Human beings now spend 3 billion hours every week playing online video games. This is a staggering expenditure of time and energy on an activity that has often been considered frivolous and escapist. So it's worth asking why.
Why are people staring at screens for 3 billion hours, clicking on cartoon pictures, when they could be cooking, jogging or hanging out with spouses and kids? In her book Reality is Broken, the futurist and video game designer Jane McGonigal offers a surprising answer: we don't play video games because they're "fun." We play video games because they allow us to fulfill our human potential in a way that reality sometimes doesn't.
This paper explores gaming as a new social space and establishes three entry points for navigating this sensitive world.
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Engauge is a full-service marketing agency for the digital and social age. We help grow our clients' businesses by leveraging creativity and technology to connect brands and consumers through the most relevant content and channels. The proliferation of content and channel opportunities for both consumers and brands has forever changed the communications landscape. But - what haven't changed are the fundamentals of marketing: The ability to richly understand a consumer, to derive a thoughtful insight, and to create a big idea. For years, Engauge has helped lead its clients by staying true to those fundamentals, while focusing on talent, technology, innovation and building a dynamic range of capabilities - from the tried and true, to social, mobile and whatever's next. Today's marketing is assuredly more complex, but to us the premise is still quite simple: Listen to the client, listen to the consumer, and deliver big ideas at the right time and place. And, most importantly, engauge.
