Gamifying Events: Experience, Agency and Role playing

This year has been a challenging but fulfilling one. While my new year resolution was to create more content, there were two main events that have kept me from achieving that promise: my own wedding and an event me and my team designed with LNL Agency for Coca-Cola! How are they related? Well, actually I landed the second job thanks to what me and my wife designed for our wedding, and it was the learnings we got from doing the first that lead us to probably one of our most successful experiences in the field of life-event gamification. This article will not be able to cover the whole design of neither of those experiences, as that endeavour would fit a whole book probably, but I want to show case some amazing experiences I had as a designer that you might find enlightening or inspiring.

This will be a multipart article, so, if you like this first part, be sure to subscribe to this LinkedIn newsletter.

Background story

If you want to know only about the design and results, you can skip this part. I want to tell you how getting married was a turning point in my design process and ended with the design of a 3-day, 500 participant event in the heart of Universal Studios, Orlando, for one of the most recognized brands in the World!

My wife, Natalia, is a big gamer and the art director of Free to Play and Azahar, our gamification company and our board game publisher in Colombia. We have been working together on all sort of projects since 2015, and she was a key player in every project we've developed, including Cash Inc, the one that got us two awards in Gamicon on 2019. So, you can imagine that when we decided to plan our wedding, we wanted to do it our way. We had no wedding planner and we wanted to transform the rigid a protocol-y structure of a wedding reception into something we loved. It took us 3 hard months of design and planning to make the reception we wanted with a really tight budget, something that two families with really different backgrounds would love, but it was worth the effort. This had a big impact for us, as it took a big chunk of our productive and non-productive time, because we really wanted to make something people would remember and we only had that rigid protocol we both hated as a starting point.

When the wedding came, it went even better than we expected! People took our design seriously, some people too seriously, and we had not a boring moment! Every detail had a meaning, a connection with the people that came, and we manage to subvert many established rituals, creating tension and playfulness. People got character sheets, could choose their dress code, had to gamble on the dessert, had powers and curses, and got personalized messages and souvenirs to take home. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In table 7, also called the "7 Wonders" table (each table was named after a board game) were my oldest friends, all the way back from high school, and in that table was Alejandro Guzman, one of my oldest friends, and actually one that has been interested in gamification from the very beginning, to the point he was in the very beginning of the founding of Free to Play. He is key to this story, because he works in LNL Agency and was the one to land us the Coca-Cola project. He loved what we did with our wedding so much that he decided to relate to his client the key moments of our wedding, and that's how we ended up, after 3 months designing our wedding, in a two month journey designing this huge 3-day event! While people in the wedding joked that we should design events like that one for a living, Alex actually took it seriously and gave us a step forward to try this on a different environment.

If you are feeling right now that 3 and 2 months is a short window of time to design something like this, well yes, it is, but we could manage it because we have been doing this for such a long time that we could pace up, and fortunately Natalia is great organizing things and making them happen. For the Coca-Cola project we also were able to hire a team to help us in the creative process, so instead of two people designing everything we were a team of gamers and geeks working on getting this right: and we had the LNL team making real everything we wrote on paper! So it can be done but it does require teamwork and skillful people!

Now, Alex was not prepared for what making this huge gamified event would mean, and he quickly found out that grounding the complexity of a good game design is something most agencies are not prepared to do! Everything was daunting and we had to balance our will to make a really good game design with the feeling, both from the client and the Agency, that everything was too complex. He would ask me to simplify and we would have to hit a balance, stripping cool things down so the client would not get too scared, without letting it get to a point were it would get dull or uninspired. We actually found out that it was best to avoid explaining the whole design process, keeping stuff like the balance of the game economy to ourselves, and converting a 60+ page game design documento into 10 slides! If it were not for the trust Alex had in us (and because he lived it first hand in the wedding), many of the ideas would have been stripped from the final experience.

The event took place this last week, and it was a success to the point that the LNL agency team on site was invited by name to the stage to be applauded by the whole Coca-Cola participants! How we managed this level of success?

Everything began with the theme and narrative

This might seem obvious for those of you who work on gamification (and I know many of my followers are you guys!), but narrative is the cornerstone of a powerful experience. Narrative in game design is a complex issue, as you need a structure to guide the players, but enough room for the players to tell their story. But narrative also has the power to tie everything together, narrative is the best medium to explain purpose and to give objective. And, what we learned from these two experiences is that the narrative precedes the event and creates anticipation!

The Moon and the Wolf - a theme for a wedding

For our wedding we wanted a fairy tale theme to inspire many design decisions. We wanted something relatable and magical. But the actual narrative came from selecting the place for the reception. My family has a terrain in Arbelaez, a small town in Colombia, and a cousin had a terrain beside a river that could resemble a forest glade. It isn't an actual forest, but it was a place to let the imagination run wild. From the location alone we decided to name our wedding a Chiaro di Luna, a moonlight valley. We went for an Italian name, not only because I love the language, but also because it would create a sense of and exotic far far away land. From there, the moon became our center of inspiration.

With Nata we had recently bough Bitoku, one of out top 10 tier board games. The theme is beautiful: the parting of the forest spirit and the crowning of a new Bitoku. This took me back to Avatar: The Last Airbender, where the moon is actually a spirit, and to make it a theme about love and fairy tale we thought of the wolf as the second main character. So with this elements in place the story would be: the sky and forest spirits were getting married, but the wedding between the moon (my wife) and the wolf (myself) would mean a new crowning would be required. Our invitees would come not only as passive spectators, but actually they would be part of the crowning ritual and two of them would become the new sky and forest spirts.

It always amazed me how, as a player, you get invested on learning the names of inexistent places or concepts. Bitoku has the kodamas, mitamas, yokais, and many more. While this game pushes this effect to the limit, we know we wanted to create a lore for the game and we would have to come up with a language. So we gave the assistants a name: Sivili. The name plays with the latin word silva, which translate to jungle. In Spanish it would be selva, and I wanted it to sound exotic but familiar. We never explained why we called the Sivili that way, but from the invitations we used this word to refer to them and everyone got onboard with it! But we had more names to give!

Our parents had to have a special place in the story and we called them the guardians (we also decided to subvert things by making them wear white). Our sisters were the main bridesmaids, but we knew them and they wouldn't love the princess role, so we gave them something more powerful and fun. They would be the pecoras, an archaic and obscure word in Spanish for witches, and they would be the only ones allowed to wear black! Every story needs a villain and they played the part perfectly! And our three best friends would be the druids, the protector and guides of the old and new spirits. This starting point gave us the elements to create everything to come.

And all of this gave us the ideas for the invitation. We created a deck of 6 cards, each one creating part of the backstory but giving some information about the wedding. Everyone knew we were not doing something conventional from there, and we managed to create hype and, why not, fear in the heart of our family and friends. All this back story led to the first mechanic: character creation!

The Search for the Coca-Cola Temple

But before I go on, we applied this to the Coca-Cola event as well. The narrative part was so important in the wedding that we had to take it with us. At the end of the wedding everyone was using the terminology we gave them and I believe no one will ever forget the word pecora. But we had a different context. In a wedding everyone is family and the theme is love and spirituality. But here we were leading with a corporate context full of people that were meeting for the very first time. The narrative should work well with the objectives of the event, and again, the location had a great deal of influence in the design decisions.

The main communication elements were about teamwork, collaboration and the future. The event actually gave us a great framework for the narrative, because they had four key words that they wanted to emphasize: magic, legacy, heart and growth. I will not explain this in detail, but you can see how this created an angular stone for creating an interesting narrative.

We knew the event would take place in an hotel in Universal Studios, so I wanted to create something "cinematographic", a kind of narration that worked well in a gameful context: my proposal was the archaeological adventure genre. Think of Uncharted, Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones. The event was about digging for the secrets of team work and collaboration, following some core principles and values, so we convert it into and actual "secret".

You see, the genre is about traveling, solving puzzles, getting artifacts and finding some long lost secret. This narrative gave us a good background to work both in aesthetics and mechanics. And it also worked well to emphasize the four words given to us. The game would be about digging for the legacy to be able to grow in the future, following the magic of team work and finding meaning to the expedition through the heart.

To create a sense of secrecy and adventure we came up with a background story that used the past of the company to create a mystery for the future. We came up with something like this: "When John Pemberthon founded the company, a group of people, called the Effervescent Enclave, wrote the Coca-Cola Scrolls, a set of secrets that would be hidden in the Coca-Cola Temple, a place that would only emerge in a moment of great need to help shape the future of the company. Then, they would create four orders: the keepers of magic, the diggers of legacy, the valiants of heart and the masters of growth to find and safeguard this secrets". This worked well with the company, as they have this secret formula they've been safeguarding for over a century.

The game, in this way would become an expedition, based on the fact that the Coca-Cola temple was spotted and the 500 participants would have to work together to find the key of magic, the key of legacy, the key of heart and the key of growth to find those secrets. How do you make 500 people collaborate and network, that would be the topic of the next article! For now, see how the integration of this new language with the core communication principles helped make those four words omnipresent and standout from all the noise of the convention.

These was harder to pull off in this corporate context of course. For the nomenclature of the game we had things like orders, order halls, guardians, accolytes, temples, shrines, sunstones, relics, travel seals, and many more. The client was becoming overwhelmed and we had to simplify that language. They thought that player's would be lost with all the different things we were creating. In reality they learned all the concepts quite fast and the additional complexity would have not been a problem, but the corporate world has a bias towards simplicity, and think complexity is only for gamers. I know this not to be true, as fantasy and sci-fi movies do this all the time and are the most consumed genres right now: if simplification of the language was really that important, movies like The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter would not be as successful as they were. But we managed to find a middle point, and hopefully the client will be willing to risk more the next time!

And again, we started communicating everything from the invitations! We developed a simple web app for the game registration that had elements of the narrative, so people would know they would find a different experience a month before the event. And the things we did before the event were key to create the event experience: in other words, the game begins before the game starts. Anticipation is a powerful feature and we managed to create this by using the character building mechanics!

Avatars and role-playing

This will be the topic of the next article, but let me leave you with and advance. Avatars are and integral part of the game experience, but not just as "portraits" or images, but as the idea of being able to play the role of a character. When the portraits you choose for your avatar become an integral part of your character, the way you feel about that portrait becomes more than a gimmick, a real expression of identity and playfulness. An avatar is not an image, is a character, with a name, a story, a message, a mission, a curse, a flaw and more.

And character building creates a game before the game. If you have ever role-played, you know how many hours people invest into creating their characters. It is a game on its own! Now, we are not dealing with role-play gamers, so it is important to find the sweet spot, and I think in both events we found it!

If you want to know how we integrated avatars and character creation in these designs, be sure to follow the newsletter.

I leave the link to the second article here: