Just finished playing all the levels of Angry Birds on Facebook and I must confess to feeling a bit under-squaaawwwked! Sure, the game’s trademark excellent production values are all in place but why has the gameplay not got all chirpy and cuddly with the social element? Friends can gift Power-ups,... Continue reading

Surely I jest! With gaming penetration levels lower than the Asian average, forget the global average?! Without a single AAA Desi game title to proudly boast about along with Bollywood blockbusters and Kolaveri Di?! With Indian game studios and publishers bleeding in the red, unable to monetize, and scared VCs?!... Continue reading

7 months away from the blog – ironical that starting something up can lead to shutting something down else. Enough with the laziness, time to multi-task! GDC 2012 is around the corner and the Great Indian Gaming Revolution is not on the horizon just yet. It’s time to look at... Continue reading

Games cannot be compared to traditional mass media. I ask why not? Games are narratives. Narratives have messages. Media carries messages. Here are 5 attributes on which I measure the power of Games as a communication vehicle which have me convinced that structurally Games are a superior form of communication... Continue reading

Did you get the subtle connotation that the word Life has for Gamers? No? Read on anyways! We Gamers are a funny bunch. We need instant gratification, and you’d think we would quickly tire of our latest toy and want to move to another game. But once we are hooked... Continue reading

To me, Alternate Reality Games are a really clever combination of narrative and user generated content that becomes the game itself. Did you just go blank? Take Two. An Alternate Reality Game starts off with a premise. Let’s take the example of the critically acclaimed World Without Oil (hence an... Continue reading

Apologies core gamers for defiling your sub-culture’s cult line for my petty purposes ! But after casual games, then social games, now comes the nascent but potentially Tsunami-like phenomenon in the shape of Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) that could sweep aside all in its path! And all because of the... Continue reading

Apologies for the sensationalist headline but as demonstrated previously, I am all about the cheap tricks! Unless you have been living under the proverbial rock, it’s hard not to have come across the latest buzzword in the Customer Engagement and Experience world – Gamification. The subject of multiple presentations on... Continue reading

Gaming, like almost everything else in life is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration but since this blog is all about evangelizing advergaming, it’s time to serve up some of that inspiration Kool-Aid! So here are my favorite advergames – you will notice not all conform to the paradigms and concepts... Continue reading

Given all the theory I have been spouting these past few weeks it’s only fair that I man up and provide an illustration of how Strategic Advergaming may work for a brand. So what better brand to take up for illustration than PepsiCo – who are all about changing the... Continue reading

Marketers want customer engagement. Digital Marketers want customers to have an engagement with their digital properties. Frequently they turn to gee-whiz graphics and cutting edge technology to deliver this engagement. In my current workplace as well as in my previous job it was common practice to label anything in 3D... Continue reading

Used to be a time when gaming was about skill and strategy. Hours spent mastering a dangerous curve in Need for Speed or the perfect collaborative team play in a Counter –Strike. Today Cityville, Farmville and Nightclub City are the new AAA titles. Skill has been overtaken by the number... Continue reading

If it’s an advergame it makes sense that the brand is front and center – in both the graphic element as well as the gameplay.. Most advergames are tactical – usually to spread brand awareness, frequently tied in with a brand launch or event. I would like to posit a... Continue reading

I Say: Facebook is not a mobile network. You Say: WTF!!? Call yourself a serious blogger - Facebook has 200 million mobile users - roughly 40% of its users access using mobile devices. Also Facebook’s launch of Zero – Facebook’s lite text-centric version – proves it’s serious about the mobile... Continue reading

It is tempting to get carried away with the brilliant success of Facebook and the equally brilliant movie by David Fincher. The F word in Facebook’s success as “The Social Network” is after all Friends. But in the real as well as the virtual world is our social ecosystem only... Continue reading

Farmville pwned World of Warcraft’s 12 odd million users with a staggering 88 million MAUs at its peak. It did this in 6 months -WoW took five years or so. Cityville went ahead broke the 100 million MAU mark. The top five apps on “The Social Network aka Facebook” are... Continue reading

Apologies for mangling SUN’s famous line from the early 90s. However, just as SUN got it years before Cloud became sexy, savvy digital marketers need to firmly embed this idea of The Network is the Consumer in everything they do. Which requires them to rapidly jettison the Digital is One... Continue reading