you have to know your musicians inside out and make the right choices for them. The best producer, crew or venue for Tiki Taane might not suit a hardcore act like Street Chant.

“If people like what they hear, they can download the tracks from iTunes. We hope players will discover new acts to follow and help New Zealand music reach new audiences.”

The game features 28 music tracks and 10 unique recording studios, venues, producers and roadies, all with their own strengths and weaknesses. Managers can hype their acts with publicity and PR, make cash from merchandising and licensing, and book support acts. Additional acts will be added to the game later in the year.

The game was developed by InGame and Tim Thorpe Consulting with art by Images & Sound.

We’re seeking $50,000 to create “Holly Melancholy The Interactive Adventure”, an indie platform game for PC and Mac featuring little goth witch Holly Melancholy.  To support the project visit www.Boosted.org.nz.  Boosted is a new crowd-funding platform created by The Arts Foundation to support local creative projects.  Unlike other crowd-funding sites, contributions to Boosted projects are donations and are eligible for a tax rebate.  The campaign runs until 20 May.

There is little government funding for New Zealand content in video games, so crowd funding directly from arts patrons and gamers makes sense for creative gaming projects.

Supporters of the project will receive invites to exclusive events, an insider’s view on what goes into making a video game, and early access to test and play the game.

Tanja Jade ‘Misery’ has long wanted to make Holly more than a painting on a wall. “I first began drawing Holly in 2002 and over time she has grown into a particularly smart, curious, brave young lady with a streak of madness. I have always felt that the ultimate way to bring my characters and illustrations to life would be through a video game. Not only would the characters move but my audience can interact and have control over what they do.”

Misery’s illustrations are known for their creative mix of crazy childhoods, fantastic animals  and female empowerment – all which the interactive game aims to reflect.

In the game, Holly must rescue her sisters and the other children of BlackPudding Shire who have been kidnapped by witchdoctor Haggis Fromage for her cat factory.  As well as exploring Misery’s unique artworks, players will help Holly collect ingredients to craft magic potions and turn a variety of innocent items into tools of destruction.  There will be no princesses to rescue.

For this project, InGame has assembled a team of local indie game developers and artists who match Tanja’s artistic sensibilities well.

Supporters can contribute anything from $5, $20 or $100 or more.  Visit www.boosted.org.nz.

‘Engagement’ is a term that is given a lot of lip-service in marketing communications, yet attempting to ‘cut-through the noise’ with a campaign with ‘great reach’ is too often still the norm.

Originally inspired by the runaway success of Facebook and smartphone games like FarmVille and AngryBirds, Gamification has been a buzzword for a few years now. Gartner Research estimates that more than 70% of Global 2000 organisations will have gamification in their marketing mix by 2014.

Gamification is the practice of adding proven game design techniques to something that is not a game – like your website, online community, app or loyalty programme. It is an answer to the age old question: If we build an app or website, will anyone actually come – and more importantly – will they keep coming back?

Popular examples of gamification include FourSquare, Nike+, LinkedIn’s profile completion bar, VW’s The Fun Theory campaign, or energy drink V’s various advergames. Coke, Walmart, Unilever, NBC, Ford, IBM and countless other brands have embraced it.

If you look past the hype, what Gamification does is appeal to people’s natural desires for autonomy, self-expression, achievement, status, social connections and even altruism.

A common gamification tactic is to provide rewards such as points, achievement badges, levels, progress bars. Many traditional marketers are surprised that these ‘virtual rewards’ are just as effective as ‘Buy 3 get 1 Free’ deals, as well as being cheaper and more immediate. However, the release of the dopamine drug by our brains is the same regardless whether the reward we anticipate is real or virtual.

But watch out as an over-reliance on extrinsic rewards (such as prizes, carrots and sticks) can ultimately be counter-productive. People start doing it for the reward, like a high Klout score, rather than for authentic communication.

Other techniques include character personalisation, sharing quests with friends, scaffolding challenges so it is easy to get into but requires mastery over time, incentives to return each day, multiple pathways presented at once, and using badges for personal branding.

Most of these have their roots in well-known behavioural psychology research. For example, psychologists have long known that variable ratio rewards increase retention and loyalty. Where are they found today? In slot machines and in how video games reward players with ‘loot drops’. Games were the simply first to be able to analyse the impact on millions of players and quantify real results. Tripling or quadrupling engagement rates is not uncommon when gamification is done right.

The starting point for gamifying your campaign, service or product is customer insight. What emotional needs are your customers getting out of it? Are they socialising with your product, feeling secure about their future, using it to achieve a personal goal? Present an activity or challenge that expresses that, give great feedback and encouragement, make it easy for customers to share their progress, and make it progress gradually so it doesn’t get boring.

Gamification doesn’t mean creating a video game (that’s advergaming which is also a great tool) or require new budget, instead its principles can amplify what you’re already doing. Because it amplifies what is already valued, the result is an increase in conversion and retention rates.

This post originally appeared on the NZ Marketing Association’s blog.

Photo credit: The Gamification of Life by VFS Digital Design.

“Gamification could become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon,” according to Brain Burke, research vice president.

A similar trend may be emerging in New Zealand. Stephen Knightly, director of gamification consultancy InGame, has noticed a strong uptake in recent years.

Knightly distinguishes between game-based learning, in which you teach new skills using a game, and gamification, in which you incorporate game mechanics into a non-game activity. He identifies numerous strengths with game-based learning: experimenting in ways that you wouldn’t or couldn’t in real life, simulating hazards to teach employees how to react, providing clear and timely feedback, and tapping into our digital literacy.

“The power of game-based learning isn’t that it’s a game and games are fun and sexy and cool with the kids these days,” Knightly said. He argued that they are a better pedagogical tool in many cases, since they demonstrate the consequences of an employee’s actions, poor or otherwise. “That’s one of the strengths of e-learning, and of games in particular – you can fail safely,” he said.

One example of this is a game that Knightly worked on to teach employees crisis management. In the game, you played the CEO of a camping goods company who had to manage a product recall and speak with a journalist. “It was really just a conversation with a whole bunch of branching choices that you would make, similar in many ways to a ‘Pick-a-Path’ adventure book,” as Knightly described it.

The player could choose to answer questions honestly, evasively, or to give context. “After a few minutes of conversation you could see whether you had a front page crisis in the newspaper or happy customers,” Knightly said.

The game was produced in the style of a comic book, so that employees were encouraged to ‘play.’ “That’s not about it being frivolous, that’s about giving the employee the permission to experiment and to take risks and so it actually helped avoid wrote-learning,” Knightly explained.

Research appears to support the efficacy of game-based learning. A literature review undertaken by the University of Colorado found that trainees who participated in game play had 11% higher factual knowledge levels, 14% higher skill-based knowledge levels, and 9% higher retention levels than those in the control.

This article by Rose Sneyd originally appeared on HRM Online magazine.

The Postal Sunday School Movement (PSSM) has been on a journey of reinvention and renewal. Following a strategic review they transformed their business from bible lessons via the post to becoming a world-leading Christian video games company called ’2ndcity studios’ – while staying true to their history of serving communities remotely. Their goal is to create a a virtual world for 10-14 year olds which shares the story of the Bible.

Creating a multiplayer online game is a significant undertaking – typically a commitment of millions of dollars and several years. Over the past year InGame consulted with 2ndcity Studios to develop a business plan, funding models, marketing strategy and select a long-term technology partner. This included assessing various providers on their experience, technology, skills, working model and, importantly, team fit.

All parties agreed that the game must be fun first – otherwise, why choose a game as the medium. Many previous ‘serious games’ (let alone religious ones) have suffered from being overly worthy.

Much of 2ndcity Studio’s design work has been around bringing together game design, learning strategies and theology, without any one element over powering the others. As a result, the world tells the story of the Bible via allegory – an approach that is less ‘preachy’, has wider appeal but is also tried and tested in religious education.

Set in a mysterious and timelessly steampunk land, the player arrives washed up on a beach and is invited to join a fledgling resistance whose aim is to restore the land to its former goodness, and ultimately return a deposed king back to the throne. This land has been overrun by an oppressive fog, and only this king knows how to start the engines that drive the fans that keep this fog at bay. Through a series of tasks, quests and interactions, the player and their friends will interact with the Bible and its story, and seek to apply learnings into the game world and their own world.

The game design uses multiple ‘game mechanics’ to get its message across. Quests align with corresponding bible stories. Overall progress aligns with over-arching themes in the Bible. The allegorical characters and events are starting points for group discussion. Regular tasks let you enact beauty, justice and generosity in the game – along with the choice to do the opposite.

It is the game’s overall system that is designed to incentivise Christian behaviour not preachy infodumps.

This is not unique, but has been an explicit part of the game design process. The worldviews of game designers have always subtly influenced the rules they create. For instance, it can be argued that classic game SimCity is a central planning socialist game where bulldozing anyone’s house for the greater good is acceptable. A superficially similar game Civilisation instead represents the American 20th Century, where technological progress is valued above all else.

Throughout history, the bible story has been carried in many forms – oral traditions, written forms, radio, movies – and a digital game is just the latest expression. Learn more about their project at www.2ndcityStudios.com.

While Gartner Research estimates that more than 70% of Global 2000 organisations will have gamification in their marketing mix by 2014, it’s still misunderstood.

These were some of the lessons from New Zealand’s first Gamification Lab facilitated by InGame’s Stephen Knightly in conjunction The Gamedojo, Idealog and NZ Marketing mag in June.

Gamification is more akin to a mix of usability and behavioural psychology. It’s the practice of generating deep insights into what makes your customer tick, creating hot buttons that appeal to those needs, and applying that across the entire customer journey. Don’t just write a technical brief, write an experiential brief for your interactive projects too.

Points and badges typically only appeal to one kind of game player. They assume that your customer or employee gives a damn about competing with others or mastering a task.

Some of the most successful video games in recent years are non-competitive. Think Farmville, SimCity or DrawSomething.

The projects workshopped at the Gamification Lab illustrate what’s possible. We looked at highly personalised career planning tools for University student recruitment, and dinner party guides for drink and ice cream brands.

Rather than just an app to book a holiday efficiently, how could you bring to life a story about how adventurous or romantic it will be and a user-generated record of how it was? That’s significantly more likely to be shared via social media.

Instead of giving real products away to your most regular customers, what if they could feel rewarded and part of an exclusive club with virtual goods as well? The release of dopamine in the brain is the same whether the reward is virtual or real. What really matters is what the reward recognises or says about you.

An over-reliance on extrinsic rewards (such as prizes, carrots and sticks) can ultimately be counter-productive. People start doing it for the reward, like a high Klout score, rather than authentic connections.

Instead, much of the Gamification Lab was spent aligning game mechanics with intrinsic rewards. These are the things at the very top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: self-expression, personal achievement, storytelling and creating.

What gamification does best is amplify these inherent emotional benefits. Because it amplifies what is already valued, the result is an increase in conversion and retention rates.

This article originally appeared in the September 2012 issue of Idealog magazine.

Click for a larger version of the infographic.

While the infographic shows the average for Australian and New Zealand combined, the Digital NZ results are also available.  The results in New Zealand align well with similar studies in the USA and Europe.

In 2012 The Accident Compensation Corporation ran Idea Nation, a national competition to crowdsource great ideas for preventing falls in the home.  InGame’s proposal for an online video game FallSafe beat nearly 100 other proposals to win the Best Business Idea category.  Now we’re working with ACC’s research, prevention, policy and assessment teams to design the game and conduct a rigorous trial during 2013.

FallSafe would be an online video game using proven gaming and interactive training techniques to teach adults and children about home hazards and risk management in a fun and accessible way.  Players build their own or an imaginary home online, similar to popular games like The Sims or Farmville.  However, they would also encounter a range of hazards at the same time.

Rather than merely identifying hazards, players could experience the impact of a fall and be able to take action to fix it.

The average player of a social Facebook game is a 40 year old female.  So the game would encourage interaction between kids and parents to spark family-wide safety discussions.

The concept was developed in conjunction with InGame partner Tim Thorpe Consulting.  Tim consults in the film, television and new media industries, and was previously a professional forester responsible for health and safety in a corporate forestry environment.

The IdeaNation judges said “What captured our attention about this idea is the huge potential that the ‘gamification’ of learning has for influencing behaviour change. This game could work in a similar way to other hugely popular Facebook/viral online games and lay down home safety fundamentals across a wide audience in an entertaining way.”

He also covered the diversity of gaming companies – on smartphones and online, for children and adults, and for entertainment as well as serious purposes.  Check out his slides below.