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Debate heats up over product placement in video games
One of the first touches of realism to hit video games was a subtle addition to the ’80s race car fave Pole Position – billboards along the side of the digital road bore the logos of real-life companies including Canon, Pepsi and Marlboro.
Flash ahead to today, and the recent announcement by top video game maker Electronic Arts that the online version of its mega-hit The Sims will allow players to open McDonald's franchises and sell burgers to earn points in the game. The Sims Online, which is set to debut on the World Wide Web later this year, will also prominently feature Intel products. Both deals are reportedly worth millions of dollars.
Real life product brands have been featured in video games increasingly since Pole Position, but this is being hailed as the first time a company has paid to have its products placed in a game. It's also being hailed as the latest step the video game market has made towards the lucrative product-placement schemes that are common in the Hollywood film industry.
For McDonald's and Intel, they couldn't have chosen a better time to make the leap into the digital world. The Sims computer game – where players control every aspect in the daily life of their character, from careers to relationships to taking a leak – was the best-selling of all time, and the online version is one of the most anticipated in history. It's also one of the few video games to ever appeal to women in large numbers – Electronic Arts says as many as half its players are women, an unprecedented figure.
But for Electronic Arts, the decision to take cash – and lots of it – for product placement has set off a bit of a firestorm in the video game world.
Until now, video game makers have taken it upon themselves to add corporate brands to their games to add authenticity. Believe it or not, video game makers say they have even paid outside companies for the use of recognizable logos inside their games.
Sports games, for example, are like a cool-hunting brand-whore's wet dream. Just like the real world of modern professional sports, you can barely swing your character's baseball bat without running into a corporate logo that really has nothing to do with the game itself.
Other games, like Crazy Taxi, see characters taking pit stops at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and even Super Monkey Ball, a game of pure fantasy, has Dole bananas logos everywhere.
Few people gave the trend much thought until last year's release of State of Emergency, a bizarre anti-globalization game created by the same company that generated the most recent violence-in-video-games controversy with Grand Theft Auto 3. In State of Emergency, players control anti-globalization activists as they riot through the streets, smashing windows of recognizable companies such as Starbucks in an attempt to topple a corporate dictator.
The game wasn’t a huge success, but it sure generated talk amongst activists – some thought it was blatant corporate hegemony, while others thought it was a great way to spread their social justice agenda.
But it also raised the question of how far the digital branding of video games should go. Is the next step seeing a Smith & Wesson logo on the rocket launcher that cuts a bloody hole through enemies in games like Doom and Quake?
Most gamers seem to think that product placement was inevitable, and they don’t blame the makers of The Sims Online for making the jump. After all, everyone has become used to seeing characters in Hollywood movies drink Coke or Pepsi rather than some imaginary soft drink dreamed up for the film.
There is a growing backlash (thanks largely to Canadian writer Naomi Klein) as corporate branding becomes more and more ingrained in culture, but people who grew up with it as a fact of life tend to see through the marketing ploys and take it all with a grain of salt.
On online forums, many of the comments about the issue were jokes about Sims characters growing obese or getting ill from eating virtual Big Macs. Knowing that much of the pleasure in playing The Sims comes from creating totally dysfunctional families, McDonald’s execs are bound to see their digital restaurants in some bizarre situations they never would have imagined.
Gamers of all ages also seem to be aware that it’s money and corporate deal-making that drives product placement, and not some kind of artistic statement by video game makers, as may have been the case in the past. As long as people understand the motive, they're no more likely to be brainwashed by playing Super Monkey Ball than they are by picking up a Beauty and the Beast Happy Meal.
But, as sports agent Jerry McGuire said in the film of the same name – long after pledging he would not rest until his football-playing client was holding a Coke, wearing his own branded shoe and playing a Sega game featuring him – we live in a cynical world. |
