Alipay’s fortune cards-How a mobile payment application turning Chinese cities into playgrounds
-What is playful and what play has become these days.
The definition of playful can be very flexible in the sense of mobile media placemaking. ‘Play’ in the age of information explosion is very fragmented, according to Labbrand, Chinese consumers spend 3.9 hours on smartphones just for entertainment, while the analysis showing applications with high usage are not traditionally considered as mobile games, but lifestyle applications (Labbrand 2017). Being inspired by Silva & Hjorth, it can be said that the requirement of lifestyle and entertaining can be combined by the ceaseless movement and interaction of people, letting everyday life takes on the dimension of playful living space (Silva & Hjorth 2019). The games have been merged in the physical world people dealing with, the boundary of play and living become somewhat blurry. (Salen & Zimmerman 2003) As the definition of modern playful spaces is settled, to add other features or rewards to the process shall not compromise its essence of it still being playful— In using one of Alipay’s fortune card campaign as an example, the new feature of this addition is that people can be rewarded with electronic cash by using their app to assist in playing the city.
-Alipay’s ‘fortune card collection’ event: what is it, how does it gets so popular?
No one would have imagined that PayPal would host such an event and be rewarded with electronic for taking part in a city play, but Alipay seized a perfect opportunity to start its layout: it combined this play with the Chinese New Year, the major and the most important traditional festival shared by all Chinese. This goes beyond the traditional rituals and festivities; what will be observed in recent year’s Spring festival is that people are holding phones, ‘scanning’ a specific type of target, which is the fortune mark, at every corner in the city, at any time of the day.
The fortune mark used to be a simple and traditional Chinese New Year’s decoration, and almost every house in China would put a new fortune mark decoration on their front door, irrespective of religious beliefs or political stance. Shopping malls, restaurants, cafes and, office spaces, even cars would have Fortune characters stuck on their windows, plus many New Year’s celebratory items that are everywhere during the festive season. They can be found everywhere in cities and villages, which provide the perfect natural venue for Alipay’s fortune card collection event.
Alipay first launched this event called “Collecting Five Fortunes” during the Chinese Spring Festival time of 2016. The principle is to scan fortune characters in various corners around the city through smartphone cameras based on image recognition technology. Once the fortune mark has been recognised, the Alipay app will grant the user a fortune card blind box, in total there are five types of fortune card Alipay ask the users to collect, complete collecting all five types of fortune cards will result in a prize drawing chance during the Chinese New Year Gala. The big prize might be electronic cash (which can reach $20k or more) or maybe free all the loans of last year you borrowed from Alipay.
Tempting, isn’t it? For 1.24 billion Alipay users (Statista 2022), this event should also be enough to drive them to take part in the city play during the New Year festival time. Hence there’s the aforementioned spectacle. During the New Year, even during the epidemic of the last two years, people are seen everywhere on the streets, in shopping malls, in communities, raising their hands, taking out their phones to scan the fortune mark when they see them.
-What does it shows
The Alipay example can fit the four components of the game proposed by Huizinga. Firstly, the boundary between play and ordinary life is whether users see the fortune mark everywhere during the Chinese New Year as a form of access to the playful urban space; if they are not motivated by the game’s design, they will not use the scanning function to trigger the game, and Alipay will remain an ordinary lifestyle app for such users. Secondly, in the other case, when users are engaged in the searching & scanning for fortune marks activity, they cannot help but notice people like themselves playing the game – it is straightforward to recognise similar behaviour between them. By actually participating in the game, people share it with others around them, thus drawing them into the process and creating a stronger sense of immersion from the environment. Thirdly, due to the long history, broad scope and acceptance of this traditional celebration of Chinese New Year, fortune marks can be found everywhere in China, and is an almost permanent installation, with the area, time and scope of the event being very free. Lastly, the rules of play and the rewards are publicised, and users are sure to get the corresponding rewards for playing according to the rules.
Hence yes, it’s not only in play but also more motivating to play profitably.
Besides, as Alipay itself is a payment-lifestyle application, this kind of entertainment has also become part of the Chinese New Year routine since 2016 among Chinese mobile phone users who, at this particular time of the year, spontaneously go out on the streets or at home to find the fortune marks that they can interact with, turning participation in this activity into a subconscious instinct. This closed-loop of spontaneous participation-sharing has brought more urban players to Alipay, making the game sustainable and repeatable, getting better each year, with more people getting to know it and more people participating.
In conclusion, the main findings of this study is focused on how Alipay transformed from a payment application to a media, where the software and the company spontaneously transformed into a comprehensive media, trying to get into every corner of the user’s life – thus, the user gets the experience of playing in the city, and Alipay gets many data that brings a value that will be far higher than the electronic-RMB it gives out to users for free each year through this urban interaction. As we can see from the Alipay example, sometimes it is possible to build a playful urban space without even investing in special, playable interactive installations upfront, at a lower cost and with a better sense of immersion (because the interaction is already achieved by borrowing objects that already exist in the city), engaging audiences and publics in alternative and playful ways, tie the everyday lives of China’s smartphone users to their city plays.
-Reference list:
Chris Wallbridge and Benjamin Noyes. 2017. “Fragmented Time: How Chinese Spend 3.9 Hours on Smartphones Every Day” Labbrand, accessed March 17, 2022. https://www.labbrand.com/brandsource/fragmented-time-how-chinese-spend-39-hours-on-smartphones-every-day
de Souza e Silva, Adriana and Larissa Hjorth. 2009 “Playful Urban Spaces: A Historical Approach to Mobile Games.” Simulation & gaming 40, no. 5 (2009): 602–625.
Salen, K., and Zimmerman, E. 2003. Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Statista. 2022. “Number of users of Alipay and WeChat Pay in China in 2020, with forecasts from 2021 to 2025”, accessed March 18, 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1271130/mobile-wallet-user-forecast-in-china/