Day 2 started off with Ruben Steige of Millions of US talking about Social Experience Design. I think one of the key takeaway elements of this talk is that, “entertainment has always been social.” In part because of a second shift in how people interact with media Ruben spent the majority of his talk examining the role that game theory and game design has come to mean for all media. The interactive shift that the web represented five to ten years ago is now giving way for a second shift that is even more fundamental. That shift has to do with the shift toward social media.
“You can’t buy attention anymore.” We now have to create entertaining things. But part of this is really about how do you get people interested and invested in media in new and different ways. One of the things that he hasn’t mentioned here is that it changes the relationship between the users and corporations.
Also related to this was what he talked about as:
- The real world is becoming more virtual.
- The virtual world is becoming more real.
He used the example of the Unity game engine which is bringing compelling virtual experiences to numerous other devices. But that again the idea is more fundamental. How do you bring design to bear that encourages user participation. He used examples from Fubar.com, the online MMO Gaia, Enitechlabs.com, and others to bring users to be engaged in media in different ways.
Of course the catch is that with traditional media you can buy your way to success, but with social media, you’re not guaranteed to be a hit and it takes a lot of significant work. I asked about the difficulty that this provides especially for established companies and brands. The answer was more that companies were not ready for something like this. I think there is more there than was really addressed, but that is a topic for down the road.