For me today is a memorable day. It's drizzling in San Francisco, after 2 days of blue sky framing the Metropolitan skyline. While I am getting ready to listen to Satoru Iwata, Nintendo CEO motivate the crowd of the Game Developer Conference to make the “impossible, possible”, in the next hall Steve Jobs is making a surprise appearance at the launch of the iPad 2.
But what is the CEO of Imille doing in a crowd of game designers, engineers and artists of the videogames industry? An old friend, Matteo Bittanti, new media expert, Stanford academic and the writer of Italian Wired, invited me. Imille is a company enjoying strong growth and I want us to have chat in order to learn how we may be able to begin a collaboration that could internationalise the agency.
This move could be a good way to understand the American people, by improving our current crowdsourcing projects in the US, but also to research and network a short distance from Silicon Valley. So I'm staying in a downtown hotel and spending 5 days at the GDC summit. I've always believed that videogames are the medium of the new century, as Cinema was for the last one. Here I am looking for inspiration, possible partners, but above all to analyse new marketing models. There is talk, for example, of "gamification", that is how videogames, in the mobile and social era of augmented reality, can be established alongside reality and change people's behaviour. And to us what means most is to understand that behaviour in order to communicate better via the new channels. We should not hide our interest in the possibility of entering into a publishing venture, converting our skills currently used to produce advergames into a long-term project in the world of social/Mobile games; but that's another story.
I have already attended many summits and one of the things that struck me most was the recurrence of the word "billion", referring to the billions of people that enjoy games via the web and smart phones. And it helped me even more to understand that behind every success story there is a company that invests not in a game but a structured network of games that self promotes and that earns through multiple micro-transactions, advertising, promotions and sponsorship.
In particular I was struck by the project of Keith Lee, formerly of Blizzard. His mobile game is called myTown and it is a type of monopoly that is played using GPS. The game is played by acquiring actual land in your city and converting the results on a mobile game system. myTown is based on a revenue model connected to advertising that deserves to be expanded: in the game users win according to purchases or check-ins made with the commercial concerns in the area. In practice the game pushes people to achieve by interacting with the actual economic system: you buy a sweatshirt from H&M and earn points in the game, you drink coffee at Starbucks and you earn game points, etc. It is an example of gamification, reality converging with videogames.
It is no longer advertising that pushes the consumer but the motivational mechanisms of videogame. I will come back to this; Imille has a new game to play.
ME
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