[Abstract] Launched by Taobao in 2016 for young consumers, Taobao Maker Festival is a large-scale offline event positioning itself as a “grand display of Chinese youth’s creativity”. During the Festival, Taobao’s creative niche merchants gather at offline markets, allowing the public to experience up-close the futuristic technologies, quirky creative goods, and amazing trendy designs etc. with huge imagination, thus cultivating considerable brand awareness over the past five years. However, as a super IP for Taobao’s brand transformation and upgrading, how will the Maker Festival maintain innovation leadership and continue to attract public participation in the creative industry market in the future, effectively stimulating their initiative, enthusiasm and creativity?

Taking the 2021 Taobao Maker Festival, which marked its sixth year, as the main research object, this paper focuses on its latest development - game-based innovation, and attempts to explore from the theoretical level how Internet platforms achieve offline expansion. "Gamification" refers to the use of game elements and mechanisms in non-game contexts to provide target objects with fun, engaging game experiences, thereby providing participation motivation, in-depth engagement and active involvement, and ultimately achieving expected goals. With the theme of “Lost Treasure” in 2021, Taobao Maker Festival worked with hundreds of creative Taobao merchants to create a large-scale immersive escape room game for the public, fully achieving game-based innovation. According to the game element pyramid model as an analytical framework, Taobao Maker Festival’s game-based innovation is mainly manifested in the game-based representations and mechanisms presented by the Festival, including game settings such as using various narrative forms to expound the game world outlook, using time and rules to constrain game participation behaviors, constructing emotional relationships between the audience and the game; game design such as mechanism to attract audience engagement in the game, incentive mechanism to reinforce investment through reward feedback, social mechanism providing communication and interaction opportunities; and game settings integrating online mobile components with offline entities.

The marketing communication characteristics of game-based innovation can be summarized as the 3I principle of innovation: the fun principle of using game scenes and narratives to attract audience engagement, the benefit principle of driving their participation through satisfying extrinsic and intrinsic motivations, and the social principle of facilitating on-site communication and interaction and mobilizing audience emotions through game-based communication. To validate the utility of game-based innovation to some extent, the author conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 audience members who participated in the 2021 Taobao Maker Festival, and drew two preliminary conclusions: Game-based scene and motivation design can effectively attract sustained audience engagement, and game-based mechanisms along with interpersonal communication and group communication facilitated the realization of marketing communication goals. The current problems with game-based innovation are mainly that limited game time and resources undermine audience's participation and communication feedback opportunities, task design leads to insufficient immersion and autonomy, game-based marketing has weak long-tail effects, and merchants have low return visit rates.