Let's Make This Fun

I think we had some really good ideas come out of our crowd-sourcing experiment today, and I wanted to record some initial thoughts. First, I think some of the apps that were discussed were very cool, and have the potential to be really great resources, but they also don't excite me very much. To be quite honest, I am feeling a little burnt out on technology and the endless flow of apps. I already have to spend so much time on my computer and on my phone, that it just isn't likely that I would download and use an informational app like that. If I were already planning on voting and just needed a source of aggregated information, it would be perfect, but it wouldn't do anything to get me excited about voting in and of itself.

One of the ideas that we talked about was putting wack-a-candidate game in the Wilk. We haven't really ironed out the details yet, so more to come on that, but I wanted to lay out some of the reasoning behind our decision.

First off, the machine will be attractive. It will be placed in a key location with a lot of foot traffic, and will probably have a certain degree of exciting music/ flashing lights/ etc. Once we have people lured in, we will take advantage of their fun-loving and competitive natures, and have them play a game that doesn't have a prize per se, but generates unbiased, informative, bite-size pieces of information about the whole field of candidates. We felt that the main hurdle would be making it fun for people to gather information, and once we've succeeded in doing that, we can trust the sense of "civic duty" to take over.

Word of a project like this will quickly spread across campus, and we wouldn't need advertising much or produce incentives to try our product. It will be self-perpetuating. Why? Because it will be fun - fun to create and fun to use. It will be uplifting, informative, and will add a little more depth to the political understanding of BYU students.

Some additional thoughts:


In an effort to go get some social proof, I floated this idea to a few friends, and they all seemed quite interested. Everybody I talked to agreed that having a physical game in the Wilk that didn't require a lot of time or effort to play is something they would be interested in. When I talked to my roommate about generating the facts, we discussed the possibility of printing out "tickets" that would have information about various candidates and their platforms, and then those tickets could be redeemable for some sort of prize.

A few people pointed out skepticism about our ability to build a legitimate game worth playing, but honestly, I think it can be done. We have a pretty diverse field of specialties in our class, and I think we would have the necessary skills to get it done. Plus, the whack-a-candidate machine probably wouldn't require as much specialty on the technical side as other games would. That's it for now, but I'll probably be putting out another post with more information or insight as it comes. If anybody has any thoughts to add to this potential idea please do!