Game on for Genesis Energy

Game on for Genesis Energy

Major New Zealand power company Genesis Energy is now using the power of gaming to cut through the clutter in an increasingly dispersed advertising market. The weapon is its sophisticated online educational game ElectroCity, which has produced an immediate payback after 18 months of creative, design and technical work.

ElectroCity

The game has been created by the direct marketing agency Rivet. And the numbers say it all: there are 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 also designed for classroom use.

Inspired by PC classics such as Civilization and SimCity™, ElectroCity requires players to make land-use and energy decisions to determine the fate of their community over a 150-turn period. Best of all, it’s available free – no strings attached ─ to both schools and members of the public.

The game’s creator, Tom Markham, says: “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.”

According to Chris Hunter, Rivet’s Executive Creative Director, even casual players quickly discover ElectroCity is more than a game: “It’s a substantive, well-researched and curriculum-matched educational tool that’s available free to New Zealand schools. Although it carries minimal Genesis Energy branding, it gives players a positive, in-depth engagement with the Genesis Energy brand.”

The game is designed for year 7 to 9 (intermediate) students. It demonstrates, in a sophisticated and entertaining way, the decisions and trade-offs needed to create sustainable communities. The layered design means that it appeals across different age groups.

Hunter says, “ElectroCity takes branding to a new interactive level. It is about giving players a positive, engaging, long-term brand experience, not a passive experience like watching a TVC from the couch.

“It’s about Genesis Energy taking ownership of the energy debate, by showing people what the real choices and their consequences are. It’s about involving young people in the type of decisions that will affect their future and that of New Zealand.

“For example, investing in hydro has constraints – suitable locations are limited, output is tied into water levels and dams are expensive to build. Thermal generation is cheaper but has ongoing fuel costs and a greater environmental impact. Wind generation produces only modest amounts of electricity, unless the wind farms are huge.”

Genesis Energy Chief Executive Murray Jackson says that with the company recognising the importance of sustainable energy generation, energy efficiency and environmental management, “we wanted to help people think about these subjects laterally. And what better way than to experience them first-hand and to see the impacts of your decisions?”

Schools that have registered to play ElectroCity become part of a competition: the student judged to have the best city overall wins $10,000 worth of HP technology equipment for their school. There is an online leader board for students to keep track of their town’s score and to compare their rating with other towns.

ElectroCity is not the first time Genesis Energy has helped New Zealand educators. The company’s ground-breaking Schoolgen programme (www.schoolgen.co.nz) provides select schools in New Zealand the ability to generate a portion of their electricity from a renewable energy source. Through the Schoolgen website and associated teaching activities, which are also free to use by any school in New Zealand, Schoolgen raises awareness amongst students, teachers and parents about climate change, renewable energy, electricity generation and energy efficiency.

The technical development of ElectroCity was managed by Rivet, in conjunction with Terabyte and Ubiquity Software. Rivet has grown out of Draft, the biggest specialist direct agency in the US and one of the largest in the world. Rivet is now a sister agency to Lowe’s brand agencies across the Lowe Worldwide network, based on a model successfully used by Draft and Lowe in New Zealand.

Hunter says Rivet is focused on ‘creating conversations between people and brands’, and ElectroCity shows how powerful this approach can be.

ENDS

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