Archive for June 2009
The word advergame derives from the fusion of the words advertising and game.
Advertgames are interactive games created to broadcast commercial messages, develop the brand awareness and bring traffic to consumer oriented websites.
The advergame marketing strategy begun in USA in 1998 when the firsts advertising expert start to test an different ways to promote their partners’ products.
The goal was to find a way to reach the audience and avoid the risk of annoying them with boring messages.
And the advert game was the perfect tool for this job because of its addicting and viral nature.
Was soon clear thar Advertgames can capture the target attention and create a more involved and complex relationship. In this way people remember the games and the products and advertisers push their brands.
Brand awareness, retention, brand loyalty and all the others marketing concepts shaped advergames through these Years.
Nowadays there are different advergames categories for different types of products and markets.
the most interestings are:
- Health advergames, created to reach the cosumer and built the brand equity of a pharmaceuticals industry;
- Exergames , developed to teach the children like Disney’s Hig School Musical Dance Math;
- Healthy behaviour games, like the one sponsored by Anderson Cancer Centre in Huston, who ordered a 32 million dollars anti-smoking videogame.
This last category shows how advergames can be used by media educators to inform, entertain and teach.
Brand engagement leads, are you ready to get in the advert-game?
- In: Curiosities | Educational | Psychology | Role Games | Train Your Brain
- 7 Comments
Recreational attitude has an eclectic and a multiform nature, a fluid ad dynamic structure that can change anytime when different inputs or actions are involved in the game.
Games dynamics studies have to focus their attention on social and psychological aspects involved during the games’ performances.
During a football game, a tennis match, a chess game, or just during hide and seek always important aspects of the human nature are involved and challenged.
This is the reason why For social science and psychology these gaming situation are an important field of study and represent an opportunity to develop theories and experimental games for study purposes.
For example games, role playing and recreational activities are widely used in management training and Human resource assessments with great results.
During special types of psychological games is very difficult to fake and that’s why H&R experts can understand a lot about a person after few minutes of playing.
Games are important for team building and mutual trust development.
An example of team building game to develop in few time mutual trust among members of a new group is the game of the fall:
Each member step on a chair, flop down backwards and the other members of the team take him and lift him up.
there are a lot of different trust games that can be played for an educational and proactive approach to team building studies, in this video a youth group of scholars play the trust game falling from the teacher’s desk.
This is a good school!
Games theory is a disciple that studies the problem of the interdependence between the players of the same game.
The behaviour analysis of game players is called strategic interaction and is used in Business studies to understand complex aspects of some kinds of markets and to build descriptive models based on subjects’ behaviours in uncertain situations.
For example, the famous “prisoner’s dilemma” is one of the main problems in game theory and is used to explain the reasons of a certain player’s choice rather than another one.
Originally developed by Merrill Flood e Melvin Dresher, the prisoner’s dilemma is based on the following riddle:
Two men are arrested by the cops, but they don’t have sufficient evidence to incriminate them:
for this reason, the cops decide to lock the two prisoners in different rooms and visit them separately to make a deal.
- If one of them testifies (defects) against the other he will obtain the liberty and his crime partner will be sentenced to 10 year in jail.
- If both remain silent, the will convicted to six months jail sentence.
- If each betrays the other both of them will receive a five year jail sentence.
So prisoners have to choose if betray the other or remain silent with the reassurance that nobody will ever know that he betrayed his partner before the end of the trial.
Now the fundamental question is: how should the prisoners act?
The game theory explains this dilemma with the help of Pareto optimality, a concept developed by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto who studied the economic efficiency.
The best choice for both the prisoners is to play in accord with the dominant strategy and confess their crime. This is the only way to contain the damages and the risks of be betrayed first by the other, minimizing the risk of a 10years jail sentences.
This interesting slide is a good introduction to the game theory study.
On a cognitive level the game is important for memory improvement, concentration, attention.
It’s a matter of fact that a poor recreational activity can compromise the cognitive development of a child.
Swiss psychologist Piaget proposed a classification of games types based on the structure of the game itself and at the same time on the genetic evolution of cognitive process:
- Exercise games are those types of games related to newborn babies until two years old. The baby try to understand how his body movement works and start to develop his motor skills;
- Symbolic games; simulation is the main aspect of the game and pretend to be someone else in a fantasy scenario is one of the most interesting aspect of any kind of game; according to Piaget symbolic games can help the child to organize his thoughts to a level that the language hasn’t reached yet. With symbolic games children start to develop “mental images” to learn and experiment new situations;
- Rule games start like imitations of holder kids games, and year by year define the child’s approach to socialization, Rule games became more frequent year after year, instead other types of games tend to decrease with the passing of time, proving how important are social relation and code rules.
We can say then that game is a spontaneous and natural activity that follow all the evolutional steps of a man, from childhood to maturity. In childhood in particular, games are for kids an important learning and self improvement tool; in general, the absence of games in a child’s life, is a symptom of discomfort and malaise.
Games are very important during the child’s growth, and for this reason is very important promote clever gaming activities to our kids. On a social level, children start to develop their gaming activities in three different stages:
- Individual games; is typical of new born babies and it doesn’t involve any social interaction;
- Collateral games, children between 1 and three years start to find the firsts gaming interactions with their contemporaries, but the game still remains individual;
- Group games, children between four and five years start to develop more complex interactions during the gaming activities and the gaming group became a micro-universe in which children start to experiment the firsts social relations and to understand group dynamics functioning.
Besides, children’s gaming activities are important for the evolutionary development of the child for these two main reasons:
- With the gaming activities, children start to discover the external reality, the unknown world that is still out of his reach;
- Gaming activities help children to be in control of their internal word made of passions, instincts, and to find the perfect balance between this world and the external one.
With clever games children can discover, understand, know new things, manage their needs and follow their interests.
Children need positive experiences, harmony and love: gaming activities can favourite all those important emotions.
These are alle the important reasons why gaming activities are considered not only as the best way for children to develop their emotions and feelings, but also as the best knowledge tools to discover the unknown world.
Clever Games for Clever People
- In: Curiosities | History
- 2 Comments
The Sudoku puzzle is a logic and number based brain teaser. Sudoku puzzle was nicknamed the Rubic’s cube of the 20th century because to solve it you don’t need to be a math genius, but you will need just a lot of logic and, above all, so much patience.
Is a common belief that the Sudoku puzzle was bron in Japan in 1984, but, actually, this brain teaser has its roots deeply related to the ancient “Latin’s cubes” created in the eighteenth century by the Swiss mathematician Euler.
After two centuries, in the seventies, the Sudoku puzzle was recovered by few math and brain teasers lovers.
In the eighties the Sudoku game became very popular in Japan and in a meanwhile it the Sudoku mania spread all over the world.
In fact, at the end of the seventies on the magazine “Math puzzles and logic problems”, Dell New York publishing proposed “number place”: A brain teaser based on compositions rules of the Latin’s cubes.
The aim of the Sudoku puzzle is to fill with numbers from 1 to 9 the 9×9 grid, divided to 3×3 sub grids called “regions”.
Some of the grid cells of the Sudoku puzzle are already filled with numbers, the payer must fill the other empty cells to solve the puzzle respecting the following rules:
- Number can appear only once on each row;
- Number can appear only once on each column.
This brain teasers was proposed in Japan in 1984 on the Monthly Nikolist magazine with the name of Sunji Wa Dokushin Ni kagiru wich means only single numbers. This long name was soon changed in Su(numbers) and doku(single).
The modern Sudoku puzzle as we all know it was born.
In the 12 November 2004, the English Times of London published the first Sudoku puzzle for the frist time in UK, since then this brain teaser became widely popular all over the world and now is published on magazines and newspapers of more than 20 nations.
Now that you know everything about the Sudoku, try to solve this famous brain teaser, starting with the one in this article or trying this new web Sudoku generator.
Among the best educational toys ever invented for children we have construction toys: children love constructions toys, because they can alwais create something new mixing up the pieces, experimenting new shapes and using those creations to set-up fantasy games: cars ships, bridges, houses became in children’s games new playgrounds where the educational gaming approach always let the child learn and experiment something new.
With construction toys children can improve their visual skills, motor skills and start to understand the basics of p
hysics, and design.
Educational toys like constructions are always a good way to let the children face problem solving and a proactive thinking attitude.
Creativity and imagination are also well stimulated by educational construction toys and for every stage of the childhood there are different sets with different benefits for your children.
Construction sets are educational toys highly recommend by pedagogues and educators for all the children above 5 years old.
Art,gaming, recreational activities, interaction with the artefacts and a lot of fun all in one great exhibition at the Tate Modern Gallery of London.
Bodymotionspacesthings, born from creative thought of Robert Morris, is the ultimate great art installation in the Tate Modern Gallery of London.
The visitor can use in a recreational way all the installations of the artist and play in a sort of art in progress path, an endless game where people are a part of a bigger artistic creation always different because manipulated by its users.
In Robert Morris recreational art installation, you can climb, you can run, drift and jump while you are contemplating a fascinating art creation, a game which always includes everyone in its artistic representation.
Due to the big success of Bodymotionspacesthings, Tate Modern Gallery extended the exhibition until 14 June 2009 and the entrance is free!
I recommend this clever gaming experience to everyone!
To get an Idea of what Bodymotionspacesthings really is watch this video and have some fun!
Games and Recreational activities play an fundamental role in child development. Spencer affirms that both man and animals have a surplus of energies utilized in games and recreational activities; in 1900 Carl Cross noticed that games and recreational activities are a sort of exercise utilized to develop motor skills and mental faculties, an exercise to see that determined innate human structures are transformed in more complex behaviour patterns, more suitable for environmental modifications. Through games and educational activities, the child start to understand objects functioning; the functional game , as pedagogues call it to underline the imitative activity of real situations: the game start to acquire the firsts representational patterns, when the child start to utilize objects in a functional way and in this way it become a representative game. The Recreational experience teach to the child perseverance and self-confidence; it’s a process to become aware of his internal and external worlds and to accept the reciprocal needs of these two realities. On a cognitive level, games and recreational activities favour the development of memory, of attention and concentration, the ability of make comparisons, of build relations and of utilize perceptual learning patterns. A lack of recreational activities, especially during childhood, can create cognitive deficiencies. Recreational activities grow step by step along with intellectual and psychological development of the child; for this reason this stage remains fundamental in every man life.
Sometimes even for adults, playing recreational activities is the only way to free their minds from any thought or worry and to unburden emotional make-up.
Games and recreational activities are very important for the intellectual development of the child because when he plays he can surprise himself and trough surprise he can learn how to relate himself with the external world; games are a great tool for the child because help him to develop his creativity, to experiment his cognitive capabilities, to build relations with his contemporaries and to give life to the development of his personality.
Intellectual potentiality, affections, relations, these are the milestones of a sane and happy childhood and of a bright future, because, as British World War pilot Douglas Bader used to say, “Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you can’t do this or that. That’s nonsense. Make up your mind, you’ll never use crutches or a stick, then have a go at everything. Go to school, join in all the games you can. Go anywhere you want to. But never, never let them persuade you that things are too difficult or impossible.”
Games for your mind 
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