PilotFish Communications - Game4Change project - World heritage preservation

Games have always been related to violence and destruction un till we were introduced to Games for Change as new upcoming genre of gaming. 

G4C -Catalyzing Social Impact Through Digital Games as mentioned on their website. 

A unique category of games that is engaging the world with a relevant causes and making a difference. To further my belief in the new line of gaming i came across the article Mashable.com http://mashable.com/2011/01/18/games-social-good/ which explained the changing scenario and creation of Games for social cause and how people use platforms like Games to educate the world about current issues. A very good example mentioned in the article is Farmville and their effort to raise funds for haiti with their campaign "Support Haiti" and that is something that we would like to achieve as a team. Making a difference is key!

The instructions were simple create a game that causes a social impact with the theme of World Heritage Preservation. PilotFish Communications was then set to action as a team of 6 with equal creative input to formulate a Game that has a message. In our first meeting after the brief we were excited. The target audience was set for 16 to 25 a very young category. In order to get your attention out of games like Candy Crush Saga and Temple Run and play a game related to a social cause was a daunting task. I say this after looking at this Youtube video that pretty much describes the audience we would ‘like’ to communicate too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Qv26IWyGU

With a few million hits I cannot really assume this is our ‘Target Audience’

But the category of audience is what we are currently in the process of defining as a group. 

Pilot Fish communications is a media and communications company and we believe that our vision is to 'enthuse and activate the world with limitless creativity'. We started off with perfecting our logo and stuck to Michele’s hand drawn logo to bring the creative aspect of our company.We did initially try to develop a Photoshop version but stuck to this as it brings out our brands identity. 

As we walked through the client brief we came up with 3 ideas to address the game and its social aspect. As research began the one thing that I came across the gamers fraternity is their obsession with aliens and came to the idea of using them as a character. We did come up with an initial idea to have the aliens as the character endangering these world heritage sites and how the player has to save the world by protecting these sites. This game could be modified and enhanced and be a breakaway from the current obsession of zombies in the current mobile gaming market (ZombieRun, Plant vs Zombies, Age of Zombies.. etc) We concentrated on creating 3 versions of the game which targeted different aspects like Bio diversity and Sustainable Tourism and worked with themes of games like quests and adventures. After our feedback we though we needed to work a little more into the theme and story line of our game. 
As a basic outline our game needs to be Entertaining, Creative, Engrossing, Dynamic, Built for the 'head down' generation that creates a rippling effect on the same generation forcing them to lift their heads and make a difference in protecting our culture and heritage.

As we walked through this there were a lot of things that we needed to keep in mind considering our client brief was creating a game for World Heritage Preservation.

1^st: Defining our audience and narrowing down on the Ideal audience who would play this game.  The age group was defined as 16 to 25, which is a very relatable age for us as a team. A very important question that will help us through this process would be if we as individuals would play such a game. We need to balance three aspects to appeal to an audience, first being creative and interesting and 2nd creating an educative game that interests people and third being the recall value of the game. Keeping all this in mind our ideal audience would be either be a student or a working individual. We wont really restrict the category to certain kind since our idea is to create a universal, fun game that is easy to play and interesting. The game should have humor value, since it is a very common thing to relate too!

2^nd: Creating the right platform and launch for the game and defining the message of the game.
Since our game is a game that has a social initiative involved we need to define what all platforms will the games be launched on? Will it have a Facebook version? Will it be available or android and itunes? Will it feature on game websites like Zynga or will it be an extension on google? Ideally we would like to have all of these. We are also currently concentrating on defining the purpose and theme of our game which is extremely essential at this point.

3^rd: Coming up with an idea that is intriguing and commercial that will automatically attract people to download our game and compete with their friends as they try to save world heritage sites. Utilizing social media to effectively forward our cause and create a sensation as a game that can be played like by all. 

4^th: Creating a strategic game that educates people and extends their skills and brings them back to play it (recall value like candy crush and temple run) and share it with their friends and enables people to support our cause and our game and spread the right values through our game

5^th: Creating a game that enhances a persons cultural and ethical skills and at the same time is very engrossing and engages the gamer to play it regularly.

As a theme of our game we have decided to concentrate on Sustainable tourism as a topic that we would like to educate people. We also our working our way towards a character of our game being a Pigeon and we are currently undertaking research to come to a consensus about the lead of our game.

PilotFish communications are currently undergoing R&D for the game and we will soon have all our essential ingredients ready to cause a stir and create a Game for Change. 

Sukriti Chopra

PilotFish Communications