Posts Tagged ‘audience’
Improv and Gamification: Introduction
You can divide improvisation into two rough categories: short-form and long-form. Short-form improvisation consists of games (also called “scenes” or “forms”) that last about 3-8 minutes and, generally, have specific guidelines to which the players should adhere. Many organizations, including ComedySportz and Theatresports (from which ComedySportz was derived, with the permission of Keith Johnstone), use team-on-team competition to enhance the audience’s experience. Winning a round gets a team points, which are compared on a scoreboard, and provide a clear metric for the state of the show.
Gamification, the practice of applying game elements to business and social activities, has become increasingly popular. Kevin Werbach of Penn’s Wharton School and Dan Hunter of New York Law School (and adjunct faculty at Wharton), two leading gamification proponents, wrote For the Win, a book that’s available inexpensively on Amazon through Wharton Digital Press. In their book, they describe how companies have gamified internal processes and customer/product interactions to add fun to what might otherwise be boring situations. If you’ve ever become mayor of a business by checking in on FourSquare, you’ve been gamified.
Werbach and Hunter go into significant detail on how gamification works, but I’ll focus on four points (mentioned on p. 44 of the book) over the next few posts. They are:
- Motivation
- Meaningful choices
- Structure
- Potential conflicts
I’ll tackle each point from the perspective of an improviser who also spends time in the business world.
If you’d like to learn more about gamification, you can take Werbach’s Gamification course on Coursera.org. The next section of the course starts on April 1, 2013, but he offered it in the Fall of 2012 and, with luck, it will be available again for readers who learn about the course after the current session ends.
A Genius, in Retrospect
Mikhail Tal, the Latvian chess grandmaster and one-time World Champion, played a raging, attacking, seemingly bizarre brand of chess. His willingness to sacrifice his pieces for nebulous compensation led to some embarrassing losses but resulted in many fantastic wins when his opponents couldn’t, as Tal put it, see their way out of a forest where 2+2=5.
As an improviser, I admire his courage to randomize a position and put both him and his opponent on the spot. It’s easy to think of his creations as “just games”, but he was a professional player in what was then the Soviet Union. The tournaments to which he was invited and, more to the point, allowed to participate in depended on both his style of play and his results. Of course, it wasn’t until a game was over and the chess world had a chance to analyze his moves that the verdict for a particular sequence was known.
The same consideration is true for improvisers. We don’t know whether what we do is brilliant or not until a scene is over, but we have the luxury of working with a team to make all of our choices brilliant. And that’s why I have such respect for a competitor like Tal, who told this story (paraphrased):
I was in the middle of a tournament game when I began to wonder how one might rescue an elephant stuck in a swamp. Over the next 45 minutes, I imagined a series of pulleys and levers arranged in various configurations but came to no satisfactory conclusion. Then, seeing that I was running low on time, I looked at the board and played the first sacrifice I saw.
The journalist covering the game reported that, “After 45 minutes of thought, Tal unleashed a deep and powerful sacrifice that resulted in a won game.”
We can, and should, look at the mechanics of our work, but we must never dismiss what the audience takes away from a performance. The show exists in their memory as well as ours.
How to Apologize
It’s never easy to apologize, especially when you’ve angered the very people you count on for your livelihood. The National Hockey League, specifically its owners, potentially reversed seven years of increasing goodwill and fan excitement when it locked out its players in an attempt to force the players’ union to accept an odious Collective Bargaining Agreement.
The players (rightfully) dug in and, on January 12, the two sides ratified an agreement and 48-game schedule they could have reached months ago. So how do you make up for three months of no hockey and a loss of 34 games per team? One good place to start is by putting your money where your mouth is. The dispute was about money, so that’s the currency you use to apologize to your fans.
The social media team for the Calgary Flames, a team I’ve followed since I was an intern as the U.S. Consulate in Calgary during the summer of 1989 (the year the Flames won their only Stanley Cup), sent out these three tweets today:
For the first two home games this year, you can get a beer spilled on you at the Saddledome for half price, buy Flames gear for 50% off until the end of the first game, and have a guaranteed win of C$50,000 (with another C$50,000 going to charity) for the 50/50 drawings at the first two games. That’ll go a long way toward regaining their fans’ support.
Apology accepted, but this is the third time we’ve missed games during Gary Bettman’s tenure. Don’t let it happen again.
Memories Change Over Time
Memories of dramatic events seem to be burned into our minds. It seems easy to recall where we were when we learned JFK was assassinated (before my time), Ronald Reagan was shot (middle school gym at the end of the day), Elvis died (in a car near the top of Massanutten Mountain on our way to my grandparents’ place), or on September 11, 2001 (checking email after sleeping late).
It all seems so clear, but how reliable are our memories of the events and the circumstances surrounding them? Not very, especially as time passes and discussions of the events contain information not available at first. For example, a Smithsonian magazine article notes that Karim Nader, a neuroscientist, examined his own memories of September 11 and found he had made some mistakes.
Nader, now a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, says his memory of the World Trade Center attack has played a few tricks on him. He recalled seeing television footage on September 11 of the first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center. But he was surprised to learn that such footage aired for the first time the following day. Apparently he wasn’t alone: a 2003 study of 569 college students found that 73 percent shared this misperception.
These changes are normal and expected. You store long-term memories by associating new information with things you already know. As you continue to receive information about an event, it becomes difficult to distinguish what occurred when. That’s why legal experts view eyewitness testimony as unreliable – humans are fallible, our memories especially so.
When you’re an improviser, this fallibility works to your advantage. Long-form shows can run for 45 minutes or more and, given the huge number of choices performers make, inconsistencies crop up all the time. The good news is that your audience wants you to succeed and, unless the error is too big to ignore, they’re almost always willing to go along with the new reality. Not doing so would undermine their enjoyment of the show, so they have an incentive to play along.
This forgiving atmosphere isn’t present in politics and business, at least not for your competitors. They want you to fail and will bring up every instance of you ignoring or, in their opinion, attempting to mischaracterize the past. It doesn’t help when a campaign adviser admits that’s what you plan to do. As reported in a CNN.com article on March 21, 2012:
Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s senior campaign adviser, was asked in a CNN interview Wednesday morning whether the former Massachusetts governor had been forced to adopt conservative positions in the rugged race that could hurt his standing with moderates in November’s general election.
“I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes,” Fehrnstrom responded. “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again.”
Ouch. I anticipate the Etch A Sketch will be a theme in the 2014 and 2016 election cycle. Regardless, the lesson to draw from this incident is the same for both improv and business: Don’t abuse your audience’s goodwill.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/How-Our-Brains-Make-Memories.html#ixzz2BfHlkdVx
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/21/politics/campaign-wrap/index.html
Semantic Memory: It (Can Be) a Trap!
In my previous post, I talked about the difference between episodic memory and semantic memory. Episodic memory, as the name implies, refers to memories of episodes in your life. These memories don’t always come back quickly, or at all in some cases, and they can change over time. Semantic memory, by contrast, refers to items you can recall instantaneously. Knowledge of simple arithmetic is a terrific example what’s contained in your semantic memory.
Episodic memory provides a nearly endless source of inspiration for improvisers and business people alike. Not only can you drawn your personal experiences to create scenes are presentations, you can use your knowledge to understand another person’s point of view. And, of course, if you don’t share another individual’s experiences, you can use your interactions as a tremendous learning opportunity.
Semantic memory can be a bit of a trap in both improv and business. The things that you know and feel that become ingrained enough to become part of your semantic memory can trap you into always reacting the same way to a particular stimulus. For example, you might give a presentation to a prospective client in an industry you’re not familiar with. If they ask a question you’ve answered many times before, you might give an answer that’s appropriate to your previous clients but not to the new client’s circumstances.
In improv, relying on semantic memory results and repetitive scenes and quick burnout. Audiences can be creative, but many times you’ll find that they tend to give the same suggestions. You have to find new ways to ask for input to avoid that repetition or, alternatively, constantly find new ways to build scenes around the suggestions of monkey, banana, and Jell-O. You and your audiences will be happier if you do, especially if you tend to have a lot of repeat audience members.
Improspectives 
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