via Disney Buys Playdom in $763 Million Deal – NYTimes.com.

I believe this trend represents something much bigger than just explosive growth in the gaming industry. For years, many of the world's smartest people, from psychologists to behavioral economist to marketers, have been studying what motivates people to perform specific actions. In marketing terms, the most important of these is the purchase impulse. Today, the research on buying behavior is beginning to be reframed in terms of gaming mechanics.

Game mechanics are the rules and rewards that make a particular game fun and gratifying. I eat a ghost in Pacman and get 200 points. I pull a lever on a slot machine, three cherries line up and bells ring while money pours into my hands. Farmville and other social games have mastered these mechanics to combine highly addictive positive feedback loops with viral social play. Users compete with each other for status, measured in “levels,” while paying real money for virtual items that enhance their gameplay.

Marketers need to pay attention to this for a few key reasons. Most obviously, there is a large consumer audience attached to these games. Farmville just launched a massive in-store campaign with 7-Eleven that includes broad in-store co-branding while rewarding cash purchases of hot dogs and Slurpees with Farmville currency. More important, however, is applying the lessons being successfully demonstrated by these games to promotional and branding efforts.

Rewards and loyalty programs have been doing this for years in the form of points and frequent flier miles. These strategies have proven extremely effective, but can now be applied to digital and other marketing efforts to even higher levels of engagement and brand loyalty. A good example of this is Bunchball, a San Jose-based start-up whose technology allows brands to integrate challenges, leaderboards and virtual rewards into their website. Their customers, which range from NBC to Victoria's Secret, are delighted to be able to map any desired activity to a reward. For example, a user might be given 500 points to visit a particular page on the site or 1000 points for joining the brand's Facebook group.

I see this “gamification” as a trend still in its infancy, but one with great promise. Can you think of other ways this might be applied in the future?

via Why Marketers Should Pay Attention to Booming Gaming Trend – Advertising Age – DigitalNext.

Star Wars Video Games: A Visual History – PCWorld.

Rocketboom Blog – BP Kills Mario.

The average social gamer is a 43-year-old woman. And social games – played on networks such as Facebook – are expected to generate about $1bn this year. Traditional console gamers might eventually be in the minority.

Facebook might not sound like a particularly significant gaming market, but it has more than 400 million active users. If it were a country, that would make it the third largest in the world, ahead of the US. So, it's no surprise that the world's largest entertainment industry wants to move in.

Reflecting the older, more female demographic, top Facebook games are mostly non-violent collecting or simulation games.

via The player: Are social games the future? | Technology | The Guardian.

One thing continues to be a constant in mobile gaming, or at least it has for the decade or so I have covered mobile and portable gaming: casual rules. Despite all of the hype and dev dollars pouring into more sophisticated game designs, the most-played genres by far remain arcade/puzzle, card and word or number games. For all the games I have on my phones, the simple and free Word Warp is the one I use at least once a day.

via MediaPost Publications Mobile Gaming Goes In Two Directions At Once 04/15/2010.

Mobile gaming is more than ever a tale of two devices: feature phones and smartphones. The U.S. population playing games on regular mobile phones fell by 35% last year to 29.5 million, while the number of smartphone gamers shot up 60% to 21.4 million, according to a new comScore study. The mobile gaming audience overall has dropped 13% to 51 million.

The dramatic shift in mobile gaming toward smartphones underscores both the proliferation of high-end devices and how critical a platform they have become for both casual and serious gamers. The iPhone alone last year accounted for 5% of U.S. video game sales, or about $500 million, according to a recent study from mobile analytics firm Flurry.

via MediaPost Publications Mobile Gaming Soars On Smartphones 04/16/2010.