Social game in action

When you are stuck on a plane and have already gone through newspaper and emails, there are limited options available to you.  Browsing airline catalog and looking at the flight information can entertain you only for short while.  I had to realize these all over again yesterday when I flew.  But thankfully there was another option: social gaming.

Delta in-flight trivia quiz social game;
next time you are on Delta flight, try it.
It will make your flight go faster.

I flew Delta and on the second leg out to east coast each seat had touch screen LCD.  It was refreshing to see touch screen display.  Compared to non-intuitive experience that I had with international flight entertainment system, it had a lot better user interface.  But what caught my attention was the social gaming aspect of trivia quiz.

I did not realize when I started the game, but as soon as you entered already progressing quiz game, my score was posted against all the other players who were playing at the same time.  The trivia quiz game was built with social gaming in mind, and it was showing seat number and pseudonym to display the leader board.

What's interesting was as soon as I started playing, a teenager boy who sat next to my seat immediately started playing as well.  It turned out that he knew many more answers than I did.  He got most of the answers right on the next round, and ended up getting the first place.  That started a conversation, and we exchanged a few comments about how he learned most of the answers from his high school classes.  It was interesting to see how we could all start playing together and share the same experience.

I think that's power of social gaming.  It creates challenges for community of players to solve, either in friendly competitive or cooperative environment.  By creating such a challenge, it gets players to share their commonalities and see how we can learn from each other.  I think it's a great example of how social gaming can be used in real life.