Presenting 11 things from Thought Den, on 11th November 2011! These dates don’t come around very often, and while we’re all wearing poppies in remembrance of the real significance of this day, we also quite like maths and numbers. And you don’t see that many 1s in a row very often. So apart from the obvious (we’re number one!) here are 11 things from Thought Den

1. We are moving office on the 1st of December! It’s bigger and better and nicer and has a swanky new meeting room. It’s still in Stokes Croft
2. Before leaving, we have managed to change the layout of the office about 3 times in a week (in binary that is eleven) !
3. Dan likes the 11 times table because it’s so easy to remember. He is actually pretty good at coding things.
4. Dan is also an experienced “piper” having Grade 6 flute and Grade 5 saxophone (which equals, uhm, 11)
5. Antoine can do 11 pullups on the office RSJ, which is impressive because it DESTROYS your fingers. No-one else has come close.
6. Dan likes binary. Today’s date is 1023! (1+2+4+8+16+32+64+128+256+512) -> 11/11/11 11:11:11
7. Current studio intern Peter Simon likes sandwiches and liquorice. But presumably not liquorice sandwiches.
8. Ben Templeton and Ben Webb are currently redesigning the Thought Den website. Turn it up to 11!
9. George Rowe is skiving today. Apparently he is having his legs waxed at the Clifton Lido. Or something.
10. Our bike suspension system currently holds up 2 bikes (next to each other, like 11) but when we move it’ll be expanded for all the office. No more director’s privilege.
11. oops

Before the clocks went back (and with thanks to our friend @LouiseDowne, previously of Tate) I attended a conference in London called Games For Brands; I won a free hour for effort! All in all, an interesting event if you’re interested in games. And pigeons.

The event was attended by the great and good in playful production (Preloaded, Mother, Hide & Seek, 4T2 and AKQA to name a few) and some incredibly experienced commissioners from the BBC, Channel 4, Tate, Wellcome Trust, Stardoll and EMI.

More interestingly, though, were the representatives from all kinds of brands, institutions and enterprises looking to level up and get their game on. Was it surprising BAE Systems were along for the ride? Or a chap from HSBC? Don’t McLaren Automotive have their hands full making cars go fast round corners? And what does gaming have to do with selling seats on Virgin Atlantic? A surprising amount, as it turns out, because like it or not, we’re entering the era of gamification (surely there is a prettier, less cynical word?)

Gamifi-what?

LinkedIn introduced a feature a few years back that had a profound effect on site engagement. Did anyone else feel press-ganged into completing their LinkedIn profile because of that bastard progress bar? Or even worse : “The fastest person to register today did it in 14 seconds. Can you beat it?” I’ll beat it alright!! **smashes keyboard into monitor**

Nicholas Lovell from Gamesbrief remarked that any parent is painfully familiar with gamification techniques – How quickly can you get into your pyjamas? If you eat one mouthful of broccoli you can watch Nickelodeon for four and a half hours. Etc. Play is an obvious motivator and brands are seriously looking at ways of harnessing this. Product placement in consoles for example. Or custom-built viral games like Fire Kills and Swamp Drifter from the Den. But it’s much more than that…

A fine example

The finest example I took from the event was Star Player, by AKQA for Heineken. For those who have not yet had the pleasure of using their Champions League “watch with mother” app, the top level aim was to capture the tension, immediacy and community-spirit of watching live at the stands and put this in the hands of the casual home-viewer. And boy did they nail it. Andy Hood’s illuminative breakdown made it look easy.
His top tips: Understand your subject and your audience down the most granular level, build core functionality, then iterate. Obvious really…
Favourite feature : hit the ‘Goal Now’ button and if a team scores within 30 seconds you get a squillion points.
Interesting point : the system is 100% manual, requiring a team of expert football and gaming fans to mange match events as they unfold, thus creating live gamable data for home-viewers.

A final rundown

Brief round up of other awesome stuff from the event :
Ville Heijari from Rovio (Angry Birds) said it all started with the characters – initial game mechanics were far too complex. So rather than get people addicted, they wanted players to love their characters and rewarded them with a rich, distinctive look and feel.
Jo Twist from Channel 4 Education hasn’t yet worked out what to call immersive content environments that aren’t games. Playful systems of content is pretty catchy, right? Plus she was ‘gamed’ into replying to people on OKCupid after realising she had the ‘Badge of Death’ for never replying…
Robin from PLAStudios recognised that games can’t be ripped like music can and they offer a connection with the artist that fans are looking for.The new LP sleeve for today’s gamers? Play his great annoyingly addictive game for Blink 182 here get182.com
Tom Chatfield was full of insights and it’s worth following his twitterings. He talked about the challenge of hard play (the mastery needed to complete Portal 2) and the delight of easy play (chucking a shiny bird at evil pigs)
Good and bad of gamification : Giff Gaff incentivised their customers with cash-money to provide support to other customers! Klout is rubbish, and easy to cheat, and has loads of annoying alerts and badge-awards you can’t skip.

Conference summary as a poster!

Beautifully designed by our pigeon-loving intern Abi and curated by other folks at Thought Den from the #games4brands Twitter feed, it features the top 10 tweets of the day laid out for your inspiration – download it here

It was great to see the Tate team and hear more about the game they’re launching with Preloaded, all about neuroscience and Alice in Wonderland…read more on that over at Preloaded’s house. Download our lovely poster!

Back in the good ol days (2009) our mates and collaborators down at Mobile Pie decided to rate the usual spots they hit for lunch, and compiled them into a lovely graph. In 2010, they did it again. So enamoured were we with their Lunchometer that we bought them the web address as a present…

They didn’t want it! Well, they did, but they didn’t do anything with it for ages, so we stole it back (AHAA). Based on their original idea, we have now created…www.lunchometer.co.uk

Let me tell you a little bit about it…

Everybody likes lunch, but it’s a minefield out there. What’s needed is an easy method, preferably built in flash and colourised in earthy tones, for rating and sharing your favourite lunch spots. Lo and behold, from the fingers of tech emeritus flash wizard Adam Vernon flew graphs of spellbinding beauty…

It’s just a bit of fun, but we think it’s a nice way to do a little bit of office bonding, maybe give the new kid/senior C# developer advice on where to eat, and embed a little something cool on your blog without even breaking a sweat.

All you need to do is go to the Lunchometer creation-o-matic, specify a name and your area and start entering in your haunts! If you like, you can then copy the embed code and paste it anywhere you enjoy pasting HTML.

Here is the Thought Den Creative Director/senior hairstyle guru Ben Templeton’s one about lovely Stokes Croft:

As you can see, Biblos came out on top, mainly due to their bad boy portions, extreme tastiness and proximity to the office, with the French Patisserie coming in a close second.

A few of our good friends have had a pop as well:

Scott at Play Nicely clearly loving the work of slightly-out-the-way, Edward Lear themed Runcible Spoon.

Dave Tidman over at Kerve in Bath, collaborators on projects for JD and Soutern Comfort, obviously feeling the Nando’s portion love!

Whereas Hannah Flynn from Tate, for whom we made this lovely game, gives you a little rundown of what you can get around their neck of Millbank, LDN.

You may have also noticed the little ‘settings’ fork and spanner in the top right. Click on it. Go on! You can use these functions to discount certain ratings categories (if you don’t care about proximity, for example) and see how this effects the rankings. You can also change the graph to a more horizontal alignment, turn off the auto sorting or even make that Lunchometer full screen! MADNESS. Feeling hungry? Create your own Lunchometer right here!

Hello, I’m Abi.

I’ve just finished my degree in Illustration at the University of Gloucestershire and am lucky enough to have an internship at Thought Den for a couple of weeks. I have been living in Bristol for about a year working under the name of Pigeon; doing exhibitions, entering competitions, meeting with local art groups, doing commissions for children’s books and local bands and anything else I can find to do with art and illustration.

I am currently working on a series of Christmas cards and other products to take to a gift fair in December and preparing work for upcoming exhibitions. I like to draw animals, especially birds because they can be easily adapted to do lots of things, so my character for Thought Den is a bird  playing a game on an iPhone because they love their games and apps.

Things you need to know about me if we are going to be friends:

• I love good coffee, freshly ground, yum
• I have a really sweet tooth and love sweets, cake and chocolate of any kind
• I like little dogs with funny faces
• When I was little I wanted to be a bus driver, an opera singer and a zoo-keeper
• I do not like seafood or fish of ANY form

Hi, it’s me, Dan Course, Co-founder and Technical Director here at Thought Den. That’s me on left. Hi! This week I’ve been lucky enough to begin mentoring a group of four College lads from St Brendens in Brislington as a part of the Bristol Young Talent Awards.

Our team’s project is to promote Bristol’s BloodHound Project with an app created with the AppFurnace platform (another Bristol thorough bred).

In making the promotional app, the students will receive training in Project Management from Everything Everywhere (T-mobile & Orange), Presentation skills from BBC and Work Attire from Cribbs Causeway.

The awards seem to have hit a national and local nerve. Businesses have offered cash prizes, coverage and one company have put forward a fully paid apprenticeship for one lucky student. I’ll be keeping you updated with how our group’s going over the next 6 months.