The Adobe Flash Player is required to view this multimedia interactive. Get it here.

Digital Savant

Omar L. Gallaga writes about technology culture for the Austin American-Statesman. He's worked for the American-Statesman since 1997 and edited Technopolis, the newspaper's personal tech section, and ¡ahora sí!, Austin's Spanish-language newspaper. He's currently a contributor to NPR's "All Tech Considered" segment, which airs Mondays on "All Things Considered." He's been a writer and performer with Austin's award-winning Latino Comedy Project, and is a contributing writer for Television Without Pity. He writes a comic strip, "Space Monkeys!" with his brother, Pablo, and lives in New Braunfels with his wife and three technologically savvy cats.

A note on commenting

You can comment on entries, but they will not be posted until they are reviewed by the blogger.

RSS feed

If you use an RSS reader, here is the feed for this blog: XML.

Learn more about RSS.
A FAQ on Web logs

What's on this page?

The entry titled "SXSW Keynote: Seth Priebatsch of SCVNGR."

Commenting is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. M-F

Blog Roll

Statesman Blogs

Austin360 Blogs

All Blogs

Blogs FAQ

Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2011 > March > 12 > Entry

SXSW Keynote: Seth Priebatsch of SCVNGR

By Omar L. Gallaga | Saturday, March 12, 2011, 03:23 PM

New York Times photo

Time/Date: 2:15 p.m., Saturday (hashtag: #GameLayer)

Speaker: Seth Priebatsch, Chief Ninja (also founder and chief executive) of Boston-based SCVNGR

The gist: The incredibly energetic, fast-talking, supremely engaging Seth Priebatsch, the 22-year-old head of SCVNGR entertained with an opening keynote that touched on gaming in relation to education, social shopping and business. When you talk as fast as Priebatsch (seriously, he’s a machine), you can cover a lot of ground in an hour and he did. He began by talking about the ways that the grades/rewards system of schools is broken and actually is set up in a way that encourages cheating and does not do enough to provide rewards for their own sakes. (He compared it to offering points for tooth brushing; eventually kids will brush for the points and not because they need to brush.) He then examined how $15 billion Groupon works and segued into a discussion of location-based services, rewards and how everyone his industry (including Gowalla, Foursquare, Whrrl and others) could be doing more to reward loyalty; none of them is making much money compared to the giant gorilla in the space, Facebook. Priebatsch introduced a game in which audience members traded colored cards to make rows show the same color. By “winning” the game (much sooner than the countdown he set up), the audience earned a $10,000 donation to the World Wildlife Foundation. It demonstrated communal gaming skills, he said. It was very well received, as was the entire keynote, which started late due to lines and crowded conditions.

Quotes: “The killer app at this year’s South by Southwest, as it always has been… is the community.” - Hugh Forrest, fest director. “The game layer is just now being built… unlike the social layer, the game layer traffics in influence.” - Priebatsch. “(School) grades are a game mechanic you can lose in a game where we don’t want ANYONE to lose.” - Priebatsch.

Takeaways: The game layer is coming, it’s going to be fun and it’s going to help solve real-world problem. Gameplay mechanics are going to influence location-based services, online shopping rewards in other areas of social transactions in ways that may not be readily apparent. Communal gameplay is a magical dynamic that can be applied to online business, schools and many, many other areas. The “Moral hazard” of gameplay - replacing real rewards with fake rewards, is a problem that can ruin a gaming dynamic. Games that rely more on social rules and self-enforced rewards and punishment can be more effective.