Here is an overview of the key advergaming genres and their prospects for the future, with respect to their use in online viral marketing and advertising. The ratings assigned to each genre (out of 5) are obviously very rough indicators and vary greatly depending on the quality of the game in question, but may give some perspective to newcommers to the gaming world (especially all those account managers out there who are working on their geek-quotient).

I have included a few examples that demonstrate each genre. They may not be the best exponents so if you have any better examples to add, please send them through - particularly any examples that are more focussed towards marketing & advertising campaign objectives than some of the examples listed.

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3D Hardware Acceleration will revive Director Shockwave for Online Gaming - I’m putting my balls on the line here people by proclaiming that Director is coming back bigtime! As much as we would deny it, we’re all suckers for sexy 3D graphics, and the only way to do 3D properly online is with Director, because it (unlike Flash) supports hardware acceleration.

That’s not to say that the application in its current form has much of a future (bloated IDE, ~50% browser penetration, dwindling developer base, cross-platform projector issues) because as we all know, it hasn’t been getting a whole lot of love recently. However, it all comes down to giving people what they want. Online audiences are increasingly responding to online / portable / casual games - and the main way they are currently being delivered is with Macromedia Flash (I know it’s official by now, but Adobe Flash just doesn’t sound right for some reason).

But as much as we deny it, we’re all suckers for sexy 3D graphics, and the only way to do 3D properly online is with Director, because it (unlike Flash) supports hardware acceleration.

…so maybe the future of Director is not quite that rosy, but I am betting that the only thing that it really does uniquely (hardware accelerated 3D graphics) is alive and kicking. In the absense of any other promising platforms, I’m going to get stuck into lingo (thank the lord for javascript syntax) and take a one month actionscript-free diet.

And if it doesn’t end up working out that way, I guess I’ll see you at Centerlink!

(On the other hand, they could easily add 3D hardware acceleration to Flash, or Adobe Apollo, but I’m not holding my breath…)

References:

Director coming to Intel Macs, says Adobe

It’s late and I have a whole lot of work to do, but I have finally setup wordpress (it was pretty bloody simple in the end) so now I have no excuse for not writing anything!The plan is to pick out some of the coolest online games, talk about what makes them fun & innovative, and (for the point-dexters out there) try to work out what makes them effective. The way I see it: so long as we can find ways of making games effective customer touchpoints (think beyond competitions and glorified uber-banner-ads) the more time we can spend making them (instead of resizing banners for 6 hours a day, and SEO for the other 2)

Hopefully the next installment will contain more content than rant! See you soon.