Breaking down an old favorite project: Facebook Gaming
Defeat sucks for sure. Loosing projects is generally lame, and no one likes to hear that a ridiculous amount of effort just went in the trash.
There’s probably a TON of reasons a project didn’t go through, and some of them are simply out of the creative’s hands: relationships between the contact and the Account Manager, the simple fact that sometimes projects are out to bid simply because it’s client policy (but they already know who they’re going with), or maybe Mars wasn’t inline with Venus on the Autumnal Equinox that year, and you were cursed from the outset of the project with no chance at all… your project-submission was written in the stars as a failed attempt at design-glory. Oh well.
Or maybe the design just wasn’t the right vibe, but sometimes there’s so little to go off-of with a n in-development or new product or brand that it’s really hard to hit the mark. As was probably the case for the ill-fated Facebook Gaming project I had the privilage of working on for the GDC event (the Game Developers Conference in San Fransisco every year). This event was to mark the Facebook entry into live-streaming games, in a similar fassion as Twitch does… but with a WAY MORE targeted audience because, well… it’s Facebook and they know pretty much everything there is to know about you (if you post enough that is).
That said, even though we lost the project to another exhibit house, it remains one of my personal favorites. Not so much because of how the design was eventually crafted, but actually because of the thought that went into the space and the material choices and overall concept of building off of the gaming comunity’s inherent energetic vibe and passion for the worlds and characters and stories they explore. That was fun… really diving deep into the essence of the why people enjoy casting games and why people spend more time watching others play games than playing the game themselves (this is still a foreign notion to me… I’d much rather just play the game and enjoy the experience myself than live vicariously through someone else, but whatever… it’s still interesting!)
The overall goal was to introduce people at GDC and E3 to Facebook Gaming, which was to contend with Twitch by offering viewers the ability to connect with the personalities in the game-casting world (called creators… because they create video-game-coverage content… not because they actually create the games they’re playing) with a much more targeted scope than Twitch can, becaus Facebook may understand what games certain people are playing and what their likes and dislikes involves, including what demographics the audience is most likely to connect with. It makes sense, and if you love the world of gaming it might be worth your time to compare the two services and see which you like more.
From a design standpoint, the introduction of the new service meant something very complicated: introducing an off-shoot brand (so it contains whatever history or stigma the audience automatically chooses to attach to it) to an EXTREMELY sensitive crowd (gamers can notoriously be quick to judge), which is searching for a voice with a very well known existing competing service. That’s a super tall order.
And why it led to a lot of thoughtful elements in the design meant to distinctly oppose the established competition in emotion and feeling, while also making the brand true to its perceived nature. Facebook has always been about connecting friends and family… originally it was just about connecting College kids to other college kids, but of course that changed over time. And now its a repository ofideas and it offers the distinctive opportunity to chronicle a lifetime if users choose to post enough pictures and write enough meaningful moments of their life onto its servers. It’s admitedly a neat thing to watch pre-compiled video photo-albums of years gone-by and see howmy kids have grown, and so I can attest to the true power of facebook over time: it connects you with other people, but it also connects you to your past.
There’s a lot there to unwind, but I think when designing the project I meant for the space to be meaningful spot in whihc people passionate about games could connect and explore what they LOVE about games. Games have nevr really attained the level of recognized prestige as other art forms… but I would certainly say there’s an incredible amount of passion and true devotion to games that might eclipse people’s attachment to even their most favorite films. So it’s weird we don’t give games as much credit.
But Facebook Gaming is a piece of the larger puzzle I think that will continue to bind people together, and that’s why after the team and I went through all of the many goodies and moments and ideas you can find around the booth design, we wanted tocram this explosion of WHAT GAMES ARE and WHO GAMERS ARE into one space that felt as comfortable as home. So we did! And it’s messy, and it’s eclectic and it is NOT CAREFUL about how it portrays itself, because the awsome thing about game culture is that ANYONE IS WELCOME. Literally anyone. Pickup a controller, pop in a game, and explore at your own pace. And you too can fall in love with a story because theres a game for anyone out there! And any company venture that aims to strengthen those ties between the community members is something pretty compellig to your’s truly.
A space to broadcast to a comfortable crowd seated in an open lounge setting, cluttered with game consoles on make-shift pallet pedestals and flaked by glass-casting cubes covered in artwork and nostalgia from beloved game franchises filled the exhibit with a sense of energy. Behind the stage, a double deck structure held private meeting spaces where content creators oculd freely discuss their ideas and momentum with their audience to Facebook Gaming staff, and hopefully drive new initiatives on the platform. Below, a green-room offered comfy seating and a space for the tech staff to run the whole intricate opperation and drive a seamless production that anyone walking past oculd see through glass windows.
But the most important element, at least to me, remained largely obscured, even though it was right out in the open and very large. An L-shaped wall which supported the many monitor arrays and encapsulated the casting-cubes which surrounded the booth, were probably seen as a fairly utilitarian element. Like a cheap-way to build up something. And it would have been pretty cheap yes… but the real reason I placed it there wasn’t to skirt around budgets, but was actually because it represented something simple: building things. More exactly, it symbolized that the game comunity is far from complete… that games are something we cherish and love, and that this community was still being built… by ideas like Facebook Gaming.