AD ALTA
JOURNAL
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INTERDISCIPLINARY
RESEARCH
games). These quests were given to them by various NPCs,
special staff members in costumes, that were positioned on
various places around the campus.
The marketing-oriented questionnaire that we have at our
disposal (conducted by the faculty’s student as part of her future
bachelor’s thesis, that is yet to be published) shows that this
game is really only added value at the festival, and that it is not
one of the motivations why visitors come to it. It was not heavily
advertised and besides gifts given by sponsors (and school), it
was not a costly part of the festival as a result of the decision not
to hire a company for it (as we were considering), but to leave
this part to a student who was interested in it. He convinced his
friends (mainly) from the community of cosplayers and other
students to play the role of NPCs for a ticket to the festival. The
application, which recorded the entry of quests and the
movement of coins at the same time as the “payments” at the
final auction, was also developed by one of the students.
Thus this game did not have to meet any financial expectations.
In addition to what has been said – its role to make the course of
the festival more special for those who decide to do so and to
serve as a training tool – we also wanted to use the quests to
better involve the festival partners and inconspicuously bring the
visitors’ attention to them. That is something that we would like
to test in a future in a restructured way; ideally, such
involvement should be reminiscent of in game advertising, in
which players interact with brands – in our case, visitors to
partner organizations.
3.1 Interpretation of numbers
What seems to be more problematic is that we have yet to find a
practical way to verify qualities of implementation of game
elements in this particular way. When dealing with gamification
in product marketing, brand loyalty or in similar fields, success
or failure is possible to describe in revenues, sales, employee
productivity, or other measurable index.
When treating gamification as a tool to just better the experience
of the person, we have few possibilities; we can ask them in a
focus group, question form, making annual reports of how many
people “finished” the game until the very end, but none of these
methods seem to be appropriate.
However, we will not abandon every academic approach to this
issue; instead, we plan to focus more on the few things that we
are able to measure. As said before, our mission on this festival
is to bring the audience to a world that we like and find relevant
and to test various ways how to accomplish that. We can observe
behaviour of the festival visitors and use them as a form of
research group and now we are developing schemes on how to
use available and observable facts as indicators of some sort.
2020 was the first year we used mobile app as a platform for
taking track of the in-game events. This year was more
appropriate for this “innovation” than another, since the festival
was cyberpunk-themed, but we plan to use it next year. It is
valuable as an option to keep track of how long guests are
staying and even when the number of people participating in
these quests are relatively small in comparison to the number of
all attendants.
This year we can interpret the data obtained from the app, which
helps us determine the attractiveness of individual quests. In
some cases, this can be easily estimated by monitoring, and such
an estimate can later be verified in the data from the application.
For example, the quest “Masking”, in lore explained as receiving
the mask needed to fight evil corporation, was actually letting
two girls to paint your face cyberpunk-style, and we could
already notice at the festival that it was quite popular, seeing
how many guests walked around the place with a cables and
hardware painted on their face.
Anyway, these data we gathered showed us that this game was
played by one tenth of the total number of people at the festival
throughout the weekend (around sixty participants of this game
to six hundred people). It may seem like a rather disappointing
number, but we need to take into consideration that in that pool
of that 600 people, there is a lot of people that were not the target
group in the first place (staff and festival crew that was
prohibited to play in order this game to be fair, gamers at a
esport tournaments that did not have time for it, people from
guest list such as university personnel and sponsors and so on).
After subduction of these sections, the final ratio (of people who
were participating in this LARP and those who were not)
increases to about 1:4. That is an appropriate result and we do
not consider it a failure. Fact is, that just about half of them
“finished” the game and participated in the final auction.
However, we plan to better and polish happenings at UniCon
and try to attract more people into this game; we do have some
educated guesses on how to do so, as explained in the next sub-
chapter.
Although the festival is organised by university, it is attractive
for younger audiences as well (as expected) but the data tells us
that this LARP was played by both kids and adults and that
seems like a proper representation of what the festival consists
of.
3.2 Flawed parts and improvement plans
This game for sure differs from “real” LARPs which use to
connect groups of people that are dedicated to play, but that is an
acceptable part of putting up this model at a game convention.
In this hunt for coins, sometimes it became more obvious that
main motivations are the coins itself/or the process of collecting
than the quests alone. It somewhat creates inconsistency in the
whole idea of this game as a form of LARP, but it is
understandable as well, since a huge part of the quests was to
“make” people try out various attractions and “discover”
locations of the festival. If we aim to build an atmosphere that
provides a playful experience, the game itself needs to balance
out more trivial motivation that prizes are, but we do understand
the limits of game design in this particular circumstances.
We do have some ideas for changes. For example, the matter of
people losing motivation in the game and not staying until the
end could be partially resolved by creating fractions.
Already this year, we entertained the idea of creating teams in
which players would join. In this testing phase, we came up with
several ideas to make such a system more reliable and attractive.
For example, the creation of two or three fractions, i.e. teams,
should create a better structured environment for creating in-
festival connections.
For example, it should motivate people who do not want to
participate in the festival throughout its duration, but may also
want to participate in the game anyway. We would test whether
being part of something more complex than just the player
himself would be a relevant factor in the players’ behaviour. We
would allow better flow of currency in between players in one
fraction, give them some in-game benefits and so on.
In a bigger picture, we are hoping to create some sense of
community, so called communitas. We can take inspiration in
existing successful projects, that “demonstrate the growing
importance of having more fun with strangers and of using
games to build our own capacity for community participation.”
(McGonigal, 2011)
We also consider this, because we believe that it is one of the
ways to pull guests “deeper” into this play. Since this is a small
university event, there are no strict lines between staff and guests
(which is the reason why the total count of people may be
inaccurate for calculating success rate of the game), and we aim
to continue to erase these boundaries in order to bring these
players into the game in this way as well. Therefore, we want to
give fractions, in addition to advantages, also certain positions of
function.
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