The KTUH Pledge-a-Thon®

The developers at KTUH FM Honolulu are dreaming up new games that we hope will revolutionize the station—and community radio as we know it.

The KTUH Pledge-a-Thon® is a serious game that builds the individual capacities of KTUH's army of volunteers as it advances KTUH's mission: to serve the students at UH and the broader community. Through learning the radio trade, encouraging communication, and participating in projects, the game provides the players with a meaningful experience, gives them autonomy, and presents opportunities to master new roles in the station. By involving listeners in the game, the Pledge-a-Thon can be used to raise funds for the station, too.

Not only is the game really fun: it fosters the community of our DJs and beloved listeners. To explain, we break the game cycle into three stages.


Phase 1: Onboarding

Before even signing up: the first minute needs to be fun and offer value. We begin with an immersive audio-visual environment—Virtual KTUH. There's no chance to fail; we build winners, starting in the virtual air room, and a quick sequence of reward. We use the sequence suggested in Gamification by Design:

1. Action: Play a song from KTUH's archive server. 
2. Reward: Points awarded, music begins to play. 
3. Action: Announce the song over the air. 
4. Action: Add the song to the playlist. 
5. Reward: Well done! 
6. Join (register). We ask for:

• DJ name and email
• Profile picture 
• Social media links 

Upon registration, the game welcomes the player to the station as a new volunteer DJ. We could have non-player characters act as guides. A selection of of mini-games is available, but to prevent feelings of information overload, the games open one at a time, after walkthroughs of each, guided by text or the NPC. In either case, the walkthrough is a no-fail familiarization with the gameplay, features and rules.

Incrementally, the system opens up to the player, preventing feelings of information overload. By the time the player is familiar with these games, we are firmly in "the grind," where habits of play form and where the action is. A description of the game dynamics follows in the next section. 


Phase 2: Capacity Building, Challenges and Competition

Our prototype plan is to implement:

• Introduction
• User accounts 
• Points & Badges
• Quests
• Project creation
• Search & post projects
• Project gets goal
• Users can join
• Forum
• Project has thread
• Help! forum

Not listed are the various affordances of the Makahiki gaming framework, conveniently developed for us by the Collaborative Software Development Laboratory. We plan to use its Quest Engine much like the Kukui Cup does, where predicates determine when number of points, number of completed tasks in a category or of a given type, when to award a badge, who wrote a post on their "floor wall," (KC teams are grouped by floors of dorm buildings), or who added a picture to their profile. In In KTUH's own Smart Grid Game, unlocking boxes on the grid opens new mini-games, study packs, and ways to hang out with the other gamers.

Each challenge and quest is designed to feed into engagement loops, rewards and incentivizes the players to keep everyone excited and engaged. Players can earn two types of points. Game points are rewarded for completing game actions—learning new skills, finishing projects, and completing quests. Peer points are awarded by fellow gamers for making helpful comments, answering questions, or producing tweets that get upvoted and posted to KTUH's official Twitter account.

One of the apps we propose is "Projects," which allows players to submit project ideas that benefit the station or the community. If a project sets an achievable, measurable goal and makes sense for the station, the game administrators can approve it. All gamers can give their support through comments and upvotes. The Project's database model will allow admins to specify things like the number of team members to join, a budget (behind the scenes if necessary), and statements of the goals and deadlines. On completion of the goals and the project, points can be given variously—the admins decide—to reward the effort. Project reports should also be rewarded, because having a written record allows others to learn about the station, which is part of our capacity building goal. We believe that making public posts and updates possible is necessary to promote the development and execution of projects for KTUH, and this is accomplished with our system.

To encourage communication, we will open a forum with categories for questions, help and projects. Participation in the forums will yield points with a reputation system similar to Stack Exchange. We have yet to explore the feasibility of building such a system into our game with their co-founder's new forum software, Discourse, but it is open, free, supports REST, and "has an excellent API."
We know that project management isn't much of a "game," but we know that we can be successful in making a game of it because others have already done so. DiDa Delivered is educational software developed for both education and project management. It includes 4,000 learning objects and 300 mini-games, which make it learner-centric, highly individualized, and geared toward a large body of content. Anne Derryberry calls it a great success in her white paper "Games for Online Learning." Diane Nolan, DaDa Delivered's product manager, says it "gives teachers a new tool and the means to customize it for their own needs." What we seek to do is much the same, but on a smaller scale, as our "student body"—the volunteers at KTUH—numbers under a hundred people.

While not in our prototype plan, we do have more fun games in mind. One is TweetMoar, another is That's My DJ!, and a third is a spaced repetition system similar to Anki. As for the latter, basic training is covered by our program already, which makes it a low priority for us now. While training is among our program's basic goals, we expect it will come through the capacity-building processes, which necessitates peer learning and group-directed project building. The peers at KTUH have much to teach each other, and we hope to catalyze that through our games.

The first challenges and quests:

1. Post on the "floor wall"
2. Post a tweet
3. Upvote a tweet
4. Join a project
5. Log first hour of volunteer time
6. Attend an IRL meet-up, workshop or talk
7. Study a deck 

Phase 3: Mastering the System

Still more quests (among many more possible beyond these):

• First project organized 
• Project role quest 
• Pass a certification 
• Answer a Help! question
• Advertise for someone else 
• Lead an IRL meet-up, workshop or talk

Prize categories at the game's end could include:

• Most Hours Pledged
• Most Funds Raised
• Most Sponsorships
• Most Badges Won
• Ms. Popular
• Mr. Popular

Points awarded for:

• Challenges and quests completed 
• Posts and comments upvoted 
• Project-related actions 
• Addditional hours, posts, workshops, tweets 
• Continued study

Badges awarded for:

• First sponsorship gained
• All study packs studied
• All certifications passed
• Numbers of hours served: 10, 25, 50, 100
• Singing a request on air
• Funds raised: 25, 50, 100, 250
• Choremaster
• Tweetmaster
• All badges completed 
• Superconnected (on social media)
• Supervolunteer

Decks (for study):

• KTUH Policy & Procedures 
• FCC & Media Regulations 
• Technical Skills 
• On-air Best Practices

Serious game design is a nuanced, time-consuming process. We look forward to refining and iterating the game plan as we dig in to development. This paper represents a much of the research done on this game's design, but still raises much for discussion, and perhaps much to be refined or reconsidered in some cases. Finally, we would be remiss not to mention that we owe a debt of gratitude to WFMU for inspiring the name of the game.