Overview
ON WEDNESDAY, JUNE 24th, Google Apps and Virgin America invited the brave and the willing, the airborne and the earthbound to embark on the Day in the Cloud Challenge, the first online scavenger hunt played simultaneously in the air and, well, everywhere else. Google chose Makalu to design, develop and operate the online game which anchored the ambitious campaign.
Design Challenges
The game needed to be fun, engaging, accessible, responsive, supportive of the strategic objectives, and compatible with the context of in-flight play. Through an intense, iterative (and fun!) process involving the creation of game mechanics, visual and interaction design, and technical front-end and back-end development, a beautiful product emerged.
Technology
In addition to game mechanics and interaction design, the project presented a variety of technical challenges as well.
To provide a dynamic and engaging, yet lightweight and responsive user interface, the client-side component of the game was developed using JavaScript and the jQuery library. In order to rapidly scale performance under heavy load, the server-side application was developed in Python, and hosted in the Google AppEngine environment.
The application supported a number of external interfaces, including a game data initializer from Google Docs, and an external real-time monitoring application, developed and hosted at Makalu.
Gameday
At midnight on June 24, the switch was flipped, and the game was launched. Throughout the day, players throughout the United States — including passengers on all Virgin America flights — competed against each other in an online scavenger hunt, using Google Apps to help answer as many questions as possible
during the one-hour game. At 6:00 am, two special press flights — with some of the world’s top puzzlers onboard — left Los Angeles and San Francisco, in direct competition against each other and documented in the above video by BoingBoing.
Summary
All of the hard work and passion put into the project from the teams at Google, Virgin America and Makalu was rewarded in the experience of a perfectly executed campaign. Reviews were glowing, and the positive buzz surrounding the campaign reinforced the positions of Google and Virgin America
as innovative leaders in their respective markets. Announcements of the winners, video interviews and a permanently-playable version of the game are maintained at the Day in the Cloud site. Be sure to check it out.
