Today our CEO, Keith Lee, spoke about ways to apply game motivators to real-world activities and locations in order to build fun and successful games. Keith outlined the benefits of creating a game with real-world incentives and expanded upon the many challenges and opportunities that have arisen from his experience in this space. He closed by giving advice to those in the audience. That advice was that too often companies begin with the mindset of needing to do everything in a game; instead, Keith believes that companies should be "laser-focused" and simply excel in one thing.
Adding real-world aspects to a game has been a proven formula for success. Whether you have real-world goals, such as losing weight (Wii Fit, Fitbit, Nike+), real experience, such as interacting with the an actual world rather than a virtual environment (Tonchidot, Gunman, and other Augmented Reality games), or real world rewards, such as those MyTown offers with our recent H&M and ZonePerfect campaigns, the one thing that is constant is the need to have in-game incentives to achieve these goals. In MyTown, we incorporate real-world validations (you get points from proximity-based check ins), and real rewards (incentivized deals), among others, into our game in order to give the best experience possible to our users.
Many of our own struggles came from figuring out how to tackle the conundrum of incorporating the real-world into our game. Our first attempt, Booyah Society, was a dismal failure. However, it was because of this failure that we were able to improve and come out with what we think is an amazing game in MyTown. Keith stressed that developers must look inward and decide what a team's strengths are, and then capitalize on those different strengths.
The last piece of wisdom that Keith imparted upon the audience (this piece came from the Disruptive Innovations panel) was that developers must figure out where they want to be in 6-8 months from now, and pivot immediately. In other words, if you're reacting to changes in the market when they happen, you're too late.
Today was the last day that anyone from Booyah will be speaking, but we'll be around for the rest of the week enjoying the conference. We've loved our interactions with those who have introduced themselves to us thus far, so don't be a stranger and come say hi!

