Sending a message: serious games for communication
Resources
A serious game is a game with a serious purpose at the core of its design, which is to say, not purely for entertainment. As a concept, the serious game has been applied across sectors as diverse as corporate training, medical education, and even military recruitment. The functionalities of digital simulations and data collection make serious online games a great tool to recognise and qualify aptitude. At the same time, they offer an immersive user experience that’s conducive to knowledge acquisition and skills practise.
But can serious games be used by businesses and charities as a means for effective communications? Can they be used to support public relations (PR) campaigns, or for activating communities around specific causes?
In short, yes, the dynamic and interactive format of modern serious games means they can be customised to serve myriad purposes. They’re not only great learning tools, but can also convey targeted messaging through storytelling. In this article, we’ll review how serious games can be used by organisations as part of reputational and educational communications strategies, with numerous examples and ideas as starting points for customising your own serious games.
How can games affect communication?
The simulated environments in which serious games exist are what gives them power in communications strategies. Serious games allow an organisation to control a lot of variables through which to tell a story or convey a sentiment.
Through the digital medium of a modern serious game, you can construct scenarios which either paint your organisation in an approved manner, or suggest and motivate participants towards intended ideas. It’s basic storytelling at its core. The game mechanics and pulling of psychological levers contribute to making it a more engaging and impactful experience. Utilising game engines such as the Quiz on the Drimify platform allows you to propose scenarios, both in text or through video, to set up a digital simulation that aligns with your organisation’s view or narrative.
The answers to the questions and the further content all contribute to the message you’re looking to send: your serious purpose.
Gamifying communications
So how can you, as a communications professional, start to apply serious games to enhance your communications? The first step should always be to identify opportunities or projects that would benefit from gamification. You could even start by identifying a project which hasn’t been communicated effectively by traditional means. Ask yourself, why hasn’t this connected with an audience before? Could an online game be the missing storytelling device to breathe new life into it?
Serious games offer businesses and nonprofits a two-way communications channel with their audiences. Online serious games, customised through Drimify, offer playable experiences that work on any modern device. This means your audience can engage with them on their smartphone from the train as easily as on their tablet from their sofa. They offer easy data collection, so you could utilise game engines such as Drimify’s Survey during the research stages of a campaign. This would allow you to make a broad evaluation of your audience’s opinions before defining your digital strategy.
To take greater advantage of the possibilities serious games present in communications, you could customise a playable experience using Drimify’s Dynamic Path™ format. This gives you access to every game engine to make different levels or modules, with participants learning about a cause or issue as they travel across a customised learning pathway. This longer digital format allows you to create a far more immersive experience. You could even include a customised Survey at the end to serve as an early indicator of your game’s effectiveness. Through careful implementation, serious games give you influence over and visibility of the aggregate psychology of your audience. To send a message effectively, it helps to know who you’re sending it to, and what you intend to gain.
Examples for marketing campaigns
Serious games offer great utility for marketing campaigns. For example, a food supplier could develop a game on the Dynamic Path™ format to educate players about the journey of ingredients from nature or agriculture to the dinner table. A customer base that better understands the challenges a business faces, and has a broader view of the various good practices employed by said business along the supply chain, are far more likely to buy into the brand.
Players could play through any number of customised digital pathways. These could be represented by the oceans if the company supplied seafood, plantations if they supplied exotic fruit, or even a farm producing crops if they supplied cereal. Players would navigate the pathway, making decisions that affect the supply chain. Each decision would see players collect points to enter a leaderboard to appeal to competitive natures. Ultimately, players learn about the journey their Alaskan smoked salmon has been on, or about the crops and domestic farmers they’re supporting by selecting certain products. The interactivity and competitive element within the game keeps them engaged for companies to get their messages across. This format delivers an experience and challenge that wouldn’t have been there if they’d just read some literature, or just as likely, ignored some literature.
In a similar format, a car insurance company could benefit from developing a serious game with the purpose of teaching players safer driving habits. Players would need to complete various challenges, quizzes, and playable experiences to either demonstrate their knowledge of good driving habits, or learn some. Each level would see players awarded points based on their performance, with them competing for a place on a leaderboard to drive engagement and foster competition. Through Drimify’s platform, the game could be integrated seamlessly across websites, shared on social media, and even be accessible by scanning a QR code. Such a game could be utilised by companies for positive publicity, and also for data collection to qualify leads.
For environmental management and climate change
Serious games can also be used to effectively educate audiences about climate change. Further yet, through engaging gameplay and intelligent design, the serious game can encourage behaviours in everyday people which protect the natural world. The important ingredients are that the game shows the results of the correct behaviours, and sheds light on the negative results of irresponsible behaviours.
An example of a serious game that could be adapted by a nonprofit focused on environmental management, or even a recycling business, would be to develop a serious game focusing on reducing waste and promoting sustainability. The design of such a game could be adjusted to suit the target audience. It could invite players to assume the role of a superhero who must recycle in order to save the planet in the case of children, or to appeal to adults, a titan of industry-turned environmentalist whose mission is to save the world from an ecological disaster. Participants could play through multiple levels of quizzes, games, and content, accumulating points to score on the leaderboard while learning about sustainability in more depth. This could take the form of educating them on global issues, and advising them on practical everyday actions (such as rinsing their bottles, and knowing which plastics can be recycled and which can’t).
The end result for the user is an engaging, playable experience. For a charity, it educates audiences and garners grassroots support. For recycling firms, as well as data collection, it could create greater operational efficiencies by encouraging best user practices. Because all the games on the Drimify platform offer seamless integration across websites and socials, such games could easily be shared around social media, meaning they can also offer engaging and effective advertising.
An agile and innovative communications tool
The online medium of modern serious games means businesses and nonprofit organisations have an incredibly powerful and versatile tool through which to deliver messages. Targeting people with engaging interactive experiences they can play through at their leisure, on any device, can tap into their intrinsic motivations far more effectively than mass emails and pamphlets.
By appealing to people’s desire for competition and natural curiosity, and engaging them through interactive experiences, serious games make for an effective and exciting method of sending messages, promoting positive social ideals, and collecting data.
Want to know more?
