Our conference game brings the power of gamification to conferences and conventions. Typically played on a smartphone, tablet or laptop, this product aligns nicely with conference goals: retention of keynote/breakout teachings, encouraged interaction with partner kiosks, and enhanced attendee networking.
By adding game mechanics to a multi-day event, the entire experience becomes energized, playful and more rewarding for our clients and their audiences.
Attendees will be sent ‘Missions’ that they complete online throughout the conference -- via phone, laptop or in-person. Each players’ score is tracked (individually or by cohort) and shown on the leaderboard. The game is easy to access, and can feature a wide variety of content -- from breakout sessions, keynotes, networking challenges to creative challenges. No one conference is the same, so we built the game to be modular and flexible. The one commonality is that people get 'into' our games!
We’ve been ‘gamify-ing’ meetings and conferences since 2001. 10 years and 5,000 events later, we’ve honed in a winning strategy for making a game fit right. Not surprisingly, it takes careful planning, fluid communication with all stakeholders, and robust technology. Ultimately the editorial oversight of a top-notch game-creator ties the content, theme and game mechanics together. The Go Game has been providing these services to clients the world over, with winning results
This game can be played via an app (iPhone/Android/HTML5) or our simple html game platform..
Case Study: SAP TechEd 2011
In the fall of 2011, The Go Game created a spectacular conference-wide game experience for SAP that united some of our best people (past and present) with our best practices. Called Knowledge Quest, the ongoing 4-day experience wove a game-layer throughout SAP’s TechEd user conference. The primary goals were to:
- Enhance/deepen the learning at session breakouts
- Encourage attendee networking
- Drive traffic to the showroom floor
- Oh, and to have fun of course!
We were floored when we found out that our most famous Go Game alum and Gamification Guru, Jane McGonigal was going to be delivering the Keynote for TechEd! SAP is looking seriously at how game mechanics can be integrated to work, and who better to describe its virtues than Jane? And who better to build a game, and give attendees a hands-on tutorial in all things game-y than The Go Game? We’ve followed Jane’s career arc with great interest and enthusiasm over the years. She’s been a great flag-bearer for our industry and we like to think that we played a small part in her development as a game designer! It was so timely to have her encourage all the attendees to play Knowledge Quest the night before it kicked off. We’d spent the previous 2 months building a robust game engine that would host up to 5000 players at any given moment.
The design of the game was a slight departure for us. We included some of our fun scavenger-style and creative missions (wouldn’t really be a Go Game without it), but they took a backseat to the SAP-centric, content-driven challenges that made up a large part of the game. The attendees (few of whom know one another) are there to learn about what’s new at SAP, and it’s a packed 3 days. We literally saw dudes with their heads on fire.
After each session, players would log into the game (via latop, tablet, phone) and answer questions (written by the presenter) about what they’d just learned. Viola – points! And you’ve reinforced what you just absorbed. Additionally, the players could fill out a survey of each session as part of the game (for points of course). The feedback will make next years’ TechEd even more insightful.
We built an intake site for the Session Teachers and the Exhibit Hall Partners to enter their unique content into the game in the form of ‘missions.’ This isn’t the first time we’ve gamified a trade show, so we knew it was going to be fun. Part information-sharing, part networking, these missions are a perfect case for why a ‘game-like’ interactions work so well in these instances. People want to network, and they want to talk about the products and services they use/sell, but approaching one another without the ‘grease’ of a game-layer can make the interactions feel forced or awkward. Nothing gets people out of their shells like fast, easy-to-complete challenges.
One of the most exciting part of the game was the ‘collective point goal’ where we aggregated everyone’s score. If the entire community of TechEd could rack up one million points, SAP would donate $20,000 to Kaboom, an awesome non-profit that builds playgrounds for kids who don’t have access to them. On day four, we passed a million! And there are some kids spinning on a tire somewhere who can thank a bunch of IT nerds in Vegas (and SAP of course)!
Here are some of the key stats:
- 884 teams completed over 55,000 missions
- The average player completed 90 missions
- 91% of the players said they want Knowledge Quest again next year
For the English Majors out there, here’s a nice graphic of what attendees had to say about Knowledge Quest!
