Advertising through Digital Games: Looking Beyond Simulations of Products and Services

This chapter delves into the reasoning that advergames following Bogost’s procedural rhetoric approach may not be achieving their communication goals. Moreover, it claims that games designed under the proceduralist domain may be unattractive to players. Correlating advertising messages with the actual features and functions of goods and services implies assuming that consumer preferences reflect rational decisions. This approach takes for granted that the consumers are able to differentiate products according to their characteristics and that they use rational thinking to make decisions and to differentiate the offers made by one company from those made by its competitors. This strategy focuses on specific product properties and uses analytical, quantitative and rhetoric methods to convince consumers. However, although Bogost asserts that this strategy is the one that better fits with the properties of the digital-game medium, the fact is that the use of this strategy in digital games entails a series of difficulties compared to its use in other advertising media. These difficulties are related to (1) information overload, (2) channel noise, and (3) semantic noise. This chapter reflects of how these three factors should be taken into consideration when designing digital games to convey advertising messages, and which persuasive strategies could be followed to overcome the challenges associated to them.

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