Bat on a Booster Rocket

In 2009, a small Free-Tailed Bat landed on one of the booster rockets of the Space Shuttle a few minutes before take-off. While Wikipedia describes bats as "generally quite robust", however sitting on half a million tons of rocket fuel accelerating rapidly towards space was probably not going to end well, or as NASA put it: "The animal likely perished quickly during Discovery's climb into orbit".

Maybe it is drawing a long bow, but I reckon this little mammal is a good analogy for how sometimes we hitch ourselves on to new digital media trends without realizing the explosive consequences of our ride.

This column is all about interactive games: an industry filled with high-octane explosive materials if ever there was one. Prostitution and derivatives trading have better reputations. Yet suddenly "gamification" has entered boardrooms around the world and replaced "in terms of" at number one in management-speak bingo charts.

Gamification is the application of game mechanics to non-game environments. In some ways this works well, and in others it should be avoided. Like publishing peoples' overdrafts as a high score table.

And yet there are fabulous games out there, and some people are making a lot of money. Zynga, the makers of Farmville and Mafia Wars, has an audience of over 215m active monthly players. That's not viewers, hits, page views, or other wooly marketing fluff, that is an active and engaged audience that is spending money on content regularly. On the mobile platform, iPhone games like Flight Control and Fruit Ninja have put Australian game design onto the world stage again.

So this column will cover global gamification experiments as well as follow the story of a small number of games that we at The Project Factory have in development, and tales from beyond. It will be a diary of production and commercialization plans, successes and failures. It will be the story of a bat on a booster rocket as we work on these titles and bring them to the public and hold on for the ride. Readers of Encore will be the first to see these games on iPhone, Android phones, on Facebook as we boldly create strange new worlds and let people play with them.

This article was first published in Encore Magazine, January 2012