It's all fun and games -- until someone bonds with a brand

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"Would you like to play a game?" In the classic 1983 drama WarGames, starring Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, that computer-generated query sparks a nearly apocalyptic cautionary tale about playing with technology you can't really control.

But with fears of technology apparently as dead as the Cold War, people are now spending a growing amount of time playing online and mobile games. And marketers are building entire game-based campaigns, in hopes of using fun to embed brands in customers' lives.

Think marketers aren't playing games with you? So-called gamification is the engine behind the explosive growth of companies like Groupon, which offer time-limited deals in hundreds of cities around the world. It's the reason millions of people are downloading apps like Foursquare to their smart phones, enabling users to earn free products and services for being loyal customers. And, by appealing to the childlike desire of people to instill a sense of play in their lives, it enables brands to burrow into the hearts of consumers in unusual ways.

"Gaming has become ingrained in culture," says Ann Mack, the director of trend spotting for JWT, the worldwide ad agency which last month issued a report suggesting that gaming was one of the top 10 trends to watch in 2011. "The consumer has become more and more engaged, and [gaming]allows them to spend more and more time with your brand, and gives them incentive to do so."

"Social media enables social one-upmanship and competition," she adds, noting that Twitter and Facebook users sometimes compete to earn the greatest number of followers or friends. "People often compare their activities, habits, behaviours to those in their social circle."

And major companies are buying in. Last summer, the Facebook-based game FarmVille incorporated the organic foods maker Cascadian Farm in a week-long promotion that enabled players to virtually plant the brand's blueberries. In the first three days, more than one million players took up the offer. That followed an earlier promotion in which FarmVille players who purchased certain blended drinks at 7-Eleven stores were able to redeem codes printed on the cups for virtual products in the game.

"Historically, marketing and advertising was about telling the public what the attributes of a brand are: 'We have the best-tasting bread.' 'We are the cheapest airline,'" observes Gabe Zichermann, the author of Game-Based Marketing, published last spring. "Now, it's about creating a long-term engagement with the consumer that moves them along what we call, 'the player journey' - the long-term emotional engagement of the user with the brand."

Mr. Zichermann, a 36-year-old, Canadian-born, New York-based consultant, says gamification blends behavioural economics, motivational science, and - for companies, most promisingly - the alignment of player motivations with business objectives.

Later this month, San Francisco will be the site of Mr. Zichermann's latest brainchild, a two-day conference known as the Gamification Summit that will bring together about 300 marketers, designers and thinkers to explore the increasing use of so-called gaming mechanics in engaging consumers.

Among the presentations will be a case study of last November's launch of Jay-Z's autobiography Decoded, in perhaps the biggest use of game-based marketing ever mounted. In that promotion, developed by the New York-based agency Droga5, large-scale versions of every single page of the hip-hop star's book were scattered around the United States. Fans were able to log on to a dedicated page on Microsoft's search site Bing to win an autographed copy of the page by decoding clues online, or via a mobile phone, before anyone else.

The campaign followed a similar effort in London last April by Nike, which engaged runners in a city-wide game that awarded special badges to players who made their way fastest through one of 40 postcode areas.

The use of a badge echoes Foursquare, a mobile phone application in the midst of explosive growth: It had fewer than 500,000 users last March and is expected to surpass six million this month. With the app, people "check in" to a location, broadcasting their whereabouts to an invited circle of friends and associates in the hopes of earning a reward or honour. Being the most frequent visitor to a location earns someone the title of mayor, which can win them, say, a free pint of beer from a bar they favour.

Encouraging customers to check in helps marketers create stronger emotional ties to their brands, which builds loyalty. "It's about getting a consumer to live the experience, rather than simply absorbing the message," explains Anthony Wolch, the executive creative director of Organic Inc.'s Toronto office. "Living that experience creates a memory that brands become an inherent and indelible part of."

Game-based marketing also has the potential to disrupt traditional loyalty marketing operations, like those run by Aeroplan or Air Miles. In a survey conducted for the JWT report, 65 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement that, "with loyalty rewards programs, I feel like it takes so long to accumulate enough points to get anything worthwhile that I generally don't bother trying."

Mr. Zichermann argues that traditional loyalty programs are also both expensive and misaligned. "The vast majority of those programs are a 'buy 10, get one free,'" he notes. "That has a marginal cost of 10 per cent, which is really expensive. And frequently it gives the most regular customers products for free that they would have paid for anyways."

Potentially more valuable to users - not to mention less expensive to companies - are virtual rewards like those offered in the 7-Eleven promotion which enhanced FarmVille players' experiences. "It's the system that's engaging, not the reward," he says. "That's what game designers know really well, and this is what gamification is unveiling to the marketing world."

Mr. Zichermann points to the efforts of companies like Gilt.com, the website that offers luxury goods at a discount. "Gilt doesn't give its top customers free stuff. They give them early access to discounts."

"It's a big shift in understanding that what motivates users, long-term, isn't always free stuff," he adds. "And that, in fact, when we take the emphasis off of free stuff, we find we create better, longer-term engagement with users. These are things that game designers have known for a long time, but that are coming into the mainstream. It's the gamification of life."