Paper Abstract - Anja Rau

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PLAYING WITH THE FUTURE:
DEVELOPMENT AND DIRECTIONS
IN COMPUTER GAMING

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ABSTRACT

All Your Game Are Belong to Us - Computer Games and Online-Marketing

Anja Rau

Computer games are a multi-billion-dollar industry. They are also, as the growing number of international games-and-culture-conferences attest, a pop-cultural phenomenon, if not an art-form. The "leisure society", the "generation fun" plays and is obviously willing to invest their large buying power in entertainment. But computer games are not only fun, rule-based activity outside the values and demands of everyday-life. Since the mid-1990s, "edutainment" has been the bogy of education - learning with games would, many fear(ed) soon lead to no learning at all. Today, there is hardly a commercial site that does not offer the visitor some sort of game. And with users who grow sick of games that try to push a marketing-message, selling through games might well lead to no gaming at all.

During 2001, computer games have turned into the favorite toy of online-advertisers in Europe and the US alike. They take the place of banners that have grown less attractive with sinking click-rates - not before, however, account managers realized that it is not only clickthroughs that count, the amount of times a specific banner is clicked and leads a visitor to a referenced website. Equally, if not more important are factors like brand-awareness and image which banners have tried to create through ever more obtrusive formats like sound-banners or skyscrapers. But banners, like inter- and superstitials always interfere with users' primary viewing-aims.

In contrast to this, games are an end in themselves: users access a games-site specifically in order to play. Whereas banners get ignored and superstitials closed in a matter of seconds, casual players spend an average of ten minutes on a game. Studies show that a game-environment increases the viewers' willingness to engage with a product or an advertising message, that they remember contents better and that the object advertised is perceived more positively than with other forms of advertising. On top of this, players seem to leave more data than the casual site-visitor, starting with traces of "soft" preferences and going all the way to addresses and the permission to be sent news, updates or general marketing through e-mail. Finally, while conventional advertisements have to be brought to the target groups, payers spread the news among their peer-group which allows for a higher return rate.

Advergaming has long gone past the simple single-game strategy (cf. the 1999 "Moorhuhn"-shooter for Johnny Walker). Companies from Lego to Lifesavers offer online game-portals that immerse players in branded environments with a continuously expanding choice of games. Lately, branded game-worlds have come into fashion: projects like Warner Bros' "Operation Swordfish" site that elaborates on the movie's main theme and adds a couple of sweepstake-prizes to keep players coming back and build awareness of and interest in the movie. The international Nokia game goes s step further even in that it does not only sit on the web and waits for players - players get emails and SMS to their mobiles. Thus the advertising game-world merges with the players' everyday world.

Ted Nelson is not alone when he predicts that the game will turn into one of the dominant modes of human communication. My thesis is that when games become a utility and are universally perceived as serving a cause (or several causes), they lose their inherent gamey-ness: their position outside the restrictions of everyday life. Advergames together with games that spill over into the so-called real world (like EA's "Majestic") might well lead to the disappearance of games as we know them. - Unless the ROI sinks before saturation sets in.

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