I like video games! I always have. Despite the fact that my parents never bought any kind of video game console for my brother and I when we were growing up (although someone did give us one of those brick shaped Gameboys when we were young) we have both always loved video games. Let me just point out that I appreciate my parents never buying us one, it taught us some valuable lessons.
Anyway, about 18 or more months ago my brother Daniel showed me a video on TED (Warning: if you are prone to time wasting, like watching clever videos or have an addictive personality you probably shouldn’t visit TED) about a guy who was taking the principles of game theory and linking them to social media and marketing. Game theory examines what makes certain video games popular and tries to apply these principles in real world situations (i.e. completing quests/tasks, leveling up, earning rewards, battling etc.). One excellent example of this is the Pokemon games. Over the past 15 years the Pokemon franchise has released approximately 30 video games for handheld consoles (I’m not counting the console games because I never got to play them). More than half of these games are the exact same format and formula! Nintendo had discovered what made gamers want to keep playing and captivated the attention of Tweens, teens and young adults for 15 years! To this day Pokemon is my favorite handheld console game because it gives me what I want from a video game. Anyway This guy had created an app (only available in the US) that did this. At the time I thought it was really interesting but didn’t see any application in my areas of interest/study/ministry.
About 3ish months ago one of my Facebook friends put up a link to a story about a school teacher using game theory as a behavior management system in his year 5-6 classroom. Suddenly I could see the application! I spoke to a few people about what I had read and they were happy for me to be excited about something that made almost no sense to them. My wife in particular could quite grasp the idea because she never really played any video games. But I knew my brother would appreciate it.
Anyway a couple of weeks later my brother and I went a played a round of Supa Golf (if you’re not from Perth you won’t know what that is but it doesn’t matter). As we were walking around the course we started talking about game theory and how it might be applied to my children’s ministry. The results have been great.
For the sake of keeping posts relatively short I’ll stop there and you’ll have to wait for the next one to find out what we did and how it works!!
holletthoughts 