EXPLORING THE VIRTUAL WORLDS OF ADVERGAMING BOYD EXPLORING THE VIRTUAL reasons why people would want to move into the ad-supported space. WORLDS OF ADVERGAMING Chris Boyd THE ORIGINS OF ADVERGAMING Malwarebytes, UK In 1978, what was arguably the fi rst piece of advergaming was born when the text adventure Adventureland inserted a Email [email protected] reference to another title by the same developers called Treasure Island [5]. From there, other forms of advertising followed including the placing of Doom mod CDs in cereal ABSTRACT boxes, and the realization that visual adverts could be placed into game titles directly. The games market was worth US$90+ billion in 2016, and with an estimated billion hours a month globally spent playing In 1983, Coca Cola released Pepsi Invaders, a Space Invaders mobile games alone [1], there has never been such great clone in which the aliens were replaced with the word ‘Pepsi’ opportunity for making money where in-game advertising is and the spaceships were replaced with coke bottles. Other concerned. However, that desire for profi t also comes with companies followed suit through the years, releasing problems for device owners, who frequently fi nd themselves at ‘alternative’ titles, which often required the purchase of the mercy of poor disclosure and intrusive advertising. child-focused food in order to gain access to them. As adverts in gaming (‘advergaming’) ecosystems continue to Early electronic toys were also forerunners of downloadable become more sophisticated, so the potential complications content (DLC), where the original product effectively becomes grow for parents, children and gamers, who just want to play the marketing tool for additional fi nancial buy-in. One such without having to worry about where their data is going (and product, Mr Game Show, offered an electronic quiz; additional how it is being used). Ad-blocking attempts in games have questions could be purchased via cassette tapes which were resulted in ads being embedded in such ways that they can’t connected to the toy via a cassette player. easily be removed, and the rise of new ad technologies in Twenty years on, tape and plastic have been replaced with virtual reality (VR) raises questions about the visceral, direct digital downloads and always-on Internet connections. nature of this form of communication. For many children, their fi rst introduction to the world of In this paper, I look at: virtual reality would have been the View Master. Created in • The value and origin of advergaming 1939, the viewing device was held up to one’s eyes and circular disks containing stereoscopic 3D pairs of photographs • Convergence, ad types, cross-device buy in created a 3D illusion. • Heat maps, ad positions, achievements Whether desktop, mobile, plastic toys or the brave new world • Mobile issues of VR, all of these spaces are embracing advergaming in • Ad blocking inventive ways – some of which potentially put the customer at risk from bad adverts, or tracking, or a combination of both. • Real-world gamifi cation, VR/AR. CONVERGENCE ADVERGAMING: BIG MONEY There was a time when hardware limitations meant that your The global videogames market is a vast money spinner, phone, game device, computer, pager, and other essentials with around US$41bn of its estimated US$90bn worth were all kept separate. Over time, convergence brought them spent on mobile, US$34bn on PC gaming, US$6bn on all together and games consoles were marketed as ‘all-in-one’ consoles, US$2.7bn on VR, and just under a billion spent on entertainment systems. eSports [2]. This ensured that every console in every home had the ability Advergaming – the process of displaying adverts in a game to serve marketing, from fi rst boot to just before switching off. title, or making a game based entirely on a specifi c product in This convergence has had the consequence of placing artifi cial order to advertise it to the fullest extent and create band barriers between the gamer and the game. Previously, the association with consumers – is now a fully fl edged industry. game fl ow was as follows: Videogame engine developer Unity Industries surveyed more 1. Switch on device than 2,000 gamers and developers [3] and found that: 2. Game loads • 78% of mobile gamers are open to having video adverts 3. Game publisher’s copyright/terms of service (ToS) instead of paying for a game title presented • 62% of gamers would regularly interact with ads for an 4. Play game in-game reward 5. Turn off device • 62% of developers saw retention rates either climb or stay level after introducing ads to a title that previously had Now, the typical fl ow might be more like this: none 1. Switch on device • Only 18% of gamers would pay up front for a game. 2. Console updates applied (if any) When companies such as Zynga are able to generate US$153m 3. Dashboard loads (containing a mixture of adverts and of revenue purely from in-game adverts [4], there are clear wanted content) VIRUS BULLETIN CONFERENCE OCTOBER 2017 1 EXPLORING THE VIRTUAL WORLDS OF ADVERGAMING BOYD 4. Game loads effectively more adverts for more products – with no buy in, 5. Legal/ToS/privacy policy (often detailing the ads/ you miss key portions of the story you’re following. A famous networks/how your data will be used) presented example of this is The Matrix, with plot-crucial spinoffs including Enter the Matrix and The Animatrix to name but two. 6. Menu screen/DLC offers presented The end result is that consumers are now subjecting 7. Loading screen with ads for DLC themselves to additional forms of advertising or analytics in 8. Play game (potentially containing dynamic/interactive order to get the full picture. ads) Some desktop games will offer relatively low in-game 9. Exit game with ‘before you go’/‘rate this’/social rewards obtained through normal play, but create companion media buttons apps for mobile which provide easy ways to boost resources. For example, Mass Effect Andromeda offers an app, subject to 10. Return to dashboard/ads EA’s various privacy policies, which helps players gather 11. Turn off device additional useful in-game items. There are now numerous additional key steps in the process, There’s no real reason the main game couldn’t have included during which ads can be served. The game being played higher volumes of resources to collect, but downloading the serves as marketing for the DLC, which is how a game app potentially exposes the player to more advertising/ continues to generate revenue long after its initial launch. analytics touch points. Note that console dashboards try to display relevant content that may interest you prior to launching a game, so in theory, GAME DESIGN AS SOCIAL ENGINEERING: any attempt to load a game means being subjected to ads not HEAT MAPS only in the title in question, but also to ads unrelated to what you initially intended to do. One of the major benefi ts of console connectivity and improved data analysis is being able to track how gamers play, right down to the smallest details. For example, ADVERT TYPES producers of fi rst-person shooters are able to generate ‘heat Before the rise of net-connected gaming consoles, adverts maps’, which provide a detailed rundown of where gamers were infrequent because with no way to update them, product go, how long they stay in particular locations, the general ebb placement would quickly look outdated and out of place if and fl ow of movement over time, choke points, and so on. locked into (say) a Nintendo NES cartridge. There was also no way for advertisers to get feedback on how well viewed/ infl uential/disliked an ad was. These are known as static ads. From the Dreamcast onward, Internet connectivity meant that static adverts could be replaced by always-on, always updatable adverts served by content delivery networks (CDNs) in much the same way as ads were served on web pages. This is known as dynamic advertising, and dynamic ads have almost entirely replaced static ads across all devices, from mobile to desktop. One danger of dynamic advertising is that, as the ads are fl uid, banners could be left blank should the ad network shut down or the paid spots be removed. If the ads appear on banners or billboards in the game world, this could be Figure 1: Heat map. somewhat immersion breaking. The Matrix Online (2005) ran into such a problem, but placed the words ‘Ad space for rent’ Over time, fi rms have started to make use of these heat maps in on all of the empty ad hoardings. order to calculate the best location for ad placement. In the real There are interesting parallels to be drawn between world, we now see billboards and banners containing cameras developments in online and offl ine advertising. In the real which track their own ‘heat maps’, providing data that world, out-of-home (OOH) advertising such as billboards and potentially includes head movements, general demographics posters used to be limited by their static nature in the same such as age and gender, and (most crucially) whether people way as non-net-connected in-game advertising, but they have look at the ad or away, and for how long, as well as which now gravitated towards always-on, analytics-based portions of the ad attract their attention the most [6]. approaches. In a similar fashion, heat maps ensure that intelligent game In the virtual realm, games with static adverts have similarly level design goes hand in hand with exposure to branding.