Subtle Games Marketing

Creator of Flickr creates a New Startup, makes her coworkers play Dominion

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_caterina_fake/all/1

Caterina Fake, Hunch’s chief product officer, instigated the weekly game night shortly after she arrived at the Internet startup in June 2008. But on this particular spring night, the whole thing threatens to fall apart. Fake has brought Dominion, a game with such byzantine rules — something to do with monarchs using gold, militias, and witchcraft to seize unclaimed land — that even the MIT-trained engineers struggle to make sense of it. Fake furrows her brow as she studies the rule book. After 20 minutes, it looks like her coworkers are ready to forget the whole thing and head home, but Fake cajoles them into staying just a little longer. “Could somebody turn this music down?” she asks, shooting a glance at the office stereo blaring Girl Talk. “I can’t concentrate.”

WUSSBAGS! Dominion is easy.

Hunch learns about its members through “Teach Hunch About You” questions. These queries can cover anything — exercise regimens, the ethics of SeaWorld, zombies — and the more of them people answer, the more complete a profile Hunch can create. (Since the site launched in June 2009, it has collected 55 million answers to these questions from its 1 million active users.) Once Hunch’s algorithm collects enough data, it can start finding surprising correlations. For instance, people who swat flies have a thing for USA Today. People who believe in alien abductions are more likely than nonbelievers to drink Pepsi. People who eat fresh fruit every day are more likely to desire Canon’s pricey EOS 7D camera. And respondents who cut their sandwiches diagonally rather than vertically are more likely to prefer men’s Ray-Ban sunglasses

This is just like OK Cupid, only with more of a product angle than a human behavior/desire angle. Also, its getting more like Artificial Intellegence ...

But Hunch is arguably the most ambitious social search service. Ultimately, it isn’t just helping people shop for cars — it is getting its users to volunteer a truly impressive amount of unique psychographic data. Just as Google built a vast index of the Web and Facebook constructed a model of our social connections, Hunch is assembling an extraordinarily rich and detailed picture of each user’s taste. From there it can claim to know or extrapolate everything that a person likes or would like. “The ultimate goal of the company is to map every person on the Internet to every object on the Internet, be that a product, a service, or a person,” Fake says.

SKYNET! SKYNETTTTTTT

Social Games Hall of Shame

Oh Facebook Social Games, how you thrill me with your adorable graphics and instant gratification. And yet, your ads literally have NO SHAME. Maybe thats part of what I love about you, yes I suppose it is.

Now lets bring out the feminism constestants:

Do you "Like" this ad?

Thumbs up, they have nailed women's marketing on the head.

FINALLY SOMEONE HAS SEEN TO MY NEEDS, THESE AWFUL TINY wait, what?

This next iPhone Game one for Word-Fu is actually pretty good, heck it worked on me. But again, no shame. Really, my HONOR is at stake if I don't play this game? Harsh Realm.

It all makes perfect sense!

BUY THIS GAME OR THE PUPPY GETS IT!111

No Pun Intended?

How Not To Market to Girl Gamers as seen in Game Informer Magazine :b

Farmville Game Bar

Now this is pure frakking genius.

It's also the beginning of the end. Will Zynga be our new Google? I for one welcome our casual game overlords.

I wasn't going to bring this up...but then I got riled.

I just read this on twitter:

@theborderhouse Why are most casual gamers women? http://bit.ly/actM8L

linking to: http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=1414

This article really pissed me off...it is a glaring example of how most of the media, and possilby many gamers, are thinking about games. Boy vs. Girl...Blue vs. Pink. Guns vs. Unicorns. Spatial cognition vs. social relations.

Why is the author assuming these 70% female casual games are Pink and Long Haired? Why were those the images the website linked to? Casual games can refer to puzzles, murder mysteries, haunted mansions, wizard towers, hidden objects, card games, deserted islands...

This Queen of Hearts blog has lots of women, and I thought about marketing it as such, but I don't want to. It's against the very point.

This is all stuff my friend Lehanna started me thinking about, along with sending me many links to Jezebel coverage:

Games are games and brains are brains. I like playing rogue assassins and am obsessed with treasure collecting (see my user name). I love sniper gunts and anti personnel ammo and mininukes.

The whole "girls play becasue their boyfriends do" angle makes me ill. The people I date tend to like video games because like me, they love fun, and games are fun. I don't play because they do - we ALL play because we ALL like fun.  We all have brains and like being challenged and figuring out problems people before us have crafted for us to play with and solve.

http://jezebel.com/5443722/act-like-you-know-nielsen-research-confirms-that-women-buy-systems-and-play-games

http://jezebel.com/5381665/why-is-marketing-to-female-gamers-considered-challenging

more on this later!