Today, we played at Digital Accademia, a digital school near the H-Farm. We were invited to talk about our experience in a workshop called Gamification: playing is a serious thing to do. Games are turning into a real trend in corporate communications strategy and our format was highlighted as a case in point. Tomas gave a brief lecture and then participants in the class experimented with the DIGit version of WHAIWHAI, which can be played entirely on a tablet, for an enigma-filled treasure hunt that mixes physical realty with the web. It was a fun event in a school of digital culture that gets more welcoming every day.

Why not play WHAIWHAI away from the city? Companies that have worked with us, using WHAIWHAI as a team building tool, have asked us this question on several occasions. We now have the right solution: you can now play our treasure hunt full of stories and enigmas from a hotel room, a resort or a convention center. WHAIWHAI DIGit is a social adventure that takes place wherever its participants go, so a resort, a convention center or even company headquarters can become a playing field to explore. Each story can be read on digital devices like smartphones or tablets, through a web platform created specifically for the event. The stories contain anecdotes on the topic of innovation. The game flow is the same as the traditional form of WHAIWHAI you already know: read the story, go to the location, solve the enigma. We’ve played this way several times with Vodafone. Check out these photos and video of two DIGit events.

They’re ruining my life. How many other Lupins are there in this city?! They’re petty thieves, awful wannabes. They cruise around town in old 500s, wearing green or red jackets, passing themselves off as me, and the worst part is, they get caught!

I really need your help to get me out of this jam, to help everyone figure out I’m the one and only real deal. I can’t work like this. Once these impostors are out of the way, I’ll be able to pull the heist of the century! But I’ll tell you about that later…

And so the challenge begins! Starting today, until Sunday, you’ll find us at Lucca Comics & Games 2011. LOG607 is at the RCS stand promoting the movie Lupin III: Green vs. Red. With a special text message-only version of WHAIWHAI, we bring festival-goers straight to the stand, by way of a series of enigmas pointing to various beautiful locations in the city. Only those who make it here will receive the prize: a free DVD of the film.

Update

Now that the Lucca comics and games fest is over, let’s tally up the totals: 315 WHAIWHAI games were played in the city to search for the real Lupin! Have a look at the pics.

On Saturday, September 24th in Milan, the first ever event by and for instagrammers in Italy will take place. Who are instagrammers? People fond of the Instagram, the Twitter of images. It’s one of the most successful iPhone apps with an international community of over 60,000 followers after just six months on the market, and its popularity is growing by the day all over the world. This one-day event will be dedicated to pictures taken in Milan and should be fun and packed with features: sign up for the event here. We at WHAIWHAI will be there for a surprise that we can’t reveal just yet.

This week got off to a good start for us, as the September issue of Wired has an article containing an interview with Timothy “Speed” Levitch, author of the stories in the upcoming New York edition of WHAIWHAI. Speed talks about some of the secrets he describes in the guidebook. You can download that article from our press area.

Climb on board, the guidebooks for New York are on the way! They’ll disembark in about a month and will then be distributed in American bookstores starting September 13th. In the meantime, enjoy this video we put together for the occasion.

WHAIWHAI NEW YORK / the pegleg from LOG607 on Vimeo.

We’re back from a very special event, a WHAIWHAI experience customized for Avis car rental and the Alfa Romeo Giulietta. This challenge saw five teams travel all over Italy searching for clues about the race car driving hero Juan Manuel Fangio. To all the players, we handed out a travel notebook chock-full of original stories and an iPhone. Along with the usual text messaging functions used in the game, having an iPhone let the players share information about their whereabouts, share their photos and express their thoughts on Twitter and Foursquare. On the Avis blog, the experience has been recreated through images and videos posted by the teams on the road. From Verona to Parma, from Bologna to Florence, from Milan to Genoa to Siena, this is a new way to do WHAIWHAI.