Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

The appreciation of games as critical objects meriting scholarly attention is still fairly recent, yet games are still, significantly a medium for mass communication. In Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing, the authors contend that video and computer games are the ideal product in a post-industrialist “friction free” economy. Appropriately advertising and brand identities appear in the simulated play-spaces of video games. Attempts to understand the phenomena of both in-game product placement and “advergaming” tends toward the rhetorical or the phenomenological (see, for example, recent discussion on the weblog www.watercoolergames.org) but I propose an investigation into how the presence of ads and brands affect the experience of play itself and the quality of the gaming experience.

Games offer unique experiences of fantastical worlds, epic quests, and simulations of tremendous sporting ability. Identifiable game genres offer unique types of environment and modes of play, and the differences between some genres is so vast that only the common technology of the PC or console and the presence of “play” classify allow both to be recognizable as video games. Accordingly, an analysis of branding in games requires a brief inquiry into the dominant genres of game with an emphasis on the reality that is simulated and the particular pleasures offered by that environment.

Another important consideration in the reception of in-game branding is the culture of the gaming community itself. Games are aimed at and consumed by a broad audience, but a sense of hierarchy stratifies the audience into the core group of “gamers” as opposed to “game players.” This distinction is important for several reasons—Gamers embody and give meaning to the idea of a “gaming community,” treat games as significant cultural objects, and write reviews which influence the buying decisions of gamers. The sense of pride Gamers associate with their gaming skill is closely related to their investment in the game’s space and the amount of time they spend immersed in it. Therefore, their awareness of brands in that space is significance as a disruption of the immersion they value. Product placement in games is currently a new enough phenomenon that it is still often met with qualified astonishment—and that disruption can prove detrimental to a game’s reception—but certain game genres have managed this incorporation to the extent that brands become a novel point of a game’s appeal.

In this paper, I will argue that there are three types of in-game branding. These types correspond to different genre, but they lead to suggestions about future roles for the appearance of branding in games. First, a broader distinction must be made between games created overtly to advertise a single product and games ostensibly independent of brand association. The first category is generally termed “advergaming,” and includes internet “banner ads” which become games or demand some active participation not related to accessing the site from the user (Expedia’s “Spike the Volleyball” is an example) as well as more fully developed titles like Jeep’s “4x4: Trail of Life” game and the U.S. Army’s ambitious America’s Army. The Army’s game is perhaps the most interesting because their brand also carries an ideology that is arguably at odds to core gamer values which are closely related to the anarchist ideals of hackers and in that the game’s play values require rigid obedience of orders and severe in-game consequences for disobedience.

As opposed to Advergaming, games which are sold as products in themselves are increasingly incorporating more insidious appearances of branding. Any one who downloads the Army’s game expects it to be a sales pitch because the concept of the game is structured around that ad, but when player’s in Enter the Matrix use a Samsung cell phone through their avatar, a different and perhaps more lasting brand impression has been made. I want to look closely at the appearance of brands in Enter the Matrix, SSX 3, and Super Monkey Ball2 to suggest three different modes of in-game product placement as it relates to game genre. These three categories are “instrumental”, “diegetic”, and “archetypal”. “Instrumental” product placement occurs as players interact with a branded product and simulate its use through their on-screen avatar, “diegetic” brands appear as simulations of real-world ads as in billboards in a city level, and “archetypal” brands appear as regular game features (power-ups, bonus tokens, save points) are imbued with a brand label.

Game Genres

Game journalism typically divides games into about eight categories. One website “Home of the Underdogs” which aims to resurrect underrated games from the past has a slightly more inclusive list with “action, adventure, education, interactive fiction, puzzle, RPG [role playing games], simulation, sport, strategy, and war” (www.the-underdogs.org). This is a good demonstration of the meaning the term “genre” takes when applied to games because the site also lists games by “theme:” “Anime … Fantasy … Horror … Humorous … Political … Science Fiction … etc.” terms which are often used to describe film genres. Therefore, a game’s genre is directly related to how the game is played instead of what the game is about. I consider some implications of this use of “genre” in another paper, but understanding the reaction of gamers and game players to branding begins with an understanding of how a given genre invites a player to interact with the environment. This positioning of the game’s diegesis in relation the player’s natural environment brings the phenomenon of branding into sharper focus and allows for more informed speculation about the effectiveness of the branding on the players. In addition, it is important to note the issue of “style.” If “genre” refers to the way in which a game is played and “theme” refers the “textual” content of a game, then “style” includes the manner of addressing the player and the feel of the game in relation to itself. That is, a game with an a ironic or “hip” style would be more likely to use ironic inclusions of artificial brands to mock familiar brands or advertising.

Super Monkey Ball 2

Super Monkey Ball 2 (Amusement Vision/Sega 2001) is the most straightforward of the three examples I plan on examining in some detail, but the nature of the brand awareness is by no means simple. The game consists of a number of party games which augment a main “story” driven game mode. The party mode features several varieties of head to head competition, and the story mode requires players to navigate maze-like courses in order to advance to harder, more unusual puzzles. The plot of the story is not very important to game play, but it has something to do with four player-monkeys Ai-Ai, Gon-Gon, Mee-Mee, and Baby attempting to regain their stash of bananas from the evil Dr. Bad-Boon and prevent him from marrying Dee-Dee. The game levels feature Dole-emblazoned bananas (see Figure 1) as bonus point items which give the player more chances to play in a single round of challenge mode. The important fact is, of course, that the bananas are consumed Pac man-like as one makes progress through the game.

In my schema of the three types of product involvement, the Dole bananas occupy the place of an archetype, that is, a universally recognizable object in a game environment that has no real world referrant and does not necessarily simulate a real world object. Pacman’s “dots” are the original archetype of this form, but Mario’s coins and Sonic’s rings fit this pattern as well. The games which use this archetype seem to model the maniacal consumption of goods, but the relationship of the player to the consumed object is not realistic enough to be seen as consumption, therefore, these examples do not fall under my “instrumental” category but instead operate as functions of game progress or as tiny metaphors for moving through space with the aural chime of success and visible convergence of avatar with object providing satisfying feedback reassuring the player that progress is occurring.

In Branded:The Buying and Selling of Teenagers Alissa Quart mentions the Super Monkey Ball 2 example in a list of other games which are forcing a branded version of the world onto teenagers. In Quart’s view, games are brand neutral territories which corporations have colonized to foist their product (through brand loyalty) onto a naïve audience of teenage consumers. Similarly, a few reviews of the game mention the Dole branding in negative terms—GameShark mentions the “shameless advertising” in passing (www.gameshark.com) and a user /reviewer on GameFAQs.com wonders “Honestly, What’s up with DOLE bananas everywhere (sic)” (Sheepy99, www.gamefaqs.com) --but most reviewers barely mention the product because I suspect that few Americans see bananas as branded products any way. I personally have never made a decision to buy Dole over Chiquita or Banacol, so there seems to be some other motive behind the inclusion of the brand’s logo. I will admit that a survey of my grocery bill would probably find that I buy more bananas when I’m involved in accomplishing a difficult set of goals in SMB2; therefore, it’s at least possible that a branded banana is a more appealing banana simply by it’s appeal to realism by wearing a brand. The bananas themselves are rather deliciously rendered, and the Dole image establishes the banana as “official” or consumable. But as I learned recently from Ian Bogost of www.watercoolergames.org, Dole did not pay for the logos to appear in the American release, but Sega chose to include them anyway.

The SMB franchise originates in Japan, and the story goes that Dole wanted it’s name on the bananas in the game to accompany the launch of a new “luxury” line of bananas.. From what little I know of programming, it seems that removing the logo would have been a fairly simple task, so the fact that Sega retained the Dole insignia in the American release of the games indicates something else about nature of the simulated objects. In terms of play, the realism of the banana does not seem essential to the rich environment’s addictive playability, yet perhaps the persistence of a brand consciousness which exists independent of any attachment to an object acts as a suturing effect to bring the game’s world closer to our own. The archetypal bananas give the game more depth.

Though it is an early example of explicit “advergaming” Chester Cheetah: Too Cool To Fool (Kaneco/ Recot 1992) for the Super Nintendo (SNES) (see Figure 2) uses Cheetos as its archetypal consumption object. There is a slight difference in that consuming the Cheetos restores the “life” of Chester, so the product is perhaps instrumental as well as archetypal. But Chester is relagated to an obscure footnote of gaming’s history partly because of the game’s highly derivative play and nonsensical, but more importantly because the branding of the archetypal object is as irritatingly obvious as the chatty hipster avatar. Therefore, attachment of brands to archetypal game elements works until it reaches a certain saturation point and the game becomes unbearable. The game can be dismissed as a poorly disguised attempt to garner our loyalty, yet other games succeed in just such a strategy by relying on subtlety.

SSX 3

I am not primarily a player of sports games, including extreme sports games of which SSX 3 (EASportsBig 2003) is an excellent example of the snowboarding milieu. I suspect that my hesitation to play sports games is related to the competitive two player feature of most of these games and my ensuing public defeat and humiliation that almost always resulted from playing these sports games in social contexts. This anecdotal preference for more narrative oriented single-player games does have an important bearing on my ability to receive branded products in that the genres I prefer playing are less likely to carry brands as completely and predictably as sports games.

At any rate, I have enjoyed “researching” SSX 3 and it presents a combination of different branding styles. I expected that the snowboards and clothing I chose to decorate my chosen avatar would be branded merchandise that I could conceivably go purchase after becoming enamored with snowboard culture. This model certainly exists in the series of skateboarding games bearing Tony Hawk’s identity and in 1080 Snowboarding’s Tommy Hilfiger association. However, SSX employs a model I will discuss later whereby objects that are typically branded in the real world receive an artificial brand in the simulated game world. This leads to an entirely different dynamic of branding and some different ideas of relating the game world to the real world.

SSX 3 does offer some great examples of diegetic advertising and demonstrates some of the problems of product placement in games. My real world relationship to billboards is not often a positive one, so how should I feel about billboards in games? Billboards in SSX often can be used as platforms for launching tricks or finding a short cut, but the object is itself a simulation of a natural object. It is not an archetypal feature because it exists as part of the landscape of the diegesis. In terms of advertising and brand consciousness, it seems at least possible that I might receive a more positive association with the 7up brand as I perform a “late 720 method grab” in front of alart 7up billboard, but it’s unclear to me if that perception is any different than a similar billboard at a baseball game or on the side of the ride. I believe, there is a difference, however, when I collide with apparently fatal impact force into the same billboard.

(Note the easy slippage which occurred in the previous paragraph in replacing “the avatar” with “me.” This ambiguity and apparent one to one substitution is crucial to understanding how ads and brands work through the avatar to the consumer.)

When an obstacle carries a brand, it’s difficult to say if the annoyance of the obstacle attaches permanently to the game. Reviews of SSX 3 are generally glowing with little mention of the 7UP billboards or the ubiquitous Honda Elements, but it seems generally true that any negative reviews do mention the advertising. Therefore, noticing the brands works against both the brands and the game and diegetic objects that carry a brand are even more troublesome than generic diegetic obstacles. SSX does also employ something like an archetypal product placement as a boarder can gain a bonus by sliding through the open doors of a Honda Element in clumsy mimicry of an actual Element commercial (thanks to Alex Sharpe for pointing that one out), but the bonus item itself simply happens to be inside an otherwise normal Honda Element perched at the top of a steep incline.

The diegetic placement of branded product is fundamentally different in that the product itself does not appear in the game, and the simulated object itself need not have the problem of being a “too-aware” archetype, as in the Chester Cheetah example, and it may not have the same problem of poor representation in the instrumental variety of placement, but the billboards or banner ads themselves appear as objects in the simulated world of a game and as such build the sense of 3D realism and verisimilitude of any sporting game. It seems that the reception of sporting games in general (extreme sporting games may actually be an exception) tolerates more advertising presence, and if one makes the case that games succeed by mimicking real events, situations, or narratives, then the resemblence of simulated sporting arenas to actual ones must accommodate for the massive presence of advertising. Stephen Kline et. al. observe this trend as an inevitable convergance of corporations and “synergistic” licensing arrangement:

The transformation of of game space into ad space is yet another moment in a gradient of commercialization, in which marketers have continually adjusted their methods of influence to take full advantage of the characteristics of each new medium of communication. Whether it be a hockey rink or a snowboarder, many video games are now regarded as incomplete without advertising appearing in the right place. For game designers, designing products and logos into games puts them one step closer to the Holy Grail of “realism”(235).

Their conclusion has a surprising phenomenological bent which overshadows their more significant observation which is of the projection of brand preference into the game environment from the player. If an aspiring snowboarder swears allegiance to Airwalk merchandise, he or she will enjoy the option of “tricking out” his/her on-screen avatar with similarly brand-loyal digs. In cases like SSX 3 where the equipment does not carry brands, the game must attempt to simulate a sense of brand loyalty, which I will discuss more later.

Enter the Matrix

The slick packaging, philosophical pretensions, and compelling diegesis of The Matrix film and their spin-offs is a useful if complex demonstration of product placement occurring at many different levels. The films themselves include branded products, and the games mimic those placements to some extent, but the use of the objects in the game world (simulated use by the player) offer a chance for analysing the difference use makes in carrying a brand awareness from a simulated world to the real world where consumers by products. The Matrix itself as a brand has influenced cross-branding with Samsung creating (and selling) the preferred cell phone of Morpheus et. al. and Powerade providing energy to fuel the batteries. The recently released special edition DVD of The Matrix:Reloaded even includes a segment on all of the cross-branding and the production values that went into both the commercials and the products themselves as they appear in the film.

Powerade advertisements are perhaps the most complex in terms of their relationship to the game. Powerade bottles and machines adopted a “Matrix-esque” look to establish their cross-branding, but the appearance of Matrix-esqe Powerade machines in the game (see Figure 3) lead to such Borgesian questions as, “Have the characters in the game seen the film The Matrix?” In the film, the matrix is an artificial world created by machines to keep the humans in line. The film led to a Powerade campaign which mimicked the look of The Matrix. The characters Ghost and Niobe enter the matrix in Enter the Matrix to accomplish various missions and come across a Powerade machine. The appearance of the machine is like an “easter egg,” a hidden trick or joke in a game that is supposed to simulate a real Powerade machine but actually dictates a new kind of Powerade machine. Suddenly the analysis becomes Baudrillardian or, at the very least, the machine is anachronistic to its environment. It should, therefore, stand out as a glaring inconsistency, yet I’m not aware of any review of the game that mentions it.

In my schema of the three types product placement, the Powerade machine is diegetic. A player can “use” it, but one can only push the button and look at his (apparently) free Powerade on the floor. There is no button to pick up and drink the product, so primarily, the machine is there to fill up the environment with the normal furniture one expects at an airport. Therefore, the machine has the appearance of an instrumental product placement, but it is in fact diegetic.

ETM does incorporate branded products “used” by the player-characters, notably, Samsung phones and sunglasses by Blinde Designs, but the branding is not so obvious, and the characters interact with these products, not the player. In other words, you don’t need to know how to work the phone in order to play the game. This relegates the phones existence in the game entirely to style, and the function is not even considered allowing the style to remain reserved and a bit mysterious with no interferance from what might as well be a difficult product to use.

(The Jeep 4x4 game was such an example for me as I grew frustrated with the Rubicon’s inability to drive over seemingly flat rocks, and the Army game alienated a fellow gamer who was court martialed for shooting his sergeant and can not play the game until his sentence runs out.)

It is significant, again, to note that the phones, sunglasses, and apparel were all designed to appear in the Matrix world. As such, it is a bit backwards to refer to these instances as product placement in games, it’s more like Matrix-brand product placement in the real world. The game’s relationship to advertising is significant therefore, and it does offer a subtle, ironic twist on it’s diegetic brand appearance.

In one significant scene, players must make their way down through the traffic on the interstate, weaving through exploding cars and warding off police vehicles and Agents in Cadillacs. Billboards on the interstate seem to offer the typical diegetic billboard advertisements bearing the logos of Samsung, NVidia, and Powerade, but some “ads” are meant purely for ironic value and actually present a critique of advertising.

Figures 4– 6 show a series of these signs, with regular advertising juxtoposed with the “mmmm…steak” ad, apparently a reference to the character Cypher’s discussion with Agent Smith where Cypher offers the steak as evidence that the simulated world could be more real. Therefore the ad is an encouragement to stay in the matrix. Similarly, the billboard reading “Watch T.V.” appears frequently as an apparent reference to John Carpenter’s They Live (thanks to Mike Sansone for bring that to my attention). These ads seem to be critiquing the ads they accompany, but the question is whether any are meant to be noticed. The billboards occupy a corner of the screen when close enough to read, and the player’s vision is supposed to be focused on the road. If the ironic ads are intended as “Easter Eggs” then are the main ads meant to be noticed as well?

Deciphering the image in Figure 7 took some effort, but it eventually led me to a website about the rock band P.O.D.’s contribution to the soundtrack (www.alededor.com). This definitely counts as an Easter Egg because of its distance from the “beaten track” of the game play, but can it also be considered an advertisement?

Easter Eggs

Easter Eggs appear in games as hidden elements that require effort beyond the standard gameplay to uncover. The first Easter Egg is a good example of what they typically accomplish. In his foreword to The Video Game Theory Reader, Warren Robinett, designer of the 1978 Atari 2600 title Adventure, recalls that after the difficult process of actually finding the secret, hidden room “My name filled the screen like a throbbing, multi-colored movie marquee” (xviii). The Easter Egg was his way of putting himself in the game he had worked so hard on with no credit from Atari. Games at that time did not have end credits or much information on the packaging, so this hidden room was Robinett’s “advertising” of his involvement in creating the game. If this is indeed an advertisement, it reaches a very small, but probably elitist audience of gamers who strive for the exhaustive experience of the game environment.

The fact that the Powerade machines can vend a virtual Powerade bottle is also an Easter Egg in that it is not necessary in anyway to the game’s play, but since the Matrix phenomenon as a whole seems to favor an elitist dissemination of hidden or secret knowledge (the “hacking” feature of the game and website allows savvy users to unlock more pictures, video clips, and mini-games) it is possible that the game’s designers count on their typical user seeking out these Easter Eggs and receiving them as privileged advertising.

This creates, I believe, something other than typical brand identification and leads to an even more fetishized view of the branded products than is created in the normal branding process. At the very least, the stratification of the gaming community suggests that players will seek out Easter Eggs, and through the effort involved in “unlocking” the Easter Egg actually has the ability to position the ad as an award with greater positive associations.

Simulated Brands

If as Alissa Quart and others authors suggest, ads in games can be explained away as corporate infiltrations into an otherwise neutral space, then some other definition must apply to games which develop an artificial brand consciousness for products that are used in the game. For example, after a couple of hours of playing SSX 3, I found I preferred the handling of the board named “Death by Kappa,” and the format of the game suggests that I can unlock more boards in addition to the 20 or so available at start up. These boards are not exactly fungible as they ostensibly exhibit particular strengths and weaknesses and are associated with a particular character, and the identification of each board by a (virtual) brand name helps me easily remember and later identify my favorite boards. Also, the use of a branded board informs my relationship with the character I choose to play through. When I achieve a particular stunt with the character “Kaori” the narrative of my experience of the game has identified a significant association of success and and accomplishment with Kaori. Kaori uses the “Death by Kappa” model board, and so that brand name contributes to the story of my play with Kaori.

A similar (and more familiar to me ) example occurs in Grand Theft Auto 3 (Rockstar 2001) where a player can choose to hijack a wide variety of artificially branded cars like the “Cheetah” and the “Banshee” which bear close resemblance to real-life Lamborghinis and Jaguars, respectively. Choosing to hijack a Banshee reflects in in-game brand decision that does not influence real-life brand decision, in part because a real-life Jaguar is not an option available to me, but more significantly, because the object and the brand are virtual. Yet, my association of the Banshee with successful missions (or not) influences my in-game decision to hijack a vehicle for the next mission. In other words, the influence of the brand is restricted to the game’s, but it enriches the play experience.

Whether or not real-life brands can survive the mental transition from virtual world objects to real objects remains to be proven, and it probably doesn’t matter. From the advertisers perspective, a game player is still exposed to the images and brand identity in a manner that is cheaper and probably more visible than a product placement in a film or TV show. And from the game designer’s perspective, a branded environment is a richer environment that is all the more solid because of the insertion of recognizable brand franchises. I disagree with Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Grieg De Peuter’s claim that the goal in these cases is realism. Rather, it is the same draw of branding that applies to the real world in that brands imbue a feeling of importance and direct stories to the consumers which repeatedly tell consumers “You deserve a break today.”

In the context of the games mentioned above, that phrase could be repostulated as “You deserve a real banana”; “You’re extreme, so is Honda”; or “You have access to privileged information” or any similarly gratifying phrase. In other words, branded consciousness is a part of our receptions of entertainment media and our investment in the interaction with the simulation, and brands are more successful when they appropriately play into that consciousness.

Works Cited:

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