How can we combine the boring parts of other disciplines, work fields and such, with games to make them more fun – and a more complete experience? This is a question who came from Jonathan Samel Baskin who held a presentation about this subject at the NLGD Festival of Games in 2009. He had the opinion that people don’t believe in the lies and stereotypes of brands anymore. He thinks that if we turn our brands into games and use all the powerful elements games nowadays use, brands would make more sense and tell costumers their true story. And I think he has a point.

Games are very strong if it comes to binding costumers (or players) to their experience and maybe even better at creating memorable experiences. Almost nobody reads through policies and terms of use – a game with these simple lines of text at its core would surely make these important aspects much more present.

Why can’t brands be more game-like? Why can’t, for instance, people ‘fight’ for their products? Why are brand products often not related to each other in terms of the relation between the product and the costumer? Why don’t brands have achievements and why are costumers not rewarded with titles when they achieve them? Why is there no interaction between the costumers who bought certain products from a brand? I could instantly think of a dozen examples of how to turn a brand into a MMRPG!

I can not imagine the examples I called have not been tried, but I haven’t found any game or brand yet that has become successful in it.

Please comment, this is presumably a very interesting topic.