Over the past 18 months, virtual events have been looking to video games for engagement tactics — after all, gaming is the gold standard when it comes to engaging online audiences. Many platforms now offer some type of gamification feature, usually in the form of a point allocation system and leaderboard.
However, gaming dynamics go far beyond simple point allocation, and thanks to the MetaVenue, developed by video game experts at Alice & Smith, so can virtual events. Alice & Smith was founded in 2014 and mainly creates alternate reality games (ARGs) for big brands such as Paradox Interactive, which proved to be very helpful experience when the pandemic hit.
“This work became our training ground for Covid,” says Andrea Doyon, Founder & CEO of Alice & Smith, “because it was all about bringing people around the world into an immersive virtual experience, to tell a story, while taking into account multiple time zones, languages, etc.”
Alice & Smith’s work with virtual events started with gaming clients who came to them for help for online engagement solutions when major conferences like GDC and E3 cancelled last year. “We worked with event agencies to help them with online components, including Twitch streaming, and we realized that our tech expertise could provide value to event management companies who were struggling with that side of things,” explains Doyon.
Alice & Smith designed the MetaVenue platform based on its existing tech, PlayfabXR, in order to host virtual events and was able to bring to the table certain basic gaming principles that were lacking in virtual events, “like user engagement, user progression, and focus on the entire user journey, from the moment you book your ticket for the event.”
The company’s tech was already capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users, meaning that it didn’t face attendee limitations — as Doyon notes, 5,000 people is a good size for an event, but 5,000 players doesn’t make for a viable video game — which facilitated its expansion into events. Doyon and his team also wanted to enable year-round communities with their platform, the same way they do for games.
“When you’re in gaming, you need to have a platform that can support a million users or more and that’s very inexpensive to operate,” he says. “So we ended up with a great experience platform that clients can operate all year long. This was in line with many of the things that people in the event industry were already doing or wanting to do more of, but often didn't have the required engineers and software developers to support them.”
Doyon shares that one of his clients, for example, used the platform to engage employees in the build up to a sales meeting with quizzes, games, and other activities. One of the most powerful features of the platform, however, is based around user progression, which is all about crafting a customized journey for each attendee. Users can be segmented into extremely specific categories, such as attendees who have been logged into the platform for more than an hour but haven’t accessed any of the networking capabilities.
“As soon as they enter that segment, you can trigger a specific action or notification,” explains Doyon. “So, for example, the platform can suggest that they check out an icebreaker session that’s currently going on. At an in-person event, if you have a guest that’s stuck in a corner and not doing anything, you would go up to them and see if they needed assistance or information. This is the same thing, but you can apply it to tens of thousands of people simultaneously in a digital environment.”
When it comes to user progression, Doyon notes that video games typically allow players to focus on progressing certain abilities over others, like combat training or trading skills, based on their playing style. MetaVenue implements the same concept. “You can deploy a multi-progression path to appeal to different styles of users,” he says. Some methods of progression and point-building may revolve more around networking, others could be around engaging with sessions, etc.
Another principle that MetaVenue borrows from gaming is the concept of a party, where players with different specializations team up for specific missions or quests. “We can do the same thing on our platform,” says Doyon. “If we have a client who wants to break attendees up into groups to ideate, for example, we have a system where we can take, say, one person from HR, one from sales, and one person from production — who may not otherwise interact — and put them in a virtual room together to leverage each person’s specific expertise.”
MetaVenue also has the ability to interface with Unreal Engine, which is particularly useful for virtual events that include a studio component with a green screen. For a recent event hosted on the platform, virtual attendees were able to impact the 3D universe around the host by voting on the platform.
“It’s very interesting to see how clients can creatively use principles from the gaming world regarding engagement, user onboarding, tutorials, and more to engage an audience around the company, the product, etc.,” notes Doyon. “Gaming dynamics have proven their engagement power on a huge number of players over the years, but they’re very applicable outside the gaming industry as well.”