>> Donald Brinkman: All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome. And thanks for joining us today
as we talk about an experiment in social gaming that we embarked upon this year with a
partnership with the Skype team.
I'm really pleased to talk about this. We had an amazing time. We had some tremendous
support for some great engineers and the Skype group who helped us to bring this thing to
reality.
Our goal was to instill slavish devotion to the Skype brand, and in that we succeeded, to me,
because I've decided now that I wear entirely Skype colors from now on. Well, I'm committed
now for love of ISHI to wear Skype colors for the rest of the day. And including my wristband.
But you'll learn more about kind of what I'm talking about soon when I hand this over to
Avimaan Syam. He's my intern. He is a graduate student at University of Southern California.
He's working on his MFA in interactive media and games. He brings to Microsoft a really strong
blend of industry and academic experience, and he's worked on some really cool projects in the
past. He just recently did an internship at IBM working on augmented reality games for their car
lines and all kinds of other stuff which he'll get into in more detail.
So without further ado, I will hand it over to him. Thanks, Avimaan.
>> Avimaan Syam: Thanks, Donald. Thank you all for coming. I'll be presenting, as Donald
mentioned, about ISHI, which is a social game for the Skype team. So just to give you all some
background of my background, before coming to USC I was a playwright and director,
theoretical director by night and a software developer and journalist by day.
And at USC, as Donald mentioned, I was part of the Mobile and Environmental Media Lab,
which explores putting interactive experiences in buildings and cars, and I went on to further do
some of that work at BMW last summer. And I also helped found and lead the Worldbuilding
Media Lab which is Alex McDowell's lab. Alex McDowell is the production designer of such
films as Fight Club and Minority Report. And this lab was kind of exploring a future medium
software between game and film.
So that's some of my background before coming here to Microsoft.
So to get started, our main goal here for my internship, if I could put it into one question, is can
we embed a meaningful game in the newly opened Skype buildings. And we'll get into what it
means to have a meaningful game in a second. But just to give you some background onto why
we were looking at the Skype buildings for this, Ross Smith, who is director of tests of there, had
an initiative that he called Signal Hill that was kind of the forerunner for this event. And Signal
Hill, if you don't know the background of that name, was the point in Newfoundland where
Marconi had the first transatlantic communication.
So Ross really wanted these new buildings, which are five and six here on the Redmond campus,
to actually have the buildings be interactive experiences. So the buildings as community
organizers, the buildings as facilitators of employee health and initiatives, so that they would
actually have these different personas, which he dubbed Ingrid and Ingmar, which apparently
had no reference to the Bergmans, but there you go.
So these buildings in this premise would be able to help facilitate your day. They would learn
more about you. They could potentially bring you into small interactive experiences in some of
the new innovative experiences that they had in the buildings. So here's one of their -- what they
call an alt space in the buildings, which is like a conjugation, collaboration area. And
additionally it could help maybe be gamified in a way of incentivizing you to some healthy
activities. So those were kind of the backgrounds from Ross's perspective of health games and
using the buildings as a conduit for those experiences.
And additionally, as these buildings were getting open, Skype had some very specific branding
that they wanted to do which at Redmond had to do with retro Mariner shirts and tattoos,
obviously, and I don't know, they had a very specific -- they wanted to bring in culture shock,
that was the big thing they talked about, culture of innovation, and so they had some very
specific ideas of what they wanted these new buildings to be, which was an open office that was
very different than what was there before. So kind of look at what our over top-level initiatives
were. This was at the beginning of the summer, before the experience started. We wanted to
engage employees in a healthier lifestyle, make the workplace not feel like a place of work. We
really wanted to bring together employees that would otherwise not interact on a day-to-day
basis, which was pretty big because with Skype and Lync coming together in these buildings,
there -- from some of the just basic demographic interviews that we did before our design, we
found that there were a lot of people that didn't necessarily interact with people in their
neighborhood or between buildings or had any idea who these other people were. And
considering that they were working on products that were becoming more and more integrated,
we wanted to find ways through our game design to get that to happen.
And we just -- like we said, these buildings had this very specific branding, and we wanted to
help people learn about those.
So a very brief primer of games and game design, not to get into it too much but just a little bit as
to why something like this is important, so on a very formal level, this is like very objective way
of approaching a game, it's a closed formal system that brings about conflict and looks to have
some kind of resolution to that conflict.
And another way to -- and so the -- just really quickly, this quote comes from Tracy Fullerton
who's my professor at University of Southern California and literally wrote the book on game
design. If you want to know more about game design and get into it, I heartily recommend this
book and following Tracy. And this quote comes from Bernard Suits' The Grasshopper, which
is saying that "Playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessarily obstacles,"
which is an important thing to think about because a lot of games, if you stripped away the
context of the game, are actually things that you wouldn't really want to do in real life if they
were your job. If you think about Sin City, you're essentially a resource manager without the
objective of the game.
So we willingly allow ourselves to play in these experiences because it allows us to try out
different things in that space.
So the way that I see it, the things on a basic level, if you're thinking about games, games have a
goal, games have rules, they give you feedback on your play and they're voluntary, so you opt in
and out. So we just look at soccer, the goal of the game is to win. The rules are different things.
You can't foul people, you have two 45-minute halves, et cetera. You have feedback, so
everybody knows when a goal is scored. And if you don't enjoy soccer, well, you can just leave
the game.
And this just kind of to caps on this, so people play games for very different reasons. And, for
example, if you guys know the board game [inaudible], my wife and I, when we play, have very
different reasons that we play. All she wants to do is trade with other people and interact and
have this social experience, and I'm much more interested in being cloak and dagger and winning
the game. People like to win, people like to play, people like to interact. They get into this flow
state for various reasons. And that's an important thing to consider when you're designing a
game, was ultimately your game design reinforces whatever desired behavior you want. As a
game designer, you need to think about what you want players to do and what players want to do
and how those overlap, because between those two things is where you get a game that people
will want to play and you'll be proud of and will create that behavior that you like.
So even a much, much briefer primer of ARGs, which was kind of the original impetus when
Donald brought me aboard, was to create an alternate reality game for the Skype buildings. So
an ARG stands for an alternate reality game, if you all don't know what that is. And actually
interestingly enough, ARGs kind of have their origin here at Microsoft.
So right here this is a poster for A.I. which came out in 2001, and there was an ARG starter, what
they called The Beast by Jordan Weisman and some others. In the credits really there was a
really small line of somebody's name that said that she was a senchant [phonetic] technology
specialist I believe was the term, and so people would Google this person and then they would
start to unlock -- they would find all of this crazy information and they unlocked this really crazy
puzzle about a bizarre murder mystery. And I think they had like 3 million players and they got
a ton of press for it.
So and then I Love Bees is a similar one that came out I believe with Halo 2, which they had like
the trailer for Halo 2 and then there was this really quick I Love Bees URL that was bleeped at
the end of it, and people started to explore this really crazy fake Web site and this history behind
it. So the idea of an alternate reality game is kind of embedded narrative that is kind of not of
this world but in this world that people can engage with. And it's used -- it's been used a lot as a
marketing tool or kind of a different way to get into -- get people engaged. And traditionally -although it's called an alternate reality game, it usually has do with puzzles. It's alt -- I would
call it an alternate reality puzzle. So a lot of embedded narrative that you have to go through
puzzles to understand or to figure it all out.
And so that was different than what we really wanted to do ultimately because there's a big
difference between games and puzzles. Puzzles are a part of games, but a puzzle always has a
finite solution and the goal of a puzzle is always to find the solution.
And the problem is ten years later, if somebody wanted to play The Beast or people wanted to
play I Love Bees, well, it's all solved. When you look it up on the Internet, that's all you get is
the solution. So there really wasn't this option for multiple people to come in afterwards. It's
one of the things a couple weeks into our design, you know, we had an initial way that we were
going, and Donald asked me, is like, well, is this something that can be replayed, could we create
this in a way that it could be done again and again or the same people could play it again and
again.
And we were kind of initially going with this crazy ARG that was based off of Ingrid and
Ingmar, this crazy Scandinavian couple that had come to Seattle to be musicians, and we were
going to embed all this crazy narrative and these puzzles. But we decided that the alternate
reality game wasn't exactly what was going to be the most meaningful for the people at Skype in
that we really did want to create something that would last.
So on that note, I'm going to play -- this is a rough cut of some documentary footage that we've
been shooting about what this whole experience is about. So hopefully that will kind of clarify a
little bit of where we're coming from and where we're going, and then we'll move on to some of
the design and some of the results.
>> Video: Everybody's asking, what's ISHI? What's ISHI? What's ISHI? ISHI, well, I don't
really know. Let me try this again. ISHI can access. That's about all I know. ISHI is a kind of a
collaborative game. Seems like some sort of research project to help us get better connected to
each other. Driving people to get up, move around, interact. It's been working, it seems like
there's been a lot of people I've met that I never would have met otherwise. Yeah. Other than
that, I don't know. There's been questions asked, so they're going somewhere. I don't know.
Rather than developing a narrative to embed in these buildings, we decided that we would create
a mechanic, an experience, and a game that would create culture from the people in these
buildings. Because ultimately, while we think that we want other people's stories, the stories that
matter to people most are the ones that they create themselves and tell themselves and can tell
other people. Microsoft has a long history of trying out new ideas on its own employees. We
call it dogfooding. We believe we should eat our own dog food. And one of the ways that we do
this is by testing our own software. And we've been using games to test software for more than
ten years now. The incoming generation of whether it's Microsoft or any employee is coming
from a background of gaming and social networking and digital technology. And so it would be
natural, then, for those tools and techniques to evolve into the workplace as well. We wanted our
mechanics to focus on collaboration and communication. And we wanted there to be a low
barrier of entry and yet the game to feel rich nuance and more complex as you went on. So the
main mechanics that we focused on were connections, breakthroughs, and bolts. The
connections mechanic was driven by the goal of getting people out of their seats. They would go
as individuals to these kiosks or stations that we put across the two buildings, they would swipe
their employee badge and potentially answer a few questions about themselves. Whenever I
would get up and take a break to go get a drink, I would just make a loop through my floor. We
would actually usually do like two stations, because if you go to get coffee, which, you know, we
would normally do every day, you know, us and some other guys from the team at the kitchen,
there was two stations. And I just planned a route. If I went to the bathroom or I went to get a
drink or whatever, I would just purposely pass the ISHI station. Once a team had accrued
enough connections, the next mechanic came in which was breakthrough mechanic. A
breakthrough is a challenge that everybody on the team receives and must complete together in
order for their team to level up and move on. These breakthroughs started out as very simple
tasks, say just need one player at a specific station in order to level up. But as the game
progressed, they became more complex over time. They needed people at different stations at
the exact same time across buildings, two people at both stations in a different building at the
same time, then they would have to start answering questions about their fellow teammates, then
they would have to find hidden objects in the buildings, then they would have to start making
media together. Are you guys on the challenge? Yes. Okay, wait, wait, wait. Okay. So I don't
know what the -- oh, who's calling me? Did you guys get the challenge? Yeah, we finally got it.
Our final mechanic was bolts. With connections and breakthroughs, ultimately people didn't
really have any reason to think about other teams or the game at large. Bolts were ways that a
team could interact with another team, either positively or negatively at their choosing. But did
you play a bolt? I did play a bolt. I played several bolts. I think two bolts today. And what
were those bolts? I played -- well, that was the one bolt, and the other bolt I played was a
barrier, just now actually I played a bolt to block the Edisons. One of our big initiatives in
creating this was to really foster collaboration, communication between people in these
buildings, even if they don't know each other. I know just structurally we're changing our
communication style and interacting differently. Certainly initially we didn't even have to be a
team, we could just be individuals doing tasks, but that quickly changed. I think I got to know
the co-workers in my room better and I actually socialized with them, whereas I did not before.
One of the things is having a friend at work is one of the best ways to sort of retain people. And
so making these connections in sort of a whimsical fun sort of way really can help the health of
the organization and help with retention and just overall morale. A lot of teams get siloed when
they're supposed to be working together. And so if you have had this kind of interaction in a
game setting with somebody and then you actually have to work with them, it's going to be a
different initial meeting. And ISHI's been great because it's sort of subtly connected people who
would not normally be connected. And so now people from different disciplines and different
teams who may or may not work together regularly now have a different connection. We found
some interesting patterns across both weeks that as the week went on, we would get more and
more players and more connections throughout the week, which I thought was really fascinating,
that people who didn't necessarily have the initial call to play would see their teammates
achieving things and would receive messages or e-mails asking them to play and finally would
come out and would begin playing. With ISHI we're trying to lay the foundation of a new form
of new employee orientation. I wish we could do it all the time, because it's -- I think there's
something that you're doing that's not -- that breaks up the day a little bit and gets people to
interact. So the opportunities for doing something like ISHI here at Microsoft are actually pretty
tremendous. Not only is there a lot of amazing hardware literally embedded in the walls, but I
found a lot of people very receptive to the whole idea and experiment. We wanted to encourage
employees to create their own culture and do things not because they're getting some points or an
achievement, but because it's meaningful to them in a more intrinsic way. The challenge of
running a game in the workplace is that it is a place of work and whatever you do can't get in the
way of that. If management was like on board, I think I would play. I like games. You know, if
you're playing a first-person shooter game and you're trying to get the new weapon or level up to
a new suit of armor, you know, it's akin to, okay, I'm doing my job to get to the next level or to
get to the next title or get to the next role. And so integrating some of those and taking what we
learn in digital games and applying it to the workplace can only help with engagement. Cool.
Well, okay. Well, let's keep going. Yeah. This was fun.
[end of video]
>> Avimaan Syam: Great. So that, like I said, is a rough cut of a little bit of our interview
footage as well as kind of our higher goals, so hopefully that gives you a good idea. But just to
reiterate what some of our design initiatives were going into the experience was to make it
replayable so it was something that could be experienced again and again and focusing on game
mechanics. That was the collaborative and increasingly collaborative as time went on and grew
in complexity in that regard. And really gave ownership to the players so that it didn't feel like it
was story that we were telling that they were uncovering but was something that they were doing
and they could take ownership of.
And then some of the constraints which is something that's actually very important to game
design is constraints, because when you don't have constraints, you can design anything. So it's
important to know what you're kind of designing towards.
So we had a really tough balance between voluntary versus involuntary. As you mentioned,
games are always voluntary. You can opt into a game or opt out. Work is not necessarily as
voluntary. So if you have to do work, you have to do work. And the balance between game and
work was something that we were always playing with.
Another issue is that we were kind of trying to create as small a footprint as possible. We were
really lucky to have Ross Smith, who was director of tests at Skype, to be a huge support for us
there. But I wouldn't say this was an official project, you know, it was kind of a bit cloak and
dagger so to speak. So we were trying to put this game and run this meaningful game in the
workplace without really disrupting people.
Again, and then another issue was the Skype and Lync merger and trying to figure out which
technology would be best for reaching everybody in both buildings, being that some people were
more likely to use Skype and some people were more likely to use Lync and then figuring out
when and where to use those two technologies. And then figuring out a mechanic in which
somebody who only played for five seconds a day felt like they were making a meaningful
contribution and somebody that was playing for 30 minutes a day felt like they were making a
meaningful contribution. So be able to allow both of those to be helpful.
And then finally I've mentioned Ross Smith a couple of times. This is a table from one of his
papers, "The Future of Work is Play," which I recommend you all check out. So this table is
looking at what kinds of games are most successful in the workplace. And in his studies Ross
has found that the most successful ones are ones that have to do with learning skills that have do
with your job. Or what's called core skills that are not related to your job.
And by core skills it means things that you might do that are less than what you actually do for
your job. So getting up, moving around, answering e-mails, playing games. You know, it's not
necessarily part of what makes your job unique. So I would say that ISHI with its connections,
breakthroughs and bolts definitely falls into this category.
And the other interesting thing to note here is that jobs that have to do with unique skills to the
job -- excuse me, games that have to do with these unique skills are traditionally failures because
if people feel like they're being successful in those games, then maybe they think they deserve a
promotion. And if they're not doing well in the game, then maybe they're worried about their
job.
So the kinds of games that work in the workplace, it's not all kinds of games, and so these are the
kind of areas that are traditionally focused upon.
Okay. So just a quick review of the mechanics that we went over in the video. So the individual
actions were connections that involve swiping your badge at these different stations. There were
two stations for each floor of the two buildings. And when you did a connection, you either got
just a thank you message from the buildings, either Ingrid or Ingmar, or it asked you to answer a
few questions about yourself.
Once a team had done enough connections to reach a breakthrough, which was somewhere
between four and ten connections, they would get these breakthroughs which, as again
mentioned in the video, they kind of rose in complexity over time.
So it started off with just single connections and then rose through increasingly collaborative
efforts till we were hoping to get to these more interesting things where they had to answer
questions about their teammates to figure out which ones had to go to stations or find objects
together, and then ultimately create media together.
So in the actual app they would look at the leaderboard to tell every time they'd been moved up.
And then, again, there were bolts. So this is an example of a bolt right here where every bolt
they received had a negative and positive charge as we called it. So they could do something
that positively impacted their team and potentially another team or negatively impacted another
team. And that was a choice that they had to make.
And so all of these messages about breakthroughs and bolts were received by every member of
the team via Lync. And so yeah.
So just a really quick note on onboarding, which was the week-long process before the actual
game. So we placed these posters across the two buildings, which we were lucky to have an
awesome graphic designer to put together these kind of communist propaganda posters that said
either ISHI Connects Us or It's Just Fun and Games.
And I think we found that pretty quickly we had gotten total coverage just from those posters.
We put them in front of all of the doors, and really quickly a lot of people were asking just what
ISHI was. And, you know, in that regard it's a success. So here you can see three different
places that it was up around the buildings, near the kitchens, near the doors, and then in
high-traffic areas.
And then we also put up these onboarding stations. So people would see our ISHI logo going up
and down on this tablet. And then if they swiped their badge, which they told them to do, they
could say yes or no if they wanted to know more about information about it and get signed up to
learn more about it.
So that was kind of our main onboarding process, and we found that we had about a hundred
people sign up. But, you know, and also just we had, to further our awesome graphic design,
help design a logo, and then we designed a hat and jumpsuit. So we were kind of walking
around the buildings in these jumpsuits, and I think I was referred to as jumpsuit guy for a long
time afterwards.
And so we actually even had a ukulele player come and kind of create more mystery. But we
found at this point like the ISHI buzz had saturated. People were already wondering where ISHI
was. So we had people come by our office wanting to know more. We would give them stickers
or different promotional materials.
But we kind of had different reactions to this process. So this is really cool. This is some fan art
that was done during the first -- during the onboarding week. So you can see the ISHI logo here
in the distance says Skype Lync, making connections, and then doing it with the Skype and Lync
logos, which was really cool to us that people -- that you know they got it on a higher level, even
if they didn't actually know what ISHI was at that point.
So people were intrigued, but there was a lot of different reactions. Some people really got into
that mystery and were really excited by it, which was really cool. Some people saw the posters,
wondered what it was and just out of sight, out of mind. And two weeks later they still had no
idea that ISHI was even running.
Some people were scared to join. They just felt nervous about it. Some people were really
intrigued but really annoyed that we wouldn't tell them what it was.
So, you know, did we reach our target audience is a big thing that I've been thinking about
afterwards because, as I mentioned earlier, people play games for a lot of different reasons. And
mystery and whimsy is not the reason for a lot of people. It is for some people. But this kind of
mysterious background in onboarding process is something that's very popular in ARGs, like I
mentioned The Beast and I Love Bees, it was about all this mystery and this thing that you
uncovered.
And not to take away from that, but I wonder if we had been more explicit about some of the
things that we had done if we actually would have gotten a lot more people that would have been
interested in this collaborative team-based game and know that it wasn't something that was
potentially dangerous or weird or et cetera.
So I think if I could do one thing about the onboarding different, I would just try to find a way to
let people know a little more clearly what the game was.
And to temper that, we were in this difficult position that Donald said to me there is a possibility
that somebody could ask us to take all of this down day one. So we were in the tough point of
trying to find a way to get people interested and motivated without being in people's faces.
You know, and like I said, I think we got about -- we got a hundred people to sign up. To me, I
think the buildings hold roughly 500 people, and based off of walking around, it seems like
there's probably three or four hundred people in the buildings right now, especially over vacation
time. So that's a reasonable percentage to be catching.
Okay. So looking at the actual results of the experiment, just to reiterate, our original objective
was a two-week experiment where players are randomly assigned to teams of strangers to
compete. So when they came in the first day, I sent an e-mail the beginning of the first day
telling them to come by and receive their package to help them explain what this game was since
they didn't know at that point, and they got packages that looked like this. And inside was a
sheet with the rules and a letter, a big plastic colored letter which I told them that they had to
hang on to because it would come into the game later. There was also a sticker involved.
And we created DLs so that the teams could communicate via e-mail and Lync. And then we
just told them to figure it out and have fun. I tried really hard not to be explicit about go do this,
go to X or Y and Z.
And I threw this up with rewards because ultimately, like we mention in the video, we were
looking for a meaningful game that has intrinsic rewards. So here are a few pictures of what the
actual rewards were in the game. A foam-rubber cow skull with our logo driven -- drawn on in
marker, lanterns, bags, wooden ducks with stickers on them.
So people were not playing this because they were going to get gift certificates or, you know,
external rewards that were of value. Our rewards were essentially trinkets that had to do with the
game and enjoying the game itself.
So in looking at the results, people liked it. That was really, really cool. It's really scary as a
game designer to put a game out there and know that people might not like it. And people
played, which was also very cool. This is a picture of two different teams. You can't see the
station, which is back here, but both of these teams are trying to coordinate a breakthrough at the
same time at different stations. So they both needed two people at the station at the same time
and they both had to be at the same station randomly.
So that was big reward. You know, there's a lot of things that I would do differently, which we'll
get to that second, but we had players, and that was a big relief.
You know, at first people were really curious about what ISHI is. This message got sent out at
UC at 11:00 on the first day. 7/29 was our first day. So this was kind of -- like I said, whenever
a team got a breakthrough, challenge, or bolts, a Lync message would get sent from the ISHI
accounts to all of the players. And see you can see here all of these people for the first time
getting this message and then Lync messaging back to ISHI wondering what the heck ISHI is.
So people were really curious to get in to figure out what was going on. But, you know, pretty
quickly they begin to organize and to figure out what the goal was and how that goal had to be
achieved. And more players -- you know, we started off, I said we had a hundred people come in
and say they were interested, but we would get more players both weeks as we went on, people
asking to sign up because they would see -- there were either people in their neighborhood or
their friends, you know, achieving things.
So this is an e-mail that was sent out after the first team got the trophy of the game, which was
the horns of ISHI. So we're sending an e-mail out to his whole team, letting them know. Then a
couple guy from his neighborhood wanted to join up subsequently from that.
And at its height, we had eight employees simultaneously collaborating on achieving the next
breakthrough. So they had two people at four different stations across the two buildings, which
is, you know -- it's a pretty -- that's a very difficult amount of people to coordinate.
And so the first week, just to be clear, on all of these DLs, I had also put our account, so I was
able to kind of monitor a lot of the communication just by being a part of that group, so I could
see these e-mails as they were sending out, the Lync message and stuff. So people use Lync,
people use Skype, people -- Outlook, they even used Yammer to try to come together and figure
out how to collaborate. So we gave them a couple of those tools for them to be able to do that,
and we just let them figure it out by themselves.
So and then, again, speaking to the idea of trying to teach them about the neighborhoods, you
know, the first couple of times people engaged with breakthroughs that told them that they had to
go to a specific station, they were completely confused as to what stations were -- what these
things meant. Because a lot of people in the buildings only knew the name of their
neighborhood. So they knew they were in motor sports or cloud room or off-ramp, but they
didn't know that sit and spin and weathered wall, et cetera, existed.
And what we found was that teams actually made cheat sheets that told them about all the
different neighbors in there. These are two different teams. They made a physical cheat sheet
that they passed out to their teammates, and this one sent an e-mail to everyone just letting them
know where all the neighborhoods were.
And this is actually my favorite picture. This is a picture of an SDET, Senior UX lead, and a
Principal GPM collaborating for -- and showing off their trophy. And the thing that I actually
like about this picture the most is that they asked me to take it; it wasn't me documenting it.
They were proud. And they sent this out to the Edisons list showing that their team had taken the
horns of ISHI back.
So this is I think proof of the fact that a game can create that culture between teammates who
exist -- who none of these people even knew each other before the game started and they're
proudly taking a picture together, and I think that really speaks to the employee engagement that
we got from the people that played. And yeah.
So we had had a really strong first week, and then we had a problem. You know, being in the
middle of the summer and just talking to some of my players, because whenever there was a
small bug going on people would pop by, or if they had an idea about the game, people would
often come by the ISHI office, and just talking to my players I found that roughly a third of our
core players at the end of week one were going on vacation for week two, which was kind of a
lot.
So we thought about it and we were trying to figure out a way to make the game sustainable,
because the problem was we had really made our design, we tried to beat it out for two-week
experience. And when you're balancing a game, those numbers, they're really tricky to figure
out, especially because there's a bit of a guessing game because we couldn't play test it.
So even though we had designed it to be a two-week experience, we decided that we would rerun
our one-week game because the idea of the replayability allowed for that. So we came up with
this new challenge of we organize for the neighborhoods the wings that they sat in in the
buildings. And rather than create DLs again to really help them out, we said, okay, this time
you're on your own. We're not giving you tools. You guys have seen it a little bit, you figure it
out.
And we also said that if you don't want to -- we made them tell us that they wanted to continue
playing the second week. So if they didn't tell us what neighborhood they were part of, they
were no longer part of the experience. Which was really interesting because you would expect
all of your top players to continue playing, the people that have done the most connections. But
we actually found that there was a lot of people that had only made, say, one connection, two
connections, three connections the first week that still really wanted to keep playing, which
really speaks to the fact that something like this can engage a lot of people even if they're not
directly involved in the game play. So it can improve the workplace culture and environment
just by the awareness of it rather than the specific playing of it.
So this is our -- this is our trophy the second week. Well, the seashells were an additional touch
not made by me. But we found that the second week, when players had to mobilize their own
coworkers, some rose to the challenge and some didn't. So we had a slight drop-off in game play
versus the first week, but we still had a pretty high level. And so it was really -- I don't have as
much documentation of it because I wasn't a part of DLs, as far as I know they didn't exist, I
didn't create them, but we definitely saw a lot more coordination. And when people are working
from the same neighborhood, oftentimes that can be nondigital communication to get things
started.
So just looking at some of the numbers, these are kind of our high-level numbers from the two
weeks. So just that connection of getting up, swiping your badge. We had 2,357 in total, 1,395
of those the first week, and a little less the second week. This is kind of we did this chart of our
connections by the hour. And so what we found is that we had a lot of -- a little spike around
lunch and then usually we'd have big spikes around the afternoon and towards the end of work,
so kind of like teatime players, if you will.
Breakthroughs, the levelling up, this collaborative act that you would have to do, we had 93 the
first week and 61 the second week. And then bolts, you can see we had 20 the first week and 11
the second week. And this is a distribution of days. So we had a couple of days that got a little
crazy.
And just to clarify really quickly on bolts, it was every time somebody made a connection they
had a 1 in 20 chance of getting given a bolt.
So the amount of players, we had 58 players in total. We had 43 the first week and 31 the
second week. And obviously there's some overlap of people that kept playing the first week and
then new players the second week as well.
And we found that our players, if you're familiar with distribution laws, you know, we had our
high players up here and then we had our fall-down to a lot of players who made just a few
connections over time, which is pretty similar to what you would expect from a distribution of
players and how much different people are committed to it.
So I did a quantitative and qualitative survey that I sent out to all of the players at the end. And
so I just wanted to share with you all some of the feedback from that. So we found that pretty
definitively people learned a lot about -- felt they learned about the buildings. We got pretty
good feedback about that.
So there's an interesting thing about the people. I feel like looking at the people who filled out
this survey, the ones that played a lot felt like they got a lot out of the games and the people who
didn't play that much but still filled out the survey didn't feel like they got much out of the game,
which is where you'll see some of the people filled out the survey didn't really play that much
and so they didn't really feel like they met new people because they didn't, they didn't really play
as much.
And that's something that we kind of see across the board with playing ISHI and enjoying ISHI.
By and large, positive.
I would say we'll get to this a little bit more later, the question of did it distract from work, and
you can see that's roughly the same as the people that enjoyed it.
So it was definitely balanced in a way that it took too much time from the workplace, and that is
actually probably a fault -- it's not probably a fault, it is a fault of mine as the designer, which I'll
get to later.
People seemed, again, divided about the length of the game. And I think that this also spoke to
people who didn't really engage with it but people that did. And we find that as well with people
seeing themselves playing it over a long period of time. Some people were really interested in
that and some people were not interested in that.
So, you know, I think the interesting thing when I'm summing up not just a quantitative but the
qualitative data is that people just wanted more from it. You know, they were really excited by
the potential. One of the things, just to summarize the broader trends of the qualitative data that I
got, people really enjoyed collaboration, meeting new people, playing with their teams,
achieving in that fashion, which is great because that was one of our huge goals. People wanted
the game to be more complex. They wanted to get to those points of answering questions,
making media. They wanted to solve puzzles. They wanted it to be richer than just signing in at
stations. And that's great. I really wanted it to be richer than that too.
And this was a really interesting point. People kind of wanted a smaller footprint option that was
like, hey, I'm really busy right now. I don't want to be getting an IM telling me that this is
happening right now. I don't want to be getting five or ten e-mails in the course of five minutes
when I'm really busy. It's almost like they wanted like a mute button on the game for when they
had the call of work.
And, you know, speaking again to the mystery, some people wanted a little bit clearer goals and
why people should play to help incentivize others, which is understandable and a tough balance
because we kind of wanted the game to get richer and not tell them everything that was going to
happen. But people genuinely reacted very strongly towards the mystery and the branding. So
looking at these points together, it's a tough balance to find. And we didn't quite find it, but there
was a lot of positive points.
And it's actually as a designer you get these things where people will say I want it to be more
complex, I want a smaller footprint option, I want clearer goals. That's great. Because you want
to have bad feedback. Because I think that ultimately speaks that people wanted more from the
experience. And this was an experiment that we had such a short amount of time to run. And
when I look at this feedback, I see people wanting it to be more meaningful than it was. And
that's something I can agree with. And I think that that speaks well to what it can potentially be
in the future.
So here's just kind of a set of my conclusions and things that I learned. So we had a really
difficult time because it's very difficult play test something like this because you don't have all
the players running around or predict the amount of players that we were going to have. So I
think we had on the fourth day of the first week the teams that pushed past where we had play
tested beyond, and then bugs started happening because we just had not had that option to kill
those bugs.
Therefore your design specifically, like looking at the database, needs to be as adaptable as
possible. And Andy Lim, our designer, did a great job of making that design as adaptable as
possible. So things that we needed to tailor immediately as the game came up could be. For
example, from that hundred players that we started with, we initially had ten teams of ten. I just
divided them into the ten teams. And then on the first day it became really clear that the amount
of players that we had playing that were poor we needed to have less -- fewer teams so that
people could collaborate together. So on the first day we were able to switch from ten teams to
four really easily.
So this was a really difficult one. And what I was talking about earlier, we really wanted people
to play my game. I was really frightened that nobody would play. But a game that's successful
in the workplace is not a game that people want to play all the time. And I ended up balancing
the numbers and skewing the design to incentivize more and more game play as opposed to the
amount of game play that might be more feasible to run long term in a workplace.
For example, we had this rule set in that after your team got to a certain level there would be an
amount of time that you would have to wait between connections. And initially the smallest
number was five minutes and then we'd go to ten and then it would go to 15.
And I got super scared the first day because there wasn't a lot of play and I dropped that number
down to one and two. So it's just like please play my game. But as some of the players pointed
out, that's super incentivized people that could just play as much as possible for their teams to
win. It was not really a game about skill and creation and -- it was about collaboration in terms
of getting timed events together, but it wasn't about collaboration in terms of making things
together or thinking about Skype and Lync together or, you know, some of the ideas that we had
like that we would have to create something with LEGOs or just take pictures and make media.
We missed out on some of those richer things. And, you know, part of it was there and part of it
I wish had been there, but as the game's done you have to look past your desire for I want as
much play as possible for this to be successful to what is that workplace game that is successful,
what is the best game that is meaningful in the workplace.
And to bring up a point that I brought up again, just because employees aren't playing doesn't
mean that they aren't involved. And we saw that there was a lot of positive engagement from
people even if they weren't actually playing the game, people aware of it, people wanting to stay
involved that had never made more than one connection. So I found that to be a really positive
and rewarding experience that you don't need to play to benefit from this experience.
And then so like I said earlier, we had created this two-week experience, but some of the initial
Signal Hill initiatives and some of our goals for the experience were really long-term ideas and
then we were trying to put them into a two-week experience. And some of the stuff kind of was
a jumble in that regard.
You know, the answering questions about yourself was really a long-term idea that we could
provide rewards and create affinity groups based off if everybody -- if ten people answered that
they are Van Halen fans, that was our go-to, was if they like Van Halen fans and they also liked
cats, then we would put all the Van Halen cat fans in a room and have them figure out what they
had in common and then give them some kind of reward. So answering questions about yourself
was kind of a long-term design goal. And we kind of pigeonholed it into this design.
So there's a big difference between what a long-term issue looks like and a one-week issue looks
like. And the design that we had here was kind of borrowed from both of those, I think.
It was really hard to run ISHI by myself. And I really want your sympathy and understanding.
Because we had these old tablets that would kind of fake out every once in a while. And, you
know, I was really lucky, I had an awesome developer in Andy Lim, and, you know, I couldn't
give him all the stuff that I needed to give him in order to get all of the right design to the app
necessarily or, you know, to make sure that I was there for everything.
So I think you kind of need two game runners for this. We needed a little bit more team support
to kind of pull this off. It was a very exhaustive experience from my side during the actual
experience because I felt like I couldn't leave because potentially the card readers were very
inclined to fritz out, so they had to be woken up again. So I felt like I could never leave, which
was a tricky thing. And hopefully if we have better tech in the next version, that is not really
going to be a problem.
But, you know, that being said, we did do a lot of good database design. And the infrastructure
for what we actually have to embed for ISHI, if this went back in the Skype buildings or
somewhere else, this is actually pretty minimal, you know. The stations that we set up was an
Ikea table and a tablet with two card readers. And we could easily get rid of the Ikea table and
there would be a lot of other places where we could put them in.
I was actually really surprised that people that were in the neighborhoods where we put our
stations, nobody ever complained. When I went in there, people hardly even noticed me.
Sometimes there was a little bit of ribbing. I was told people would joke with other people about
it. But, you know, putting this into an area is not that hard. You know, it would be pretty easy to
install this anywhere.
You know, like I said, I think we would need another pass on the game design, the graphic
design and the development. But, you know, if you got two people just being aware of the game
part time, I think you could run this most anywhere on the Redmond campus.
So just to reiterate, I think that ISHI was really successful at making this -- at hitting this like
most impact core function and really benefiting workplace culture through the game. And the
fact that we saw these people come together that didn't know each other from all of these
different backgrounds in the company was really rewarding. And as much as I would like to
change, improve about the game, I think that we saw that it can be a success in this environment.
And kind of finally I'm just like really grateful for Donald for bringing me here and to be able to
be given the opportunity to positively impact so many people. Just on the last day I actually had
a ton of players come by and just, you know, say thanks and wonder about what the future was
of ISHI. So, you know, I think it really did positively impact a lot of people and I feel really
lucky to have that opportunity.
And just in a final thank you, I'd like to thank Donald who brought me here; Ross Smith, the
director of testing Skype who was like our big sponsor and helped us set that groundwork; and
Andy who was my developer and just, you know, I would have been in a lot of trouble without
him. And, you know, I gave him -- he made -- he had to make a lot of -- figure out a lot of things
just based off stuff that I gave him that was not enough information. And, yeah, he did an
awesome job.
And then finally to all the people that played ISHI, because ISHI was designed to exist through
them, and it did. And they did a lot of awesome things.
So yeah. That is ISHI. So now I'll open up to any questions that you guys have.
>> Donald Brinkman: Questions? We have a captivated audience. I have a question for you.
>> Avimaan Syam: Okay.
>> Donald Brinkman: You played a lot with infrastructure with doing -- using employee
information in some ways. Did you run into any issues with using that data? Are there other
aspects of the data or ways you could use employee data you think to enhance experience?
>> Avimaan Syam: Well, we -- in all of our messaging, we told them up front that we wouldn't
be giving our data to anybody else and we wouldn't be showing anybody else in the company
like X, Y, and Z about them.
We didn't take a whole lot of information from them. We just used their alias and their e-mail.
And we were trying to learn more things like in terms of their favorites and things that they liked
so we might provide them with a richer experience.
You know, it would be interesting how much -- like if this got integrated if you could involve it
with people's calendars when it might be better for them to sync up or something like that. I
think if a company organization afforded that opportunity you could help make things more
customized and personal in a way that didn't seem like it was invading somebody's privacy.
>> Donald Brinkman: Great. So I want to thank everyone that came out to hear the talk. I want
to thank everyone else out in Internet land, present and future, for listening and learning about
what we're doing. You can reach out to me or to Avimaan if you have more questions.
And, yes, a special thanks to Andy for helping out with the engineering and for Ross who is
really our champion who has been for more than ten years a champion of serious games here at
Microsoft, the champion of serious games at Microsoft and who made this possible.
And my final revelation, I'll reveal the Easter egg inside of ISHI that you've all been wondering
about. Many of you have seen this logo and you have probably -- because we've talked about
Signal Hill, and this is the Signal Hill initiative, so you might have heard that this is like the
Signal Hill and this is like the bolt, the radio transmission that Marconi sent. I'm here to tell you
today that that's actually not true, that this is actually Ross Smith's call. So yes. And it's -- and
that ISHI is the idea that sprang from his head like Athena from the head of Zeus.
So with that, thank you all very much and thank you, Avimaan, really freaking fabulous. I'm
really pleased. So yeah.
[applause]