Online Gaming

1. YAMAHA MOTOR SOLUTIONS INDIA Pvt. LTD. Online Gaming – YMI Website

4. An Old Kind of Client Web games are a recent phenomenon, but games in service of business are nothing new. Crossword puzzles in newspapers increase reader loyalty by providing daily amusement. Contests under bottle caps boost sales by promising a chance to win prizes. Trivia quizzes in movie theaters keep customers entertained while waiting for a movie. The puzzle above promotes Symington’s soups. The goal is to stack the four blocks so that each face of the column shows all four soup labels. The puzzle was invented and patented in 1900. A later independent incarnation of this puzzle was marketed by Parker Brothers in the 1960s as the hit game Instant Insanity. This game has a lot of the same virtues as web games: for a small price you can give the customer an engaging memorable experience they will want to share with friends.

10. Adobe: Track Page Hits The Adobe Puzzle was divided into several pages. Here is the page that appears when you solve the puzzle. The Adobe site already kept count of how many unique visitors saw each page — we didn’t have to build any special tracking technology. By counting who reached which page, we could track how many players started the puzzle, and how many finished it.

17. Reason 1. Attract Attention iwon.com Contests are a great way to attract attention to a site. When you visit the portal site iwon, you see this screen. The more often you visit, the better your chances of winning. Through this simple gimmick iwon has come within striking distance of market leader Yahoo!

20. Reason 2. Draw Repeat Visits uclick.com Newspapers use syndicated daily comics and crossword puzzles as a way to keep people coming back for more. In a Gallop poll, more than 25% of the American public reported having played a crossword puzzle in the last month, making it the most popular indoor sport. The Universal Crossword by Tim Parker is the most widely syndicated crossword puzzle on the web, with millions of players daily.

21. Reason 2. Draw Repeat Visits sarbakan.com Mr. Snoozleberg, by Sarbakan.com, is an innovative web game that includes a simple but compelling storyline. Such a game could be presented in weekly installments. The animation production costs for a game like this are relatively low, compared with the cost of producing a fully animated movie such as Mondo Minishows.

23. Reason 3. Retain Visitors lycos.com Big portal sites like Yahoo!, AOL and Lycos offer games for the same reason that shopping malls have game arcades — to give customers everything they want in one place. Why let your customers escape to another site if you can offer everything they want in one place?

25. Reason 4. Distraction mondomedia.com Heavy Metal Guy is a humorous 5-minute animated show produced by Mondo Media. New episodes appear regularly on sites such as Netscape and iwon. Because episodes can run as much as a megabyte each, each show begins by giving the viewer the option to play a game while the rest of the show downloads. Such a game is called a “download game.”

26. Reason 4. Distraction The download game for Heavy Metal Guy is based on the musical memory game Simon, with the title character making appropriate noises and gestures. In general it’s good to dress a download game in the style of the content. Like Disneyland’s elaborate pre-show exhibits that you see while waiting in line, a download game should be part of the experience of the main show, not merely a time-waster.

27. Reason 4. Distraction When the show has loaded, the player is given the option of launching the show. In general it is a good idea to let the player control when the game ends, instead of automatically launching the rest of the show.

28. Reason 5. Teach newmedia.com Web games can teach concepts. This game teaches the concept of color mixture — an important skill for visual designers on the web. I designed this puzzle for my monthly puzzle on newmedia.com. After ten years of creating puzzles for NewMedia I found that I could make games to teach almost any concept.

30. Reason 6. Brand Marketing candystand.com Candystand is a web site aimed at kids that promotes Nabisco’s many brands of candy.

31. Reason 6. Brand Marketing candystand.com Here the donut-shaped Lifesavers candies form the holes for a game of ski ball. Since it is not appropriate to sell candy to kids on a web site, Candystand instead creates positive associations with its brand names by incorporating the products into familiar arcade games.

32. Reason 6. Brand Marketing mentalworkout.com Here is a completely different example of brand marketing. I recently designed puzzles an ad campaign entirely built around puzzle solving. The client is the business consulting firm Cambridge Technology Partners, and the goal is to recruit new employees.

33. Reason 6. Brand Marketing mentalworkout.com The print ads point to a web site called mentalworkout.com, which has interactive puzzles like this. Here, the goal is to arrange the tiles so all lines connect all the way across the board, both horizontally and vertically. Players can post high scores and win prizes.

35. Reason 7. Product Marketing shufflebrain.com Computer game publishers often put demoes on the web to help sell games. Here is a web game I created to help sell the CD-ROM game Obsidian, which I also worked on. I didn’t use actual puzzles from the game because they would have been too big, and given away too much of the game. So instead I created original puzzles using art and themes from the game. In this puzzle the challenge is to unscramble a poem that occurs at a critical point in the game. The game originally appeared on segasoft.com; you can play it at shufflebrain.com.

36. Reason 7. Product Marketing gamelet.com Gamelet.com built this game for Proctor & Gamble to promote Cascade Complete, a dishwasher detergent that lets you avoid prewashing. The goal is to juggle the dishes. The Cascade box is a powerup. When you catch it, all dishes are suddenly put away clean. Through this imaginative dramatization, the game communicates the idea that Cascade Complete lets you “skip the sink”.

38. Reason 8. Viral marketing battlemail.com Marketing people all know that word of mouth is the most effective form of advertising. No wonder there is so much buzz about “viral marketing”. The web site battlemail promotes itself to advertisers as a potent form of viral marketing. Not only are customers likely to infect friends with the virus, the messages are highly targeted, based on the types of people that like particular types of games.

40. Reason 9. Brand Extension station.sony.com Jeopardy! is one of the most popular syndicated TV game shows, second only to its cousin Wheel of Fortune. Dozens of versions exist, extended into every possible medium. To make sure the internet generation keeps watching the show, parent company Sony created the Sony Station web site, with spiffy new online versions of its game shows. Note the co-branded versions of Jeopardy with VH-1 and ESPN.

43. Tip 4. Customizable Templates shockwave.com Most puzzles in newspapers use the same form every day with changing content. By building a puzzle on a re-usable template, you can shorten production time, make it easy offer cheap semi-custom puzzles, and streamline production of a periodic feature. An example of a template-driven puzzle is Jim Collins’ jigsaw puzzle on shockwave.com and uclick.com. Drop in a new picture and voila, a new puzzle. Not only is life easy for the puzzle creator, he can offer the tools to end-users to build their own puzzles.

44. Tip 5. Levels of Customization clevermedia.com Web game developer Clevermedia created Speed Snack for the Planet Lunch web site eploids.com by dropping custom graphics into an existing game engine. By using such engines, CleverMedia can customize games for low incremental fees. In general it is good to offer a range of customization options, from free generic games, to expensive completely custom games. Ezone offers some of its games for free, even giving away the HTML on their site. Tim Parker creates a widely syndicated crossword puzzle. Pay a bit more and you can get a custom crossword puzzle for your site. By offering both generic and custom games, you lower customer resistance, and give customers a gradual migration path toward more expensive options.

45. Web Games that make Business Sense The web is a new frontier for game developers. It is too early to say which strategies will succeed. But whatever happens, the winners will be the companies that build web games that make business sense.