Gaming Insider

“Gaming has come of age,” and is no longer confined to “Joystick-obsessed guys who once hunkered down in basements for hours,” Adweek declares in this week’s Digital Special Issue looking at the hobby in depth.

Despite the fact that Adweek also said that in 2009, there’s no doubt that today, gaming is fertile ground for marketers to reach consumers across numerous demographics in innovative and engaging ways. It seems like every month there’s a new study that aims to break our assumptions about who gamers are (the audience is older than you think and skews more female than you think), and the proliferation of mobile devices as gaming platforms means that more and more of people’s idle time is now spent gaming – which, for a savvy marketer, is an opportunity to reach people.

Adweek’s special issue is packed with some great insights into gaming culture and opportunities for marketers that are definitely worth checking out. Below we recap a handful of articles from the issue.

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Game developers like Zynga have thrown a major spotlight on social gaming with titles like “Farmville” and “Cafeworld.” At the same time, these games are bucking another major trend, that of subscription online gaming. The model that made “World of Warcraft” such a huge money-maker for Blizzard and Activision might be ready to surrender to so-called “Free to Play” games.Anyone who’s played Farmville is familiar with how most free-to-play games work — you can get started for free, and if you’re content with a baseline gameplay experience you can continue that way. If you pay, you get a bit more, from in-game items to quick advancement through the game’s challenges.

And boy, can you pay. A pre-teen in the U.K. racked up $1300 in charges buying “Farmville” credits on his parents’ credit card, the Guardian reported last week. While that sort of consumer isn’t entirely typical, having an engaging game with what’s called an “elastic velvet rope” — a paywall that lets people go farther the more they pay — is almost a license to print money.

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Last month was the annual DICE (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) Summit, and there was one talk in particular that captured a lot of imaginations — Carnegie Mellon University Professor Jesse Schell’s “Design Outside the Box” talk, which covered Facebook, convergence, and the future of reality-based gaming.I knew this talk was generating tons of buzz when, at a recent conference I attended, it was heavily copied by not one but two separate presenters. The biggest takeaway from Schell’s presentation — and you should definitely watch the whole thing if you have the time — is that games that connect to reality, either by letting you compete with your friends, or by awarding you points for real-world activities, exert a special kind of psychological hold on gamers, especially casual gamers.

Social apps like Foursquare are currently taking advantage of this concept, and they’re also getting partners like Bravo into the act, awarding users badges for checking into locations that appear on the “Real Housewives” TV shows and eating at “Top Chef” restaurants. The TV network is essentially giving Foursquare users points and recognition for living the Bravo lifestyle.

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In his last post, my fellow Gaming Insider Josh Lovison mentioned the possibility of advertisers reevaluating the advergame space, especially in light of the success of the distribution channels through the Xbox Live Marketplace and the Playstation Network store.While it would be great to see an uptick in quality branded games, there are definitely some barriers. For one, the skill set for making fun, simple, casual games isn’t especially widespread — it seems like it’s easy to make an OK advergame, but very difficult to make a good one.

That said, with all the tools available on the wide variety of social media and content sites, there are many ways that companies without a lot of experience in gaming can nonetheless create a strong casual game offering without necessarily outsourcing or hiring someone with the video game developer skill set. A great example is a  a simple choose-your-own adventure game developed by the English Metropolitan Police, designed to educate British youths about the dangers and consequences of carrying knives (and the fact that British police can search you without probable cause, apparently). The game, while very slickly produced, only requires a solid understanding of YouTube annotation functionality and video production skills — something any medium-to-large-sized firm should be able to muster.

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EA’s “Sin to Win” promo should have aligned with social marketing best practices instead of conforming to crude gamer stereotypes.

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” goes the famous quote by H.L. Mencken, which many marketers seem to take to heart. After all, if you want to maximize your reach, you ought to appeal to the lowest common denominator, right? Wrong, as Electronic Arts found out this week, as its “Sin to Win” promotion for the upcoming “Dante’s Inferno” inspired an enormous amount of backlash which eventually forced the company to apologize for the whole scheme.

The Cliff Notes version of the promotion is that EA was encouraging Comic-Con attendees to “Commit acts of lust” with “booth babes” (by which they simply meant “take a picture with a booth babe”) and then tweet a photo link to the Dante’s Inferno development team’s feed with a #Lust hashtag appended. The grand prize, according to the flyer handed out at Comic-Con, was a “night of lust” with two of said booth babes (by which they meant a chaperoned dinner).

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Most games that include moral choices let users choose between hero and villain — with no options in between (image via Flickr).

As video games continue to mature as a medium, one of the major narrative elements being included in AAA titles is the idea of your character’s moral choices having an effect on the outcome of the game and the game world itself. Some of the top games of the last year have incorporated this element, including “nFamous” and “Fable 2″ (where your character’s moral choices not only affect the world, but also your character’s appearance, ranging from saintly to devilish). Several major upcoming titles are also using this element: “Mass Effect 2″ and “Dragon Age,” to name two, both currently under development by BioWare.

But there’s a problem with this approach. In almost every game that features these kinds of moral decisions, the choices aren’t just easy, they’re totally transparent. The first decision you make is whether you want the character to be the good guy or the bad guy, and then all decisions you must make to achieve that outcome are predetermined: Feed the puppy to be the good guy, kick it to be the bad guy. As former Activision developer James Portnow put it in his column this week on Gamasutra: “We tend to deliver to our players all the exciting possibilities of either being Mother Theresa or being Hitler.”

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Integrating Facebook with Xbox 360 would let gamers leverage the power of community to seek out more compatible opponents (Image via Flickr).

Last week, my colleague Josh touched on the new social features Microsoft is adding to the Xbox 360 – Facebook Connect and Twitter functionality that will allow users to broadcast their gaming activities to their friends.

As one of Josh’s commenters noted, bringing Facebook onto Xbox is of limited utility. Without an easy-to-use keyboard, at least as easy as a mobile phone keyboard, for example, the main use for access to your Facebook account on Xbox Live will be to ping friends to come join you in-game, or to show off your gamer score.

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