Serious games and branding

The gaming market is expanding to include not only traditional nonprofit firms but also for-profit and hybrid entities that have strong social values and missions. Specifically, due to high pressures from the part of social activists, companies are trying to respond through developing CSR strategies in order to appear more legitimate to their publics (Van Cranenburgh, Liket, & Roome, 2013). While previous papers have documented the trend of INGOs using serious games (SGs) for education-entertainment (Arora & Itu, 2010) the phenomenon of companies branding themselves and their causes through SGs have not been adequately addressed to this day. This thesis examines a wide array of SGs, developed from various types of organizations, aiming at raising awareness and stimulating activism. This taxonomy aims to shed more light on the ways branding differs not only among the non-profit and commercial sector but also among larger and smaller companies, generating patterns that will not only contribute to the existing SGs’ research but bring a real life perspective of how the CSR sector and the SG entwine. In addition, as social issues require far more resources than any single organization is capable of mobilizing independently, my main focus will be to investigate potential emerging partnerships and social alliances that span the non-profit and for-profit boundary and create hybrid entities of professional and educational pillars working in tandem. Therefore, through analyzing with a content and comparative analysis the ways in which each organization promotes their SGs and through exploring their design and narratives through auto-ethnography, this paper highlights the various schemes leading to activism, portraying different and novel branding patterns.