game Archives - TheWayoftheWeb

Using games to develop ideas and awareness for business isn’t new, but it appears to be growing in popularity at the moment, perhaps driven by the buzz around game mechanics and gamification.

For instance, EDF Energy is just launching a game for young engineers, which lasts for 3 weeks in January 2011, and involves you in an interactive adventure game to devise and produce energy and consume it efficiently. If you happen to be a young engineer, you can sign up here. Oh, and there’s a handy video:

All the world’s a game, and all the men and women merely players, with apologies to Shakespeare. More importantly, I think we’ll see a greater pace of gaming adoption by companies once more, and a larger number of gaming-based promotions proving to be successful by offering better interaction, engagement and rewards than in the past, due to the fact so many more people have a far greater understanding of how games actually work.

Upcoming racing game Blur combines two of my interests – microblogging and videogames (As you might guess from the recent launch of Online Race Driver).

When it becomes available on the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, racers will be able to send Twitter messages from within the game. So you can challenge friends to beat your time from within the game, although you can’t send message between the three games and platforms themselves.

It’s another example of something I recently blogged over at TheWayoftheWeb (Yes, I have three sites currently running in my spare time!), on why ‘The time is right for pervasive social gaming‘.

And integration with Twitter and Facebook is one part of this – and will increase as console-based games converge with the new social gaming phenomena.