Post # 9, Bogost Chapters 5-7

As much as I am loathe to admit it, the people in Cupertino, California are masters of advertising. Recently, one of my best friends, Jessica, was in the market for a new smartphone. She needed to replace her dated BlackBerry and she looked to both me (avidly anti-Apple) and our friend, Matt (fanatically pro-Apple), for suggestions. Surprisingly, Matt told her that he didn't really know much about any phone other than the iPhone and that she should probably just ask me. I, on the other hand, gave her a laundry list of reasons why she shouldn't get an iPhone (avoidance of the lemming mentality that Apple encourages, the higher processing power of Android phones, the wider variety of handsets to choose from, and growing momentum of Google's platform). A few hours later when it was all said and done, she called me and apologetically confessed that she'd bought an iPhone 4. "I couldn't help it, man," she said. "All the posters in the store were for the iPhone and all the sales reps had iPhones." I was oddly disappointed, but I was also relieved that she didn't get a Windows phone. I had to begrudgingly respect the power of Apple's advertising. It did its job.

Types of Advertising

According to Bogost, there are three types of advertising. The first is demonstrative advertising. As the name implies, this form of advertising "demonstrates" a product to the potential consumer via facts and tangibles; the consumer is being directly told why there is a need for the product being pitched. In this type of advertising, the product is presented as a commodity; as such, the functionality of the product being represented is very important. When Intel comes out with a commercial that details the specifications and processing power of its latest computer chip, that is demonstrative advertising. The second type of advertising is illustrative. Illustrative advertising shows, rather than tells, a potential consumer why the product being pitched is necessary. This form of advertising illustrates tangibles and intangibles and focuses more on  social and cultural context. Take the following picture, for example:

This ad features the music superstar, Beyonce, and her younger sister, Solange, looking absolutely gorgeous and trendy. They are both sporting Samantha Thavasa purses and the ad features only a little text, which communicates that the purses are part of a debut collection and in very limited supply(research revealed that this was just a marketing ploy and the purses were never in limited supply). The effect of having the two gorgeous creatures in the ad is that subconsciously women will think that owning this particular purse will make them equally as attractive (an unfortunate lie). The final type of advertising is associative, which communicates only indirect information. This advertising type eschews the mass market appeal of a product and instead focuses entirely on a niche category of the market. The following ad, which shows a frumpy business man in casts and a wheel chair as a metaphor for a crashed Windows PC, is an example of associative advertising:

Oddly enough, even though videogames are more noted for their procedural rhetoric, advertisers rely on the older and simpler visual rhetoric to take advantage of the medium. 

Licensing and Product Placement

Licensing and product placement has been a part of games for as long as I can remember. One of the very first games I had on the original Nintendo Entertainment System was Total Recall, based on the movie by the same name. Over the course of the 22 years that I've been a gamer, I've played countless games based on the intellectual properties of movies, sports franchises, novels, comic books, etc. While putting players in the role of one of their favorite fictional characters (like Harry Potter) is a selling point for game producers there is a negative side to this somewhat shameless exploitation of licenced material. It is almost universally accepted amongst serious gamers that games based on movie adaptations are of poor quality. And games based on game franchises like the Madden football games push out a new game every year with little noteworthy changes except for updated rosters. Along the same lines, product placement in our entertainment mediums is almost always met with cynicism and disdain. When Bogost references the shameless product placement of the Ford F-150 and Mustang in the hit show, Alias, he points out that the plug was ridiculed and drew laughter for being so obvious. Advertisers don't really care about subtlety, though. As long as the product gets seen, that's enough to justify the lack of advertising tact.

Advergames

Advertisers are unscrupulous creatures, and they will invade every part of our lives if we aren't diligent and actively resist them (they're not unlike a cancer in this respect). When game developers allow advertisers to blatantly pitch to gamers in videogames, they risk the ire of the gamers. More and more, developers are opting not to allow advertising in their games. The high costs of current generation games developed for PS3 and Xbox 360 aren't offset by the fees the advertisers offer the developers. It's just not worth it for the developers anymore. Likewise, advergames--simulations of products and services (200)--are also facing a backlash. Not only is it because of the overt advertising, but also because of the poor procedural rhetoric that these games employ.

Questions:

1) Advertising is really just a form of rhetoric. It is meant to persuade you to buy or support a product. Is there any way for an advertiser to effectively pitch a product in a game without it being invasive?

2) Do you think the practice of making sub-par videogames based on movie properties reflects poorly on the developer or the original intellectual property? And if there is such a negative reaction to these types of games, why are they so persistent?

3) What was the first game you played where you noticed overt advertising and/or product placement? Did it affect your opinion of the game as a whole?