Retention has always been a challenge for both voice applications and chatbots: without dedicated space on a home screen or in an app drawer, it can be tough for users to serendipitously open a voice action (or recall that it even exists) unless they’ve formed a habit of using it.

In developing our first game with Google for the Google Nest Hub, Cookie Detective, the MediaMonks Labs team drew on its past experience of building games and in developing Google Assistant actions. The resulting game offers a nice benchmark for brands on how design elements and gamified features can come together and entice users to continue engaging with voice well into the long-term.

Long-Term Play Requires a Commitment to Long-Term Development

To be successful in voice, brands must understand that voice applications (and by extension, chatbots) aren’t a “set and forget” touchpoint. Just like with any interactive platform, you must commit to supporting a voice action into the long term, revising responses and the flow of conversation based on usage—for example, identifying which steps in the conversation users are likely to drop off and not come back.

“Your initial intuition during the creative process isn’t always right,” says Geert Eichhorn, Innovation Director at MediaMonks. “You must be willing to look at the data and see how people are using the voice action, or how they want to use it, and provide that for them. In the end, this leads to a better app and happier users.”

Realizing this, the mobile “games as a service” model—which has essentially boiled down FOMO into an art form—serves as a useful blueprint for how brands can achieve similar success in building loyalty through incremental updates. These games use a variety of fresh content, limited-time events, competitions and more to extend the shelf life of a game and keep players entertained over time. And with increased popularity of voice-enabled devices with screens like the Google Nest Hub or Amazon’s Echo Show, new possibilities will open up for brands to create more engaging and playful voice experiences.

Building a Compelling Voice Experience

Cookie Detective is focused on providing fun for young players, offering an appetizing, voice-based take on hide-and-seek, 20 Questions and Guess Who. It invites kids to ask ten questions to locate a hidden cookie within three virtual kitchens at varying difficulty.  The Labs team approached this project by combining its experience as voice developers with its wealth of knowledge in gaming accumulated over the years—especially in mobile and web game development, which both share similarities with the Google Assistant platform.

The premise of searching for cookies in the kitchen is based on the fact that voice devices are often placed in common areas where families gather. We focused on one of the most-trafficked places in the home (the kitchen) to ensure the experience fits the overall context of when and where players will engage with the game—perhaps when they’re on the hunt for a sweet treat IRL.

“We wanted this game to be something a kid could do while mum is cooking—no supervision needed, but with them together in the room,” says Eichhorn. “A cool addition to the game is the option for the parent to hide the cookie in the virtual kitchen using the touch screen (so the child wouldn’t hear the hiding spot–this is the only touch-only feature in the game).”

Fitting your voice action within a daily ritual like this can make it more habit-forming for the user. “This brings a really nice parent-child dynamic into the kitchen during an everyday activity like cooking and allows a potential reward to be earned for the kid as well,” says Eichhorn.

It’s also worth noting that the voice medium is unique for mimicking conversation on a human level. Therefore, the team found it was important to center the game’s narrative and gameplay prompts on its characters, whose lively voices reveal their personalities and bring their stories to life. In this way, dialogue (and its delivery) is not only fun and memorable, but functional.

And that tip doesn’t just apply to sound; if your game is played on a device with a screen, art direction and fluid animation also add a lot to the experience. If your brand has an especially strong mascot or IP that it can leverage through these elements, it’s easy to see how a brand can use voice to forge a strong relationship with players as they engage over time.

Enhance Loyalty Through Gameplay

In addition to some of the narrative and conceptual tips above about how a voice game can uniquely activate loyalty and retention, the team recommends that developers shift the approach from a one-off experience to an everlasting one where players can establish stronger connections with the game through added gamified elements.

One way to do this is to build a true sense of progression through unlocking items and rewards based on in-game performance or achieving milestones. This gives players a goal to aspire to and work toward. As they achieve new milestones, consider expanding the universe and story of the game to keep users interested or establish new habits.

This could be especially useful for brands related to health: imagine an assistant action that encourages children to brush their teeth twice a day without missing a day, perhaps using music and animations to ensure they brush for the correct amount of time. Likewise, a food brand might challenge members of the household to consume a well-rounded diet throughout the day.

Competition is another powerful motivator for encouraging replay value and loyalty. A leaderboard that refreshes on a timely basis (weekly or monthly, for example) is a simple way to achieve this. Notifications that players have just lost their leaderboard position can also get users back into the game. If your game is family-oriented, look for opportunities to pit family members against one another for some friendly competition!

Whether through lively characterization and narratives, brands can enable a closer relationship with consumers through voice—one strong enough to continue engaging over time. The competitive element that is unique to gaming, as well as frequent content updates that have worked so well for the mobile industry, can further encourage users to regularly check in and avoid churn. By combining these strategies together, voice becomes an effective channel for brands to build long-term relationships with consumers and fans.

See what else Labs has been up to.

For years, we at MediaMonks have racked up high scores in developing games with our clients, dating  back to the days of Flash. Today, we work across a breadth of platforms to create compelling  games that push the limits of technology—and most recently, we’ve worked with Google to take voice gaming to the next level with two new games for smart displays. 

Cookie Detective is an appetizing, voice-based take on hide-and-seek. It invites kids to ask ten questions to locate a hidden cookie within three virtual kitchens at varying difficulty. An upcoming game we’re working on is Junior Chef, which continues the culinary fun by challenging kids to instruct a team of chefs in their own  restaurants.

Both games aim to encourage play-based learning (children learn about international ingredients in Junior Chef, for example). As an Easter egg, the game also welcome positive behaviors, such as speaking politely to the chefs.

As the games were developed for the Google Nest Hub and Hub Max, we aimed to bring together the best of screen and voice-based interactivity. We relied on the Interactive Canvas framework to power-up even more possibilities for voice technology and the role it plays in the home.

What We’ve Learned 

Look Ma, No Hands! 

Historically, players have interacted with games using keyboards, mice, controllers and on screen buttons. While traditional controls are ingrained in the medium, voice offers a couple of new challenges: developers must account for a variety of variables like accents, context, subjects, phrasing and more. These interactions must be as accessible and intuitive as talking to another person. 

Context is Crucial 

Voice devices are often placed where the family gets together. We kept this in mind when developing our games, focusing on one of the most-trafficked places in the home: the kitchen. We  chose activities natural to the kitchen (like cooking, learning recipes and looking for cookies) for the core ingredients of our two games. 

Build on Previous Experience 

Google offers several tools for building Actions, most notably Actions Builder, which lowers the barrier of entry by eliminating the need for technical development  to create simple Actions. For our games, we combined the Actions SDK, the Actions on Google client library, the Interactive  Canvas library and our solid background of web development to build a cohesive framework and robust architecture for building voice-enabled games. 

We approached this project by combining our experience as voice developers with the wealth of knowledge in gaming that we’ve accumulated over the years—especially in mobile and web game development, which shares similarities with this platform. With Cookie Detective and Junior Chef, we aim to provide a benchmark for what’s possible, discover what works best, and learn how we can push boundaries even more in the future. 

Let Characters Drive Stories & Interaction 

Voice-based gaming offers an opportunity to deliver a rich story featuring characters with distinct personalities. While we made ample use of text and animations in our games, we relied on our characters’ voices to reveal their personalities and bring their stories to life. Expressions are not only fun, but functional: if a command isn’t clear in Cookie Detective, the cookie will respond based on the situation, for example the cookie could say, “I didn’t catch that, you can ask me something like, are you in the cookie jar?”  

These responses can help immerse players into the game, though we found that it’s important to balance dialogue that serves characters’ personalities with lines that support gameplay. Deliver something playful the first time a player makes a particular action, followed by something short and concise for recurring interactions. So, when our cookie friend once again can’t understand what a player has said, he will still give a response that fits the situation, for example: “You can ask me something like, is it green?” 

Keep it Fun – and Fluid 

Keep in mind that a game made for the family should be about having fun, even when you lose. If players end up making a less-than-stellar meal in Junior Chef, for example, they’ll still take delight in watching how their guests react with exaggerated, funny faces. Whether it’s someone’s first time playing the game or their first time using voice, this eases pressure felt by the player and encourages them to come back and try again. 

And when it comes to animation, we realize that smart displays aren’t trying to be in the same category as home gaming consoles. With performance and a casual audience in mind, stick to simple, colorful vector graphics and choose when to trigger animations wisely. We used Bodymovin for both games, which gave good results despite being a bit limiting. 

Design Responsibly 

When creating games for children, the potential for an emotional connection with the voice assistant is significant: studies have shown that interactions between kids and voice assistants reinforce patterns of behavior. We considered these responsibilities heavily, as well as others, including privacy and addictive screen habits, by designing each game to encourage polite offline social interactions.

Taking Voice to the Next Level 

In addition to the learnings above that we’ve incorporated into the development of Cookie Detective and Junior Chef, we realize there are more opportunities to take voice-based gaming to the next level and increase user retention.

Game developers can keep users coming back by offering: 

1. Unlockable items that enhance gameplay and reward player progress
2. Long-term support that adds new levels or expands the story 
3. Competitive elements, like daily challenges and time-based leaderboards 
4. Notifications that alert users to new content or a lost position on the leaderboard
5. Improvements based on tracking user behavior 

We love how this experience allowed us to bring new elements to gaming and recontextualize the role they play in the home. We also realize that we’re in the early days for these kinds of gaming experiences, and look forward to future possibilities like support for endless voices, supporting real time audio effects or cadence, richer voice processing, and even stronger AI.  

One thing we’re sure about the state of voice gaming today is that the interaction between people and devices is more human than ever. Based on our experiments in building games  for the Google Nest Hub devices, we believe Google Assistant will undoubtedly play a key role in driving more human-centered interaction and fulfilling the never-ending need for play.

By now, we’re all well aware that games like Fortnite have become a dominant space for kids and young adults to connect and socialize. But you may not have noticed that parallel to the competitive game’s popularity, the rise of esports leagues have captivated the interest of gamers around the world: since 2012, the number of hours viewers have spent watching esports has grown at a rate of around 750 million hours each year, going from 1.3 billion in 2012 to 6.6 billion in 2019, a 508% growth. 

This article was originally published for print in Marketing Interactive.

A lucrative business (generating $1.1 billion USD worldwide in 2019 and expected to reach $1.8 billion by 2022), esports have been particularly popular in Asia Pacific. In fact, APAC accounts for 47% of that revenue, demonstrating just how passionate the region is for gaming content. New research from WARC shows that 400 million people in APAC watch esports online, and six of the 10 most popular mobile titles have established esports leagues. The rapid growth of gaming as both a space for spectatorship and social connection offer a unique opportunity for brands to reach a previously elusive demographic while also connecting with consumers in exciting, new ways.

Gaming Goes Mainstream

Esports aren’t nearly as niche as they once were; last year, luxury brand Louis Vuitton collaborated with popular esports title League of Legends to offer bespoke skins—essentially costumes worn by characters featured in the game—to players. The partnership shifted preconceived notions that brands may have about gamers as a subculture, much like how comic book franchises have gone mainstream. Similarly, Fortnite partnered with Marvel Studios for an Avengers crossover event celebrating the release of a new film, offering not only an exclusive skin but a new game mode as well.

In the rise in esports’ popularity, games have organized teams and leagues functioning much like traditional sports—even nabbing airtime at the 2022 Asian Games to be hosted in Hangzhou, China. Live-streamed on platforms such as Twitch, YouTube and Facebook Gaming, esports leagues have a unique opportunity to build interactivity and engagement into their broadcasts—something that’s missing from typical sports. MediaMonks’ Foam Zone activation for Old Spice, live-streamed over 12 hours, drew over 126 thousand interactions bolstered by 80 live polls, making it a top-performing livestream.

This opportunity for drawing together online audiences is critical, and hints at why gaming has become so popular for youths who flock to digital environments to hang out and connect. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a surprising number of leagues have cancelled or postponed their events—though some, like Blizzard’s Hearthstone Masters Tour, have become purely digital. At the same time, the cancellation of traditional sport seasons may also boost interest in esports as an alternative to spectators. While in-person esports competitions serve as critical touchpoints to connect with gaming audiences live and in-person, this moment—combined with ever-faster connection speeds—will prompt increasingly engaging and immersive experiences for spectators.

Rising Stars Offer New Opportunities to Tech-Forward Brands

With the growing popularity of esports comes a new class of influencers: the players themselves. Brands looking to engage authentically with a native digital audience like gamers will do well to lean on such influencer partnerships. In launching its series of Omen gaming PC’s, HP tapped into the talent of esports stars Astralis and Na’Vi to validate the precision and power of the product.

Tapping into the fandom of these communities also offers a way for brands to think more holistically about the role they play in users’ lives; engaging not just in esports games themselves, but also across social media, through AR/VR technology, experiential platforms and more, to reach a hyper-passionate and discerning audience at the cusp of digital experiences. The world of esports offers brands the opportunity to expand their marketing efforts through fresh and innovative content, providing engaging digital experiences through personalization and emerging tech that can attract new, and previously out of reach, audiences.

By bridging together players and spectators that are immersed in socializing and connecting digitally, esports offer an enticing opportunity for brands in APAC and around the world to forge stronger relationships with consumers–by experimenting with in-game activations, elevating the livestreaming experience or by simply taking inspiration from the ways that players and fans interact.