Gamification and Advergaming

This chapter will expound on the concept of gamification and its adoption by various brands. It will be focusing on advergaming, which is one of the very famous applications of gamification. The chapter will elucidate the various launch details of advergaming applications by various firms and brand websites including online games, social network sites, and interactive digital television. It will also discuss the techniques underlying gamification, which include game mechanics and game dynamics, which will also reveal the impact of advergaming on consumer engagement and decision making to buy a product or not and also the benefits to the brand site. The chapter will also explain the techniques and strategies of advergaming used by various product websites nationally and internationally and their effect on consumers and the product or brand websites.

NuGinga Playcode: A web NCL/NCLua authoring tool for Ginga-NCL digital TV applications

Entering the world of Interactive Digital Television (iDTV) applications can lead to an exhaustive process that involves reading extensive standards and may need a robust middleware solution to run Ginga-NCL applications, which is a subset of Ginga and the standard for interactivity of digital television adopted in Latin America countries. Even though there are some open and commercial solutions for development of Ginga applications available on the market, most of these solutions present downsides such as deep dependency of Ginga engine implementation, need of complex en- vironment setup and they are not very intuitive NCL/NCLua coding platforms. To solve these issues, we created an IDE developed in web technology that makes possible for students and professionals to learn how to develop Ginga-NCL applications. With this tool, developers can write, validate and experiment their applications entirely on the web environment, with no software installation required.

Gamification and Advergaming

This chapter will expound on the concept of gamification and its adoption by various brands. It will be focusing on advergaming, which is one of the very famous applications of gamification. The chapter will elucidate the various launch details of advergaming applications by various firms and brand websites including online games, social network sites, and interactive digital television. It will also discuss the techniques underlying gamification, which include game mechanics and game dynamics, which will also reveal the impact of advergaming on consumer engagement and decision making to buy a product or not and also the benefits to the brand site. The chapter will also explain the techniques and strategies of advergaming used by various product websites nationally and internationally and their effect on consumers and the product or brand websites.

A Tool to Simulate the Transmission, Reception, and Execution of Interactive TV Applications

The emergence of Interactive Digital Television (iDTV) opened a set of technological possibilities that go beyond those offered by conventional TV. Among these opportunities we can highlight interactive contents that run together with linear TV program (television service where the viewer has to watch a scheduled TV program at the particular time it is offered and on the particular channel it is presented on). However, developing interactive contents for this new platform is not as straightforward as, for example, developing Internet applications. One of the options to make this development process easier and safer is to use an iDTV simulator. However, after having investigated some of the existing iDTV simulation environments, we have found a limitation: these simulators mainly present solutions focused on the TV receiver, whose interactive content must be loaded in advance by the programmer to a local repository (e.g., Hard Drive, USB). Therefore, in this paper, we propose a tool, named BiS (Broadcast iDTV content Simulator), which makes possible a broader solution for the simulation of interactive contents. It allows simulating the transmission of interactive content along with the linear TV program (simulating the transmission of content over the air and in broadcast to the receivers). To enable this, we defined a generic and easy-to-customize communication protocol that was implemented in the tool. The proposed environment differs from others because it allows simulating reception of both linear content and interactive content while running Java applications to allow such a content presentation.