I'm skeptical that anti-advertising of any kind can prevent consumption. In fact, people raise their defense mechanisms when products they know and use are called into question. Ayse Binay wrote her doctoral dissertation for the University of Texas at Austin on the effects of subvertising, and her research supports this theory.
Binay showed her test subjects advertisements for Absolut Vodka, famous for likening the distinctive bottle shape with a funky idea and pairing it with a catchy slogan. "Absolut 69," for example, shows two bottles next to each other, one pointing up and one pointing down. Binay also showed her subjects subversive parodies designed by Adbusters. The "Absolut Impotence" ad features a slumping bottle and comes with a brief warning about the obstacles to drunken sex.
Tests found that product loyalists don't change their brand attitudes after seeing attempts to subvert them, while those who are hostile to the brand are not really influenced by the anti-ads either. But the really interesting stuff happens in the middle. Those who didn't come with preconceived ideas about Absolut felt positive about both the actual ads and their subversive counterparts. At the end of the day, their views of the product were more favorable, no matter what they saw.
"Even though the ultimate goal of Absolut subvertisements may be to challenge the cultural norms about drinking or to dismiss the value of brand arbitrage ... the subvertisements seem to be unintentionally and unexpectedly working in favor of the Absolut brand," Binay concluded.
Bogost said in an interview that he's not interested in using anti-advergames or advergames to change people's brand loyalties. He'd rather use games to create ads with high "social value."
Most ads these days sell an image or an intangible feeling that people associate with a product. In Persuasive Games, Bogost referred to the Coca-Cola polar bears of years past. Consumers can associate the bears' carefree attitude with the enjoyment of drinking Coke, though the ads say nothing about the drink itself.
Bogost accused advertising of manufacturing wants and needs instead of explaining how products fit into someone's existing lifestyle. The solution, he argued, is more demonstrative advertising as it was a few decades ago.
"Traditional advertising, it used to be like this," Bogost told me. "If you look at the golden age of television - and advertisers today would argue that this is just because it was unsophisticated - what people did was they tried to say, 'Oh, here's my soap, or my dishwasher, and here's what it does and why it will make your life better.'"
Videogames can return to the old ways of advertising, Bogost said, because they can use procedure and logic to demonstrate a product's usefulness. Anti-advergames function similarly, allowing the player to interact with a troubled environment. It's a noble goal, but does it work?
Typically, advergames are measured in game plays. Rob Small, CEO of Miniclip, a website that hosts games with and without commercial branding, said he guarantees 5 million game plays for his advertising clients, who pay Miniclip to develop and host a game. Roughly 15 percent of players also click-through to that company's website or watch the trailer if the game is promoting a movie, Small said.
In Persuasive Games, Bogost said eyeballs and twitching fingers aren't enough. To know the real effects of anti-advergames, there has to be discussion. People have to mull a game over, he said, and their thought process on internet chat rooms and forums is evidence that it's happening. What's troubling, however, is Bogost's disregard for the player's ultimate conclusion.
"It might mean, you know, I've had some sort of intangible change in my attitude about a topic like my relationship with the fast food industry and I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with that," he said in an interview, "but I'm going to noodle it and it may come back to me later, so there's a spectrum, certainly, of possible responses."
