Bunchball Makes Everything a Game

Forget what mom told you about never playing with your food. If there's a will to play a game around an activity, Bunchball will find a way to build it and help you and your business utilize the power of gaming. "Game designers have known for years how to invent and motivate player behavior, and they do it by using things like points, levels, badges, high score tables, virtual goods, et cetera," said Rajat Paharia, co-Founder and CPO of Bunchball. "We've taken all that and provided it as a web service that any site owner can take and integrate into their content, their community, and their commerce, in order to drive any kind of behavior online. For example, increasing consumer engagement, participation, and loyalty," Paharia said. How Bunchball started and grew is a story familiar to startups and small businesses across the world. "In 2005, I discovered this opportunity: that it was easy to play games online with random strangers, or by yourself, but playing with your friends and family was hard, which was weird, because that's how we play games in the real world. And so there was a huge opportunity to build a gaming platform that enabled people to do that," Paharia said. The niche that Bunchball filled came from their realization that the games that drew, and more importantly kept, the most users were the games that were the ones that "wrapped their games in a layer of game mechanics, persistent elements that crossed games, a fabric that tied all those games together, like points and avatars," said Paharia. The key was realizing that they could integrate that gaming experience into any experience, and not just gaming. "Those mechanics are based on satisfying our fundamental human needs and desires, for rewards, status, achievement, competition, self expression altruism, that they work on any client or context," Paharia said. The reality is that consumers are no longer passive, soaking up whatever television throws at them between handfuls of potato chips. People expect entertainment to be engaging, a two-way street, and something they can interact with and be involved in. If you watch, say, USA Network, you'll see that

they run has its own website, its own competitions, its own games, its own tie-ins to other media beyond television. Other than television programs, which are a natural tie-in for gamification, there are other avenues that Bunchball is pursuing. For example, they are looking to expand into employee relations and motivation within corporate America. "Employee motivation, sales incentive, knowledge sharing, to make employees, who are the number one cost center in any company, more valuable to the company and more productive. And, at the same time making them more engaged and interested in what they're doing. I think there is a huge opportunity there and we're working hard to open up that opportunity."