Short answer: a lot. These professionals have one huge goal in common: they both try grab the target attention as much as possible and for as long as possible. Games can trigger a collection of emotions and so can marketing campaigns. In his book Descartes Error, Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, argues that emotion is a necessary ingredient to almost all decisions. So, people rely on emotions, rather than information, to make brand decisions — and that emotional responses to ads are more influential on a person’s intent to buy than the content of an ad.

How many boring ads do you see per day on Facebook? 10? 20? 100? And what if we sum this amount with ads from billboards, TV and Radio? According to this article by Forbes, experts estimate that Americans are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 ads each day. At some point, we start a screening process for what we engage with and start ignoring brands and advertising messages, unless it’s something that we have a personal interest in.

But how can we use those emotions? In his book Designing Games, Tynan Sylvester determines that games have “basic emotional triggers”. I’ll select a couple of them just to make my point, but you can have a look on a summarised list on this article written by Matthew Tyler-Jones.

Emotion through learning

Not just any old learning though. “If a lesson is obvious,” he says, “there’s not much buzz in finally getting it because it was always fairly clear.” Instead, he advocates a moment of insight, where everything that has come before “clicks into place and reveals the shape of the whole.”

Emotion through character arcs

This is what film can do so well, engaging the audience’s empathy with one or more characters, as they face internal conflicts, grow and change.

Emotion through challenge

And this is the emotional trigger that we most readily associate with games, testing the the player’s dexterity and pattern learning before rewarding him or her not just with a sense of accomplishment, but progression within the game.

Emotion through social interaction

There’s still a perception of gamers as solitary types with no friends, but of course most games, not just team sports, are ways of bringing two or more people together.

Emotion through acquisition

As Sylvester acknowledges, gambling games are all about acquisition, and computer games often simulate the acquisition of wealth (or simply points). Of course, gambling works in two ways, and the bitter emotions of loss shouldn’t be disregarded.