My hometown earns Playful City USA honor

Grand Rapids earns Playful City USA honor from KaBOOM!

GRAND RAPIDS, MI – In line for a possible $15,000 grant from Sprite, city parks also could get up to $30,000 from Dr Pepper.

Grand Rapids is one of 213 Playful City USA communities being recognized this year by the Washington, D.C. non-profit KaBOOM! for efforts to increase play opportunities for kids.

This is the second time that Grand Rapids has been named a Playful City since the program started in 2007. The honor stems from several factors including the city’s overall commitment to building new playgrounds and improving existing ones, KaBOOM! spokesman Mike Vietti said.

(via Friends of Grand Rapids Parks)

Playing the Game of (Your) Life

Jesse Schell’s Future of Gaming

Jesse Schell is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center, founder of Schell Games, and a former Disney Imagineer. He recently gave a presentation at the 2010 DICE (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) Summit.

The first 20 minutes of the talk are about the unexpected success of Facebook games. Skip all that and watch the last 10 minutes.

Schell’s “Design Outside the Box” Presentation (video).

The Newest in Gaming Technology? Brushing Your Teeth.

Schell paints a picture of what the future may hold due to the ever-decreasing cost of sensor and communication technologies. He imagines toothbrushes, cereal boxes, public transportation, advertisements, books, and essentially every artifact of your life able to score and track points. He predicts that basic sensors and wireless technologies will eventually be so inexpensive and small that they can be embedded in a cardboard box or in a toothbrush. He’s not talking about video games. He’s talking about living your life like playing a game. Brush your teeth? 50 points. Take the bus instead of driving? 100 points. Eat high fiber cereal? 75 points. Ace your exam or totally nail your piano practice? 150 points. Compete with your friends. Why not?

He doesn’t make this, uh, point in his talk, but let me, ahem, point out that much of our retail commerce experience already works this way. Reward cards, frequent flier miles, sweepstakes, and even those foil lids on yogurt cups — aren’t they all a more primitive form of the points-based game systems Schell is describing?

Winning at Life.

Schell suggests a compelling upside — tax breaks, better insurance rates, credits toward scholarships. All by gaming the system, if you will.

What’s the downside? Obviously there’s concern about privacy here. Schell’s response? How many of us know the small details of the lives of our grandparents or great grandparents? Very few. If we know that we will leave a record of our decisions, might we not make better ones? Read more and better books? Watch less and better TV? Treat our bodies better and maybe even one another better?

More Big People Toys to Influence Public Policy & Behavior

Building on a previous post on the benefits of using play to shape public policy & behavior…

The Fun Theory just added Bottle Bank Arcade Machine [youtube].

This contraption turns collecting glass bottles for recycling into something akin to Whack-A-Mole (minus any actual whacking of glass).

This is brilliant (and by electing to use italics I’m signifying that if you could hear inside my head as I typed you would have noted that I really drew that out and made it go all sing-songy).

Big People Toys to Influence Public Policy & Behavior

Volkswagen just launched The Fun Theory, an online, off-brand marketing campaign.

The first two projects are:

• Piano Staircase [youtube]
  A subway staircase is converted to an electronic piano — ala Tom Hanks in Big — to encourage taking the stairs rather than the escalator.
• The World’s Deepest Bin [youtube]
  To eliminate litter, a trash container is outfitted with sensors and speakers so falling trash triggers one of those awesome cheap electronic bomb dropping sound effects.

First of all, I wish I had thought of these. Secondly, what’s fantastic about these simple playful technologies is their implications for larger social, behavioral, and public policy issues.

Public policy is the balancing act of penalties and rewards to influence mass behavior toward some goal. Humans, of course, respond to penalties—as often by subverting them as by conforming to them. However, conversely, the rewards of most public policy systems aren’t all that enticing. We eat better and have better health and lower healthcare costs. It’s a good thing, sure, but you don’t find hoards of people fighting over access to read government nutrition guides.

So what if we go lateral or orthogonal to the normal reward system? Reward not the end goal but the immediate process of contributing to it? Blamo. Play as reward and playful technologies as enablers of public policy.