Wii Wii All The Way Home

This morning another piece of Nintendo heaven arrived at my door. A box-fresh Wii complete with Wii Sports and the dodgy Wii-mote control strap. It’s set to shake up my family’s gaming habits by bringing us all together for some serious bonding. But that’s not until Christmas Day. Until then the Wii belongs exclusively to Mii.

Their Walmart, Argos

A review of Argos’ advergame on Adverblog with a revealing comment on the relative size of UK retailers:

I have no idea who Argos is, and the site isn’t innovative at all in graphics and interactivity, but it’s based around toys from the ’80s, and this is enough to grab my attention.

Maybe the game will change that…

quick links 8-Dec-06

A well crafted idea for Logitech: http://www.ballbalancer.com/

Smart but a little over-cooked game for Argos: http://www.goodgamegoodgame.com/

Whack-a-mole re-skin for the National Christmas Tree Association*: Attack of the Mutant Artificial Christmas Trees

*only christmas trees can join.

Meal Or No Meal?

The more virals there are, the harder it is to get noticed. And as we get desensitized to the extremes of the funny, the fleshy or the foul items that crash into our inboxes our own criteria for what IS and what ISN’T worth forwarding on get ever more refined and hard to meet.
But this makes the cut for me.

Meal Or No Meal? is an advergame made to promote a handy new auction service called Price Your Meal where the items on offer are tables in restaurants. It’s a highly satirical take on Deal or no Deal, the TV quiz show for which we have Noel Edmonds to thank. I’ve not seen much of Deal or no Deal but I can safely say this is much better.
What is so impressive is the lengths to which the fellas at Chunk have gone to with the dialogue, video and production quality (the casting of the host is borderline genius - he should be on telly). All for an advergame. The bar just got a little higher.

Sit up and take notice

Business Review Weekly (BRW) is a high profile business magazine based in Australia. It is a conservative magazine, not a publication we would have expected to publish a profile piece on casual games and advergaming. Even when they interviewed 3RD sense for the article we weren’t really sure the piece would actually be published.

It is certainly pleasing that the casual games industry is drawing greater attention from the mainstream business community, but it is hard to know whether as an industry we have reached a maturity where other business sectors see us as a major business opportunity, or just another business fad of the moment.

My thoughts are that any exposure we get as an industry is good, and when it comes from respected mainstream media publications, online or not, we should accept that as a move in the right direction.

I like to think that the recognition we as an industry are getting from this increased exposure is as a result of the hard work invested by the thousands of creative people that work in our industry. We love what we do and we think it’s worthwhile, and millions around the world agree with us.

It’s early days, but it seems the business community is finally sitting up and taking notice.

Roadie Runner

I got sent this by the creator of this game Roadie Runner. It’s a frogger-type game for Make Roads Safe, a group that campaigns to reduce road deaths globally. There are 3 charming things about it: its simplicity, the graphics for the vehicles and the Dirty Pretty Things soundtrack. Have a look and remember to sign the petition.

quick links 16-Nov-06

A smart, well produced Sonic derivative for the School Food Trust - called Snack Dash. I find it a little too hard - but then again, I’m not 12 years old anymore.

Aygo is a weeny car that Toyota make and this is a game about it.

Big, Flat and Twisted is not a game about the Millenium Bridge. It’s for Capri-Sun and it’s very good.

Top ten viral marketing mistakes

This is an interesting list posted on e-consultancy but created by the folks at AzACreations. Apart from the slightly alarming thought that there are even 10 ways to make mistakes with viral marketing, this is a handy list for advergame creators:

1. Neglecting promotion and seeding
Utilise mailing lists, press releases, forums and invest in banner impressions or PPC.

2. Failing to create an incentive for users to pass it along
Make the content itself good/funny – according to AzACreations, 88% of web users say they have forwarded on jokes or cartoons.

3. Failing to capitalise on a campaign that proves successful
If your campaign starts to take off, ask yourself whether you can get any further publicity, further monetise incoming traffic or use it to generate leads.

4. Trying to copy a popular viral campaign when it doesn’t fit your aims
If a campaign isn’t suited for you, you will end up with something that’s out of synch with your brand.

5. Failing to integrate viral campaigns with other marketing efforts
Implement the concept of viral marketing to other campaign processes, and test out different types of viral campaigns.

6. Using a sledgehammer rather than a fine scalpel
Simple ideas, such as email signatures, often produce better results.

7. Failing to understand the SEO value of viral marketing
Try designing viral pieces around your important keywords, and provide users with easy means to link to your application or site.

8. Forgetting to ask the user to take action
Encourage them to submit an email or sign up for a newsletter, as well as adding the application to their website or blog.

9. Not making it easy enough for users to forward content
Use send to friend forms, single button clicks etc.

10. Confusing your marketing message with ‘the hook’ that will attract users
Don’t be too self promoting.

Only one thing I would add - use a specialist.

Who are you calling casual?

I was thinking last night, is being referred to as a casual gamer a put down? Are casual games less important than hard-core games?

Labels are funny things. By adding casual to the title does it make us sound less serious, less committed? Well the statistics being released of late seem to indicate the opposite.

Casual gamers are some of the most dedicated gamers out there. And unlike the young male dominated world of the ‘hard-core’ gamer, casual gamers are made up of all demographics and all ages. The dominant group of casual gamers are in fact women over the age of 30, a fact that comes as no surprise to those in the industry. However it’s not the demographic or age group that immediately jumps to mind of the general public when you talk about computer games.

The beauty of the casual game is its simplicity, and that’s why the worldwide audience of 100 million* continues to grow. Sometimes you just need a little diversion to get through the day.

We at 3RD sense are extremely proud of the games we create, and we thank the lord that people like them and keep coming back to visit. We don’t consider our games casual, and I bet to the majority of Playaholics gamers out there, casual is not even a term they use.

Of course casual games are as important as the more traditional hard-core games. If they were not, then people wouldn’t play them and our industry wouldn’t exist. I just wish we had a better name.

* source: Jupiter Media Metrix

quick links 16-Oct-06

We keep telling whoever will listen that girls like games and a lot of smart game productions have come through recently targeted squarely at them - here’s a couple:

Kiss Chaser - created for Tampax

Action Impulse - created for Unilever’s Impulse

Our Web 2.0 awakening

If you were talking to marketers and you wanted a sound bite, you’d probably say Web 2.0 was about unleashing the power of the community. This is a grand statement, but what does that mean? The best way we can explain it is by drawing on our own experience.

Some time ago, we decided that we wanted to create a directory of online casual games. There were two ways we could go about that, really. The first route would have been to try to build and create that directory ourselves. The second route — and the one we chose — was to build an environment that allowed the users to create their own directory.

We launched Millions Of Games (MOG) five or six months ago, using techniques that were pioneered by sites like Delicious and Flickr. MOG is still in beta. It’s not finished. We haven’t really launched it at all yet. But in that period, over 1400 people have created what is now the world’s biggest directory of online games — something that would have been impossible for us to achieve on our own.

So how does that work? When they come to MOG, players have the opportunity to sign-up for free and create a list of their favourite online games. We call this “mogging”. What makes MOG a Web 2.0 application is that this list is shared with other people. Very quickly you can see who else is playing the same games as you, and you can see what else they are playing.

Very quickly, users create a powerful array of data that would have been impossible to assemble in any other way. That’s an important part of Web 2.0.

Jacqueline Wilson said…what exactly?

First, the well known and hugely popular childrens author Jacqueline Wilson said that junk food, tv and the internet are ‘poisoning childhood‘

“They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to processed “junk”), real play (as opposed to sedentary screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives.”

But then follows a statement of regret that standards of kids’ tv will naturally fall as a result of any loss in ad revenue brought about by a ban on junk food advertising:

“For various reasons including the lack of advertising, our children are not going to get the very best television programmes any more,” said Wilson.

I dunno. There’s always the Beeb. Or maybe for the sake or decent drama on childrens’ commercial channels we should install Krispy Kreme vending machines in all primary school classrooms. These days you just can’t have you’re cake and eat it.

Chrysler.com - an Alexa rank of 9,000?

How can this be? Chrysler.com has an Alexa rank of 9,000. For an online brochure? Surely this is a spike caused by a runaway piece of viral content?

But no - a small amount of casual Googling reveals that Chrysler have been using branded games with huge success for over 2 years now. As a consequence of this partnership with Wild Tangent, they have found that online activity has had an increasing influence on the whole selling chain:

Chrysler is using a variety of custom branded games involving their products to lift its brand recognition and purchase intent among consumers. A “Chrysler Golf” title signed up 124,732 players and resulted in a 33% lift in purchase intent, while a “Jeep 4×4 Trail of Life” game got 383,403 users …and more than 1,000 Jeeps had been sold to players of the game in the last 18 months.

Recognising that I might be the last person in the games industry (or on the planet) to have spotted Chrysler’s investment in advergaming I still can’t believe this has been going on for so long; as our feeling is that it’s only this year that ad agencies and brands are accepting games as part of the language of marketing so that that they’re discussed as known feature of the landscape rather than ‘unknown territory’.

What I particularly like about what they have done is the ‘if we build it they will come’ approach. These may have been created as one-off promotional games but there is ongoing value in aggregating all the content to give their target audience exactly what they would have gone elsewhere for. Which means that once more I can post a link to this: It’s time to experiment 3.

Hitching a ride?

There’s a boom in advergames for cars at the moment, and some are much better than others.

A recent game for the Toyota Yaris was nicely produced, but it squanders this excellent foundation by being too difficult to understand and play.

Worse, it drives straight past its target audience. If the idea was to market the Yaris to young women flaunting their car about town, then this wasn’t helped by the game’s harsh colours, structure and complexity. In fact, the car at the centre of the game comes off like an aggressive prowler stalking the neighbourhood. Not a good look.

My guess is this was not developed by a games specialist, but rather by an in-house web designer or programmer who decided to try their hand at games design. Why is this my guess? The final product seems not to be based on solid market research, meaning that while the production and the design are pretty good, the fundamentals are missing.

This don’t mean I dismiss the possibility of using advergames to market cars to young women — far from it. For example, racing games such as Peugeot Time Trials and Driving BMW may seem masculine, but their simple objectives and adrenaline charged experiences have made them popular with diverse audiences, which naturally would include young women.

At 3RD sense we recently created an advergame for Nissan that we hope is another example of how content and gameplay can be tailored to the particular interests of a target market segment. The idea behind this game was to show how an extreme, outdoors model of car would complement an active lifestyle. In the game, characters ride snowboards down a valley, hurtling towards Nissan Xtrails parked by the finishing line. The game engages with its target audience because it is fun, has an unobtrusive soundtrack, is more graphically advanced than most other car games and above all, it gets the adrenaline pumping.

If we want to make successful games for the car industry, or any industry for that matter, we must be creative, take risks and move onto new things if our idea isn’t working. Above all, we should always tailor the gameplay and content to the target audience and objectives. If we’re not onto something good then we should get out of the drivers seat and find another ride.