We recently took on the challenge of how to get a positive message about a power company through to students. Using online gaming to cut through the clutter in an increasingly fragmented advertising market, the result was a sophisticated online educational game called ElectroCity.

After 18 months of intense creative, design and technical work, the game has already been overwhelming successful: there have been up to 55,000 daily visitor sessions on the www.electrocity.co.nz site, and the average length of a session is more than ten minutes. More than 7.6 million page views have been recorded in just over two months and over 370 schools have registered to play the game, which is designed for classroom use.

According to the game creator, Tom Markham, “ElectroCity is educational, but it’s also really fun to play. You start with a pristine New Zealand landscape of rivers, mountains and bush. Then it’s a case of deciding what you want to do with it. You can create a clean and green tourist town or a monstrous metropolis with millions of citizens. You can even do nothing.

“Unlike other building games, our scoring system does not force players to focus only on growth. But ElectroCity is still competitive and addictive. That’s the trick.”

Play it for yourself or watch the interactive case study or better still chat to Mark on how we can do a campaign for you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 10:14 am and is filed under Campaigns, New sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.