Videogames, advertising, and videogames as advertising.

I watched a thoroughly ridiculous movie over the Christmas break. It was called Christmas in Wonderland and starred Patrick Swayze (unfortunately in one of his last roles) as well as a whole host of B-list movie stars (Chris Kattan, Carmen Electra, Tim Curry). The plot of the film revolved around counterfeit bills being used in the West Edmonton Mall, and the plucky kids who try to stop them. The movie itself was absolute dogshit – seriously, one of the worst movies ever made. I'm no graphics nut, but when you put this scene into a movie, well…

I enjoyed the movie, a lot actually. And it's not just because I'm a connoisseur of trash culture, but because the movie makes for an excellent drinking game (and one that's guaranteed to have you crooked drunk by the end of it). Because the movie takes place in the West Edmonton Mall, the movie is literally overflowing with product placements. U-Haul and Sony being the biggest offenders, but by our final count, there were well over a hundred product placements in the film.

Advertising in videogames, specifically in this fashion, is nothing new. I played NHL '96 and '97 pretty religiously back in the day, and it's hard to fathom sports games without advertisements these days. Indeed, NHL 2K10 features intermissions "sponsored" by XM Radio. Advertising is a pervasive element of media culture, and games are no different.

It at least makes sense for sports games. These games are supposed to be facsimiles of the real thing (more or less) anyways, and advertising is a huge part of the sports world, like it or not. But there are far more egregious and invasive examples as well. SWAT 4 and the Matrix Online are two of the biggest culprits, with SWAT 4 connecting to ad servers to stream in ads as in-game posters, and the Matrix Online basically doing the same thing, but being especially awful as the game was subscription based. Some games, like in the Fallout series, have thankfully taken a different route, as the games in that series mock advertising's supposed "golden age" with some pretty hilarious results.

Games are expensive to produce and market – I get that. Especially to market these days; when I start seeing Mass Effect 2 ads on during the Superbowl, that's when I start to realize how heavy duty the marketing machine behind games is, and how the lack of advertising, either online, in print or on TV, seems to seal a game's fate to languish away, selling maybe a few tens of thousands of copies. (This is an argument used to highlight the lack of support for supposed – even though I'm loathe to use the term – "hardcore" games on the Wii, but considering that development costs are much lower, and the companies making these games, like Grasshopper Manufacture, don't exactly have huge budgets to begin with, the argument kind of falls apart)

So is it about the money? In the case of heavily hyped games like SWAT 4 or the Matrix Online, it couldn't have been. More likely, advertisers are starting to see videogames as a way of specifically targeting particular groups – I can almost guarantee that the demographics playing either of those games were white, middle-to-upper-middle-class 16 – 24-year-olds, a demographic that is key to marketers. The developers get a little extra scratch, and the advertisers get their key demographics. Everyone wins, right?

Well, not so much. As an English teacher who uses cultural studies theory as the central tenet of my teaching, I'm very consciously aware of the lack of media literacy, specifically in the demographic mentioned above. This form of teaching involves using a variety of texts (not just canonical ones, and not just novels or plays or short stories or poems) as counterpoints and connectors to the curriculum-approved texts, often through the use of advertising. Adolescent males are painfully unaware of the ways in which they are manipulated into buying things – they don't consider the images in front of them, and instead let advertising and media portrayals unconsciously inform pretty key aspects of their being. I'm not saying that there's a direct correlation between an Axe commercial and a teenaged boy's treatment of women, but advertisements do seem to reinforce negative tendencies in an effort to "connect" with their audience.

Advertisements have often used cultural modification to get their point across – either by simply changing the belief structures of a group of people to fit a more easily advertised-to homogenous whole, or by appealing to the baser instincts of people through the subjection of women, people of colour, harassment of homosexuals, etc. One could lose a lifetime simply sifting through examples of this; but I'm more interested in how games themselves are acting in much the same way as advertisements do in this regard.

I would never think of killing someone in real life, but I've done it countless times in games. I would never steal a car, but I have in GTA. I've never chest-bumped a dude after wiping out a huge number of people of a different ethnicity than me, but that happens in Army of Two. It's easy to point to these examples as ways that videogames are "corroding" our youth, but I won't do that here. I realize that these games are essentially adolescent male fantasies played out in videogame form, and that videogames are only appealing to that instinct.

What I'm more concerned about is how these games are setting out clearly definable marketing targets, ones that are awful to disenfranchised people, and ones that don't cater to these people at all. Not to mention the issues I have with gaming's "critical" community, who are basically saying that games where shooting and killing are central mechanics are the only ones worth playing, and anything else is for babies or soccer moms. It's that shift towards the "hardcore," the "extreme," that further niche-ing of games that keeps it cloistered as the hobby of white men everywhere.