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Children’s picture book author, Tonia Allen Gould, wants to crowd-fund an island to bring awareness to the children of Nicaragua who drop out of school, on average, by the sixth grade.

The Finding Corte Magore Project works virtually to connect a global community of students and crowd funders in real time with the plight of educationally and economically repressed Nicaragua. The project incorporates social entrepreneurialism, gamification, and augmented reality and involves showcasing, purchasing and managing, through collective voting processes, one of the country’s own small, yet beautiful islands to create awareness, coupled with sustainable, positive and long-term impact on the country’s people.

Samuel T. Moore of Corte Magore Original Musical Score by Robby Armstrong, Copyright (C) Tonia Allen Gould, All Rights Reserved.

As part of my volunteering activities to serve the community, I teach public speaking to 14 year old school children at a local school on Saturday mornings. Sometime ago, one of the challenges I noticed was that students would not applaud and cheer when one of their peers completed a speech on stage. Worse, many of them would speak to each other and be distracted while one of their classmates was speaking. As you can imagine, this was demotivating for the young speakers, many of whom were giving a speech for the first time in their lives.

Then, I introduced a simple idea which has changed the atmosphere of these sessions considerably. With the help of a few “student officers”, we divided the class into four “houses” (groups) that competed against each other in a friendly manner. Next, we started giving points to the group that was the most enthusiastic audience. Overnight, we had a class full of hyper-interested students that were willing to listen carefully to their classmates’ speeches and cheer their progress.

The human brain is wired to play games. Competition, evaluating and managing risks, teamwork, chasing goals while overcoming obstacles and staying within boundaries (rules) and keeping score are part of what make us human.

What is a Game?
Jesse Schell, author of the excellent book – ‘The Art of Game Design’ offers this definition for a game:
“A game is a problem-solving activity, approached with a playful attitude.”

Now, what if we phrased the problem of marketing and promoting books using the “lens” of games? Then the game can be defined for readers in the broadest possible manner as:
“A game where you solve the problem of discovering new books and evangelizing them while having fun”

Now, maybe you’re thinking that this will never work. People are busy. They are serious. They don’t have time to play games. If this is your thought, then I ask you to reconsider … after thinking about the following examples:

1. The stock market – The stock market is a game. There are rules. There are goals (make as much money as possible while managing your risks.) And it can often be fun (especially if you make money!)

2. Discount sales – Have you ever been to a Labor Day sale at your local fashion store? Have you felt the rush of excitement as you get your hands on your favourite brand at 50% off? Here again, there is a problem (get a good product at a lower than normal price), there is competition and it is mostly fun.

3. The Wii

It’s still way too early to decide the winner in the social network race (but it appears Google+ might be lagging as it’s already losing visitors. In our opinion, the network still has yet to show how it’s better than Facebook)... Read the rest of this post