What Virtual Meetings Must Learn from Video Games

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, meeting planners canceled or rescheduled their meetings and events, but from April 23rd to 25th, hip-hop artist Travis Scott performed five concerts to a total of over 27 million people around the world. The event was hosted virtually on the online gaming platform Fortnite. Scott performed from his home while attendees danced in the concert as avatars.

While a large part of the concert’s success can be attributed to the performer’s fame, another factor could be the video game experience itself. If virtual meetings want to engage the next generation of workers—those born after 1996, also called Gen Z or Zoomers—tech providers will have to up their game and meeting owners and planners will need to take more technological risks. 

According to DigiTravel Consulting VP Shimon Avish, corporates have been slow to adopt virtual meetings. One reason, said Bizly chief strategy officer Kevin Iwamoto, is because new tech can introduce executional errors. “You’re expected to perform at 100 percent every time you organize a meeting. Your boss wants everything to go as perfect as possible, so the expectation level is like being a pilot,” Iwamoto said. “Any major screwup reflects badly on the company.” 

Covid-19 has given meeting organizers one choice: convert to virtual or cancel. When they did it, though, many were surprised to see their events attracted a greater number of attendees. The challenge was how to engage them.  

“How do you get mass participation and interaction in an environment that people are not together in a room and there is no crowd energy?” Iwamoto said. Many corporates have been making the mistake of replicating what they were doing in-person to their virtual conferences.

“You go on to a webinar or internal team meeting and you get distracted by the technology,” said Avish. If virtual meetings are going to thrive—and deliver real dividends to both hosts and participants—they have to create online magic, community and excitement. 

The Kids Are All Right

The Center for Generational Kinetics published a report last year titled “State of Gen Z.” It analyzed a survey of 2,000 U.S. respondents, 50 percent of whom were born after 1996. According to the report, 61 percent of Gen Z reported gaming at least once a week and for younger members of Gen Z (ages 13-17), that number was higher at 70 percent. About 79 percent of Gen Z gamers said their favorite thing about gaming was that “it’s fun.”

Drill down a little further, and nearly half of that cohort said their favorite aspect was the time they spend with their friends. That’s also what meetings are meant to do—bring groups of people together who are likeminded or who want to exchange ideas about a shared interest. Gen Z—digital natives born after the internet—have been using virtual platforms to maintain relationships and do just that. “Millennials and Gen Z figured out how to develop communities and live in a virtual world,” said Iwamoto. 

Online gaming platforms have cracked the code at maintaining large-scale participation and engagement. Some would say they’re really good at getting people addicted. It should be hard for virtual meeting buyers and suppliers not to learn from it, according to meetings technology consultant Corbin Ball. “A major video game has out-shadowed a major blockbuster film by dozens or even thousands of times more. They are just huge moneymakers,” he said, adding e-sports to that category as well. 

Yet, virtual meetings platforms sometimes introduce friction, said Ball. “How does an exhibitor meet with an attendee and really conduct business?” Ball asked, adding that users will have different comfort levels with digital participation. Virtual platforms, he said, need to make it easier for the average person to use and navigate. He pointed to Second Life, which he used more than a decade ago for virtual speaking engagements, as just one example that never delivered that intuitive experience.

There are already some engagement strategies incorporated from online games. “Event technology has borrowed from gaming to achieve [engagement] for more than a decade, starting with gamification built into event mobile apps to bring mobile devices into the experience instead of competing with them,” said Cvent cofounder and CTO Dave Quattrone, who said future events will go to hybrid in-person and virtual platforms. 

In the gaming world, video games hook users in with behavioral tools like thrilling plotlines that require players to push forward by accomplishing tasks, point systems, multi-player competition or immersive experiences. 

Virtual events provider Remo has incorporated the "create your own adventure" and multiplayer communication gaming strategies to go beyond video conferencing and screen sharing and to enable interactivity and more game-like navigation, said Remo head of customer success George Huang. On Remo, for example, attendees can navigate around and within virtual buildings and sit and chat with other attendees at virtual tables. 

In the gaming world, users are also hooked in by using controllers, headsets and mobile phones that players use to interact with the games they play and with other players. Game designers are integrating virtual reality headsets to get users into the world and the action of the game.  

Virtual Reality Has a Seat Reserved at a Future Meeting

Out of all the engagement tools used in the gaming world, VR technology is the most likely to enter the virtual meeting space in the coming decade. Virtual meetings providers Intrado and Remo differ on the value of immersive experiences for adding engagement in meetings, but they both expect VR to make its way into how people connect in the meetings and events industry.

Intrado Digital Media president Ben Chodor sees immersive gaming features being the future of virtual meeting platform technology. Attendees will be able to engage with content, exhibits and other attendees in imaginative environments with augmented and virtual reality technologies, he predicts. Intrado is investing money and hiring game developers to help the company level up when it comes to immersive experiences. The company is looking to launch a next-generation version of the virtual meeting product that incorporates more VR-like qualities and gives meeting organizers approachable but sophisticated tools to capture the imagination of their audiences. 

“As we go through the third and fourth quarter of 2021, some of the technology we’re going to see is going to blow everyone away and for the first time a virtual event is going to rival a physical event,” Chodor said. 

Huang anticipates VR goggles will eventually make its way into virtual meetings space, but labeled the use of immersive experiences in virtual meetings as "gimmicky" and "flashy" and not essential to the objective of meetings, which are to facilitate strong authentic human connections. Remo doesn't see immersive experiences in its future, at least at this time, he said. Instead, Remo is more focused on perfecting its platform experience to be more intuitive, frictionless and accessible. 

Huang foresees a coming revolution in collaboration and networking, one in which anyone around the world will be able to participate in and develop connections at an event. He also expects all virtual meeting technologies to make events accessible to those with hearing and viewing impairments.

Likewise, Chodor expects participation to be democratized by virtual meetings technologies becoming customized to attendee interaction preferences. Each attendee will be able to participate whenever they want, with whomever they want and through multiple tech mediums, whether it's AR, VR, their mobile phone, computer or being at the event in-person. For example, attendees will be able to use VR to interact with booths and products at an exhibit while others can view and interact with their panel sessions on their iPhone. 

Both Chodor and Huang also agree organizers will have to upskill no matter how intuitive the tools are. A year from now, both agreed, companies hiring meeting organizers will be asking about their virtual planning experience.

Chodor also said they will need to prove their creativity in engaging attendees in an online environment. 

“The ‘ooh-aah’ moment doesn’t last for three days,” he said, adding that it’s critical for organizers to keep those moments coming. “If I go to a session that is not compelling and can’t interact with anyone because it’s 2D or 1D … then I’m one click away from never coming back.”