Hello everybody.
So, good to be here,
and here at New World Stages, not on that side but on this side,
which is very fun.
I want to talk to you today
about the end of the audience and the dawn of the player.
Let me start by introducing you to your new customer,
your next generation customer.
This is your millennial audience,
and they are at turns brilliant and also unbelievably annoying.
It's like a really sort of shocking combination of things.
But there's a reason why the millennials are this way.
They didn't end up this way just kind of out of happenstance.
They're super easily distracted.
It's the world we live in,
but millennials are very easily distracted.
They've a device in their pocket,
it's constantly buzzing, and its buzzing all the time,
whether they're at work or at play.
They also have conquered boredom, which is kind of amazing, right?
There's no reason to be bored ever again, even if you're not a Grindr user.
(Laughter)
They are technologically literate and obsessed.
By the age of five or six
today's American kids have used more technology,
and understand more about the Internet and tech,
than most of us understood by the age of 30 in our generation.
It's a shocking, shocking change.
And because they grew up
in an environment with very few limits and very little discipline,
they love obsession.
And "obsessed" is not just a word that entered our culture recently
on kind of a drag queen's wing and a prayer,
it's also something that legitimately is part of our view of the world.
Now we don't have discipline, we have OCD.
Their rise has given extra momentum in leverage to the nerdy anti-hero.
We've always had nerdy anti-heroes,
but today the hero is the nerdy anti-hero,
and we can't get away from this idea in the constructive narrative.
The reason for all of this, my friends, behind all this, is the power of games.
Even for people who don't play games,
the way games have influenced culture,
the way they've changed the way we think about things,
is the reason why we end up in this fun-frustrating place.
You may ask yourself: Why are games so powerful?
Why are they so influential, what do they do?
Well, the core of it is some science called intrinsic reinforcement.
And here's how it works.
Anytime you challenge yourself to something,
anything, no matter how big or how small,
and you achieve that thing,
your brain secretes a magical little bit of a neurotransmitter called dopamine.
And dopamine is a very pleasurable experience.
So,challenge, achievement, mm, that feels really good.
Now, Ian Robertson, a neuropsychologist, has talked about yet another construct,
which is called the winner effect.
The more you do this: challenge - achieve - dopamine
you also start secreting testosterone
in connection with the challenge - achievement - dopamine loop.
So, over time, challenge - achievement - dopamine plus testosterone
affects the way your brain is structured.
And the net of effect of that structural shift
is that things that don't give you a constant rush
of dopamine and testosterone
don't feel particularly fun.
So your orientation is towards the things that deliver that dopamine release:
challenge - achievement.
And so I posit we're at a unique inflection point today
in which all of these things have come together
to profoundly change the nature of the audience,
and change the way that we interact with content of all kinds.
Now, many people have come before you,
especially for those who work in content or the creative industries,
and have said, "I have the answer, everything you do is crap!"
Right? The world's change, everyone's changed, everything's crap.
I'm not going to position this that way at all.
I'm going to tell you things are changing,
some of us see it, some of us don't,
some of us are millennials, some of us aren't.
You may feel this intensely as I do or you may not.
But I want to show you through a series of examples
what people are doing, how other folks have responded to it,
and what I believe the future is
of this very, very august institution, live entertainment.
Now, I also tell you that I think we can use the power of games
to our advantage, to get where we want to go.
And if we do that deliberately instead of letting this happen to us,
but we take an active role in this,
that's called gamification.
And that's using the constructs of games
to engage people and change their behavior.
And we have the power to do this. It's very exciting.
Now, what we need in order to make this happen
are what are called the three F's: Feedback, Friends and Fun.
Any system that has feedback, friends, and fun in it,
is engaging and interesting.
And the more of the three "F"s the system has, the more effective it is.
Let's take a look at this
through the prism of something that some of you probably consider fairly gross:
The idea of taking pictures of everything you eat before you eat it.
And if you're my friend on Facebook -
and I highly encourage you to friend me on Facebook or Instagram -
I promise to deluge you with an unbelievable number of food photos.
You'll get to be right there with me as I eat everything.
Okay, so some of you probably consider this really gross, right?
Like, hey, stop taking pictures of the food! Eat the freaking food!
Right, you're here with me, this is our experience together,
why are you so concerned with taking pictures of your food?
And some people have responded to this whole multitasking in public spaces
which some of you might know is the don't-be-a-jerk game!
And basically the way this game is played:
Everyone puts their phones on the table like guns in the Old West,
and the first person to reach for their phone
has to pay for the dinner.
Not a bad idea -
I feel what kind of a crowd we are. Right? Okay, you love this!
So, here's the thing though, here's the thing:
As uncomfortable as all this sounds, as many of us like to deride this idea,
we're missing the elemental concept here,
which is that today for this gamer generation in the gamification world,
the people at home are part of the experience.
They're providing a lot of feedback on the live experience.
They're clicking "Like", they're clicking "Hearts",
they're commenting.
They're providing that positive dopamine release,
and sometimes they're more interesting than you are over dinner. Okay?
It just depends: not you, okay, not you, but you!
So sometimes they're providing more positive feedback,
and so they are part of that experience.
And all that is really cute, right? Like:
"Ha-ha, Jimmy won't talk to me over dinner."
What are the real business effects of this?
And let me tell you a story.
One of the largest automakers - I was working on a project -
said to me we've a problem:
"Teenagers don't drive the way they used to.
They don't want to anymore."
I said, "What's it about?"
They said, "The research classic millennial stuff.
Their care's the environment.
They don't want to drive a car or spend money on a car,
But the number one reason
why driving rates have fallen off a cliff among American teenagers
is because they're getting the message about not texting and driving.
so they're choosing not to drive."
(Laughter) (Applause)
Okay?
Now, It's true!
Now, if I had told you, if you had come to me five years ago,
and you'd said, "Gabe, Instagram would kill the car."
I'd laugh you out of the room. I'd say, "How's that possible?"
But let me explain this to you.
With this generation, with our world today,
with this positive reinforcement loop
produced by that dopamine - challenge - achievement,
everything is on the table.
It doesn't matter how ingrained the behavior is,
it doesn't matter how culturally significant the behavior is,
people will follow their bliss.
They will go where the most positive reinforcement is,
and that threatens to upend
everything and anything we know about people's behavior,
nothing is sacrosanct.
And for people who work in an industry
based on a very long-term view of content creation,
it might be meaningful.
Now consider:
How does the live performance industry respond to social media?
It's kick the person out of the room, attack them,
grab them with the bouncer, make fun of them.
No way, you can't use social media,
while you're in the middle of watching a performance.
And I think this sets up one of our classic kind of conflicts
with this generation.
You know that in the United States four-fifths of the population
watched broadcast entertainment, like a TV show,
with the second or third screen open in the last 30 days.
We can't even sit through 22 minutes of television without going crazy
because we are so bored. Right?
How are they supposed to sit through two hours of not interacting?
So, one option is, instead of fighting this trend,
let's turn and use it in kind of a positive way to our advantage.
So this is a project that I worked on, I designed, called Livecube.
It takes the social media to live event, and makes it into a positive experience.
So it focuses it.
It uses game concept to get people to compete with each other,
to create great social media moments, to promote the event that's going on,
and so on.
And has been very successful, very effective -
instead of fighting with it, roll with it, and leverage that power
to do other things, to do great things, and extend the experience.
And here's another of the conflicts we often see with live performance.
We assume that because the millennial generation,
because this next consumer likes to be the center of the action
- remember in games you're always the center of the story -
many content creators believe that what this audience really want
is to write their own story.
They want to come and decide the outcome.
And sometimes that's true, right?
We've got voting in reality television.
But in practice they want you to give them the entertainment.
They want to be part of that though,
they'd like to be more viscerally involved.
So you've got highly successful immersive entertainment.
There's no surprise
about why really immersive entertainment at this moment is so popular.
It really works.
It allows me to be part of the story,
but you're still writing great story that principally carries us through.
So, if you can't do that,
how could you use technology to allow the user, the player,
to be in the center of the story?
And I think Domino's tells us a great case study on this.
So, Domino's built this app called Domino's Pizza Hero.
And in it you play a pizzaiolo, someone who makes pizzas. Okay?
So, they teach you in the app how to knead the dough,
roll the dough up, like Luigi, and put some sauce on it,
and cheese and vegetables.
And flick your finger,
it's instantly baked at your local Domino's
and delivered right to your door
from inside the game.
And if you're especially good at it,
Domino's will invite you to apply for a job
(Laughter)
from inside the game!
Now, ha-ha-ha, but this company needs to recruit 30,000 people a year -
and by the way they make a $1M a week in incremental revenue from this game.
This game replaces the soaring inspirational video
on how Domino's uses only the freshest ingredients to make your pizza,
and watch this guy make your pizza,
and everyone is well paid and happy in white. Uhm!
Now, it's an interactive experience, it's visceral,
and this is an important part of the difference in storytelling.
Many storytelling opportunities in the theater
are about where the boundary ends between the audience and the performance,
where the performance ends and the rest of people's lives begin.
And with new technology we don't have to end the story when the story ends.
We've got new - I'm not saying you should all get Google Glass,
but just as an idea.
Some of you may have seen this amazing Google Glass game
called "Zombies, Run!"
And the idea is to get you to run by chasing you with zombies.
(Laughter)
But you can extend your stories and your storytelling in much the same way,
whether it's with Google Glass or not,
it allows you to connect with people in a different place.
And this is another piece of the core value proposition in the millennials,
which is that the idea of personal achievement is critical, it's primary.
How I feel about the things that I do is very important,
and I want to know I'm making progress,
and I want your product or service, your idea, your content,
to be part of my story of progression and mastery in my life.
And this is core to gamification.
So apps like Nike Plus have been hugely successful.
They are effectively loyalty programs.
This is like a loyalty program.
But it leverages my own personal drive to be better and do better,
and allows you to extend your content beyond where it is.
And this extension, this consumptive extension, is very important,
because the millennials are also on the leading edge
of this concept of binge consumption
made famous by the Portlandia "Battlestar Galactica" episode. Right?
So binge consumption is the idea that I should be able to decide
how much I want to consume as well.
I don't only want to consume the nuggets you've given me,
if I'm really into the thing you're making,
I want to consume as much of it as I possibly can.
And I want to consume it to the exclusion of other things.
So there's an opportunity to extend the concepts that you make
even if you don't have the resources,
even if the content that you're creating
doesn't fit neatly into a binge consumption model. Right?
There's an opportunity using technology in gamification to extend what you create
and to come into people's lives in a different way.
And one of my favorite examples of this
that also leverages an important concept in gamification is Tabasco Nation.
And that concept is tribalism.
Because above everything else we've talked about,
millennials care about connecting,
they care about finding and being together with their tribe.
So Tabasco Nation want a way of extending
the concept of their hot sauce into the world
and drive behavior among people who like hot sauce to the media assertion
that if you like spicy food, you're part of a tribe.
Every drop of hot sauce that you use is a point that you earn.
The crazier things you do with hot sauce, the more points you earn:
like putting it on a piece of cake, take it to the top of the Eiffel Tower,
you know, put some in your teacher's drink.
It's cool.
The more you do, the more points you earn.
the more cool experiences they unlock for you.
But the core value, and it's a very successful campaign,
the core value is that you're part of a tribe.
Just like you may be a part of a tribe if you really like Sondheim musicals.
You probably are!
(Laughter)
And here's the sort of coup de grâce for all of us, you guys.
Everything I've talked about
I put through the framework of this millennial generation,
the next generation,
but, in fact, everything that the millennials want,
be the center of the story, consume more content,
feel they're making progress,
understand how your thing fits into their world
and be viscerally connected to it,
that's stuff that people of all ages want.
You don't have to be 24 to want those things.
It just so happens, if you're 24,
because you played a bunch of games, you expect those things.
But it's also true that if you're 45, you still want challenging,
you still want the content you want,
you still want to feel connected to the story and be able to do more.
It shouldn't surprise you,
the single biggest game playing demographic in the world is women over 40.
It's true.
If you text my mom right now,
and you're like: "Hey Gabe's mom, what are you doing?"
She'd be, like, "Candy Crush."
(Laughter)
Okay? That's this demographic!
So, if you're not concerned
[about] the future of the live media consumption industry,
you've got twenty years to go,
let me be the one to tell you don't.
So, in closing, I just want to say,
I feel like we are at this important inflection point.
We're at a moment in time in live performance,
in the creation of content.
We've been doing the same thing the same way
for literally thousands of years, more or less.
And as many the other speakers have told you today,
lots of technological advances are happening on the periphery.
We can use lots of different techniques, incorporate lots of different ideas,
to make live performance and our connection with the audience
deeper and more meaningful.
Along the way though, we're going to need to adapt our entire concepts
to think about things using the new and improved brains
of the next generation.
And gamification is the platform we'll use to make that happen.
Thank you.
(Applause)