Will Wright is the designer behind some of the best selling video games of all time. His specialty is the god game, a game that empowers the player to control the elements of the game on a large scale, such as creating civilizations or guarding and influencing autonomous characters. Wright’s games enable the player to exercise his or her creativity – to mold the game and its characters to the player’s vision – and to add personal relevance to the mixture. That’s essentially the same idea behind one of today’s fastest growing trends in marketing and advertising. Consumer co-creation leverages the creativity of consumers to develop better product, brands, and marketing campaigns. While Will may not consider himself a master marketer, his game design strategy may just be the key to helping marketers create stronger, more relevant brands.

Will Wright with a graphic from Spore™

Will’s foray into the god game began in the summer of 1991 when a firestorm swept through parts of Oakland, California, destroying his home and turning his life upside down. He had to relocate his family, replace destroyed belongings, and essentially, rebuild his life. There was an upside. The experience gave Will an idea for a refinement to a city-planning game he had developed in the late 80’s. His new idea was for a game that would call upon the player’s interpersonal skills as well as city-building skills. The new game, which he called Project X, was kind of like a ‘virtual dollhouse’, and simulated the dynamics of an average family. The game put the player in charge of getting his characters shelter, good education, and jobs, as well as finding them mates, friends, and all the other things that go into leading a happy and fulfilling life. During a time when ‘search and destroy’, fantasy, and sports games were top sellers, Will’s game seemed like a crazy idea. Early focus groups hated Project X, and even some of the people at Maxis, the company Will co-founded, were skeptical about the idea. Still, Will was sure that people would be excited about a game that called upon the player’s creativity to help simulated characters navigate real life situations. In 2000, after seven years of development, Maxis published Will’s game under the name The Sims. It was an instant success. The first edition of The Sims sold over 16 million copies. Today, The Sims franchises have sold over 70 million units worldwide, raking in more than 1.6 billion dollars in sales, making it the best selling PC game in history.

Wright’s desire to build highly engaging video games that harness the player’s creativity may have been fueled in part by his parent’s choice of schools. Growing up in Atlanta, Wright flourished in the local Montessori school. Speaking last spring in New York, Wright compared his strategy of game development to the Montessori philosophy. “If you can build the right toy and let somebody directly experience interacting with it, they’ll discover really interesting principles on their own… When somebody is able to create their own thing with the computer, the emotional attachment with it is tremendous.” Undoubtedly, we should expect just as much attachment to Will’s newest game which is due for release this year. Spore is yet another game that enables the user to explore what Wright terms “possibility space”. In Spore, the player can mold and guide a species across multiple generations, growing from a single-celled organism into a more complex animal, eventually evolving into a sapient. Perhaps Spore’s greatest innovation is the use of procedural generation for many components of the game. This results in millions of different possibilities for the player. Instead of choosing from a handful of pre-designed characters, Spore’s “Creature Editor” enables the player to build his own, giving the user ultimate control. The creature editor empowers players to build their online persona from the ground up, starting with what looks like a lump of clay. Players can choose from a variety of different legs, arms, eyes, mouths, and sensory organs. Then, they can add decorative elements and play around with different colors and patterns for the skin. Finally, the player can test the creature in a small, enclosed area before taking it onto the playing field.

Perhaps the best feature of Wright’s newest magnum opus is the game’s ability to leverage the creativity of its players to continually improve the gaming experience. As players create new elements such as creatures, vehicles, and buildings, those elements will be automatically uploaded to a central database and then redistributed to populate other player’s games. The resulting continuous loop of creative feedback should keep the game fresh and challenging for even it’s most avid players.

Unlike the crisp lines of the urban landscape in Will’s earlier games, Spore has a more “cartoony” appearance, making it stand-out in a time when graphic realism is the gold standard among high end game developers. Wright says he feels that the realism of some of the best games comes not from the graphics, but from the player’s imagination sparked by the power to create the characters. Wright draws an analogy to the evolution of art over the past two millennia. “Art went through a period where realism was the goal followed by post realistic impressionism and modernism”. Wright says video games are also evolving to the point where graphic realism isn’t as important as giving the player a tool for artistic expression. By keeping the graphics simple, Wright believes Spore can unleash more of the user’s creativity. “I don’t want to make players feel like Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins”, Wright says. “I wanted them to be like George Lucas or J.R.R. Tolkien”.

Tapping into Consumer Creativity

Will’s game design philosophy leverages the creativity of game players to deliver a better product and a more meaningful experience. Today’s marketers are also beginning to embrace the idea of consumer co-creation to add value and relevance to their brands. After all, it was the consumer that discovered that Arm and Hammer baking soda helps reduce odors in the fridge and that Avon’s Skin So Soft makes an excellent bug repellant. Increasingly, consumers are interacting with brands and the companies behind them to help design new product features and craft brand characteristics. Some consumers are even lending their own voices to ad campaigns.

Jones Soda Co. looks to their loyal customers for everything from the label designs to the quirky quotes found underneath the bottle caps to the flavors of sodas they offer (which over the years have included Chocolate Fudge, Blue Bubble Gum, MF Grape, and their version of an energy drink called ‘Whoopass’). Customers are invited to submit photos of themselves, their kids, or their pets, for use in Jones marketing. Visitors to the Jones Soda Co. website can vote on their favorite photos and the company chooses the highest ranking photos to feature on the labels of their soft drink bottles. Consumers love the Jones brand, and it shows. In a flat soda market, Jones Soda Co. has successfully leveraged the creativity of their core customers to grow into a company with thirty million dollars in annual revenue.

With more and more companies embracing the consumer as co-creator, many helpful tools have been introduced to facilitate marketer-consumer collaboration. Dassault Systemes, a French software company, has a new tool called 3DSWYM (which stands for 3-D See What You Mean). It enables consumers to go online and play around with a 3-D image of a particular product design. They can spin the product around, modify it, and even see how it would look in different contexts such as a sitting on a grocery store shelf or in a kitchen cabinet. If consumers don’t like what the company has designed, they can change it as many times as they like. The company receives all the consumer feedback and can then use it to improve the designs.

Sportswear giant Nike created a web site called NikeiD that enables customers to design their own shoes online. Visitors to the site can customize the colorways of different shoes to create thousands of possible combinations. In just five minutes, a user can design a shoe with the colors of his or her alma mater and even personalize it with a name or monogram. At the Lego Factory website, visitors can use Lego’s software to design a custom Lego model, upload the model to the factory, and order it online.

Of course, some consumers don’t need special tools (or even an invitation) to experiment with their favorite products. The Mentos in Diet Coke craze began when two consumers, Fritz Grobe and Stephen Volz of Portland, Oregon, created a short video of the explosive chemical reaction that results from combining the two ingredients. In the video, Grobe and Volz, dressed in white lab coats, create a mini version of the Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas by dropping Mentos into 101 bottles of Diet Coke. A day after the video was posted to the internet, 14,000 people had viewed it. To date, it’s estimated that between 10 and 20 million viewers have watched the video online. In 2006, sales of Mentos jumped by nearly 20 percent, their largest increase ever. Pete Healy, the company’s vice president for marketing, credits the whole craze for a big part of the increase. A search of ‘Mentos’ on You Tube returns over 11,000 search results. Most are videos of people making their own soda geyser. Mentos has embraced the consumer adaptation of their product and has supported the movement with a special section on their website called the “Mentos Experiment”. Mentos’ advertising budget is usually around $20 million per year, and company officials estimate they’ve received at least $10 million in free name recognition from the buzz created by the video.

Co-Creation Starter Kit

Marketers ready to embrace the co-creation model should consider these key points:

First, the format for consumer interaction must mesh well with the brand’s DNA and the target customer’s lifestyle. While the web is a great medium for co-creation for most brands, there are some cases where a different environment would result in better collaboration.

Second, the co-creation relationship must be sincere. Consumers can sense which companies truly want their feedback and which companies are just giving lip service. Companies that seem like they’re trying too hard to cash in on the engagement model may suffer a backlash.

Finally, consumer input and consumer-generated content needs to be properly vetted before it’s unleashed on the world. No doubt you’ve read recent accounts of unfiltered consumer generated viral video content that went awry.