Creating a gamified experience for an event
As Project Lead of a team of six, I designed a gamified experience for the More Than's Time Well Spent event, whose main speaker was Experience Economy pioneer B. Joseph Pine II. I led the team by building on each member's strengths and making sure everyone was heard, and did the visual execution of the experience.
Context
More Than's B2B event Time Well Spent had B. Joseph Pine II, the pioneer of the Experience Economy, as its main speaker, and its theme was edutainment: entertaining and educating at once. I was asked to lead a team of six in designing an experience for it.
My connection to the event began years earlier, when one of the company's partners was a customer of my employer at the time and was impressed by my customer service and can-do attitude. Later, my former teacher and he agreed to build an experience for the event, and she asked me to join as an alumni and lead the project.
The challenge: design, in just a few weeks and with limited resources, an experience the team could run for the event's guests on the day.
3 weeks in 2023, with a team of six with me as the Project Lead.
Experience design, Gamification, Project Management, Experience Economy
Experience realms, progression of economic value, brainstorming, ideation, Lego, Canva
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Understanding
We met as a team for the first time to hear about the project. The event's theme was edutainment: entertaining and educating at once. Our experience would run for 30 minutes, three times, for groups of ten, and we had two and a half weeks to deliver it with a tight schedule, budget and resources. We also got an overview of the event, its programme and its guests, so we knew who we were designing for. Finally, we learned what our team would do on the day itself: help set up the premises, welcome and guide guests, keep everything running smoothly, facilitate our own experience and take part in the workshop Pine would hold for everyone.
Direction
We started ideating the next day on Zoom. Our first idea was an icebreaker: guests would make quick sketches about themselves and their company, turn one into a business card visual, and pass it on for others to add a slogan. It would have made guests do something creative and a little challenging, but we decided it was too boring, too business and too general. It wasn't an experience, and we wanted to show guests what a great experience feels like. That led us to gamification and challenge as our keywords, and to a first structure:
Guests receive character cards and take on that character for the whole experience.
They solve a riddle to open a box, one giving instructions and one solving it, perhaps with eyes closed.
In the box are instructions for building something from given items, such as Lego, perhaps carried out the same way.
After building, they create a story around their creation and have to sell it without saying what it actually is.
At the end, each guest receives a card explaining what they just experienced and which elements it had.
Next we defined the theme and flow, drawing on whiteboard walls. We weighed several experience design frameworks, among them the Hero's Journey and the Experience Pyramid, and chose the Progression of Economic Value and the Experience Realms. Pine created them with his co-author, and we wanted to honour our main speaker. Following the Progression of Economic Value and its cake example, the characters became Farmer, Manufacturer, Baker and Entertainment Center. With ten guests per run, we planned five pairs for four characters, so one of Baker or Entertainment Center would be done by two pairs, since those two roles allowed more varied results.
We then scheduled the experience to fit 30 minutes, with safety time at the start and end and three minutes to reset between runs. That showed there wasn't time for every group to pitch a story, so we replaced the pitch with a display where everyone could see each other's creations. We also decided that the introduction would explain the basic idea of the Progression of Economic Value, so guests would understand what the experience was about.
Development
Next we got the Legos to help us generate ideas for the tasks and riddles. The riddles could be anything related to words, letters, Scrabble or pictures, but since we didn't know what kind of locks we would have, we couldn't go into detail yet. Because not everyone could make it that day, we decided not to take the concept further and to present our ideas to the others first. I wrote up the ideation from the walls on paper in a clearer, more structured form, since brainstorming material can be hard to read for anyone who wasn't there. I also listed what we needed to do next, and what we still had to get: Lego's, boxes with locks, boxes for the display, and possibly some decoration.
We went through all of this with the rest of the team on Zoom the next day. Everyone liked the ideas, and we continued with them. We added the idea of giving each guest a Polaroid of their creation as memorabilia, which meant bringing several cameras and enough film. We also divided the responsibilities. Each team member prepared one part of the materials (the introduction speech, character cards, riddles, building instructions or memory cards) and would also run that part on the day, since they would know it best. I took the name tags and the visual design. The teacher took care of printing and the supplies (Lego's, boxes and locks), and others brought the Polaroid cameras and a proper camera for photographing the event.
We agreed that everyone would deliver their materials to me, so I could combine them into one cohesive visual form, and that we would meet again a few days later with the people creating the materials, to make sure they fit together before I made the visuals.
Creating the materials
We reviewed the materials together on Zoom and adjusted them to fit together. One change was renaming Entertainment Center to Entertainer, so all the characters were people with one word names ending in -er. Because we didn't yet know what locks we would get, the riddles became pictures that guests put in the right order, with numbers or letters added later. We agreed to review on Monday before printing.
I made the designs in Canva instead of Figma, since the others had already worked in it and its ready layouts saved time on a tight schedule. The theme became a birthday party built on the cake example, which guests would help create. I prepared the materials in the order of the experience, adjusted the colours of the others' cards to fit the theme, and kept them simple and easy to replicate, since the experience was short and fast. I reused the Experience Realms visual from my thesis on the memory card, the card each guest takes home. The team loved the result.
Final preparations
On the preparation day we went through the materials and made final improvements. We combined the five pairs into four groups, one per economic category, and dropped the blindfolded instructing and solving roles so everyone could take part equally. We left the Experience Realms out of the theme and memorabilia card for clarity. We had planned a locked box for each group, but we found only one box and four glass jars, too small for the Lego's. So we changed the flow: guests solve the riddle, open the box or jar to find the instructions, and then have the whole pile of Lego's in the middle of the table, which also gave them more creative freedom. We chose different types of locks for variety and gave the hardest, the direction lock, to the Farmers, with three people in the group. I also made an Excel timetable of roles and responsibilities for the event day.
We invited some students to test the experience, with me walking them through it while the others observed. The test led to concrete changes. We marked the riddle images by cutting the same corner for each topic for easy recognition and resetting of the game. We added to the introduction that riddles are solved within each group and how the lock types work. We changed the confusing zeros on the number locks to fours, placed the boxes and jars in front of guests from the start, made the display the finale of the experience, and planned to tell guests how long each part lasts. Then we printed, laminated and cut the cards and packed them in named envelopes for easy set-up.
Outcome
On the morning of the event we learned that only three of us would facilitate the experience, because the others had other responsibilities. The roles we had planned had to be divided between three people, and that meant dropping the Polaroid pictures, since there weren't enough hands to take them quickly enough. We prepared the room together. We didn't have four tables of the same size, so we used what we had: three small tables and one big one, with the pile of Lego's in the middle, a locked box or jar and character cards for each side, and a display table at the end of the room.
I didn't facilitate the experience myself. I welcomed and guided the guests, hosted Pine together with an More Than's representative, and took part in his workshops. To find out how it went, I asked Nataliia to report back, and what follows is based on her account.
The guests were divided individually and in random order around the tables. The introduction took one to one and a half minutes instead of the planned three, the riddle two to three, and the Lego building up to ten, at each group's own pace, though some groups needed help with the locks, especially the direction lock. Presenting the creations on the display took one to two minutes, and the closing words and memory cards took the planned two. Most groups finished five to ten minutes early. Our tasks were probably too simple, since we had tried to allow for guests who might never have done anything like this. More time to prototype and test would have made our timing more accurate, and it showed us how easy it is to overestimate how long things take. It also meant there would have been time for the Polaroids after all.
According to Nataliia, the guests really enjoyed the experience and had fun, with plenty of positive feedback, smiles and laughter.
I have worked with Minka as our team leader in an international B2B gamified event in Finland. Minka is very communicative, active, and easy to work with. Even during the toughest moments, she shows great emotional intelligence skills. Her energy is contagious and she can transform a moment into a pleasant memory. As per my experience, I strongly recommend her for project manager positions.
Valter Biscaia da Silva Filho, team member
Had a great pleasure to work with (and under helpful supervision of) Minka for the More Than's "Time well spent". I was part of the student team taking care of designing and creating the experience, which Minka was overseeing. She had the helpful encouragement of a great team leader, would always give full creative freedom to anyone who was sharing ideas, and was able to efficiently summarize the said ideas so as to communicate them to others and those on the More Than's management team. She was very trusting in us as a team an that translated very well on the very day of the event and our activity. Attendees had a fun and entertaining activity that aided them in familiarising themselves with the main topic of the events, that was the workshop by Joe Pine II about the "Experience Economy". Hence, cannot recommend her enough to be a leader of a design team or project, as she will make sure to lead it to a great success!
Nataliia Chernova, team member
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