Google PLAYTIME 2025 Korea (NFC)

At Google PLAYTIME 2025, VVFY Studio planned and built an NFC-based interactive quest system around a clear goal: creating an event experience that participants complete through their own actions. The event needed to go beyond passive viewing and encourage active participation, natural networking, and tangible moments of experiencing Google's technology. To achieve this, NFC was embedded into participant badges and the entire venue was designed like a game board. Participants begin a personalized experience the moment they enter through their NFC badge. Rather than acting as a simple access pass, the badge becomes the central interface connecting every part of the event, allowing attendees to complete quests and earn points by tagging throughout the venue. In this process, participants stop being spectators and take on the role of players who move, choose, and shape outcomes themselves. Every action is aggregated in real time and reflected on a live leaderboard. Participants can instantly check their ranking and score, naturally encouraging competition and prompting their next action. By offering a clear goal in the form of rank, the event keeps attendees engaged again and again throughout the day. In the networking zone, game mechanics were introduced to break the awkwardness that often comes with first-time interactions at events. Participants could earn points by tagging each other's badges, turning greetings and conversations into a mission of their own. This encouraged natural icebreaking and made networking feel voluntary and rewarding rather than forced. In the session area, QR-based quizzes were offered immediately after each talk so that content consumption could flow directly into participation. Google Gemini judged the quiz answers, letting participants experience AI naturally inside the event rather than through a separate technical demonstration. This allowed Google's technology to be felt as part of the experience itself. In booth and demo areas, an NFC reader system instantly recorded participation history and converted it into points. More than simple visit verification, the structure connected exploration and play, encouraging attendees to move through the venue and significantly raising booth engagement. A treasure hunt quest also led participants to explore the full site, improving both spatial usage and experiential density. PLAYTIME Quest did not treat networking, sessions, booths, and treasure hunts as separate programs. Instead, VVFY Studio connected them organically through one interface, NFC tagging, and a live leaderboard. The result was a rare kind of immersive game experience for an offline event, with participant behavior data and engagement flows naturally accumulating along the way.