The oldest profession in the world, if the old wives’ tales are to be believed, is prostitution. Rather than attempting to capitalise on other vital human needs like food or shelter, early entrepreneurs apparently realised that turning tricks was a far more profitable vocation that flogging freshly hunted mammoth or taking first-time home buyers around luxury off-plan caves.
I reckon though that the first occupation to come into existence was actually advertising: those primitive prozzies may have made a living off their prehistoric privates, but in fact they were doing nothing more than simply advertising a product. And as it is with the basic principle of ‘supply and demand’, transactions were made, money changed hands, people got screwed, and hundreds of generations later there’s not a human being on the planet whose livelihood doesn’t revolve around whoring him- or herself out.
Apart from writing opinion pieces (such as this one), reviewing the occasional video game, and tending to my ever-expanding collection of imitation Fabergé eggs, I spend the bulk of my waking hours working in an advertising agency. Yes, I am one of those people who are responsible for you, the average consumer, being bombarded by what is estimated at around 5 000 advertising messages every single day.
However, the debate of whether or not I made a good career choice or whether advertising in general is a good thing are not exactly the subjects of this article. (And it’s yes to both, before you ask.) I’m more concerned about how advertising affects us as gamers, and how the discussions on in-game advertising that have surfaced recently seem to be leaving a lot of us not wanting to rush out and chug a Coke or support Barack Obama, but rather lash out in retaliation like only the faceless hordes of the Internet can.
But is the animosity (or even the advertising) actually necessary?
In-game advertising, also known as gamevertising or advergaming, is the practise of using video games as an advertising medium. This can involve product placement like a Nike or Adidas ad in a FIFA game, an ad disguised as ‘realism’ like the KFCs or Pizza Huts in ‘Crazy Taxi’, or a variety of officially licensed cars in ‘Need For Speed: Insertgenericracingmonikerhere’. Hell, even genuine replicas of guns in the ‘Grand Theft Auto’ series have been branded as evil advertising heresy by some purist gamers.
The reasons for loving or hating these ads, however, vary depending on which side of the controller (or the profit) someone is on.
The most obvious advantage to Nike, Fiat or the people that make all that Barbie paraphernalia is that they not only manage to sneak their products into the homes of potential customers, and do so when said customer is actively focused on the game (and hence the ad) at hand, but they can target a specific market with minimal effort. Slapping the latest tween fashion brands into ‘Barbie’s Virtual Playhouse’ almost guarantees an audience of only teenage girls as they’re the ones we know will buy it; that is unless you’re a guy gamer with no shame and even less co-ordination, or a 21st century paedophile who’s scarily evolved far beyond the traditional offering of candy.
And you don’t need someone who works in advertising to tell you that TV is a dying medium. In the convenience-centric world of PVR and home entertainment systems that remove the need to ever venture outdoors, video games become a valuable method of reaching sheltered consumers.
The advantage to developers seems a tad less insidious though, as they not only get to make money for themselves but can also offset development costs to make cheaper (or preferably better) games. Sadly, in a market plagued by piracy and fickle gamers, in-game advertising thus becomes almost a necessity, and has created the vicious circle between players who refuse to pay for their software and yet complain when ‘Splinter Cell’ makes them scale a giant, neon AXE billboard.
This brings me to us, the gamers. Where should we draw the line between what constitutes realism and what is just blatant commercialism?
For a change though, I’m going to jump to the other side of said line here and advocate the side of the advertisers.
Sure, we can complain about ad clutter and how it’s had to find its way into our beloved games, but we need to come to terms with the fact that we will never, ever escape the pervasive talons of the evil advertising machine. Once we realize this, is it not better to at least see ads that are relevant to individuals rather than infomercial spam, or those badly-dubbed cosmetics ads for women with crow’s feet or chunky thighs?
It’s also a great way of relating to an audience that has become wary of traditional media. Barack Obama bought ad placements in 18 different games during his campaign for presidency, and while this may seem extreme and even invasive he certainly must be commended for his shrewdness and tech-savvy self-marketing. (And I can only help but recall his predecessor, G. Dubbya, who will never live down his comment about the ‘Interwebs’.)
On top of this, Kerri-Ann Kuhn of the Queensland University of Technology studied the effect of gamevertising and found it to have little effect on the majority of gamers anyway. “The problem is that there is too much already happening in the game,” she said, “so the user is concentrated on game play.” As a result of this, she concluded that, “there are not enough cognitive resources left to take in any advertising messages.”
So are we perhaps grabbing our pitchforks a little early here? Are we putting up the stake and gathering the villagers for a witch hunt that’s not actually necessary? I think so. And if I’m going to burn as the witch for not taking the gamers’ side as I usually do in these opinion pieces, then chuck another log on the fire, because I’ve come to accept that in-game advertising is remarkably similar to the prostitutes I started this article off with: no matter where you are or where you go, they’ll always be there trying to make a buck just like everyone else.
(Flamesuit, engage.)
Discuss Gamervertising (or jsut the hostory of prostitution, if you like) in the forums
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