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Today, as marketers grow increasingly unhappy
with the value delivered by traditional media, they turn to alternative
communication channels, including computer games. Marketers, who
for a long time have been discounting computer games as a fringe
activity reserved for teenage boys with unattractively little purchasing
power, are now gathering for conferences devoted to the sole issue
of game-based advertising.
While still on the fringes of marketing budgets (games’s
share in the overall advertising spending remained at meager 0.1%),
in-game advertising and advergaming is slated to grow to a $1B
business by 2009 (Yankee Group), although this forecast tones
down an earlier promise of the $1B by 2005 made by Forrester.
Over the past few years, at least eight major companies have sprung
to claim their stake in this advertising pie, their services ranging
from dynamic insertion of standard ad units to customized product
placement tailored to the advertiser’s needs.
As the interest in the medium’s potential grows and
industry professionals are careful to note how important it is
for the game-based ads to be unobtrusive, gamers are wary. On
forums, they protest against advertising intrusion into what they
see as their last haven safe from the marketing onslaught. Current
advertising practices do little to placate their fears and to
suggest that games won’t become the next victim of advertising
excesses. One reason for these misfiring efforts is the systemic
deficiency of the advertising process; the current market is better
equipped to process mass-produced and recycled communications
than custom-tailored messages. The other reason is a lack of experience
in planning for an idiosyncratic medium that has only recently
emerged from a relative obscurity and reluctantly opened its doors
to advertisers. This paper is designed to address the latter problem
by compiling, arranging and analyzing the existing body of academic
and industry knowledge to distill a set of guidelines for advertising
in computer games. The main question it seeks to answer is how
to design and place in-game advertising in a way that would recognize
and respect the limitations of the medium while taking advantage
of the unique opportunities it offers. In search for an answer,
I examine the medium from a variety of angles arranged in the
following four chapters.
The introduction outlines problems that advertisers face in their
work with traditional communication channels: the clutter of competing
marketing messages, the failure of mass media to match the marketers
with their audience, and the resulting consumer frustration. This
part introduces the idea of a virtual world as a pristine environment
with its own rules. It allegorically argues that when immersed
into a computer game, consumers undergo a transformation that
demands radically new approaches on the part of marketers for
their efforts to be successful.
THE NUMBERS GAME
For advertisers, one of the games’ appeals is the demographic
profile of the medium’s audience. The Entertainment Software
Association estimates an average gamer to be 30 years old with
a decade-long experience in playing. Every other American is playing
electronic games. Jupiter Research reports 27 million of them
play on their PCs for more than five hours a week, while another
twenty two million are spending that much time playing on game
consoles. In 2004, they collectively have bought 248 million game
copies while, as it has been widely lamented, spending less time
with other media. The first part of the paper aggregates the scattered
bits of the statistics to paint a coherent picture of the gaming
audience by answering a series of questions: who the gamers are
and how many, what they play and to what purpose, what other media
they consume and, importantly, how receptive they are to in-game
advertising. This part also outlines difficulties associated with
reaching a highly segmented audience spread across many platforms
and titles, as well as the risks of planning for ad placement
in properties whose market success is uncertain. The sources used
in the analysis are third-party industry reports by Jupiter Research,
the Entertainment Software Association, in-game advertising networks,
and where available, Nielsen.
EVOLUTION OF THE MEDIUM
The second part will examine the evolution of games from the
once cutting-edge Pong to massively multiplayer environments,
populated by millions who calculate their play money in terms
of GDPs comparable to those of mid-size countries. This part also
explains why marketers have avoided the medium for almost 30 years
of its existence – and what the important exceptions were
– and how this lack of interest has pushed the game industry
into an isolation that created difficulties for advertisers down
the road. The chapter draws on the history of the medium to map
out scenarios for its future evolution and implications for advertising.
Bibliography for this section includes the following:
- Steven L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games: From
Pong to Pokemon--The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives
and Changed the World
- Rusel DeMaria, Johnny L. Wilson, High Score!: The Illustrated
History of Electronic Games
- Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds : The Business and Culture
of Online Games
NATURE OF THE MEDIUM
The third part will examine the nature of the medium, the modes
of play, and the gaming culture. The main question the chapter
answers is how games are different from other media and how these
differences affect the way games are “consumed”. It
will talk about the attributes that make games games – immersion,
rule sets, the inherent sense of objective, interactivity, extensibility
– and how these attributes can affect advertising planning
and execution. Special attention is paid to the social structures
that have emerged in online game communities and the potential
ways of leveraging their power. The chapter is based on an overview
of the following texts:
- Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play : Game Design
Fundamentals.
- Mark J. P. Wolf, Bernard Perron, The Video Game Theory
Reader.
- Ralph H. Baer, Mark J. P. Wolf, The Medium of the Video
Game.
- Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Pat Harrigan, First Person : New Media
as Story, Performance, and Game.
- Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of
Narrative in Cyberspace.
- Brad King, John Borland, Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise
of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic.
- Justine Cassell, Henry Jenkins, From Barbie® to Mortal
Kombat: Gender and Computer Games.
- Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion
and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media.
- Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age
of the Internet.
FORMATS
The fourth part reviews the existing formats of
in-game advertising that range from billboard placements and designer
clothing for game characters to level modifications and video
ads based on game properties. The chapter discusses how well these
formats fit into their respective host games, surveys user reaction
expressed in online forums, and suggests ways to improve the formats
in line with the core game design fundamentals. Methodology includes
first-hand examination of popular game titles with a particular
focus on The Second Life, Project Entropia and Grand Theft Auto:
San Andreas and interviews with companies that mediate advertising
placement – Massive and IGA. The list of references for
this chapter includes the following books:
- Raph Koster, Theory of Fun for Game Design.
- Chris Crawford, Chris Crawford on Game Design.
- Bob Bates, Game Design.
- Richard Bartle, Designing Virtual Worlds.
The work concludes with a discussion of the near-term future
of games as a part of the wider media ecosystem and a list of
advertising formats that could emerge as a result of this evolution.
Note: references that appear in the paper version have been
omitted here.
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