Participation through Gifting: Pass It On

Last week, a coworker came in with a big smile on his face. When I asked what had happened, he explained that he had been the recipient of an act of tollbooth goodwill; the person in front of him in line had paid his toll.

This simple act, a $2.50 donation to the universe, is a gift. We've all received (and hopefully given) gifts from strangers before--the woman who lets you go to the bathroom first, the family that hands you some carnival tickets on their way out and your way in. We're suspicious of gifts given by corporations and organizations, casting a wary eye on the cheerful Red Bull guy or anyone handing out religious leaflets. But a gift given from one person to another, however small, feels magical.

Why discuss gifting on Museum 2.0? No, I'm not angling for a present. One of my greatest interests is the "participatory museum," in which there is substantive, unfacilitated visitor-to-visitor interaction. When I heard the tollbooth story, I started thinking about gifting as a model for participatory experiences in museums.

This post discusses participatory gifting in three parts: the why, the what, and finally, the how.

Why is gifting a model worth exploring?

1. Gifting is a powerful game mechanic. In her fabulous presentation on game mechanics in functional environments, Amy Jo Kim lists "social exchange" as one of five key elements that make experiences sticky. These exchanges can be explicit (trades) or implicit (gifts). Why does Ebay email you a certificate to celebrate "your first positive feedback" on their site? Why do people pay a dollar to send each other virtual hot dogs and pinatas via Facebook? Giving and receiving gifts is a strong reason to come back to a site (whether virtual or real). Collect the e-card. Spend the certificate. And when the gifts are public, as on Facebook, the perception of the site as a "place of giving" serves both the individuals using the service and the site's image.
2. Gifting makes you feel good. The University of British Columbia recently published a study in the journal Science demonstrating that people who give away a small amount of money in the form of a gift are happier than those who spend the same amount on themselves. One of the authors of the study commented, "This suggests that even making really small changes in how one spends money can make a difference for happiness." Often, when we think of stranger-to-stranger participatory experiences, we think of stressful events like elevator outages. It's hard to convince a museum or other institution that they should intentionally create stressful environments to encourage visitors to talk with each other. It's much more palatable to use something that makes you feel warm and fuzzy, like gifting, to get there.
3. Gifting extends your message. If your kid gets his photo taken at the museum and can instantly "send that photo to grandma," two things happen. 1: kid gives gift to grandma (and both are happy). 2: museum brand leaves the walls and goes to grandma's house. When you give someone a brochure or take-home element in an exhibition, it ends up in the trash. But if you give them something to give to someone ELSE, then your content spreads, packaged in a bundle of goodwill.
   

OK, so gifting sounds good. What are its forms, and which are most effective?

Most gifting is personal, both in real life and on the web. I give my friend a cookie. My dad sends me a NYTimes article. Personal gifting makes for powerful participation because you are directly interacting with another individual. But it's small-scale and typically occurs between people with a pre-existing relationship. We aren't culturally comfortable giving gifts directly to perfect strangers.

Web 2.0 encourages a lot of semi-anonymous gifting. Whenever you review a restaurant on Yelp, post a video on YouTube, or heck, write a blog post, you are giving content to an unknown audience of other user/recipients. You're not recommending something to a specific stranger, so it lessens the ick factor. There's a lot of argument about whether the Web 2.0 gift economy exploits users, but the benefit for the content creators is a kind of fame and recognition. There's some participation among givers and receivers, but that participation most commonly takes the form of "in kind" actions. You gift the community a book review, I gift an overlapping community a music review.

Then there's anonymous gifting. My Hebrew school teachers told me this is the best kind because it's truly selfless, yada yada. That may be true. But when it comes to encouraging participation among givers and receivers, this kind of gift is low on the list. Whether you are writing checks to charities or sticking quarters in expired parking meters, you have only an abstract relationship with the other people involved in the transaction.

How can we improve on these models to becomes sites for participatory giving?

The real participatory power comes when we create a kind of hybrid model of facilitated or site-enabled giving. By serving as a safe barrier, websites, museums, and other venues can triangulate and match-make personal gifting, packing the punch of one-to-one giving without the ick factor of dealing with strangers.

This is where the tollbooth fits in. It would be extremely strange to walk up to someone's car window and offer them $2.50 for the toll. They might be offended. They might be suspicious. But by giving this gift through the toll booth operator, you shuttle the unsafe personal transaction through a safe transaction venue. It's semi-anonymous: the receiver can perceive the giver and his little blue Honda, but neither party is threatened by the requirement to actually engage with the other. And rather than impacting two people (giver and receiver), it impacts three (tollbooth operator).

The tollbooth enables personal giving between strangers and brings a third person into the experience. Arguably, three people who would never have met now get to share a nice experience and memory of generosity.

But we can take it even further. In the tollbooth case, it's up to the giver to take the initiative to pay for the person behind him or her. It's not a ready option that the tollbooth operator provides; in fact, in some cases it may take a bit of convincing to make this gift happen.

Sites that are serious about participatory giving don't leave all the work to the inspiration of the giver.

Here are some key actions that encourage gifting:

• provide "gift kits" that are easy and rewarding to assemble (e-cards, lanyards).
• make it easy to send or share the gift.
• make the gifts public so that others who are neither the giver nor recipient can bask in the glow of the giving experience and be encouraged to participate themselves. This is what Facebook does. I've also been to ice cream shops and bars that feature a "gift wall" of statements like "Ben buys Susie a pint" so you can pick up your free beer next time you visit. An interesting public version of the formerly private gift certificate.
  
• find a way for givers and receivers to track the gift if it passes from hand to hand. This can be Web-enabled, like sites that track messages written on dollar bills via serial number. Or, it can be charmingly low-tech, like books with previous owners' names written in them.
  
• thank the giver for giving, suggest to both giver and receiver that they give again.

How can you integrate facilitated gifting into your institution? Where have you seen it succeed (or fail)? Give us the semi-anonymous gift of your comment, and we'll respond with affection and interest!

Game Friday: Shuffle Your Brain

The very first game post I ever wrote was about incorporating game mechanics into museum experiences. A year later, and Amy Jo Kim's presentations about ways that personalization, feedback, collecting, points and exchanges can make all kinds of experiences more engaging and sticky still resonate with me. Amy is the Creative Director of Shufflebrain, a game design firm that has unique expertise in identifying and exploiting behavioral human predilections to make games and game-like experiences compelling in everyday contexts. In other words, Amy is the brain behind how and why we game.

Rather than occupying your attention with my own analysis, I encourage you to go straight to the source and check out her two fascinating slide presentations (from eTech 2006 and GDC 2007 respectively) on how to put "the fun into functional." While her main audience is software and game developers, I think the material translates directly to other experience providers (like museums).

The first presentation explains the five game mechanics and gives examples of how they are used to make Netflix (personalized feedback), MySpace (friending people as social exchange), Ebay (leveling up via those little colored stars!), and other software tools more appealing.

The second presentation focuses on the growth of user-generated and shared content in social media, and talks about how game mechanics are involved both in the applications that support such content (YouTube, Twitter, and others), and how such content sharing can enhance games themselves.

Enjoy, and please share your comments with others.

Game Friday: Netflix and Other Games that Care

When we were kids, my dad invented a game he’d play with my sister and I called “yum/yuck.” He served as gamemaster, and would throw out names of foods: “Spinach!” “Cottage cheese!” After a food was named, each of us would make our pronouncement—yum or yuck. His goal: demonstrate how impossible it was to cook a meal we would both like. But it turned into an incredibly fun game for us, because it was about us. We’d already acquired that American (human?) taste for self-obsession, and yum/yuck let us revel in our particular preferences.

I was reminded of this game last week when I logged onto Netflix to update my queue and was prompted to rate the films I’d recently returned. I felt that same self-absorbed pleasure I’d felt during yum/yuck as I blithely doled out stars. What do people love more than being asked their opinion? And Netflix, like the best dad in the world, actually cares about your opinion. It cares equally what you think of Delicatessen and Tank Girl. And it wants to give you tailor-made suggestions based on your opinion.

I wrote a post a couple of months ago about Amy Jo Kim’s excellent presentation, “Putting the Fun in Functional,” in which she examines several “game metrics” and how successful sites like MySpace make use of them to promote stickiness. Among these metrics is personal feedback from the system. There’s something magical about a machine that cares about your inputs and responds accordingly. Most traditional games rely on the human players for this feedback; I move my rook, you move your knight. I say “cilantro,” you say “yuck.” Presumably, one thing that makes games fun is the expectation that the other player—or in this case—the system, will evolve its strategy based on your inputs. If your opponent is arbitrary or uninterested, you stop playing.

Perhaps the best example of a non-human opponent of this kind is 20q, an artificially intelligent game that is remarkably good at 20 Questions. 20q is an interesting application for other reasons, particularly how it learns, but the reason people keep playing is because it’s fun, not because it’s interesting. Because the game, on the surface, doesn’t care about its own growth. It cares about you.

Netflix isn’t selling movies; it’s selling the activity of movie-watching. To do so, Netflix assumes the persona of an interested opponent who has one goal: to find out what you like to watch. Just by providing a platform for you to rate movies, Netflix celebrates and ascribes value to your preferences. Sure, Netflix gives you access to critics’ opinions as well, but it’s your stars that show up under the movie title.

Like Netflix, museums are portals that offer access to a wide range of content. But museums usually work the other way. Rather than selling museum-going, they sell the content. Instead of privileging visitor opinions, the experts are on display. If you like the content, you can play the role of the 20q machine—asking the museum questions, probing for the answers. But that’s work. Most people prefer to be polled.

Providing a forum for the expression of visitor preferences doesn’t require that museum content fall mercy to the whim of the visitor. Netflix doesn’t change its content based on your reviews. They don’t dump movies that get rated poorly. But they do give you a fun way to express your preferences, and they try to reward you for doing so. They make a big, impersonal repository of stuff something personal and fun to interact with. What more could museums ask for?

What's My Score? Gaming in Museums

"Putting Fun into Functional"is a really fabulous powerpoint presentation by Amy Jo Kim of shufflebrain, a unique game design company. In this presentation, she details five core "game mechanics" that make games compelling, fun, and addictive, and talks about how they are being applied in successful web applications like MySpace and Netflix.

The five mechanics are: collecting (accumulating monopoly bucks or dragon-slaying swords), points/score, feedback from the system/game, social exchanges (trading stuff, giving and receiving gifts or comments), and customization/personalization. Each one of these amplifies the extent to which the player/user feels connected to the game or experience offered.

There have got to be some great ways to apply these mechanics to museums. Here are some ideas... and a lot of questions.

Collecting: Some museums are using barcodes or RFID to track what exhibits the visitor uses. The visitor can leave with a printout of the activities they did, or come home to a website full of links/images that were "saved" at the museum. Is this a gimmick or does it give visitors a sense of accomplishment? In a game, collecting tools/money "matters" because it allows you to get to the next level or face a tougher challenge. How can you "level up" in a museum? What will collecting more experiences/artifacts "get" you?

Points: In a game, points get you closer to your goal, or, in some games (Pacman, pinball), they make you feel good and give you a secondary goal besides staying alive. Is there any value to getting a score for your museum experience? This may sound gross. But I've enjoyed plenty of museum interactives that take a long time to "reward" me with some kind of aha. Many guests probably walk away before they get there. What if we had a way to communicate how close you are to your goal, a compelling and accessible reason-like points-to stick around?

Feedback: At a basic level, this is what a good interactive provides. Am I doing it right? Am I good? The more flexibly the experience can adapt to its user, the better.

Social Exchanges: This is fascinating and somewhat unexplored in museums. What if instead of emailing something I enjoyed back to myself, I generated an ecard to send to someone else? Perhaps I'd be more compelled because I now have an audience I'm creating FOR, and I'm also bringing a non-visitor into the experience, which is great. Could there be ways in museums to foster social interactions between strangers by incentivizing them in some way?

Customization: Very tricky. The museum is a fixed space--how do you create a highly personalized experience within it?

I'd love to see a museum approach a "standard" content topic and apply game rules rather than exhibit rules to its design. Anyone up for it?