Translator: Charlotte Mason Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
I am the gamifier!
Where does 'gamifier' come from?
It comes from 'gamification' or 'ludification'.
It means using the tool of 'game design' in different domains,
to maybe help to communicate messages better,
for example, in communication, in marketing, teaching, training, etc.
But, I almost want to say that there's a more profound gamification,
which is maybe the gamification of today's society.
I can even say to you that in France,
despite a certain culture, which lasted a very long time,
we're currently 'germanising' ourselves,
because our Germanic cousins are big fans of playing games.
For a very long time, they've been pro-games,
whilst in France, people often had doubts.
It is itself a gamification of life.
Incidentally, me, I think that I made myself a gamifier --
just like that, boom! --
since I was very young,
I'll say since I was six because I cannot remember before that --
and perhaps because in France people tell you:
"Listen, games are great for learning different things,
but school starts when you're six; so if you want to learn,
you go to school; the rest, games, are just for having fun,
with your parents, your friends, your cousins, etc."
Me, at six years old, I actually had a very strict father
who only cared about education and good colleges,
and everything else was totally unimportant.
So obviously games, sports, was all put to one side.
And when I returned from a friend's house, obviously all I wanted to do
was to carry on with the game we'd played.
So I began making games I'd seen at friends' houses
and then to modify them.
So, I started doing DIY
and gaining certain skills in that area.
I don't really want to go over the prototypes from back then
except for one, which really impressed my friends.
I made a pinball machine out of cardboard
with rubber bands, nails, anything I could salvage.
I was lucky because my dad worked in a print works,
so I salvaged lots of paper and cardboard to make it with.
And this pinball machine was a big hit with my friends,
and they came to my house to play with it.
Then, a bit later, some years on, I discover,
I discover the game of all games:
role-playing.
'Role' play not 'droll' play!
Maybe you know Dungeons and Dragons.
Who here knows it? Raise your hands, please.
Ah really? We'll say, maybe, 30 percent.
Very good. Who has played a role-playing game,
table-based of course like Dungeons and Dragons?
A little bit less, but still, not bad!
Role-play, for example like Dungeons and Dragons,
is today often considered as the father of all games,
never mind the format: video games, board games, all table-based games,
choose-your-own-adventure books, the 'escape games'
which are plentiful in Paris, as well as in the rest of the world.
We can find elements of Dungeons and Dragons in them,
for example: the XP, experience points,
life points, ranks, etc.
We find them everywhere in every kind of game.
It strongly influenced the look of today's games.
Role-play games have brought a lot,
for personal development, for example.
When I started playing role-play,
I immediately wanted to master it.
I wanted to be God, to be the supreme arbitrator.
I also wanted to be the host
because a game master, is also a host.
It is him who will do everything
to ensure that his players --
generally, four, five, six players --
return the next Saturday and want to keep coming back.
It's placing a good cliffhanger at the end of a part,
at the point where the 'big boss' is about to strike the main character,
and then stop it by saying:
"OK, that was cool! The pizzas were good.
If you want to know the rest come back next week."
Then, obviously, after 'mastering' and 'hosting',
very quickly we also want to 'create'.
Role-play has this power, which grows very quickly,
from the literary aspects,
and also the math and the logic, the rules of the game,
to make you want to create your own scenarios,
make the adventures come alive,
re-use elements you've seen elsewhere,
often on TV, at the time, or even now actually,
and reproduce them on a Saturday evening,
we did it Saturday, but it can be anytime,
and to reproduce them around the table with your players.
That was what drove me, and I'm not the only one,
firstly, to consult long books which were written in English at the time.
Therefore, through that, I improved my English skills.
It became my best subject at high school and in my final exams.
Incidentally, I did a degree in English.
I started to translate; then I started to write,
and then I got really interested in math,
because of the history of probability.
Even with dice, it isn't really chance.
And of course, probability allows you to regulate chance.
So, I started to develop certain skills,
naturally, without noticing it,
which were useful in other domains.
Today, you know, we're post 'Revenge of the Geeks'.
Incidentally, Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons --
one of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons,
the one who pushed it the most anyway --
is considered by some as the grandfather of geeks.
And so,
I began using role-play in other ways.
As a manager,
I started putting parameters in place for my teams
to know where everybody was up to etc., that's an example.
And then, because I had a strict father,
I didn't do too much sport as a child,
even though I really wanted to --
I started fencing, and then, I started to teach it,
knowing that sport is a game.
It has rules and aims: in short, this is the definition of game.
We started to open a club in a Parisian suburb.
And like every club and society, you need to attract people to it.
You need to keep the members you have
and always attract more people to keep the club alive.
So, with the kids, it was easy.
I began distilling the playful parts, the game design aspects.
I started to say to them:
"You know role-play games, video games etc.?
And if, for example, we take these famous experience points,
these life points, powers, etc.?"
And in fact with the kids, to liven up the bouts,
we put a system in place
which meant that when they had bouts,
they felt like they were in a type of video game
or in a role-play game.
There were also narrative elements.
I pushed them to do things a bit theatrically.
For example, they each had three life points,
instead of scoring points.
So when they were hit for the first time,
they could continue to fight but, injured,
they had to hold one knee, to show their handicap.
If they were hit a second time, they continued to fight
whilst holding their ankle, even more incapacitating!
And then, if they were hit a third time,
the opponent approached with theatrical gestures
then, with a speech and all that, dealt the final blow,
and he earned experience points, and the loser did too.
And with these experience points, they could buy powers,
for example, fighting with two weapons.
There was the vampire weapon, which meant any time,
he said: "Stop! I'm using my vampire weapon
and if I touch my opponent I take a life from him
and that rewards me with a life point," etc.
The kids were crazy over it.
They asked to play it all the time.
We also created another game: Corsairs against pirates,
which was two fencing strips basically next to each other,
which each represented a boat,
pirates one side, corsairs on the other,
and the group on each side fought each other,
limited by the space which represented a sea full of sharks.
If they touched it, they "fell in" and were eliminated,
if they haven't already been hit by an opponent.
So all that, that enabled us to gamify the game.
Sport is a game, and there, I gamified the game.
And this, this has already been done, in certain games,
for example, to change a game that everyone knows, the game of chess,
which is nice and quite fun.
Someone put some rules in place
which let you completely change the rules
and make the game crazy; it's called nightmare chess.
That is also an element of gamifying a game.
It's also been done with ping-pong for example,
well in fact it's been done with any number of things.
By the way, thanks to our two young colleagues who made a reference,
which enabled me to create a type of combat sport with laser swords,
because recently, due to new technologies, polycarbonate blades,
we can really use laser swords as fighting weapons.
So you can really block an opponent's attack.
That is the same: creating this sport it was like a kind of game design.
Little by little, through fencing, with my contacts, etc.
I started working professionally with games.
People would ask: "Look you do training, you teach fencing.
Can't you go to, say, the University of Paris VIII,
into Information and Communication Sciences,
and teach a class on games,
get the students to create a game?"
Obviously, I said: "Sure, no problem".
So I worked on that, and after Paris VIII,
it was other prestigious universities.
Rather than going towards video games, I arrived and said to them:
'No, you're not going to make a video game,
you'll make a board game, or a role play game,
or a choose-your-own-adventure book, or, recently they're everywhere,
create an escape game, although on a smaller scale.
So, this type of game,
which we often call 'table top' or 'tangible games',
above all let us highlight certain features of society,
in other words, to come together around a table.
This happened naturally, if you remember, with the Wii console.
We all gathered in front of the same thing.
It was still a video game.
For a long time, we thought that video games would kill off board games.
In fact, a few years ago, just over ten years,
the Wii console: we all gathered in front of a screen, the same support,
and all of a sudden, we started playing together,
like the old days, in fact, like the old days!
People said: "We used to do this, before."
Yes, with board games.
For several years now, board games have become huge.
They're huge in France, as well as globally.
A few years ago,
there was about 50 or so board games released in France.
Today, more than 1000 board games are being released in France.
And on a global scale, its the same: it has skyrocketed.
Now, there is a big French company, who only make gamer's games,
and role-playing games, etc.
who are the global market leaders.
I'm telling you, French board game designers,
otherwise called 'party-games',
are becoming globally known designers.
Indeed, it has become their profession.
Some of them make a living just from board games.
And when they go wherever, to Essen in Germany,
to Indianapolis in the US, Tokyo, etc.,
they are celebrities and they sign autographs
over two, three, four days.
So, there's been a real change.
I've spoken about the 'hobby' aspects
but, in the work environment, there's been big developments in games.
People constantly want more.
We used to say playtime's over!
To learn, at the age of six, now, you go to school.
But we've realised for a while now --
and I've fought for this for a long time --
that play is not just for having fun:
it's taking pleasure in learning, in teaching, in training, etc.
More and more, I'm consulted by businesses or by training boards
who ask me which elements of games they could use to, for example,
make a company's employees interested in
a new product which will be released in six months.
What can we do? Could we make a game?
Yes, no problem!
Take team building,
we see it in the escape games --
you use a game, not necessarily an escape game,
you could work on a board game or create a board game
to resolve conflicts between teams
that are consistently losing money.
We did that in a really big French company.
Setting up a board game
which enabled exchanges between these different teams,
helped the employees to really recognize
their communication issues. You couldn't miss it!
So, you can see that actually, in a natural way,
games let you resolve a lot of things.
By the bye, obviously, we can see this a bit everywhere,
particularly when on transport.
Nearly everyone is playing,
thanks to the smartphone, which we all carry,
and which has led a lot of people towards gaming.
So, games are involved in every aspect of society,
and we increasingly find it in businesses.
And all of this has resulted in a lot of good things.
And games, I don't know,
but maybe they're a way to stay young.
Thank you.
(Applause)