Kiss Insight

NOT JUST FOR KIDS 26 October 2010

Nik Shah from the Future Foundation talks to us about gaming are why it is so much more than child's play.

Gaming has traditionally been associated with teenage boys and endless hours spent in front of a glowing console. But games are no longer just for kids, in fact family stage and income actually make no difference to the likelihood of having a console in the house. Men are just as likely as boys (according to Future Foundation research, the mean age of a gamer is now 39), and women aren’t far off the radar when it comes to the moreish world of gaming.

Proportion who play computer/video games at least once a week

You can see in the graph above that actually games console penetration is broadly spread and that those that play once are week are not just the teenagers we once perceived.

Not only is Gaming now broadly spread across demographics but is now the largest entertainment industry in the world with revenues coming in a variety of forms. From the average £40 cover price for a new game through to the add-on packs and onto, perhaps the most interesting for this audience, the in-game advertising. The most recent example of this is The Sims who included branded merchandise in it’s game, the Superdry range of hoodies were available for Sims gamers to buy. And in fact gamers like this branded addition, the Future Foundation have found that 30% of gamers actually think real-world brands make a game seem more realistic. Unlike other media, where the presence of ads is a way to fund Free content, in the game world people like ads, or even pay for branded content.

Games, then, offer ads a way to fulfil the goal to “be the content” and now we move one step beyond this. Game-like interactivity is beginning to creep into high-budget online advertising. From Old Spice’s commercials which allow users to interact using social media to Tipp-Ex’s Hunter and Bear series on YouTube, the most innovative online ads are more and more interactive and game-like.

From an industry point of view, changes are also afoot. Music companies are raking in vast sums from use of their back catalogues in games such as Singstar. New bands, meanwhile crave the exposure to a captive audience that the use of their tunes on a game like Grand Theft Auto can bring.  The idea that a successful action movie spawns its own game franchise is now de rigeur. Increasingly, blockbuster games lead to their own movie series. Where Lara Croft once raided, Resident Evil and Prince of Persia have set up home.

One medium which has interacted with gaming in such a way as to scare the pants off game developers has been social networking. Fully 40% of social networking site users claim to have played a game within their social networking site (i.e Farmville, Mafia Wars). And what’s more, women are more likely than men to have played these social games and the audience is significantly more spread out by age than the total gaming population.

Traditional games are fighting back, of course, by trying to tap into the same social networks to increase engagement. Xbox achievements, for example, use Facebook Connect to broadcast a gamer’s latest achievements to their newsfeed.

Mobile internet is also driving the level of sharing. Social networking is the most popular activity on the mobile internet, driven by social networking apps, which as we see here are the most popular kind of app, with nearly 70% of people with app-enabled phones using them. The Future Foundation research also found that people who access social networks on their mobile phone check their networks more often, and update their status more often than others. Mapping apps are the second most popular kind of app overall, but games come a close third in the list. If we look at only those users who have actually paid for an app, we see that games come top, suggesting that here, as elsewhere, games are particularly effective at getting consumers to dig into their pockets.

In this expanding world of games, it is not only the social or entertainment world that see it's potential. The Guardian has recently employed game-like methods online. During the expenses scandal The Guardian built an interface for their readers to go through the files themselves when they were made public, and created a game-like incentive to classify the documents. With a progress bar on every page, reading through dozens of expenses claims suddenly felt important, and even fun. The result was that over 200,000 expenses claims were scrutinised within a week. Similarly in light of the recent Budget cuts, The Guardian offered its readers the chance to try and better Osborne’s budgetary management by making their own cuts and savings.

Hopefully these examples should demonstrate the power of games to achieve serious ends, and engage people for purposes other than the killing of zombies

Another element to the expanding world of gaming comes in the arena of healthcare. Acme, the leviathan supermarket, financial services and general life management group, begin to supply self-diagnosis machines to their health insurance customers. By teaming up with Acme’s Stickycard loyalty scheme, Android and Kinect Fit, they deliver a competitive, rewarding and personalised healthcare regime which results in a fitter, happier, more productive nation. You get a discount on your premiums just for signing up, and a personalised profile is built up from an initial consultation. Participants are sorted into leagues according to their individual needs. Points are then awarded for an array of activities, from completing certain exercises on your Kinect Fit, going a certain number of weeks without eating cake, and achieving certain outcomes on your self-diagnosis equipment, e.g. keeping blood pressure lower than a certain reading or losing weight. These achievements are automatically shared among friends and lead to competition and mutual encouragement. Rewards can be adjusted according to individuals – fatties can exercise their way towards earning a low-fat pie, while fitness freaks can get discounts on new equipment. The obesity epidemic is solved and its inventor gets a Noble Prize.

Games are more widely played and more diverse in their forms than ever before. What’s more, the boundaries between games and other behaviour are melting away. Social networks are energising these developments and allowing them to reach far beyond traditional gamer audiences, particularly through the rise of automatic sharing. There are opportunities here for brands to not only send out messages, but to take a more active role in consumer lives, change behaviour and build lasting relationships. Games open out a range of possibilities for entertainment, communication and control.