How to Do Things with Videogames

9. Promotion

9 Promotion In late 2006 Burger King released three Xbox and Xbox 360 titles featuring the creepy King mascot that’s graced the company’s advertising in recent years, 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 (points are awarded for sneaking with “vigor, finesse, and a royal flourish”). To get the games, Burger King customers had to buy a Value Meal and then pay another $3.99 for each title (it was possible to buy all three with only one meal purchase). There are several ways advertising and games intersect. One is the advergame, a custom-developed title, usually played on a web page, built from the ground up to promote a product or service. Another is product placement, the insertion of branding or products into commercial games, a technique discussed in chapter 7 in the context of Monopoly. And a third is in-game advertising, the static (fixed at development time) or dynamic (delivered over the Internet) insertion of billboards, objects, or videos into commercial titles. Despite increases in both product placement and in-game advertising , web-based advergames remain far more common examples . The main reason for this popularity is the relatively low cost and complexity of creating branded browser-based games. promotIon 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. At first blush, the Burger King Xbox 360 games would appear to fall in the advergame tradition; like their simpler, cheaper cousins, these games build branding atop proven , popular game genres: Pocketbike Racer clearly arises from the now-familiar genre of go-cart racers, and Big Bumpin’ borrows its gameplay from that same genre’s head-to-head combat modes. Yet Burger King rejects the advergaming label. As the columnist Stephen Totilo reported, Burger King promotions director Martha Tomas Flynn said the project “very much wasn’t an advergaming 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.” Flynn’s reluctance may arise from the negative reputation advergames haveearned, thanks toanoverlyopportunisticadvertising industry that hasdelivered poor-qualitygames. Yet 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. Burger King and Xbox conceived the deal and brought the developers on board several months later, presumably based on their considerable experience working with licenses like American Idol and Bratz. Tomas Flynn’s rhetoric is an increasingly common one among marketers in general. As commodity goods continue to proliferate , brand companies have sought new ways to differentiate themselves from their competitors. For example, Starbucks has made efforts to become an entertainment company, first selling CDs in its stores, then financing films like Akeelah and the Bee.2 Burger King’s then new mascots embodied 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 promotIon Subservient Chicken might be, they helped suggest that Burger King is an edgy, forward-looking adult brand, while McDonald’s remains a kid-focused, mundane burger joint. Of course, just because Burger King critiquesadvergamesdoes not automatically distance its recent titles from the form at large. Who could deny the fact that the mere representation of Burger King mascots—not to mention the flotilla of BK food products the player serves in Sneak King—are advertisements in the ordinary sense? Yet these three games are also not just advergames either; that is, there’s something that separates Pocketbike Racer from the ubiquitous branded web game. One difference is the platform on which the games are played. In-gameplacementsand advertisements havecertainlygraced the Xbox 360 (including Cadillac’s Xbox Livedeliveryof a freecontent pack of vehicles into Microsoft’s Project Gotham Racing in 2006), but the Burger King games are the first titles developed from the ground up...