5 things brands can learn from indie games
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
2 likes•606 views
Presented recently at Digital Shoreditch 2015, video on slide 1. Make sure you check the presentation notes in the tab below the presentation to get context! When the ad industry looks for inspiration we turn to literature, film, art, music while somehow the gaming industry is summarily overlooked. Yet when over 59% of Brits are gamers (an average of 2 in every household) aren't we missing a trick here? Indie games can't afford to out-spend, so theyre out-thinking instead and considering their average engagement time puts advertising to shame, this session aims to radically reframe our perceptions, highlighting 5 key things games can teach brands
Recommended
More Related Content
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Featured
Featured (20)
5 things brands can learn from indie games
- 1. LEVEL UP 5 THINGS BRANDS CAN LEARN FROM INDIE GAMES @HEYHUMANAGENCY @FELIXJMORGAN
- 4. WHO PLAYS GAMES? 59% of the UK play games 48% of gamers are women Not just for kids
- 5. INDIE GAMES 5 THINGS BRANDS CAN LEARN FROM
- 22. SUMMARY 1. Inspiring creativity 2. Evoking emotion 3. Telling non-linear stories 4. Repeated engagement 5. Creating empathy
Editor's Notes
- Hi, my name’s Felix and I work for HeyHuman. I’m also a massive gamer, and this is basically the best justification I could come up with to talk about games while being paid for it. I’m here today to talk about inspiration, and hopefully shed a light for any brand owners or creatives in the room on a huge untapped resource that they could be using today.
- So to start off, where do brands get their inspiration from currently? Well, as an industry we can often be very insular, and we often try to solve a problem by just looking at what other brands have done it already. Case studies, brand examples, ideas from the cutting room floor. And there’s lots of great stuff there, but it can become very introspective unless you also look elsewhere. So to broaden our horizons, some people look at what artists are making, what crazy new technology is out there, how film makers are tackling narrative, and how musicians are standing out. But there is a huge part of culture which is full of creativity and innovation and is currently sitting off the radar for a lot of brand owners -
- - gaming. Gaming is now the biggest entertainment industry on the planet. It’s considerably bigger than the film industry, and in 2013 was worth $75 billion. There was a game recently called Destiny had a budget of $500m - that’s the equivalent to over 2 avatars!
- And there's a huge misconception that gamers are all spotty male teenagers in their parent’s basements. 59% of the UK now play games, with an average of two gamers per household. It’s an even gender split, 52/48, and women over the age of 18 represent over double the portion of males under 18. So it’s not this niche sub-culture that people think, it’s a huge part of our lives.
- A really interesting sub-section of gaming that I wanted to focus on today is indie games. Indie games are games that are made by independent studios, not backed by the huge budgets that EA or Activision might have. Since they’re so restricted on budgets, indie games are having to out think rather than out spend, and it’s leading to some really interesting solutions for problems brands are facing on a daily basis. I’m going to highlight 5 things brands are trying to do, that I think indie games are currently doing a lot better.
- So #1 is inspiring creativity. One thing a lot of brands try and do is use the creativity of their audience. We often run promotions where we try and get people to create a song, or record a video, or come up with a joke. 9 times out of 10 they fail. But, indie games are inspiring people in ways that brands could only dream of. I’m sure lots of you will be familiar with Minecraft. It was recently bought by Microsoft for $2.5 bil, and it’s one of the most successful indie games of all time. People have made some amazing things in it:
- A built to scale version of King’s Landing from Game of Thrones
- A working 16 bit computer, built inside the game. God knows how, but it works.
- A ridiculously big Godzilla and King Kong
- And here’s one me and my friends made, just because I promised to them I’d put this in there! You get the point, people make amazing things in this game. But how does it inspire creativity so well? Minecraft created a great framework that allows people a huge amount of possibility with very low barriers to entry. The tools are incredibly simple, and as soon as people download the game they can start making things. Brands can learn from this by giving people templates for creativity, and removing the friction to creating amazing things.
- #2, evoking emotion. A lot of the work we do as brands is about trying to trigger an emotional response. Emotional advertising has proven to be twice as effective as rational advertising, according to an IPA study a few years ago.
- And games are really good at this. The Graveyard makes you feel massive empathy as you take control of an old woman walking through a graveyard. It’s essentially an interactive painting, letting you relive her fondest memories in the final hours before her death.
- Octodad makes you crack up laughing as you play an Octopus who is trying to make sure his family don’t find out he’s an octopus. And you have never felt fear until you’ve played a good horror game. Slenderman, Amnesia, Penumbra, Outlast - there’s tons of them. I just wanted to show a quick video to show the impact these games can have on people.
- So a bit of context for this video - this is a reaction video from some people playing a game called Amnesia. They’re basically exploring this castle they woke up in, slowly going mad as they try and find their way out. [VIDEO] Aside from being very entertaining, this is a really visceral emotional reaction, and it comes from the level of immersion they put into the game. It’s the craft, the multi-sensory stimuli, the storytelling. Daniel Harvey from Sapient Nitro recently said that a story experienced is better than a story heard, and brands that are able to create rich emotive experiences will benefit immensely.
- The third point is about non-linear storytelling. And this is particularly relevant as storytelling has become a bit of a buzzword in advertising - at SXSW this year there was 129 different sessions talking about it. And gaming provides us with tools to tell them in ways that we never could have in the past, placing the user at the heart of the experience.
- The Stanley Parable is one of my favorite games ever. This was nominated for 3 BAFTAs and was recently featured in House of Cards, and it’s one of the most brilliant pieces of entertainment I’ve ever seen. The Stanley Parable follows a man called Stanley who wakes up in an office and can hear a man narrating everything he does, before he does it. He’s presented with choices, and as the game unravels he begins to question his own free will. [VIDEO] It’s a brilliant example of non-linear storytelling, and I think it illustrates a really important point for brands. If you let people play a role in writing their own stories they will feel much more ownership of them, and will connect with you in a much deeper way.
- The 4th point is about repeated engagement. Gaming gets engagement times that brands could only dream of. Assassin’s Creed 4 had an average session time of 3 hours 14 minutes per person. To put that in perspective, over half of the hits to branded websites have a dwell time of less than 15 seconds. So games are getting 776 times more engagement! As soon as you start talking about repeated engagement everyone goes straight to ‘gamification’, which often ends up being an excuse to stick badges and achievements on things no one gives a fuck about. I don’t really want to get into the whole gamification behemoth in this session, but I do think there are some interesting techniques games are using that brands can learn from.
- One of the most hotly anticipated new games is called No Man’s Sky. One of the reasons it’s so exciting is because it’s been made to be infinitely replayable. It lets you explore the universe, flying your ship between different planets, landing on them and exploring. What’s really interesting is that this game is procedurally generated, which basically means that the whole universe is generated by an algorithm rather than hand made, meaning there is a literally infinite amount of space to explore, and every planet has it’s own unique properties. I think it’s really interesting that the hook here isn’t about achievements, or scoreboards, or badges - it’s just being smart with code to create unique experiences that drive repeated engagement. Procedural generation is only going to get bigger, and brands can start to think about how they can use tools like this to create experiences that people keep coming back to. A nice example of this is what Skittles did with their never ending website, generating new content as you scrolled further down the page.
- The fifth and final point is around creating empathy. This is particularly interesting for charities, but also content creators generally, where content and experiences are designed to help someone see someone else’s perspective. There is no better format in the world for this currently than games.
- One really interesting example was a very low budget game called Papers, Please, which won a BAFTA. Papers Please puts you at border control in a fictional dystopian country, and as the game evolves you are put in lots of situations that force you to make tough moral decisions and choose between doing the right thing and protecting your loved ones. And because you’re taking control of the person, you feel a lot more invested in each decision.
- One final game I wanted to highlight, to end on quite a touching note, is a game called That Dragon Cancer. This was a Kickstarter project recently created by two parents of a child with terminal cancer. As they went through the treatment they were faced with lots of tough decisions and some very emotional moments, so they created this interactive experience to help people understand what they went through. By placing people in control of the experience they helped people experience empathy in a way that no other media could emulate.
- So that’s it! 5 things brands can learn from indie games. I think with all these things, it’s just about out thinking rather than out spending, and maximizing the media you’re operating in. I’m not suggesting brands need to go out there and make their own games, but brand owners should at least be playing them! Because if you’re not, you’re missing out on some amazing inspiration that could be absolutely transformative for your business.
- Thank you very much