Blurrt

The UK’s Biggest Gaming Festival

with Multiplay

We’re all quite big gaming fans within the Blurrt team (don’t get us started on the whole consoles vs PC debate!) so when the opportunity to collaborate on innovative ways to engage the audience at the UK’s Biggest Gaming Festival came about…there was no way we weren’t going to jump into this project feet first.

“All of the social enjoyment of gaming as a hobby in a live environment; a weekend’s worth of gaming action suitable for gamers both casual and hardcore.”

Founded in 1999, the Insomnia Gaming Festival brings together gamers of all backgrounds in one place for 3 days of videogame-related fun.

Insomnia is a unique gaming event combining LAN Gaming Halls, a huge Exhibition Hall, Special Guests bringing cool interactive content, large-scale Esports Tournaments, and a whole host of fun activities tailored to gamers of all ages.

This year for Insomnia 57, Multiplay were looking for a way to really blur the line between performer and audience member, envisioning ways in how the crowd could take part and shape what was going on right in front of their eyes and we’re pleased to say that Blurrt were able to help them realise this in a number of different ways.

“We’re always looking for new ways to merge both online audiences with offline events, and online social media with live broadcast. Working with Blurrt has enabled us to do just that. In the past, we’ve struggled to find a meaningful way of incorporating social media into live broadcasts, but with Blurrt’s unique ability to introduce sentiment tracking, whilsts presenting smart, aggregated social data in a visually stunning way – it’s found an invaluable home in our broadcast workflow!”
— Sam Deans, Multiplay

Any activity around the block-building extravaganza ‘Minecraft’ was very popular at Insomnia and on Day 1 the main stage held a ‘Build Battle’ competition, pitting the maestros of Minecraft against one another.

Crowning a champion is no easy task and so it was down to the audience to vote with their fingers, using hashtags we’d set up for this event displayed on a large screen. Only 5% separated first and second place, but thanks to Blurrt, the audience and easy to understand visuals – a winner was chosen.

Following the successful engagement of the first hashtag vote, we set up similar questions on the big screen such as “What are you looking forward to today?” and “Who do you think will win?”

These were accompanied by hashtag options to choose from, which were then turned into charts on the big screen, helping to build anticipation and excitement for the day ahead.

If Blurrt didn’t exist then perhaps quite a few of the team may have followed childhood dreams and become Pokemon Trainers. Instead we’re all happily building the definitive social media analytics tool (subtle plug!) but at least we have the game Pokken, a Pokemon and Tekken hybrid, to fuel our Pokemon needs.

On Day 3, Insomnia hosted a Pokken tournament for established YouTube gamers. Everyone has their favourite Pokemon characters, so in order to make the competition both fair and exciting for the audience, Blurrt invited the audience to select which Pokemon’s would take part in the battle.

#MewTwo, #Charizard, #Pikachu – all big names and all present in the battle thanks to the audience voting in, all of which could also see how well their favourite Pokemon were doing on the big screen thanks to our Blurrt Live visuals.

We loved working with Multiplay at Insomnia 57 and have more exciting projects in the near future planned with Multiplay.

We look forward to seeing you at one of the events!