The Game Layer
Thursday, September 30th, 2010The serial entrepreneur is a special breed of a special breed. Take Zalman Silber, for a case in point. Already a President’s Club member at famed New York Life Insurance Company, he hit upon the idea of a “ride” located at the Empire State Building. After all, what do tourists pay for if not to get a bird’s-eye view of the city from there? So why not provide them the Skyride, an attraction that is as enticingly named as it is misleadingly so, a tourist trap of an attraction as any to be found in the backwoods of a small hick town, only it’s right there in the Big Apple itself! And it’s nothing more than a half-hour movie, some of which is made up of helicopter flybys over city landmarks. Whoopee.
But it’s wildly successful, and from such success he has founded other successes. And that is what a serial entrepreneur is. But a new breed of serial entrepreneur has come on the scene. No Zalman Silber peddler of old-economy businesses, these young men and women are as much technicians as they are visionaries. That is to say, they harken back the age of a Thomas Edison, when businessmen actually built the things they sold. And one of the most outrageously incredible startups has been one from serial techpreneur Seth Priebatsch (who founded his first company at age nine and has pocketed enough from other ventures to get this latest off and running), based on his idea of “the game layer.” This is…well, it’s hard to explain. Best get a cup of tea brewing.
Like most of this generation, Priebatsch really likes to play videogames. It is almost certain he has tried his hand at creating some of his own, given that he also appears to have a certain amount of programming skill. But no videogame can possibly compete with the thrill of creating a business - one that is successful. And that is what drives the serial entrepreneur. The thrill of the chase.
And here’s where it all ties in to Priebatsch’s Big Idea: the game layer. It’s a kind of platform whereby just about any task can be turned into a game - and with very tangible rewards. In programming terms, it would be a little like an API, or Application Programming Interface, a set of pre-made ready-to-serve software that makes programming that much easier. A bit like a template, as it were, though vastly more open-ended and customizable.
Well, Priebatsch’s game layer is a platform upon which a business, say the local bakery, can reward you for achieving certain goals in a game. Yeah, really! The game allows players to compete for rewards at stores, gyms, museums, and so forth.
Nice idea - except that “game” doesn’t necessarily mean “videogame.” A game could be anything. Frequent flier mileage is a kind of game, according to Priebatsch’s take on things. It’s just not particularly fun.
He aims to change all that, in the process introducing a “game layer” to the world.
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