Gamification stuff we love: Urban hunt
Last week at the gamification world congress Chris Skolarski from Skolarski Studio spoke about dynamic composition and how the environment, shapes and pathways influence how a player feels about their gameplay. He mentioned an Urban Hunt, which I believe he was involved in designing, which took place in Zurich last May. The winner would receive the latest Mercedes and the runner ups would receive other prizes. The game was called Gross. Stadt. Jagd.
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The role playing game asked people to complete a run around a defined route in Zurich with various hurdles, power ups, potential natural disasters, safe houses and more interesting features. The big prize obviously the potential to drive away with a brand new Mercedes, so quite a high stake. It appealed to the fit younger urban based person and was played with a smartphone app and geo-tracking as a core element to get around to checkpoint and the location of the car at the end of 20 minutes. The challenge was to stay alive throughout the game, because as time was ticking your life on the smartphone was also ticking away.
Chris interviewed the winner and questioned him about his player strategy, the person in question is a board game player and had worked out a strategy to stay in his words 3 steps ahead of the competition, which paid off. It makes interesting reading on Gamasutra, so I recommend highly that you click through and read the original article.
What I love about this is that it was very targeted in it’s appeal to a younger and fit market segment, it included elements from online role playing games, strategy games and obviously also a treasure hunt with a big bounty prize. I am sure that from a marketing perspective this game really stands out and the fact that the prize was big, it would also magnify player styles.
Where have you seen marketing gamification that looked that much fun?
