quick links 30-June-06

More fussball from Skol this time.
A great little game for sticky.tv
…and a great little game just for the fun of it.

quick links 28-June-06

Specsavers Keepy Uppy game - enough football games yet?
Article on Adotas discusses some interesting research about which demographics prefer which game types.
Game for Gradjobs.co.uk

A different a-gender

Whether you call it a fact, a cliché or a myth, there’s no doubting that almost anyone who has anything to say about casual games has something to say about the perceptions that women play casual games and men play hardcore games.

A big thankyou to Guilded Lilies (GL) for, at last, advancing this discussion beyond simplistic name-calling.

GL argues that women who play games are being placed into two different categories — the ‘girl gamer’ and the ‘casual gamer’. This isn’t the best way to make women who play games feel loved, GL says, because it does not approach them as individuals.

But what really caught my eye was the comment from Tekanji. She said that as a woman gamer, she’d prefer to be just a ‘person who plays video games’. Tekanji basically asks — why should we be classified as a ‘girl gamer’ or ‘boy gamer’? Why are we not just “gamers”?

It’s a good question. However, with my traditional marketing background, I know these classifications have probably come about because the easiest way to start segmenting markets is according to gender. And no business person can or should ignore the statistics showing that while women/girls account for about 44 percent of online gamers, they are far more likely to be playing casual games than hardcore games.

So, that’s probably why the gender categorisation has come about - its easy and the stats are exciting. But that doesn’t mean its the best way to start to segment potential markets. None of us thinks of ourselves as being part of a gender group or a constructed category when we go to find a game to play. None of us thinks of ourselves in terms of a stereotype. We’re Anne who likes Quake. Or Sam who is hooked on Solitaire. Or Wilhelm who’d rather play a virtual 18 holes of golf.

So what is the best way to categorise or segment? Because no matter what you think about it, segmentation remains an effective tool in any marketing or product development activity, including game development. But the most effective segmentation requires us to have a deep understanding of who plays, why they play and why they like it. We need to go beyond simple demographics of gender and age into the varied and subtle reasons why groups of individuals play games.

What follows then, is that as game developers, we need to be designing our games for groups of people with common interests. Rather than thinking of them as ‘boy games’ or ‘girl games’, we should think of them as games that appeal to people who like to be intellectually stretched. Or games for people who like a two minute break. Or for people who can’t get enough of the Smurfs. People who get bored on public transport. People who like to kill time (as opposed to the dentist) in the dentist’s waiting room.

If we do this successfully, the individual will never realise that they’ve ever been categorised in the first place. They just love the game and we know we’re giving players what they want.

Once we have that nailed, we can explore drilling down deeper still and looking at games adaptation based on user needs/wants within the game play experience. That’s probably a discussion for another day though…

The Little Gamer

Act Like a Man - drink beer

You’re a beer brand, so you need to connect with your audience through either common areas of interest (football), event-based content experiences (live music) or aspirational advertising. Right?

Not if you’re Milwaukee’s Best Light. Just create some simple, well produced, funny and original advergames that appeal to the average Joe. They left me grinning and more than a little thirsty. Can you get this stuff in London?

quick links 23-June-06

http://quiz.hildebrand.co.uk/index.html - England Tourist Board quiz
http://injurytime.skive.co.uk/ - game for megastar.co.uk
http://www.keepthemuppy.com/ - mad Virgin Money game
http://www.time-to-shine.com/tts/ - ???

quick links 22-June-06

http://www.samsung.com/se/current/campaign/d600/index_en.htm - there’s a game in there somewhere.
http://www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/?p=268 - interesting lineage of match 3 games from the Ludologist.
http://www.actonimpulse.com/game/index.html - game for Impulse.

Beyond the game

If you read some of my previous posts, you could be thinking: “Sounds great, but get real! We sell stuff — that’s what we do. 20 bucks and away you go. It doesn’t get more sophisticated than that.”

I’d encourage any doubters to take a look at the ’serious’ gaming world — the hardcore games. With their Steam engine, Valve — the guys behind Half Life — have created a pretty decent preview of where we could head in the casual games industry. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely worth a look.

Real Networks has tried to do something similar for the casual game sector with RealArcade, which does take a few steps in the right direction. It puts a tool on your desktop which helps you keep track of your games — full versions, demos, and new games available for download. It’s quite a nice idea but it basically stops there. But apart from organising your games, RealArcade is still basically about pushing new content on users all the time. This focus on selling to the expense of providing a richer gaming experience is its downfall. In my experience, many users get fed up and uninstall RealArcade.

We need to push this approach much, much further…

The Little Gamer�

quick links 19-June-06

http://absolut.com/ - find the bottles; exquisite.
http://www.pumafootball.com/buffon.jsp - Beat the ‘keeper. Nice video, lousy game.
http://www.growingforlife.org/game/ - this one grew on me.

7 out of 8 don’t believe TV ads…

…according to new research from ITV and discussed in more depth at Big Picture. Unless 1 in 8 people have had a lobotomy, what’s most amazing here is that some people still do believe (after all, it’s on telly - it must be true).

Use a specialist

Have a look at this advergame for PJ Smoothies. It’s a well produced and thought out promotion - except for one thing - the game is a shocker. It’s such a frustrating experience that it undoes all the other good work that’s gone into it. Advergames do nothing until they engage the user - once you have their attention, a dialogue can begin and many things become possible. But a weak game undermines the whole package.

My advice? Use a specialist. Yes, this is more than just a game, but without a game that get’s my attention at its heart, it’s doing more harm than good.

Cash for content

The casual game sector is the darling of the media, the geek-o-sphere and the investment community. Every week, another articles appears in Forbes or the New York Times (free registration required) saying our little world is going through a massive growth spurt. And it’s true. Whether we look at diverse multinationals like Microsoft and Electronic Arts or casual game (and advergame) specialists like ourselves, suddenly we’re finding that last year’s school uniform doesn’t fit anymore.

But that doesn’t mean we’re ready to grow up.

The Little Gamer

Child labour

My kids love testing the advergames we create.

We often found ourselves going into client meetings and telling them what kids love — like we’d have any idea! We’ll say things like “they love physical comedy”, and of course we know this is true. But then we’ll create something and show it to the kids and they’ll go “What is this, it’s stupid!” Or there’s a part of it they’ll think is really cool and you’ll go “Really? That?”

I showed them our Wolf N Swine game, which tells the story of the three little pigs — except it’s the pig’s revenge. Sick of having his house blown down, he gets hold of the wolf and whacks him.
In our first version of this game, there was a nice little story at the beginning that sets it up, and a pig who came out and told the wolf not to mess with him. We thought that was really funny but the kids said “why have you got that in there? It’s not funny. I just want to play the game.” Possibly they were right — it didn’t need a story. It was like having two sets of instructions.
It would be really nice if they said a lot of “that’s cool” when we weren’t expecting it, but it doesn’t happen as often. But whether they’re giving us unexpected criticism or praise, they’re a great sounding board. As long as I can get them to pay attention for long enough. That’s the problem with kids these days…

Real objectives

I know I’ve mentioned the AT&T campaign before, but it’s worth discussing again with regard to the whole issue of strategic thinking in advergames design.

Achieving 87,000 hours of brand exposure — as claimed for the AT&T game — is a process goal. It’s a means to an end. It’s not an end in itself.

Strategic thinkers in marketing want to track the relationship between process goals and marketing outcomes, such as measurable increases in awareness, consideration and purchase. The advergaming industry needs to get smarter if we want to shift games from the “nice to have” basket to “must have.”

Branding is increasingly something you can offer as a metric with games and other online content. There are opportunities to deliver accountable solutions, whether you measure new leads or increases in brand awareness. When we’re accountable, we’ll have the respect of marketers.

Our place in the sun

Those of us who create advergames for a living face a huge challenge — putting ourselves on the radar within the wider advertising and marketing industry, especially with some of the larger companies. And a big part of this comes down to how we measure return on investment (ROI).

To pull apart ROI, let’s look at the return, then the investment.

The R in ROI

When it comes to the return, there’s little recognition by most marketers today of anything that advergames can offer beyond direct response — play, laugh, click-through, buy. Branding can be a key reason for creating an advergame, but it’s not included in how marketers are evaluating them.

Games sit in a strange area because they sort of do everything from branding to direct response; they try to be all things to all marketers. We’re almost trying to wear too many hats at once. That causes one of the biggest challenges for us, as it means we must gain credibility with all the different camps that own these territories — lead generation, brand management, etc.

The I in ROI

When it comes to the investment, it helps to compare our situation to TV advertising. When someone calculates the ROI of a TVC, they never include the production budget as part of the cost, even though it can be millions and millions of dollars. The cost they track is the biggest cost — the media spend required to reach those eyeballs.

But for a game, production is the biggest expense. Although seeding a game is increasingly a large part of the spend, the actual production cost is basically where it starts and ends. And in the advergaming industry, we’re factoring production costs into our ROI.

I’m immersed in the agency culture in London, and it’s clear to me that there are many things we need to shake out of that tree before advergaming can really become established. For a start, we need to align some of the basic comparisons, so R always means R and I always means I — whether we’re talking about TVCs or advergaming or direct mail. But realistically, we’re not really at the stage to make those comparisons yet. Our industry is still in an embryonic stage.