Playful Content
While the game team is in the nascent stages of defining its role within the company, play has been part of content generation for some time. When Jack Shepherd joined BuzzFeed as a community manager, it was the users who sparked his interest in games and play. “My goal was to try to get community involved with BuzzFeed, and have people making [and] commenting on posts, and that was a very playful thing.” Shepherd started to read game literature and think of himself as a designer, a perspective he retained when he moved to editorial—where he now heads the “Buzz” section of the site.
For Shepherd, the way to “engage users wasn’t to sit around [and] assign stories based on what we thought were the important stories of the day, but instead to kind of delve into what was going on on the Internet and try to come up with original stuff that would spread socially.” This didn’t mean ceding editorial authority: “Editorial judgment, in terms of my team, is in some ways just another way of saying ‘empathy,’ to be like, ‘Oh, this is something, it’s a reaction that a lot of people are going to have, and I’m going to build something out of it that sort of creates that emotional experience.’ And being good at that means that you’re going to have a high hit rate, in terms of things that people share.”
This philosophy is evident in a number of writing exercises Shepherd uses, including brainstorming and games, as ways to stimulate more content. For instance, he asked writers to list emotions and identities as a collective group and use those terms as the building blocks for new content.
His view of content is also design-oriented. He described it in terms of frames—or a lens through which to see content differently—and formats, which are any of BuzzFeed’s standardized means of publishing. Not unlike the stock formats mentioned in the previous chapter, these range from quizzes and games to listicles and checklists. No format is particularly better than another: “A list, like an article, is just one tool to tell a story, and there were good lists and there were bad lists. And I kind of think the same way about games,” he said.
Shepherd sees play and games existing outside of the products the game team creates. It shapes his way of thinking about content: “I’ve been interested for a long time in trying to do posts that are games, without using technology,” he said, describing a particular gamelike post he called “Can You Make It Through This Post Without Saying ‘Awww’?”, in which he escalated the level of cuteness to entice and challenge the reader.38 Play has even affected his hiring practices. Ideally, to him, job candidates should be enthusiastic and possess “a sense of play”—traits particularly felicitous for the personal and celebrity-focused content of his section.
This outlook, according to Shepherd, keeps content fresh, prevents repetition, and, ultimately, provides some structure in the relatively structureless environment of the company. He highlighted how “from that point of view creativity can be fairly paralyzing. You kind of come in and sit in front of a computer and your mandate is just to make something.” It is through total experimentation that he meets this challenge.