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.