Gareth Langley - Piing
Games for Crowds
What happens when you stop treating live audiences like passive spectators - and design play that makes a whole arena act like one organism?
Gareth Langley is CEO and co-founder of Piing, a Manchester-based company building mass-participation games for sports and live events. Their format is simple to describe and hard to pull off: thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of people scan in, use their phones as controllers, and collectively drive what happens on the big screen - creating moments of laughter, tension, cheering, and rivalry on cue.
In his MAC session, Gareth will get specific about what makes this work in real venues, with real crowds and real constraints. He’s not pitching “engagement” as a buzzword - he’s talking about designing for human behaviour: belonging, mastery, and the weird magic that happens when strangers synchronise around a shared rule set.
What you will learn in his talk
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STEP 1
1. The "Silent Stadium" Test:
Why your game’s design must start with a sound, not a mechanic.
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STEP 2
2. The "Chocolate-Covered Broccoli" Trap:
The specific reason why "gamification" usually fails to engage a real crowd.
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STEP 3
3. The Chaos Ratio:
The three-ingredient recipe that stops a mass game from becoming boring or unfair.
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STEP 1
4. The "Pack Animal" Unlock:
How to use "friendly otherism" to turn 50,000 strangers into a single tribe.
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STEP 2
5. The Climax of the Bar Chart:
Why the most boring visual in office life becomes the most electric moment in a stadium.
Gareth Bio
Gareth has spent 30 years building interactive digital experiences - from CD-ROM era multimedia, through co-founding a multi-award-winning agency, to creating Piing and scaling it from a side project into a profitable product business. Piing’s work has shown up in major live environments, with technology built to handle stadium-scale participation and the realities of latency, attention, and crowd psychology.
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STEP 1
Design for the Ears First:
Piing starts by deciding exactly what sound they want the audience to make (cheering, booing, laughing) and at what exact second. The game is merely a "prop" to earn that specific vocal reaction.
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STEP 2
Real Play vs. Shallow Mechanics
Crowds have a "BS detector" for "chocolate-covered broccoli" - tasks that feel like work but are masked with points. True engagement requires voluntary escapism where the reward is the play itself, not just a prize.
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STEP 3
The Trinity of Agency, Skill, and Luck
A successful mass game must offer total control (Agency), the ability to improve (Skill), and enough randomness (Luck) to ensure the best player doesn't win every single time, which would kill the room's energy.
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STEP 1
The Power of "Friendly Otherism"
To trigger "pack behavior," you don't need a common enemy. You use "us vs. them" formats - like Grown-ups vs. Kids or South Stand vs. North Stand - to create an instant sense of belonging without the toxicity of traditional rivalry.
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STEP 2
Engineer the Crescendo
In mass play, the "Wow" moment often happens on a simple data visualization. By using sound effects and "tick-tick-tick" animations on a bar chart reveal, you can turn a statistical result into a stadium-wide eruption.