The Powerful Benefits of Playing in the Real-World
by Chip & Dana Brown | View Bio
Storyastic is an imaginative toy, game & entertainment company cultivating human connection through story & play. Founded by former Walt Disney Imagineer Dana Brown & former Disney Studios producer & HarperCollins publisher Chip Brown. Storyastic’s debut product THE RANK GAME, which helps people tech less and talk more” through “the gamification of conversation.” It has won multiple awards, including being an ASTRA Favorite Pick.
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Playing The Rank Game makes even the most mundane moments more personal and meaningful.
- The Rank Game is about a player’s life and the people in their life.
- People are fundamentally interested in sharing their life, but they also want to win!
- Players win points by guessing their opponents’ rankings, promoting fun competition.
- Players can win when they look at the topics from other peoples’ perspectives defining the community-building power of The Rank Game.
We live in an era when families and friends have the constant distraction of buzzes and beeps going off in their pockets and an endless queue of movies and TV shows, plus social media feeds, text threads, multiple email inboxes and more.
Use of the internet and mobile devices like smartphones and tablets is widespread, and digital technologies play a significant role in the everyday lives of American families. This is also true for children, who may begin interacting with digital devices at young ages*:
- Nearly every individual always carries a screen in their pocket.
- People touch their devices 2000 times each day!
- The average family has nearly a dozen screens in their home and access at least two screens daily.
- Eighty percent of homes with children have tablets (22% more than homes without children).
- U.S. households are projected to have 20+ connected devices in their home by 2025.
- Kids get devices at a younger age than ever before.
Despite ubiquitous data showing that mental health degrades with increased screen time, families and friends somehow favor the pseudo-relationships and “poser” behavior of social media over real-world engagement in authentic community. Everyone is posting their “stories” and offering zillions of “likes” and comments, yet people feel more disconnected than ever because everyone is posting about themselves, and nobody is truly listening. It’s ironic that the very technology that is designed to bring us together when we’re apart, pulls us apart when we’re together.
Human beings desire community. We’re designed for it. Every person on earth wants to be known. They want to belong. They want to tell their story.
But there is hope! After dealing with a once-in-a-century pandemic, people are longing for in-person, real-world experiences with one another. Many families and friends recognize this as a pervasive problem and they want to fix it, but their interpersonal communication skills have atrophied, and they need help relearning the art of conversation. Playing in the real world with your family and friends also infuses the power of classic play which increases everyone’s mental health and strengthens their relationships.
The growth in hands-on games is humanity’s primal response to having real world experiences, together. Playing non-electronic games and playing with non-electronic toys cultivates more authentic experiences in real life that tech-centric products simply cannot provide. Every moment in our lives can be filled with intentional experiences. For example, at amusement parks, most people assume they spend their time on the rides, when, it’s the moments in-between the rides that make up most of their time.
Introduced seven years ago, The Rank Game is a simple and interactive way for any group to look away from their screens, put down their phones and engage in meaningful engagements with people in person. The idea for the game came to us when our family was out to dinner and our then 13-year-old daughter noticed that everyone in the restaurant was staring at their phones rather than talking to each other. She said that it didn’t matter if her family knew how to engage in conversation if the rest of the world didn’t, so the family decided they needed to “bottle” The Rank Game to help other families propel conversation.
The Rank Game has become so popular because people are fundamentally interested in what’s important to them personally, and the game is about the preferences in their life. The social media platforms got that ethos exactly right. Social media is so successful because it appeals to and amplifies (and exacerbates!) humanity’s innate selfishness. The magic trick about The Rank Game’s gameplay is that it also leverages humanity’s innate competitiveness, too.
The simplicity, mobility, and accessibility of The Rank Game makes it work as part of our daily lives as well as “game night,” by reclaiming families’ and friends’ time back from technology—they can make their time together more intentional.
*STATS FROM: Pew Research, US Census, Google Research, Statistica/Audience Project, Parks Associates, Vision Direct