Social Gaming

I’m Addicted to “Dots”.

Dots is a nice little gaming app that was developed by New York based, Betaworks One. The game is very simple; try and connect as many same-colored dots as you can using only vertical and horizontal lines in 60 seconds, in 30 moves, or you can play it in endless mode.

Dots interface is extremely clean and simple and has a social media connection allowing you to connect to your friends via Twitter or Facebook to see your friends high scores. Weekly score boards reset every Sunday, giving you a chance to make it to the top of the list and enhance the competition across your network.

Since it’s release Dots has jumped to the number one mobile game in twenty countries, with good reason. The simple clean interface and engaging user experience makes Dots highly addictive.

Public or Private?

Here is an interesting little game from BMW Guggenheim Lab. The game Public/Private explores the way we view the world around us and asks how often we seek out private space, or look for public engagement. It takes about 60 seconds to go through and allows you to share your results with the rest of the world via your favorite social media outlet. As of five minutes ago, I was the only person in the Kansas City area that had participated.

Push It With Intel.

Intel has always done a really solid job of promoting their brand and products. Intel is also a company that is heavily invested in digital convergence marketing tools, tying physical and digital spaces together quite well. One of their latest campaigns is “Push” an old school arcade game tied to a social media campaign, attached to a game where the grand prize is a new Ultrabook.

It’s a fairly simple concept. You connect with Facebook or Twitter and get in line. When your turn comes up, your name in 3D block letters is pulled by a robotic arm and placed on the table. Then those letters are pushed forward in the stack. If your name is the one to push it off stage, you win. The game plays out in real-time, streamed to the web.

DDB Spain, Polowers.

Tweet races, Twitter games, and Twitter based competitions are nothing new, but occasionally one comes along that really works. Case in point VW’s #polowers campaign created by DDB Spain. The numbers in the video are pretty impressive, even though the number of participants was only 4075. This collective race, generated over 150,000 tweets with the hashtag #Polowers in 8 hours averaging 5 tweets per second. On top of that the campaign reached more than 10% of Spain’s global twitter audience. In addition, the game generated a vast amount of visits to Polo´s product section on www.volkswagen.es, reaching a record of its history. The screen shot above is from the integrated website that was developed for the game. Unfortunately it has been pulled down.