Friendly

Play a game of 501
Play a game of Baseball (Darts Version)
Three Bullseye!
View statistics from all your friends!

Inspiration

For all the innovation that Pegasystems enables, one aspect of Pega is sometimes forgotten: Pega is fun. And Pega can be used for fun. In the modern workplace, you will not have to look far to see an increased emphasis on workplace enjoyment and coworker interaction. In some workplaces, you may find a ping pong table. In others, billiards, shuffleboard, or, in our case, a dart board. These office features can be overlooked, but they mean a lot to people. And people mean a lot to us.

As the working world has shifted to include more hybrid and remote workers, the social benefits of a bustling workplace have become harder to find. What we may gain in comfort and flexibility working at home, we lose in social interaction. With Friendly, we aim to bring the fun of engaging relationships back into the workplace.

Friendly fosters deeper relationships between individuals in the workplace and helps cultivate a social company culture. Through friendly rivalries and teamwork, Friendly enables users to play games against friends from afar by providing a virtual scoreboard and player statistics hub. Supported by the power of the Pega platform, user statistics can be leveraged to gain insights on player patterns and point out areas where a player can improve. Additionally, through artificial intelligence and Pega decisioning, users can play games against bot versions of their friends. If meetings and presentations can be translated into an online setting, now, through Pega, so can a friendly game of darts.

Primary Features

Friendly is a tool that can be used to score and store results for almost any game. In its current form, it enables players to play against each other from afar in real-time, play against simulated versions of their rivals, and analyze their performance with game statistics and trends.

Playing a game in person

When two people are playing a game of darts on the same dart board, Friendly is a great tool for keeping score. Scores can be updated in real-time on a scoreboard with automated calculations. The game begins with one player selecting a game and adding opponents to the game. In the current app version, they can choose between Cricket, 501, and Baseball (three standard dart games with unique scoring rules). Any application user who is in the system and is part of a darts team can be added to the game. In the future, we plan to continue to leverage Pega’s operator profiles and security features, using roles to add players to games based on their game preferences. Currently, each player can then log in, see they’ve been assigned to a game, and input their dart throws after each turn. With each input, the scoreboard will update until a winner is determined.

After the game, the players can see a table that displays their game statistics including their percentage of accurate throws, as captured in the below image. Did you have a great game, or did you win because you were lucky? That’s for your rivals to decide and you will all have the data you need to state your case in the game comments.

Playing a game online

A key aspect of what sets Friendly apart is the ability to play games against someone that isn’t in the room with you. Say you’re in the office, but your dart-loving coworker is working at home with his personal dartboard. With Friendly, you can start up a game during your lunch break and add your friend to the game. They will get a notification to join the game and both players can input their results in turn just as you would in person. From there, you can play through the case of the game, determine a winner, and see the game statistics.

If your rival hits a clutch triple 20 to seal the game, leave a comment in the smack talk section and feel the rush of competition even across miles of separation.

Playing against a bot

If a coworker that you always play darts with has an important meeting right when you were trying to take a quick break, Friendly still has you covered. Whenever you record a game in the app, Friendly stores your dart throw tendencies. When you throw a dart, Friendly knows the percent chance you hit the number you’re aiming for. And the percent chance you just miss and hit a number immediately next to the number you were aiming for. And the percent chance you miss and hit a number two spots away from what you were aiming for. And the percent chance you… hmm, actually, I think you might get it!

It also knows how often you hit the bullseye when aiming for it (it even stores enough digits to register a number for those of us who are more accuracy-deficient!). Basically, Friendly keeps track of all players’ tendencies, and if you want to play against a friend who isn’t available, you have the option of playing against a robot version of them. In these cases, you would input your throws and then ask the system to leverage Pega’s robust data manipulation functionality to simulate your opponent’s throws based on their stored data. From there, the game plays normally, and in the case that the AI-powered robot version of you beats a friend, you can gain bragging rights without even playing a game!

The image above shows a simulated turn for a bot in a two-player game of cricket.

Looking at statistics and data

After each game, players will have the opportunity to see an overview of their statistics for that particular game. They will also have access to their overall statistics on the reports landing page as well as a link to each game where they can view individual game stats from previous games. Shown below, the statistics report for all darts players displays each player’s win count, the percentage of the time they hit the number they were aiming for, and hit percentages for “One Off”, “Two Off”, “Three Off” from where they aimed. Similar statistics are available for the inner and outer rings of the bullseye.

This feature can be especially helpful in figuring out what areas of the game a player needs to work on and periodically checking back on stats to view their progress.

The future of competition is rooted in data. Professional sports teams have massive analytics departments that prove time and again that data driven decision making can create a leg up in competition. With the rate that analytics have grown in sports, it’s not hard to infer that data and analytics are the future of any competitive environment, and with Friendly’s ability to store and manipulate game statistics, we intend on being a part of that future.

Commenting on games and forming teams

Friendly harnesses the OOTB Pulse feature to provide users with a forum to talk about ongoing games and communicate to each other as if everyone were in the same room. Pulse has been renamed “Smack Talk” in recognition of the time-honored tradition of the same name.

Backend Highlights

While the workflow might seem simple (selecting players, playing the game and viewing postgame stats), the complex processing that went into scoring a game leveraged many important Pega features. Among the highlights were the features listed below:

Updating the skin with a fresh, new color scheme that recalls a traditional dartboard
Adding players to the game based on operators with Friendly logins and allowing players to select if their opponent is a real person or a bot
Preprocessing to seamlessly set the aim for future throws, and a user-friendly modal that allows players to quickly input throw data
Post processing that runs complex decisioning and functionality to update scoreboards for three types of dart games with unique scoring rules
Use of artificial intelligence to set bot players’ aim based on the current state of the scoreboard to give users a robust and realistic experience when playing against automated rivals
Leveraging random number generation to simulate throws from automated dart players to give users a positive experience even when playing alone
Integrate advanced Pega reporting to give users a more in-depth look into their skills and provide metrics they can use to compare themselves to friends and rivals

Hackathon Experience

Using artificial intelligence to build realistic bots was a challenge. We enjoyed building these skills in Pega and we hope to bring in Pega Prediction Studio in future iterations of the application.

Creating tournaments and utilizing OOTB Pega features such as teams to create groupings and rankings was a great learning experience for our team. We are thrilled with what we were able to accomplish in such a short period of time!

A particular benefit of this project was to be able to let loose and show the world how much fun Pega can be. We know what makes Pega useful, but we took pleasure in showing how Pega can be entertaining as well, and bring positive digital transformation into more casual, everyday situations we see in our own office, not just the business problems we solve for our clients. We made it our particular focus to show that for all Pega can do with workflows, it can do the same with playflows .

What’s Next

A key next step for the application will be adding a mobile channel to allow our users to participate using just their phone. Users will be able to play games, smack talk, review statistics, and receive notifications when another user challenges them to a game, or when it’s their turn in an ongoing game. As part of the mobile application, we plan to include integrations with social media channels, which will allow users to easily share their results across their network.

Additionally, we plan to use Next Best Decision Strategies to predict a player’s next opponent based on their accuracy. This would help to create fair tournaments between players. Tournaments are another feature we plan to expand on. We expect to leverage our existing case types as children of parent case Tournaments, and build out a flow that will hold games, calculate matchups, and track player statistics across all of the tournament games and rounds.

We also plan to create an option to use a ‘handicap’, which is calculated based on previously stored data that can be used to even up matchups between players of varying skill levels so that it is a fair game. This will allow people to play against each other even if they are at different skill levels.

Friendly is easily generalizable to other games and competitions, even those of a more professional nature—in the future, we plan to add a “Sales Competition” case type that can be used to track employee performance in sales departments. Employees can track their numbers in real-time with ease and see how they are doing compared to the rest of their team. Managers can use our reporting to see how outcomes changed for each employee over the competition time period and use advanced Pega analytics to understand performance across different groupings.

Adding a little bit of friendly competition is a great way to maintain engagement in the workplace, and as development continues, we hope to see Friendly become a fixture in offices and home-offices everywhere.