Globalspec game

Educational but still fun. It had to be engineering related, but not too over the top. They want to play a game at work, but have to justify that playing a game at work is useful. No engineering mistakes. Rule 5. Variable time to play. Since the team was hoping to get at-work plays thereby increasing the chance that their site would be used and remembered more consistently at-work , game play had to be contractible to just two minutes. On the other hand, for sincere fans, it could expand to fill hours.

Step 2. Creating the game The team selected game developers who also had engineering backgrounds to increase the chances of the game appealing to engineers.

A trebuchet is a medieval war weapon. See links below for more info. This time the team did ask engineers on staff at GlobalSpec to play iterations of the game to make sure the play was intuitive, fun and the engineering details were correct. At the same time the marketing department made sure the game contained enough branded elements including logos and related links to GlobalSpec site content.

Development time was a couple of months including extensive testing. Step 3. They tested two subject lines: a. Trebuchet: The Sport of Engineers b. Take the Treb Challenge They also tested two submit buttons in the email creative: a.

Play Now! Test Your Skills! Much of the new traffic is driven by the blogging community. However the biggest lesson was the value of sending a special game invite to new site registrants. At the time of the game launch, the big email invite to all registered users got a 8. However, emails to new registrants throughout the past year have averaged a So newbies are more likely to click and get re-involved in your site than past registrants.

Makes you wonder, what emailed invite could you automate to send to all your newest opt-ins from now on? Improve Your Marketing. Join our thousands of weekly case study readers.

Enter your email below to receive MarketingSherpa news, updates, and promotions: Note: Already a subscriber? Infographic: 21 Psychological Elements that Power Effective Web Design To build an effective page from scratch, you need to begin with the psychology of your customer. Newsletters Receive the latest case studies and data on email, lead gen, and social media along with MarketingSherpa updates and promotions. At worst, it might lead to a few missed deadlines, much in the same way Solitaire, Minesweeper and Pinball sometimes do.

But the solutions that different players have come up with to solve the game's intriguing puzzle reveal something about how engineers think -- and they don't think alike.

Think Outside the Box; Think Beyond Basic Physics To start, you grab a series of objects -- conveyers, ramps, blocks, bumpers or something else equally recognizable -- and position them on a grid plane. To launch the rocket, you need to generate a high score by having a metallic, wooden or rubber ball bounce and tumble inside your machine. With this aim, you might consider the trajectory of the ball, the impact of gravity, potential energy, inertia and other applicable forces.

But that's straightforward thinking. As many experienced players have found out, a good scoring strategy is to create a mechanical environment that traps the ball within tight corners and keeps it circulating through its internal labyrinth, even though this results in the kind of overly complex machines nobody would intentionally build in real life. GlobalSpec's BrainStrainer game invites users to create a device to launch a rocket. The longer the device keeps the ball bouncing around, the higher the score and the more successful the launch.

On Brain Strainer's "How to Play" page, GlobalSpec helpfully suggests, "The more objects you use -- and the more complex your invention -- the more points you score. Is this a joke? I take it the goal is to see how much of a Rube Goldberg monstrosity you can create. Rocket Science Chris Chariton, vice-president of marketing services and product management for GlobalSpec, knows something about engineers: "They're not going to tolerate something that isn't accurate.

But that doesn't mean Newton's Laws of Motion have been completely forgotten. Even though GlobalSpec has intended the game to be a branding tool, it may go where its developers have not initially anticipated it to go. We've had high school physics teachers request to use it. We've had many written requests. Proceed at Your Own Risk Chariton reports that "over , visitors [have visited] the game since December and 3, have forwarded the game and recommend it to someone else.