Rent This Space!

Jeff Gerstmann believes whatever the magic glow box tells him to believe. Snap him out of his hypnotized state with a sharply worded e-mail at jeff@gamespot.com.

Games are already trying to intelligently maximize your gaming experience. Racing games try to match up opponents that are of equal skill so that the players are more likely to have a competitive race. Are they perfect? No. But it's probably better than a random draw. If my gaming tendencies can be used to maximize my experience, I say go for it. Targeted advertising is inevitable. I would rather be shown an amazing deal at a local pizza delivery joint during a six-hour gaming session than an ad for a game that I might currently be playing. Trying to make a generalized advertisement that's relevant to everyone seems very inefficient. One size doesn't fit all who play games, and the more we're able to customize our gaming experience, the better it will be.

Of course, there's also the part where customizing your targeted advertising is sort of like asking whether you'd like to get kicked in the face or in the stomach. The more relevant an ad in a game gets, the more likely it is to distract you. For advertisers, that's fantastic. For someone attempting to actually enjoy a game, stopping to notice that there's a two-for-one sale on Cherry Coke down at 7-Eleven this week can be the difference between winning and losing. (Unless you really like Cherry Coke, I guess.)

The other problem is that most in-game advertising is usually placed incredibly poorly. You've got the slapped-on patch scenario, like SWAT 4, which just sort of sprinkles the maps with ads for shows you'll probably never watch. Remember Enter the Matrix? It was covered in poorly-placed Pentium ads. The Matrix Online has billboard space for sale, which at least puts ads in a place where ads should be, though filling up your slick virtual world with a bunch of real-world ads makes that virtual world kind of dumb. Well, whatever; The Matrix is pretty dumb, anyway, ads or not.

Racing games also get billboards, but you usually fly past those without noticing. EA attempted to get crafty with the Need for Speed games, so you'll occasionally get to stare at the logo for a mobile phone company because you occasionally get voice and text messages. Midway's upcoming NBA Ballers game integrates the cell phone that I own into its story sequences because it's "part of the lifestyle" or something. Good to know that my choice of phone makes me a baller.

It's already sort of crazy, and it's going to keep getting crazier, because we're in a phase right now in which game publishers are basically experimenting to see what they can get away with. Until they hear a massive outcry from some random focus group, they're going to continue to let ads creep into games wherever possible. The future holds things like licensed achievements on the Xbox 360. Can you win the Burger King-sponsored fight? If the icon for that achievement is a Burger King logo, then I think Fight Night might take the crown for most insidious product placement.

Now, I'm not completely antiadvertising. I think there's definitely a place for ads that are cleverly constructed. Some of them even manage to be entertaining. But there's a huge difference between the clever Super Bowl spot and a logo getting ruthlessly slapped onto as many walls as possible in some B-tier video game. Right now, video game advertising is the equivalent of those text message sex ads airing all over late-night television. You know--the ones that want you to text SEXYRELAX to 4147189 or something. Or that guy trying to sell CDs that will teach you how to use Microsoft Works. Those ghetto-looking ads might be funny, but they're not going to entice people.

The short-term outlook for video game advertising looks pretty bleak, because there seems to be a bunch of people involved in the process that don't necessarily understand (or care) that they're actually doing their part to ruin games. But in the long term, it'll balance itself out, just like everything else does. Game makers will find more acceptable ways to make money on the side by pushing products and services in their games; players will continue to get used to these types of invasive or "subversive" ads; and everyone goes home happy. Or, you know, everyone goes home. Either way, right? In this age of radio tuners and TiVo, you didn't really think that you could keep skipping past all those commercials on TV and radio without having them pop up elsewhere, did you?

Next Up: Small Gaming Press by Brian Ekberg