Productive Play 2.0: The Logic of In-Game Advertising

Abstract

Online video games are helping to pioneer the use of interactive advertising that targets consumers based on information about their behaviour, consumption patterns, and other demographic and psychographic information. This article draws on the example of in-game ads to explore some of the ways in which advertisers harness virtual worlds to marketing imperatives, and equate realism and authenticity with the proliferation of commercial messages. Since video games have the potential to serve as a model for other forms of marketing both online and off, the way in which they are being used to exploit interactivity as a form of commercial monitoring has broader implications for the digital economy.