Service Design as Entertainment

A very interesting article appeared today on Gamasutra about In-Game Advertising. They have a number of people industry responding to this seemingly inevitable and for many an unwelcome trend.

I feel like Young Skywalker treading the divide between the light and the dark side, the force being Games. What the light and dark sides represent is still up for debate. Is it Fun versus Profit? Are fun and profit mutually exclusive? No, I don’t think so… not at all… so, is it the Gamers versus the Advertisers? Possibly, yes…

Someone needs to stand between the marketers and the gamers in order to mediate a fair exchange. One key issue both sides need to negotiate is when does engagement advertising become invasive advertising? Central to this matter is respect, openess, and dialogue between gamers and advertisers. For the gamer, there is quite a bit to fear in terms of loss of privacy, and for advertisers quite a lot of detailed knowledge to gain about their audience. For example, what might the US Army be gaining from monitoring players in America’s Army? They don’t just want to know who you are (name/age/sex), the want to know what kind of person you are. Are you a team player, a gung-ho commando, or a coward? Here’s some revealing insight into what advertisers have in-store for gamers in the one-to-one marketing future from Fuel Games:

Behavioural research and analytics can be built into existing online games, and games can be built with the sole intention of extracting data for insight into consumer perceptions of brands, psychographic segmentation, behavioural analysis and more.

Will players tolerate this kind of monitoring… or will they even realize it is being conducted, perhaps hidden under the guise of something like Microsoft’s TrueSkill player matching for Xbox Live? Such practices could backfire on game developers and advertiser’s faces with consequences more severe than legal action: rejection by the consumers (read: boycotting). This is Eric Braxton, also from the Gamasutra article:

But in the end, business models and placement tactics don’t matter if the audience isn’t receptive. As a gamer, the very concept of in-game advertising makes my skin crawl, and every molecule in my body revolt. I hate it when I see it in films and on television, and I’m not looking forward to its ubiquity in games. For years now, it seemed like games and books were the only media where it didn’t seem like some nickel-slick marketer wasn’t hiding around a corner trying to sell me this, that, or whatever. Looks like my library card will be getting more use.

Brian Robbins at Fuel Industries, one of those “nickel-slick marketers”, hits on one of the very values that Chia-Ying and I were targeting with Urban Brand Warfare (under NDA till May ‘07), but may be missing the larger picture… more on that later. Also from the Gamasutra article:

At the same time, we are seeing brands that are finally starting to realize that the best way to reach consumers is to create advertainment that people actually want to see and interact with. The best examples of this cause consumers to actively discuss, promote and spread the message to their friends.

The best examples of engagement advertising or “advertainment”, in my opinion, are the games being done by 4orty2wo Entertainment, who are not only adverse to marketing, they’re “marketing-phobic. ” The follow quote is from one of my favorite interviews of two 4orty2wo Entertainment’s captains, Elan Lee and Sean Stewart by Jim Munroe. They are talking about the ILOVEBEES A.R.G. for Halo.

You never have to buy a product, you were never encouraged to buy a product, there was never a sell, all of it in fact…and we tell this up front to the client, what we will do if you have an interesting world we’ll tell an interesting story and we’ll let people engage in that and that’s cool but we are never going to put up an ad that says, “buy an Xbox!” you know? - Sean Stewart

Compare this view, which I think is respectful of the audience, with Fuel Industries, who appear not only in bed with King Brand, they’re lighting the post-coital cigarette. Not to take things completely out of context, you can look at how they invented Desktop Games for yourself, but this gives you the general spirit of the operation:

“You’ve single-handedly destroyed the productivity of America!” the Creative Director at one of our client agencies yelled - then laughed, what he was surely thinking was, “Now I can get consumers to willingly put logos on their desktop - and leave them there.” We had just showed him two of our latest creation, a pair of addictive Desktop Games built for Best Buy’s new customer-centric web magazines.

Is this what advergaming and in-game advertising can deliver to corporations? And not only the desktops of gamers, but also their personality profiles, wants and desires? If gone unchecked by gamers and advocates for gamers, this invasion will erode the relationship between consumers and brands, gamers and game developers because respect, openess, and dialogue are all two-way streets.