E3 Games Show: Why Marketers Need To Get Emotional ABout Gaming

B&T has teamed up with Sydney-based agency Rinsed to provide exclusive news, analysis and innovation from the biggest gaming show on earth, E3 2013

Simon Micarone founder and managing director of Rinsed, is on the ground in LA at the event and will be reporting back the big stories for B&T this week, including exciting new opportunities for content marketers, brand managers and media owners.

After a day of keynotes the world knows what is in stall over the next 12 months for the video game world. There really wasn’t a killer blow or that knockout punch but there were certainly a few interesting themes common amongst the keynotes.

Now more than ever before developers with the help of their marketing teams are planning for social connectedness. Just a few years ago social, collaboration and interacting with people was an after thought to a gaming experience. In fact it was afterthought to a lot of live events and experiences. Now it has completely shifted.

Video games are being developed with connectedness in mind. From the outset developers are looking to bring people together, get people sharing and attempting to immerse the player in the experience.

Little Big Planet for example is a better experience when played with friends. Rather than developing a game with just one player in mind the makers have thought about how collaboration can enhance the experience. How helping one another to achieve a common goal will deliver that.

Through technology such as share factory and photo mode in second factory Sony are enabling the social sharing and have some impressive numbers to back it up. Since the launch of PS4 the share button has been pressed over 220m times.

Players are also sharing gameplay for spectator sessions and spectators can now interact live with those players. Since launch over 150m spectator sessions have been shared by players on the Sony platform. With YouTube being enabled to the share functionality one could only expect these numbers to increase significantly in the near future.

The second major theme from today was the notion of emotional control. Feeling the game and ultimately feeling the experience is at the heart of making people take action. If we can trigger an emotion then it will often prompts us to share, increasing awareness and creating desirability.

Most of EA’s titles now have character emotional control where their personalities drives behaviour. This ultimately creates a very unique character and in games like Sims those characters and their individual emotional traits can be shared.

In games like FIFA, the temperament of players and how they are emotionally affected during a match can have a dramatic effect on the outcome of the result. But the end result is simple. Make people feel the game.

Content delivery is incredibly important. Whether it is the Kinect camera or playing on remote devices like Playstation Vita developers need to continue to innovate with hardware. Although not a lot was said during the keynote Project Morpheus will feature on Sony’s stand during E3. I am really keen to understand how Virtual Reality technology is going to deliver better gaming experience.

I think it is safe to say that whether virtual or real delivering the most compelling experience is fundamental to the success of a good game or in fact a great brand or marketing experience. Adversely if you get wrong it could have an equally powerful result.

For more see ‘Is E3 set to be a ‘ho- hum’ affair?’

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