I’ve been looking into the world of fashion and it looks like fashion is getting more and more interested in using games to reach their target demographic of women. With new fashion games like Stylmee, which is a badge reward system like FourSquare, marketers are seeing more and more ways to connect online gaming with real-world shopping.
A recent article sent my way (thanks Jen!) looks at these explicit connections between fashion marketing and game playing.
“What the winners understand is that games draw on psychological motivations around where we stand, relative to those around us. It’s no coincidence that, like game designers, those of us in fashion have been engaged with those motivations for a very long time,” Gardner said.
That’s a very high-level and general overview of the connections, but still noteworthy insofar that’s the intersection that fashion-focused people notice. At the end of the day they see games as just another way to drive more sales of their product line. Fair enough, but games can do so much more and I’d like to see fashion-related games that do just that.
A game mentioned in the article above is Fashion Week Live which wouldn’t load for me so I was unable to explore it. All I know is that the loading screen avatars fell into the uncanny valley.
Living exclusively on Facebook at facebook.com/fwlgame, players are challenged to form a career for themselves within any facet of the fashion world, from show production, to photography, to styling look books, runway shows or ad campaigns. Users are encouraged to tap into talents within these parameters, as well as network with other players and “rise to fame” with each challenge.