Gamification in Entertainment Industry: Glimpses From Indian Film Industry

Introduction

Gamification, in most simple words can be defined as “engaging participants with an activity/task which they perform stress-free and reflects their behaviour”. Gamification is tool used for the brand awareness, to attract new customers, make the present customers more loyal towards the product by making them engaged in an enjoyable manner. It has become one of the prominent topics of interest for many academicians and marketing professionals because of the simple reason that it is considered to be the one of effective ways to promote various services and products for many brands and other companies. In recent years, it has been observed that smartphones and tablets have become essential tools for people irrespective of the age and sexual category. People find these electronic gadgets as important mode to keep them updated, communicated and entertained. One of the most commonly performed activities with the handheld terminal is to interact with different games that can be found at the application market where the consumers spend hours playing them. As the brands become aware of this trend, they include advergaming in their marketing portfolio; video games being used to promote new products, services or ideas that the brand wants to bring to the market. Many companies have launched game apps which can be down loaded in the personal devices to enhance user’s participation and their motivation to be participative for maximum time. People get habitual to the games on screen because it makes them joyful and also gives opportunity to win something at the end. According to the FICCI-KPMG Indian Media and Entertainment Industry Report 2013, on an average, Indians spend over two-and-a-half hours on their smartphones every day and less than a quarter of that is spent on voice calls and SMS. The phone, for such users, is becoming a second screen as they spend an average of almost two hours a day browsing, watching videos, playing games and catching up on social networking sites.

Creating an advergame is not suitable for all the brands. But it presents a big opportunity for certain enterprises like sports & sports-related brands or lifestyle brands with positioning which can adapt well to a mobile game. The practice of this idea of advergaming varies from brand to brand. Mobile gaming is boosting growth of the games industry for these reasons: growth of two screens (mobiles and tablets), anytime-anywhere accessibility, free-to-play and freemium models and hardware innovations. Compared to traditional advertising, which is a passive one-way consumption, advergaming scores more in connecting with the consumer when he is completely immersed in a game. Mobiles are extremely personal device that demand fierce and total attention due to its nature. Thus, brands can benefit from this emotional involvement between the consumer and his game. Advertisement through games is becoming very popular in the market as it helps to retain the customers and also attract new customers. Most of the people are tech savvy and prefer to get information instantly and handy. Game apps on mobile phone is the most convenient way to promote services, products and information because it is user friendly and saves the time. It can be played anytime and anywhere, even during commuting from one place to another. In metro cities, people devote a lot of time to travel to the office and vice-versa and utilize their way time through various phone apps, where one of the most interesting and common way for them to get engaged is playing games which further help them to relax and make them fresh when they get down from the transport vehicle. There are instances where people started craving to play the game to reach to the next levels as it was very imaginatively designed to make the player overexcited which makes them play continuously for many hours. These type of games are especially created to popularize a certain product for targeted customers (Sharma, 2016). In present scenario, companies are hiring experts from software background who can create the salient features with systematic mapping of the games with most advanced technology so that people spend good amount of time without feeling tired. Experts strategically keep company’s logos, coupons, prizes at various levels so that people would like to clear different levels to complete the targets and get closer to the company’s products. There are certain games which are created in such a way that a customer has to even buy the product to reach to the next level of the game and people take pride to buy the product to clear the preceding levels. This happens because game makes the customers spend more time on the game app of the company and compels them to purchase the product.