Teaching the World to Sing

I think they have the same potential to be big, because anyone can relate to it - if it's done right anyone can have a go and try it out. Again you can tap into the different audiences and music likes and genres and so on. It has the same point of appeal.

I think the only way the cycle might be a bit faster is that we immediately have four strong titles on the market at once. I think with guitars and singing we sort of had a couple of major players first, then the wave caught on and you had loads of products coming onto the channels. Right now we're looking at four major products at once - Just Dance, Dance Central, Konami and SingStar.

So if anything there's just more product earlier - I guess they're platform specific at the moment, they're not flooding every single platform at once. I guess the music game thing lasted four years. I'm not sure the life-span will be four years but definitely a couple of years.

I think you have to set up that framework in a way that it's going to work. You still have to come up with creative ideas and implement them. Think, 'what will they want to share next? What can we give them? What will make people want to share and communicate. I think it's not a given. We actually have a really long list of ideas which will fit into the product we're building, but all of them have the concept of 'how will the community take this and share and amplify it'?

We're not creating big chunks of content just for them to consume, we're creating content for them to take it and contribute to it. I think the way we see that is that, when communities get together, they can entertain each other. In far greater ways that we can entertain them. If we can give them enough for them to take it and run with it then it's not just about sitting around waiting for us to create the next level. We'd rather they were able to entertain themselves the whole time.

Those are the kinds of things we think about. We think about long returns, how things might evolve. We think about events a bit more, how they stoke that community action and engagement - it doesn't happen on its own - and we think about listening to the audience, very very carefully. In any possible way. Analytics, surveys, forums, focus tests, all of those things. It's a service-based model of a game which, over time, continues to develop.

I think you create an experience, a social opportunity. That experience you might do on your own, you create a social opportunity to do that together. The game elements almost give you goals and rewards and feedback. I think those are the mechanics of games that can be applied to a lot of different things.

They naturally tap into, whether it's a competitive nature or a collaborative nature. Probably competitive, people are competitive, and you give them a score. [laughs] You give people a score or a leaderboard or a list, I think people get attracted to that in some way. Similarly with collaborative things. You put people in teams and people can be competitive in teams.

If I exercise, or go to the gym, I want to have goals. I think with games, if you really boil it down, to the mechanics, then what I see as gamification is putting some rules and goals and rewards around an activity and I think you apply that to many many things.

I think what gamification does is - games have always been interactive. It's not like television or magazines or editorial, pushing things out of you. You do something and something happens, you have this influence over the media. More and more industries are becoming interactive. We sort of call them gamified but they're becoming interactive. More social.

The fashion thing is a really good example. Where we used to just read a magazine or look at TV but now there's this whole uploading, rating, sharing... It's a much richer experience.