On Thursday, February 4th, the League of Kickass Business People, held a networking event titled GET IN THE GAME: WHY GAMING ISN’T JUST FOR GAMERS ANYMORE where attendees would find out how gaming is revolutionizing their business and the world from a panel led by Vancouver’s gaming industry leaders. The event discussed how gaming trends were shaping everything from customer experiences to community building, leadership training to team collaboration, simplified interfaces to communicating complexities - and how gaming’s impact will accelerate in the next decade. As a marketer with a keen interest in the video game industry, it piqued my interest enough to attend.

Acting as moderator, Eric Brooke, Principal of Friuch Consulting, started the panel discussion with the statistic that 63% of people in the United States between the ages of 15-75 played games. With the adoption of the Nintendo Wii by a greater range of demographics this current console generation, as well as the growth of social media games, the previous notion of who a gamer is has changed. Gaming is no longer just about entertainment as the use of gaming technology has also now provided tools for consumer engagement to keep people interested in market research and what brands are talking about. An example of how far gaming technology has gone, it has been implemented to teach academics like Math, English and Science in alternative education programs such as Quest to Learn.

Mark Magnusson, Magnus Media

Mark highlighted the emergence and growth of casual gaming through social media and how it has been changing the gaming space. In the past year, users have been going from a voyeuristic attitude online to participating in the online social media landscape. This allows for companies the opportunities to tap into different social tribes. He stated that casual gaming spaces are a game changers where games like Farmville have a huge population of users that use it as a social touchpoint where people can connect and interact with other people. I’m not sure if I could call that aspect of casual gaming as a game changer though as MMORPG’s have been doing this for years now. However, the sheer size of people playing Farmville does make that aspect more mainstream and accepted now.

Also, the introduction of motion controllers rather than the traditional haptic interfaces has allowed for a wider adoption by the general public. Technology is now the enabler rather than the solution and success is achieved by putting people first rather than the objectives and strategies. By using technology to get to the end goal, it helps the user to have an experience that matters to them. This was really nothing new as we heard this from the introduction of Project Natal where they stated that the traditional controller was a major roadblock in the adoption of gaming. Mark believes the next step would be Augmented Reality where he brought up the example of Adidas and their augmented reality campaign where you would be able play games on your mobile phone and using your sneaker as a controller.

Ian Clark, RealSpace

Ian described how his company applied gaming technology to other areas. Originally they produced 3D walkthroughs for real estate development and now creating safety training. Similar to how a Gran Turismo gamer became Pro Race driver, RealSpace provides companies simulations for users to gain experience in a virtual environment before going onto a real one. This allows users to go through worst-case scenarios that are too dangerous to go through in real life.

McElroy Flavelle, Compass Engine

McElroy had the most animated presentation of the night with probably the best introduction with ““I have worked at EA like almost everyone in the video game industry here. I haven’t been fired by EA, which makes me different than most of them.”

McElroy probably had the most informative presentation, highlighting various means that gaming has been used in business. He touched on what Eric and Mark covered and went into examples how you could use gaming to reach your customers.

• Using the billboards for Barrack Obama’s presidential campaign in Burnout Paradise, this is probably the most easily related use of gaming for marketers in the form of advertisements.
• For his example of using gaming to inform, Oregon Trail was used since it had been used in the British Columbia school districts to teach North American history.
• SuperAwards, recently sold for $50 million, was highlighted as an example for using gaming for customer acquisition, which allows Facebook users to answer surveys to receive in-game currency.
• Gaming can also be used for causes. The Facebook game Lil Green Patch, for all the land the player bought, they would also purchase real rainforest. To this date, over 70 million square feet of Costa Rican rainforest has been saved by virtue of people playing the game.
• Similar to PlayStation Home and Second Life, Mingleverse allows users to engage with other users in real-time and is an example of games for communication.
• Foursquare was again brought up as an example of games for business intelligence. Using the information gathered, you can learn what your users do in the real world based on where they go and their frequency.

Steve Bocska, Pug Pharm Productions

Steve gave the group a demo of their latest online game, Snoget. Even after letting it sink in for two weeks and visiting their website, I’m still not sure of the goal of their game is. It seems to be where you select items as they float past your screen and then compare your items with other users. Maybe I’m just too set in my traditional gaming mindset to understand the game.

Victor Lucas, The Electric Playground

Unfortunately Victor didn’t put together a presentation but did answer some questions about the future of gaming. He voiced his reaction to the earlier presentations by relating it to something to the early days of something out of Minority Report with personalized marketing that are able to tie people’s purchasing habits and behaviours. Speaking with a passion for video games, he voiced his concern that the video game business is no longer built around the love of video games but rather business cases and market analysis.

Bringing up the argument of hardcore vs casual gaming, he is seeing the migration of big name developers moving to small downloadable and Facebook games. He sees developers working on AAA title games playing Farmville and seeing their stats and scores and wondering if they are no longer supporting the industry and playing other Triple-A games. Highlighting that the games that excite him are not due to market dissection and business analysis, but rather those that take big risks in story telling with graphics and compelling characters and letting him escape, he stated that the industry grew out of inspiration from movies such as Indiana Jones, Superman and Star Wars, but he is not sure if games such as Farmville can inspire the industry on the same level.  Hoping that the smaller games will be gateways to more hardcore gaming, it may be detrimental to the industry if people stop there. He reinforced this issue with the example of third party developers on the Wii that can’t sell anything against Nintendo titles.

As a rebuttal to Victor’s concerns, Steve Bocska states that what is currently happening in the video game industry has happened before in the movie industry. Similar to how the VCR opened options for video with the growth of niche offerings like, home fitness videos and porn, the new forms of gaming is just opening the industry to more opportunities and providing people with more options to the traditional cartridge/console retail model. There will always be big budget video games in production just like how James Cameron can get green-lit for $500 million that cost to produce Avatar.

All in all, the event was eye opening although I would have liked to see larger studios represented, as it seemed to focus more on the small social media games. It would have been great to hear about how game studios are building communities around their products by allowing more interactions between the users and their games like with Halo, Forza Motorsports, Uncharted 2 and EA Sports games where users are able to upload videos online and share them with friends.