As I was writing the title for this post, I wrestled with whether or not it even needed to be said. Yet, incidences of crime amongst kids and teens attributed to violent video games still continue to make the news (as recently as last month, in fact). I’ve never understood the tendency for the public to imbue video games, movies, and most other forms of media with the responsibility of teaching children right from wrong. “What message is this sending my child?” “How can they be allowed to teach this to children?” Those are just some of the questions that are hurled at the producers of media that contain the blood, guts, and gore that we’ve come to accept as somewhat commonplace.

So, I saw the following article come through my RSS feeds this morning: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/07/games-for-tweens/ After reading it, I wondered where all of the acid-tongued criticism was, and why it wasn’t being being doled out for these games as well. Then I took a step back and asked a larger question. Why are we holding these games (and their movie counterparts, where applicable) responsible for setting the moral compass for these kids? To what degree is society willing to transfer [what should be a] parental role, into the hands of the media?

There’s been a lot of commentary on this subject before, and I’m certainly not going to be the last one to voice my opinion on it. I feel that it’s necessary to maintain a dialogue on this issue though, as whenever an incident occurs that’s supposedly linked to a piece of “corrupt” media, cooler heads seldom prevail. The witch hunts, calls for sanctions, boycotts, and bans usually begin, well before someone opts to take a serious look for root causes.

In 10 years or so, if a contestant for a reality show like America’s Next Top Model (God help me if that show is still on in 10 years) flips out and kills an entire town, I wonder how much blame would be placed on games like those in the Wired article. Or what happens if a girl falls into a manhole while texting on her cellphone? Will the city get blamed, or is it technology’s fault that she didn’t see the large void in the pavement? Oh wait… nevermind.

In the last post, I attempted to guess at the future of advertising with respect to the gaming experience. I suggested a scenario whereby you’d be able to order a pizza while playing a game, without ever having to leave the gamespace. Well, it turns out that this was in fact attempted (sort of) by Sony and Pizza Hut back in 2005. While playing EverQuest II, as a player you could enter a command into the system which would then bring up the Pizza Hut website.

This is not exactly what I had mind, as all this really does is launch a web browser which is outside the game world. But it was certainly a step in the right direction. Merging elements of real life into the game environment is something that’s evolved over the last few years, and it’s been met with equal amounts of positive and negative feedback from both consumers and game developers. The major concern amongst the gaming community is that the inclusion of marketing material into a game detracts from its creative value; if you put an ad for Coke or Pepsi into a game, the entire game essentially becomes one giant advertisement. On the other hand, the industry has to be open to different revenue models that will allow it to remain competitive. At the end of the day, someone has to get compensated. So where’s the middle ground?

Well, there are some companies that have been trying to strike a balance. IBM, SonyBMG (there’s that name again), and Nike among others have all set up permanent residence within SecondLife, an online world which has been eluding a specific definition since its inception in 2003.

Once a brand makes a transition like this into a virtual world, it changes in a way that marketers and gamers don’t fully understand yet. If you walk into a store “in the real world”, you interact with a brand. It’s the goal of advertising to make this happen (in order to facilitate a transaction). If you “walk” into a store in SecondLife, the distinction between marketing and brand-interaction becomes blurred. If you end up making a transaction, the experience is really no different than if you walked into a physical store.

The difference between SecondLife and other online worlds however, is that SecondLife has no inherent storyline. There’s no plot distract from, which makes advertising seem less intrusive. It’s almost part of the experience itself. The open ended nature of many modern online games allows for the same kind of “freedom” when it comes to in-game ads. As players find themselves in between a particular set of tasks within the game, they usually congregate in common areas, which provide prime opportunities for advertisers to engage them. At this point, it’s merely up to the advertisers to do what they’ve always been tasked with doing: Provide consumers with an engaging message that persuades them to [trans]act. This doesn’t mean billboards and banners, which seem to be the predominant form of IGA (in game ads) right now. This means being as immersed within the game world as the gamers are. This means understanding their behaviour, and responding to it in a way that is as engaging as the game itself.

An example of such behaviour involves something as simple as traveling within the game world. One of the more tedious aspects of online gaming involves plodding/flying/otherwise moving from place to place. Such a thing can take several minutes, hours, or in some cases, days. So what if a company like RedBull offered an in-game service that would take the player to their desired destination (giving them wings as it were… sorry) for a nominal price (real or virtual)?

Makes sense, no?

“The State of PC Gaming.”

It’s one of the more recent debates that’s polarized both consumers and game developers. There’s been a sharp decline in the variety of titles on store shelves, which themselves have yielded floor space to console games. At the same time, subscriptions to popular titles like World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online are quite high. Whether it’s dying, growing, stagnating, or recovering, there’s only one thing that most people can seem to agree upon; it’s changing. Scratch that… it’s changed. In fact, I can’t think of anything significant about PC gaming that’s remained the same in the last 3-5 years. But that’s actually a good thing, for those differences have allowed PC games to survive for as long as they have.

The past:

Walk into a retail outlet, buy a game off the shelf. Return home, begin the install process. Check the manufacturer website for the latest game patches. Check your PC component specs to ensure that they’re also up to date. Once you’re in the game, the usual single player vs multiplayer options present themselves, and then off you go. After an average 30-40 hours of play (single player), the title is essentially expired, and it’s off to the retail outlet once again. The only exception to this would have happened if you were involved with the still rather niche FPS genre (Counterstrike, Battlefield 1942, Unreal Tournament), or with MMORPGs which were in their adolescence at the time.

The present:

Download a full game from the manufacturer’s website, or though distribution channels like Steam and Stardock. Launch the game and wait for it to automatically update itself, verify compatibility with your system, and connect to a group of servers. Then decide if you want to pay for it. … That’s right. Lots of games are offered virtually free of charge, supported by in-game advertising, graduated subscriptions or other forms of user segmentation. Further, these same channels also allow you to centralize game/community settings, character configurations, and even hook into already established social networks in order to enrich the entire gaming experience.

The future… is anyone’s guess, and here’s mine:

As game platforms evolve, so will their content and their methods of distribution (regardless of genre), and the popularity of the MMO format will continue to inform this transformation. While this is happening, there will be a convergence between the offline and online identities of gamers themselves. The notion of a gamers “Profile” will carry more and more weight. You’ll no longer purchase “a game”. You’ll adopt a another brand which you can then apply to your profile. “John Doe the FPS player” becomes “John Doe the adventurer” with consistency in the way their online identity looks and [perhaps] performs in the new game environment. That environment will continue to integrate different (and hopefully engaging) forms of in-game advertising, in order to sustain the financial growth for the different franchises that choose to be a part of it. Imagine a scenario where you actually order a pizza from within a game environment like Grand Theft Auto, or the Sims, and it shows up to your front door. The advantages to this multiplicity favour both the gamer and the manufacturer (not to mention the marketer). If this model does indeed develop, the information associated with a player’s profile becomes that much more valuable. Granted, the requisite privacy issues will have to be ironed out, but those issues are omnipresent in any case.

To say that “PC gaming is dying/ has died” is to fail to recognize that a PC is merely a manifestation of technology, which continues to change. Arcades have all but disappeared from the planet, but you can still find just about every single game they provided a home for with a quick search online.