‘Love in Times of Gamification’ at NEXT Berlin

This talk orig­i­nat­ed from a top­ic that had occu­pied me for a while. It seems I’m not the only one if I have to judge from sto­ries told to me by friends. Love and dat­ing online has grown to be a very large mar­ket with cut­throat com­pe­ti­tion and a lot of pres­sure to try out per­sua­sive and game­ful inter­ac­tion pat­terns.

I was con­vinced there was a sto­ry here and I am grate­ful I was accept­ed to tell it at NEXT Berlin. A more thor­ough treat­ment of this top­ic is forth­com­ing, but below you can find the video of my pre­sen­ta­tion at the con­fer­ence:

As you can see from the exam­ples, there is a lot of ter­rain beyond the casu­al games and online dat­ing areas and a lot of oppor­tu­ni­ty to come up with new things. The Pair thum­bkiss — how­ev­er sim­ple it may look — is a notable inno­va­tion in a field that is mired with many of the same social net­work­ing pat­terns.

But my per­son­al favorites among the list of exam­ples are the phys­i­cal games such as the bril­liant Fin­gle and the hilar­i­ous Sword Fight. For games that already live in the real world, break­ing through bound­aries is a giv­en. But the games and ser­vices that are now whol­ly vir­tu­al will need to think of ways to break out and cre­ate phys­i­cal con­se­quences.