Page 33 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014without technology, but technology is there, and it is there to help us.Technology means developing more sophisticated, not more complex, game experiences in a way that enables the effectiveness of the experience to be enhanced. Some technologies, such as those found today in mobile telephones, make it possible to suggest new proposals to attract the public’s attention and get people involved.Thus there are campaigns, such as The Witness in Germany by Universal for the Street 13 TV station, in which, in essence we find what was achieved in the Choose Your Own Adventure books.Street 13 announced the launch of The Witness by inviting people from all over the world to register on a Web site to participate in a game experience in the streets of Berlin on the occasion of the launch of the station in Germany.The Witness is an interactive cinema project in which the setting of the game is Berlin. Participants had to download an application to their mobile phone and were called towas possible to live through a truly transmedia experience, the aim being that people would talk about the launch of Street 13 with a narrative akin to the station’s content.Are you the hero, or the next victim?PROVIDING READERS WITH MOTIVESGamification is a tool that can be used to inspire people to adopt forms of behaviour that are desirable and necessary for given projects. Motivating people does not mean encouraging them to carry on participating, but rather it means giving them motives to participate.So, if we return to books, for example, we find there are many people who do not have the habit of reading and who need additional motives to seek out knowledge or to adopt reading as a pastime.By transferring elements of games to reading we can introduce certain components that enable people who do not habitually read as a hobby to do so, to share their progress and viralise books through social networks.To this end, there are projects and platforms throughout the world that attempt to reinvent the reading of books by using gamification as a base.This is the case with ReadSocialApp, a book‐reading platform that makes it possible to create social communities around books and which enables readers to contact the authors directly to discuss issues raised by the book and to gain a deeper understanding.This platform adopts components borrowed from videogames to provide feedback as well as instant satisfaction as the reader progresses through the work. Furthermore, it establishes tasks to unlock the work’s exclusive content.meet at a hotel in the city. Once there someone gave them the key to a room in the hotel which they had to go to.The new technologies make it possible to develop partici‐ pative game experiences to capture the attention of audiences and to achieve their participationOnce they were there, and only when they were there, could they reproduce the first scene of the film by scanning the room with their mobile phone. The scene of a crime by the Russian mafia called the player to action leading them to navigate their way to various locations in Berlin and not just reproduce the scenes where the events had occurred on their phones, but to make decisions that affected the course of the story.The Witness was presented as the first immersive film in which, through augmented reality and GPS, itAC/E WHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 3: GAMIFICATION, GENERATING COMMITMENT TO CULTURECURRENT PAGE...33