The Infinite Loop

When I posted before about how I was rather disgusted by the whole Everquest II /Pizza function, I figured the whole thing was going to be a relatively small blip on the radar. Now the whole issue has developed into a bit of a furor, and I've noticed opinions on the piece popping up all over the place. What frightened me most was this piece over on CNN Money and how it interpreted the whole system and it's implication.

The basic idea is that video games are going to start employing more and more marketing internal to the game. The biggest issue for this newly expaning advertising venue is to find a way to put product into the game without directly offending the consumer. In other words, they aren't concerned about whether or not this kind of thing belongs in the games to begin with, they just want to make sure to do it in a fashion that pisses the least number of people off.

It's a win win situation for the game publishers and the advertisers. The publishers get an additional revenue stream (because apparently the money they get off the game itself, plus the subscription fees that are becoming more common, aren't enough), and the advertisers get repeated exposure. Unlike in most other media, where you can merely turn the page, flip the channel, fast forward, etc. and still get the content you're interested in, proper penetration into a video game is impossible to bypass, you have to put up with it to get the content that you want.

My frustration level with advertisements is at an all time high. When I try to listen to WEEI, I end up needing to spend almost half my time listening to advertisements if I want to enjoy any of the sports talk. I now pay $10 to go to a movie, where I am forced to sit through advertisements before I can even watch the film itself. Marketing as a whole seems to be taking the overall shotgun approach: we don't care if our product is on target for you, we'll just throw as much stuff out there as we can and hope that some of it hits.

Now the ideal solution I'm sure some people would like to point out is to simply boycott all of these heavily marketed products. However, I know this is not a feasible solution. First of all, I am a happy consumer. I like consuming things. Give a product cool abilities, neat functions, or lots of sugar and I'm there. Second, I'm also well aware that no matter how pointed and full of ire I am when it comes to boycotting a product, none of the people doing this marketing are going to give a damn if I don't buy their product. Persuasive I may be (not), but I can't convince everyone out there "Hey, stop using product X because they advertise too much." Hell, if rumors of child labor and other such 'Big Business' atrocities/negative publicity aren't enough to significantly dent sales, how can "too much advertising" have any effect on the bottom line.

Maybe that's really the problem. We keep talking about a "consumer backlash" if advertising ever gets too intrusive, but other than the Spiderman 2 bases in baseball last season, there's been very little real backlash (it's not as if Spiderman 2 did poorly at the theaters). I'm convinced that marketing has become insidious enough that we've literally come to accept it as a normal part of everyday life, and therefore there is almost no limit to how far marketing can go. Personally I wish we could go back a couple of steps to where I could easily ignore much of it if I wanted to, but I think the snowball has gotten way too big for any such reversal at this point.