Persuasive Games: Promogames, Another Kind of Advertising Game - Ian Bogost
Recently Burger King released three Xbox and Xbox 360 titles featuring the creepy King mascot that has graced the company’s advertising of late, as well as memorable former spokescreatures like the Subservient Chicken and Brooke Burke. The titles include Pocketbike Racer, a Mario Kart-style battle racer; Big Bumpin’, a collection of head-to-head bumper car games including races, battles, and hockey; and Sneak King, a stealth action game in which the player must sneak up on people and serve them Burger King foods. Rewards are awarded for sneaking with “vigor, finesse, and a royal flourish.” To get the games, Burger King customers must buy a Value Meal and then pay another $3.99 for each title (it’s possible to buy all three with only one meal purchase). These three Burger King games have drawn considerable attention from the game playing community, and they offer an invitation to ask what these new examples might show us about the evolving intersection of advertising and games.
Is “Advergame” a Bad Word? In the past several years, advergaming has partly ceded its role as darling of the advertising and games world to brand/product placement, which inserts static representations of companies or products into games (think of the Pizza Hut in Crazy Taxi, and to dynamic in-game advertising, which uses internet-delivery to insert billboard-style ads directly into commercial video games. Burger King themselves have participated in the former strategy, adding the King as a trainer in EA’s Fight Night Round 3. Despite the increased attention lavished on in-game ad placement, advergames remain far more common examples of video game-based advertising. The main reason for this popularity is the relatively low cost and complexity of creating branded browser-based games. Since the commercialization of the web in the mid 1990s, the vast majority of advergames have been web-based affairs, most often small casual games on corporate websites that add branding to proven genres. Despite the absurd cleverness of Sneak King, it’s tempting to locate the Burger King Xbox 360 games in the advergame tradition; after all, Pocket Bike Racer clearly arises from the now-familiar genre of go-cart racers, and Big Bumpin’ borrows its gameplay from that genre’s head-to-head combat modes.
For their part, Burger King rejects the advergaming label. As MTV columnist Stephen Totilo recently reported, Burger King promotions director Martha Tomas Flynn said the project “very much wasn’t an adver-gaming initiative.”1 Instead, she explained, “the plan for the game[s] and where we ended up was to make a legitimate entertainment experience that uses the Burger King icons as licensed characters.” The sentiment is understandable: the category of advergames has earned a negative reputation thanks to an overly opportunistic advertising industry that delivered poor quality examples of the form. But the Burger King games can’t be accused of amateurism; they were created by UK-based Blitz Games, which has a long history of developing games based on licensed properties (from American Idol to Bratz)2. Blitz’s participation would seem to support Tomas Flynn’s claims. Burger King and Xbox conceived the deal, and brought the developers on several months later, presumably based on their considerable experience working with licenses. Tomas Flynn’s rhetoric is an increasingly common one among marketers in general. As commodity goods continue to proliferate, brand companies have increasingly sought new ways of differentiating themselves from their competitors. Recently, Starbucks has been making a play at becoming an entertainment company, first selling CDs in their stores, then financing films like Akeelah and the Bee. Burger King’s new mascot suggests a similar approach, differentiating the company not by the nature of its product, but by the sensation around it. Creepy though the King and the Subservient Chicken might be, they implicitly suggest that Burger King is an edgy, forward-looking adult brand, while McDonald’s remains a kid-focused, mundane burger joint. 1 http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1548023/20061214/id_0.jhtml
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