Making it easy to engage on social or other media is often appealing. Make it simple to retweet or to Like, and the engagement metrics will pile up. But what about making engagement harder – so that it requires thought, requires solving a puzzle or a riddle? Could difficult forms of engagement like puzzles be a better creator of truly memorable brand moments?
Puzzles require investment from fans– but they are much more memorable and rewarding in turn. They call on fans as people who want to understand, who want to be challenged and surprised, rather than as passive consumers of prepared content. And they are natural tools for storytelling, where a problem is initially faced with frustration and dead-end attempts, but through community problem-solving and creativity, fans can succeed and receive a reward for their skills.
Two great recent examples include:
Online Puzzles
The Sentinels of the Multiverse superhero card game recently promoted a new expansion with an elaborate series of interlocking online puzzles.
The game designers hid clues in the game’s existing cards, in their rulebooks, and in an accompanying video game. Since the clues required attention to detail to notice, logical deduction skills to interpret, and often many false starts to solve, the game’s community needed to work closely together to uncover the mystery. As one clue led to the next, the game designers rewarded them with small previews – little glimpses of what was to come – that kept the community solving puzzles until they had uncovered the full mystery
Puzzle Rooms
The most recent release of Magic: the Gathering was themed after mystery and madness. To build excitement about the release, players at one of three major Magic events had the opportunity to enter escape rooms – rooms where you are locked in with a group and given a limited period of time to solve enough puzzles to escape.
Each room was set in the expansion’s world, one rich with the tropes of fantasy horror, such as experiments gone wrong, powers beyond space and time meddled with, and the good turned to evil ways. As people passed through the rooms and solved the puzzles, they got to glimpse a few new cards as they were released. Check out a few examples from:
Melbourne
Bologna
Detroit
These puzzles passed all the tests for engaging content – getting fans involved and making them excited to tell their friends about their experiences. They were:
- Aligned with their audiences. The game’ audiences are passionate and tend to pride themselves on their problem-solving skills, so problems and puzzles were on brand and on message.
- Richly interactive. They sparked their own reward through being the first to solve a difficult challenge.
- Visual and shareable. For example, an escape rooms with props is wonderfully atmospheric and gets fans engaged and excited to talk about their experiences to all those other fans who couldn’t make it there.
- Community-building. Working online to puzzle out a new cipher quickly brings people together in a real community – as actively engaged people, not just as consumers.
Image by Olga Berrios, from https://www.flickr.com/photos/ofernandezberrios/2719757761/ under a CC-BY-2.0 license.