Got Game? What You Can Learn About Content Strategy from Dragon Age: Inquisition

This is not a session about gamification. Unless you're building websites devoted to dragons, adding quests and hit points won’t improve your users’ engagement with your content. (If you are building websites devoted to dragons, well that’s just awesome.)

Content – be it text, images, video, data, or a combination of mediums – is the reason we build websites in the first place. It’s right there in the acronym: CMS. Drupal is a system – or more accurately, a framework – for managing content. We strongly believe that all website features, layout, and design choices must support the goal of serving your target audiences with the critical information – the content – they need to engage meaningfully with your organization.

Your content is the connection between your organizational goals and your audiences’ motivations. There’s usually a reason a piece of content is added to a website; somebody, at some point, thought it would be useful. Unless that content has meaning to your users, however, it has little value to your organization. Without a strategy guiding the creation and governance of that content, your quest, noble though it may be, is almost doomed to fail.

Fortunately, it’s not hard to start creating a strategy. We believe you can learn the foundations of content strategy for Drupal websites by breaking down what the team at BioWare did in creating Dragon Age: Inquisition.

And yes, there will be dragons.