You are a modern douche. Living life through a smartphone like a lemming, bumping shoulders with hypnotized strangers right before you (both) tweet about it.
You feel like you deserve the best and we answered this undeserved sense of entitlement by creating stunningly gorgeous HD wallpapers for your iPhone.
They are now downloadable for free here.
Today's gamers are very different than the stereotype from the 90s of a nerdy, acne-packed boy named Kevin who behaves like a socially awkward penguin and sweats profusely whenever he takes the leap of faith to make extended eye contact with an object of lust.
Latitude Research just released a new study, asking 290 smartphone owners between the ages of 15-54 who self-identified as "gamers" (whether casual or enthusiasts).
;)
One of the most interesting insights of this study comes from this very interesting nuance.
Games have been notorious for changing people's behaviors as they provide a high level of engagement and involvement from their audience.
The emergence of social platforms (whether through 'traditional' social networks like Facebook or social gaming via Xbox Live / PlayStation Network) and location-based technologies have provided opportunities for people to participate in shared experiences engraved with a deeper meaning than the pure thrill of playing.
This seems to resonate in the mind of participants, who also want to see games - and their unique storytelling capacity - do a better job of connecting people and leveraging the power of communities to make an impact in the real world.
If gaming mechanisms can change marketing and advertising, it can surely change lives, too.
This is quite a trite observation by now (like most of the study, to be perfectly honest), but games are now perceived as a medium for self-improvement: personal wellness, learning, etc. Brain Training was released in 2005 and WiiFit in 2008, after all.
The gamification of life inevitably means the gamification of daily, routine, boring activities: running errands, exercising, washing clothes, ironing your man, or guiltily masturbating at night.
This definitely resonates with initiatives like Fiat's brilliant "EcoDrive" initiative, trying to instill gaming mechanics, feedback and incentives when it comes to your driving style.
Infographics are an absolutely delicious way of presenting information. It's been done with great talent and bravado by companies like Wired, GOOD Magazine and many more.
Blogs - like us - love this format because it's visual and it fits within the 5 minutes attention span that we expect our visitors to have (hopefully).
The problem is that it can also over-complexify very straightforward data. And when this data is collected in a very biased way (even though it is being acknowledged a few times in the presentation), the extrapolations that are being made throughout definitely lose their impact.
The implications drawn from the study are shamelessly obvious and only point to the banality of the questions that were asked in the first place.
It's really such a shame that the sense of discovery and elevation that you get while reading this deck vanishes after the first diagram.
Source: The Future of Gaming - A Portrait of the New Gamers (http://www.latd.com/2011/08/23/the-future-of-gaming-a-portrait-of-the-new-gamers/) by Latitude
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Market research firm Newzoo is reporting that U.S. consumers are spending $21.6 billion on video games in 2011, just lower than that in 2010.
Source: Infographics from Newzoo (http://www.newzoo.com/ENG/1589-Infograph_US.html)
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Innovative. Unique. New. Interactive. Engaging. Social. Really really powerful.
Microsoft is introducing new ad units on Xbox Live: NU Ads (Natural User-Interface Ads). NU is how I spell "new" because I am young, and seeing a brand leveraging this peculiar spelling automatically gives it some serious street cred in my mind.
See it in action here (don't forget to look at the "dislike" bar):
What does this video tell us?
You may think "this is spam". I say this is about sharing interests. Teens love doing it. Social networking sites are an amazing tool to show your friends what you like. And being able to instantly tweet about new boring ads with an automatically generated phrase makes this easier than ever before.
Marketers will love those new ad units for how simple they are to deploy, since you just need to repurpose the same commercials that you already use on television.
After all, I love engaging with ads equally no matter what my current activity is: if I am in the mood to go online and play Outland with my friends, I will take 5 minutes of my time and dedicate myself to sharing an Adidas ad with them first, as it will reinforce my sense of belonging.
After all, haven't you always wondered when you were enjoying a good game: "wouldn't it be great if I could take this ad and share it with my friends using a social network?"
I am watching an ad for my favorite lovemark Coca Cola. Not only is it so convincing that I had to go pick up a can from the fridge, but now I see this little banner on my Xbox Live dashboard and cannot resist the urge to click on it using motion gestures (something that "mouse click" or a "button press" cannot achieve in the same powerful and unique way, as they lack the revolutionary power of Kinect).
"The power of Kinect and the power of advertising together can bring engagement for advertisers and consumers to a complete new level.", Enrique de la Garza, Senior Product Planner, Microsoft; while not looking at the camera.
“The new ad units really epitomize the level of engagement that everyone is working towards, [...] You can text, you can tweet, you can vote. That’s phenomenal.”, John M. Lisko, executive communications director of Saatchi & Saatchi LA.
After nearly a year of inception (BRAAAAWWWWHHHH!), the Flip Flap Man finally releases a new track: "Treadmill Indulgence", mashup between Lykke Li's "Little Bit" and Vandalism's "Smash Disco".
You will run. You will cry. You will sweat the music. You will crap your pants running and ask the Mexican guy to clean them up because you work out at Equinox and you deserve racial domination.
Hope you all enjoy the musical ride.
If you want to check Flip Flap Man's other tracks and mixtapes, check out his SoundCloud profile.
For those interested in the details, this is a mashup of:
With additional samples from:
The Entertainment Software Association has released its latest annual report (read our article on the 2010 report here), packed with factoids on how the gaming industry is changing. You can access the full report here, we give you an overview below.
In case it needs to be repeated: acne-packed teenagers living in the attic are far from being the core gaming audience anymore.
Gaming is an adult activity reaching men and women nearly equally, where older audiences can find their joy, too.
The average gamer is 37 years old and one gamer out of 4 is aged 50 and over.
Source: the very insightful report "Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Games Industry, 2011" from the ESA.
Source: ESA's "Essential facts about the computer and video games industry (2011)" (http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2011.pdf)
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Twenty years ago, this article would have been seen as uninspired science-fictioning straight out of nerdy wet dreams. Fifteen years ago, it would have looked like blind glorification of a brand that became synonymous with its category by shaking its conventions upside down and planting its shapes onto our collective unconsciousness. Ten years ago, this article would have been guilty of drooling over a seemingly unbreakable advertising formula harvesting both commercial success and peers’ metallic gratitude. Five years ago, it would have been completely obsolete as the once hegemonic PlayStation brand suffered its first turbulences.
Today, it's a memorial retrospective piece laced with nostalgia and geeky love that should provide plenty of entertainment while you sip that expensive cup of coffee.
WARNING: Long article follows.
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Raph dissects multiplayer mechanics and presents a through a structured, cross-disciplinary lens. If you are remotely interested in game theory, psychology, evolutionary biology, history, sociology, social networking or game design stuff; this is a must read.
For convenience purposes and for lazy ADD readers, we wrote a Cliff Notes' version of the deck. Think of it as the notes a bad intern would take during a great meeting of minds.
1 - Helping: advice and assistance
2 - Relative Status: quantifying a player's achievement against the opponent
3 - Races: first user to reach a given status level wins
4 - Leaderboards: compete with all historical attempts
5 - Tournaments
6 - Flower-picking: compete to get stuff, but there is always more stuff (speed up arrows on a race track). Non-zero sum resource consumption
7 - Dot-eating: zero-sum resource consumption. Whatever I get, you can't have.
8 - Tug of war: I can take your stuff, you can take mine (the engine behind all combat games)
9 - Handicapping: artificially equalizing status in order to provide a tighter race
10 - Secrets: imperfect information (knowledge as a rivalrous good > fog of war in strategy games)
11 - Last man standing
12 - Bidding
13 - Deception and bluffing: misinformation, when secrets are treated as goods
14 - 3rd party betting: I play a bidding game against others, based on the outcome of a multiplayer game
15 - Prisoner's dilemma: teammates with secrets who must choose independently to collaborate or both lose
16 - Gamesmaster pattern: third party directs the game (referee)
*17 - Roles: specialization into different games within one group
18 - Hot potato / ganging up: rotation of roles within multiplayer game
19 - Rituals: ceremonies marking significant transitions within a social structure (wall posts, gifts, for instance): birth, marriage, death, level up, holidays, etc.
20 - Gifts. Super important. (see Marcel Mauss below)
21 - Reciprocity: social expectation of a future return of a gift ("return gift" button?)
22 - Mentoring and twinking: "I get social obligation, you get value" (non-symmetrical exchange). (a car at graduation, Mickey ears when you go to Disney). Strengthens community ties.
23 - Identity: display of status and role via rivalrous goods (skins, shirts, class gear, etc.)
24 - Ostracism: grow removal via denial of common resources (exclusion)
25 - Iterative interaction and Trust. Trust is stronger than reputation (mid-range) which is also stronger than faith (at distance, i.e. social contract).
26 - Guilds/tribes: subnetworks with their own social identity
27 - Exclusivity/ Velvet Rope: use of identity (or other mechanisms) to manipulate the value of goods (VIP clubs)
28 - Guild vs. Guild: competition between social entities
29 - Player-to-player economy = Trade and contract: mutually beneficial interactions between distant nodes on the network
30 - Elections (American Idol is the largest MMO in the world)
31 - Reputation, influence and fame
32 - Public goods: non-rivalrous goods, with temptation to enjoy the good with no contribution (air, public park, etc.)
33 - Tragedy of the commons: flip side of public goods. If they are rivalrous, they can get used up (spawns, territories in a village, etc.). For instance: the Facebook ad market.
34 - Community
35 - Strategy guides: transformation of rule-based secrets into a public good
36 - Teamwork MLSs (wisdom of crowds, DPS systems, Survivor TV show)
37 - Arbitrage: allowing unequal quantified valuations of the same good to arise within the system permits trade that exploits them
38 - Supply chains: cascading unequal valuations of goods arranged in sequence (get a house out of a bottle if you trade it with the right people)
39 - User generated content: forums, character art, role-play narratives, fan fiction, player conventions, weddings, game maps, etc.
40 - Griefing
Source: GDCOnline: my Social Mechanics talk (http://www.raphkoster.com/2010/10/08/gdconline-my-social-mechanics-talk/) by Raph Koster
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No one invents anything anymore. We mash up. We combine. Creativity is being able to combine better than others. Everyone calls it laziness. We marketers call it art.
The idea that the folks at SmartNewSolutions had was to combine all of the above to create an in-banner driving experience.
It's the first of its kind. It's a relevant technical integration. It's a wonderfully attention-grabbing toy for PR generation and award shows. And it's a banner that you will play with for the next 30 seconds (hello engagement rate).
In practice, it's a horribly clunky user experience that is only frustrating for how much greater it could have been. Why not deploy in-game mechanics (objectives, challenges, time, etc. would bring some purpose to what is otherwise just a gimmick)? Why is the product messaging so light (the game logo isn't legible once, the game's eye-wateringly good graphics are sorely undersold by the underwhelming experience of the banner)?
And why can't I ruthlessly stretch Kate Middleton under my wheels while I drive in the streets of London?
You can play with the banner here.
Video game consoles have become entertainment centers offering a wide array of possibilities beyond their initial purpose: movies, online streaming, music capabilities, porn, etc.
The 7th Generation of Consoles (Wii, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) doesn't belong in the ceiling or the basement anymore (even if those were cliches in the first place).
Half of those consoles are located in the living room, where the whole family can enjoy a joyful time of communal synthesis.
This is partly explained by the need for space required by motion-controlled, social hardware. The Wii is the system most likely to be found in the family room (59%).
When consoles aren't located in the living room, they reside in the bedroom. 1 in 5 systems are located in kids' bedrooms (with the Xbox 360 being way ahead of the others: 28% vs. 14% for Wii and 16% for PS3).
Finally, rumors have it that 96% of handheld gamers admitted they played while being on the throne. 2% of those were actual kings who used "throne" in a literal way.
;)
Source: U.S. Console Gaming: The Living Room & Beyond (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/u-s-console-gaming-the-living-room-beyond/)
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