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Game-Design Evolution – Introduction

This will be the first of a series of posts about the new objectives of game designers.
Today, in fact, social-game designers have to consider revenue issues and business models since the beginning of their creative processes.

Games are one of the main reasons why people visit Facebook. In fact, it is estimated that about 40% of users are online to play social games. This means that more than two hundred million people enjoy playing on Facebook every month, and that the top ten titles on social network can boast over twelve million users each.

In the same way as the entertainment industry is rapidly moving toward online business models, for example cloud gaming, digital delivery and social gaming, so game designers need to adapt to this situation too. They have to develop their technical-cultural knowledge in order to link creativity with market laws, which have to be more and more aggressive and innovative; so, today, game designers have to find the perfect mix between fun factors and revenues.
This does not imply a leveling of gameplay in favor of monetizing for its own sake: in fact, gameplay is gaining importance even more than before, because of the fierce competition and the staggering growth of the sector. However, gameplay is increasingly focused on simplicity and on the emotional stimulus rather than on actions to do or on th aesthetic depth of the ludic architecture.Read More

Three social gaming trends for 2011 | Gamasutra: Joost Rietveld’s Blog

Social gaming, both expanding and diversifying the gamer population, has been maturing at rapid pace resulting in heavy consolidation, while at the same time leaving room for innovation. Drawing in part on 2010’s social gaming summit, consultancy activities in the social gaming sector and academic interests, in this article I look at three broad social gaming trends for 2011.

Trend 1. Mobile Social Gaming

’2011 will see the rise of mobile social games, both on Facebook as well as on other platforms such as iOS (Apple), Android Market and HTML5.’

Trend 2. Location Based Social Gaming

‘Backed by location based services, 2011 will see the rise of niche products in which cohesive communities will be served with innovative and meaningful products.’

Trend 3. Social Advergames

When properly executed, advergames are an extremely effective marketing tool. Disney acquired social game developer Playdom in July 2010 with the likely rationale of brand proliferation of Disney’s intellectual property rights through Playdom’s games and reach. McDonalds was one of the first and most visible to actually engage in social advergaming by taking over Farmville for a day in the form of a gigantic in game dynamic advertisement. Whereas Frima has attempted to iterate on the success of Farmville in favor of Mazda by developing Mazda’s DriverVille.
‘As companies have become aware of the strength of social media in 2010, 2011 will see the rise of holistic social advergames.’

Game-mechanics and game-dynamics of the gamification process

The process of gamification is based on the integration of typical game components into websites, online communities, content portals or business services and, in general, others non-gaming contexts.
But what kind of techniques is needed to obtain the desired results?
There are two different aspects to be considered during the gamification process: they are called game-mechanics and game-dynamics; the former are the tools needed to create the gamification infrastructure that lies under any game, the latter represent the human needs and desires that are inherently in everyone of us and can be satisfied taking advantage of game-mechanics.

Gamify your business – main goals

Gamification has a couple of very interesting objectives that we are going to explain in details in this post.
The first one is “to encourage an active and measurable behavior”. The implementation of gaming mechanics is one of the most efficient way to involve people in activities on the site or service. It’s a really special participation because it’s an active one: the user does something!
It’s obvious that an active contribution is more efficient than a passive one because the communication message is connected to the action itself and is melted in the context of the experience.
In this kind of environment lies another fundamental advantage: the behavior of the audience is measurable, gathering data based on actions that users do inside the game. In this way, it’s possible to profile the audience, focusing better on the target user or expanding the target audience.

An introduction to Gamification

Gamification is a meta word that is gaining popularity day after day.
The first part of it is made by game, a term often associated to fun and amusement without any particular purpose.
There’s more: gaming is not only that but taking advantage of interaction is becoming a powerful means to convey messages of every kind.
Among them you can consider the improvement of customer management, build loyalty and maximize the performance of employees and partners.

It’s a really different point of view that shift the focus away from the traditional gaming market, based on the production of titles that have a great appeal on young males, and that can reach different demographic categories.