Client work
PourPlay: wine education built as play
Client work, designed and built by Riv Lux Media.
Wine education has a format problem. The material is genuinely interesting, but the standard delivery (a course, a tasting mat, a glossary) asks for a commitment most people won't make for a drink they were going to buy anyway.
PourPlay teaches it through play instead. There are games and tastings, plus a points economy that gives people a reason to come back tomorrow.
What we built
A gamified wine-education platform where players learn food-and-wine pairing through play and earn PourPoints, collectable cards, and coupons for doing it. The reward layer is how a one-off visit turns into a habit, and the habit is what actually teaches.
Underneath it is the same catalog infrastructure that powers PairPlays: a real wine catalog with prices, ratings, and tasting notes, kept current by refresh tooling instead of hand edits.
The interesting design problem
Two audiences with different needs, one product.
Drinkers want to feel less lost in front of a wall of bottles. They need quick wins, with little friction and little jargon.
The business needs the platform to reach people at the moment they're actually choosing a bottle. That's a different design target entirely, and it's where a rewards economy earns its keep. Points, cards, and coupons make the platform useful right at that decision point. Without them, it would only be useful during a lesson.
Serving both without letting the commercial layer swallow the educational one is the whole craft of the project.
What this demonstrates
Game mechanics applied to genuine education. A points-and-rewards economy that has to stay balanced and resistant to abuse. Catalog data at scale, shared across products. And a platform that serves a consumer audience and a commercial one from the same build.
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