The Gamification of the Climbing Gym

It all started when Jan Fiess and his buddy Felix Hundhausen were annoyed. The two bouldering and climbing fans came to their regular climbing gym one day to find that their favorite route had been changed—again. There has to be another solution, they thought.

A climbing wall usually has several route options that can be identified by different colors on the holds. The colors usually represent different levels of difficulty. The number of routes is limited by the space available for the holds. Therefore, climbing gym owners regularly change the position of the holds on the walls to provide variety in the range of routes.

Felix and Jan now had the following idea: If climbing holds were not only monochromatic, but could instead glow in different colors, the wall would have more routes due to different light variations. Using the light programming, it would also be possible to adapt climbing routes according to the climbers' needs without having to rebuild the wall for this purpose. "The idea sounded simple at first," Jan tells us today, "you could just use LEDs for the colors!"

"Among other things, that led us to apply for fundings," Patrick says. In a program run by the German Federal Ministry of Economics, Rocky Motion actually prevailed despite numerous competitors. The deal in the end was that the ministry would provide 55 percent of the capital they needed; they had to provide 45 percent themselves. Hundreds of thousands of euros were at stake.

"Then we bumbled around for three quarters of a year trying to find investors," composer Patrick continues. However, the banks always found the project too risky. "We wrote quite a few financial and business plans and then threw them away again," he recalls. "At some point, we realized that the scale was getting too big for us to continue."

"We invested a lot of money in development ourselves and then realized that we were just writing business plans and not working in our actual areas at all," Jan points out, "we didn't want to fall asleep in terms of content!" Therefore, Rocky Motion dropped the opportunity of the Federal Ministry in 2021 and preferred to continue the company on a smaller scale.

"We had been in contact with Art Rock, an Austrian manufacturer of climbing walls and holds, for some time," Patrick explains. "We get along very well with the management there. They eventually brought us on board as a partner." In Austria, they then worked with Art Rock to further develop the hardware. The plan is to have the interactive climbing hold ready for the market in winter 2022.

According to Jan, the good thing is that they no longer have to devote 100 percent of their time to the company, including the sleepless nights because of the financial situation. Patrick is composing film music again, and he also has a job at the Musikhochschule Trossingen. Jan recently took a part-time job as a creative technologist for media installations alongside Rocky Motion. He now develops media installations, primarily for event and advertising agencies. "Now I'm back doing exactly what I learned," Jan says. "I do a lot with sensors, actuators, and with light: interactive media systems."

However, the two of them still try to put as much time as possible into the climbing holds. "Now that we'll soon have the production-ready prototype, the real creative development of the application is just getting started," Patrick points out. They are currently working on various gameplays and audio storytelling.

For the further direction of the climbing hold application, Rocky Motion benefited from being awarded in the government's Kultur- und Kreativpilot*innen 2021 funding program. "This program includes intensive mentoring and coaching from business professionals," Patrick explains, "now, we pretty much know how we want to move ahead with the idea."

They are now focusing more on an event approach with an emphasis on team building. Here, they have, in particular, serial audio games in mind in which teams can only accomplish certain tasks together.

"We're excited about what’s next," says Patrick, "best case is, the thing takes off this year, worst case is, we've had a good go and gotten to know each other better." Jan is confident that the climbing holds and their playful applications will be well received. But he isn’t too dogged: "I was also able to take that with me from my time at the Animationinstitut. There, it was always emphasized that the project shouldn't always be the only thing that counts, but that it's also about spending a good time together as a team." In the end, he says, this approach also benefits the product.

Anna Brinkschulte, senior lecturer of the Interactive Media study specialization at the Animationsinstitut, emphasizes that Rocky Motion's climbing handle idea reflects the innovative power of the so-called gamification approach. This is a central component of the Interactive Media study area: "The course follows the guiding principle 'Games & Beyond,'" she explains. "The focus is on the social as well as playful interaction of users with media possibilities."

One might wonder what climbing actually has to do with animation and game design. "But in Interactive Media, students look at how media can influence and affect things we encounter in everyday life." From that perspective, for example, everything potentially becomes a game. Rocky Motion's climbing holds develop an analog sport into a playful, interactive experience. They are a good example of how everyday experiences can become innovations when combined with media, Anna says.