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Running Over Virtual Pedestrians Helps In-Game Ad Recall
neuroworld writes to point out a study which found a correlation between in-game violence and a player's ability to recall advertisements seen while playing. The test subjects were given two versions of a driving game, which included "unobtrusive" billboard ads, and their eye movements were recorded by a camera. One version had players hitting targets for points, and the other version had them running down pedestrians. "[The researchers] found ads displayed along with violent scenes to be more memorable to players than those shown with nonviolent content, even though players spent less time looking at them. The results are contrary to expectations stemming from research on television, where violence has been shown to decrease attention to advertisements."
And I've been drinking Coca-Cola ever since I hit that hunderd an' eleven year old lady in Grand Theft Auto VI: The Ballad of Brawndo's Stories and her blood spilt across the sidewalk to make the Coca-Cola logo. Now ever time I crack open a can of Coca-Cola, it feels like someone's spine in my hands snapping like celery. And when I take that first drink of blood ... er ... Coca-Cola, it's like I'm drinking that old lady's life essence again.
My work here is dung.
So advertisers love violent video games. Maybe they should put some of their revenue into defending some of the games under attack because of violent content.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Quick, hide this research as fast as you can. Otherwise the next Bioshock will have you kill little sisters to various advertising jingles. I can just see the little girl in my hands, begging for mercy while in the background you hear, "J. E. L. L. O, Its Alive!" In Wait...that might actually work.
So, a real Death Race 2000 ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072856 ) would have helped Burma Shave ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma-Shave)
"[The researchers] found ads displayed along with violent scenes to be more memorable to players than those shown with nonviolent content"
--
Dilbert on "Industry Standards"
davecb5620@gmail.com
If they made the billboards destructable like in Red Faction, I bet you they'd remember the exact slogan you put on there.
Why try to "Sneak" these adverts into games, and find the best way to make people remember without thinking about it, when the only thing you REALLY have to worry about is getting people to remember it. Ads in games have already come around... so... why the illusion?
A game where I pick up an assault rifle or something and it has a Coke logo on the side. Im gonna make all those vivid dreams people have about video gamers going nuts for no apparent reason come true. Seriously sick of this. Im paying $$ for the game allready. Not only have they cut down on the length of games, but the overall quality. Apparently graphics are a good substitue for story and play. They dont really make any games that are original anymore. And now after all these god damn shortcuts the game companies are taking they want to advertise to me in game as well? Fuck that noise.
And this has been another installament of Captain Obvious!
But maybe the basic game sucks and is boring, and running down pedestrians and seeing the blood splatter is the only thing that spices it up and gets the player to actually pay attention.
The enemies of Democracy are
How bout we just not put ads in games and call it a day?
Is 50 bucks a pop not enough? Really?
Or if you are going to put ads in I have the perfect spot....level loading. Give me a stupid orbitz game to play why it loads.
TV ads occur between show segments.
Billboard ads occur concurrently with the game.
Perhaps there is a difference. Further investigation is required.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I for one welcome our new bloodthirsty advertisers.
Maybe seeing the adds juxtaposed against violence is memorable because we are not used to seeing the two together: usually it is seen as bad taste to profit from suffering so advertisers keep a little distance (for example, you don't see Stihl product placement in the SAW movies).
If that is the case, then this advertising benefit would go away as soon as people get over the idea...
/me performs a violent act in the hopes of getting his comment noticed. Blood! Gore! Mean people!
myspace.com/johnnyfreakingcocaine
They should have used Screamovision instead. Imagine the ad revenue they'd get every time Candlejack shows up on the scre
When hitting targets, the reward is more points. You get the most satisfaction from getting a high score. When hitting pedestrians, even if you get points for it, are like the points you get in Super Mario Bros. 3. You don't remember there being a score? Exactly.
This isn't about violence, it's whether you have you sights hard-set on a goal (points), or if you're just taking your time and enjoying yourself (who cares if you miss a pedestrian - there's always more).
TFA could almost be read to have the following conclusion: Violent behaviors correlate with a higher engagement with surroundings as well as increased awareness - at least in the virtual space. Makes sense the television ads would have an opposite correlation - I would imagine that placement type advertisement within violent content would have a higher portion of mindshare, while commercial advertisement between segments of a violent show would have a lower portion. The engagement is with the violent content itself, not the timeframe it exists in.
The very last line in the linked article:
"An unreleased follow-up study by Melzer reveals another undesirable result: that violent play can negatively impact a player's opinion of a brand."
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/23336/page2/
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Now, what would be even more memorable is pedestrians shouting ad slogans as they die. "Aaahh, I should have drank Coca-Cola-a-a-a" or "Oh, no! My Nike shoes!" or "Whew! Missed me like a little Fiat, you loser!"
Because this will help make the world a better, happier place...
Who said violent videogames weren't good for anything? This is in your face, Jack Thompson!
Covenant sporting Nike apparel?
It seems to me that it's fairly well accepted that long term memories tend to form more strongly when accompanied by a strong emotional response.
I think that in the case of TV advertising the ads are "in-between" the violence, so you may remember the violence from the program, which tends to suppress the ad since it's not displayed during the program.
This experiment makes the ad coincident with the violence.
Absolute statements are never true
For instance, what did the targets look like? What did the people look like? How bizarre was the juxtaposition of the targets in an environment where, presumably, people would be more natural? If, all other things being considered equal, the people look more natural in the environment than the targets look, basic logic can be used to postulate that people will focus on the targets that look out of place instead of the billboard ads, whereas they would notice the ads if everything else looked natural.
... OMG. I just ran an old lady over in my FORD FUSION... and I can't stop thinking about the BEST AMERICAN CAR MANUFACTURER*.
* - note: This may or may not be true, accurate, or sober.
"[...]to expectations stemming from research on television[...]"
FUCK NAZI TELEVISION! we have 2009!
Now billboard ad budgets are going to include the cost of lubricating the road :(
If the advertisement is showing WHILE the participant commits "murder", which is known to have visceral links for virtual actions, then there's much more brain storage going on than when watching a "murder", particularly when the advertisement comes at some time removed from the action.
This is not to say that the test shouldn't have been performed, but it mostly adds a minor corollary to what was already known.
Of course, this is a gold mine for product placement advertising.
The brain stores the *differences* of *associations*. And violence is more extreme. So it is a bigger difference. Which means the storing is stronger. Which means you remember it, and everything you associate with at, best.
Or did nobody here understand how brains (or other neural nets) work?? (I see that all the time :/)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
...Pizza Hut and Axe Body Spray!
Brought to you by Johnson's Baby oil.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
While I agree and any help in the fight against "oh my god video games with blood, think of the children!" would be welcome. I'm just thinking the whole "violence in games is ok since it helps us sell our wares" isn't going to further the cause too far =P
I have the opposite reaction. One of the things we frequently complain about on the internet is how American society gets all uppity about an act which is an expression of love between two adults and then turns a blind eye to glorifying acts that hurt other people. Somehow I doubt that letting cynical marketers know that they can better impress their brands by upping the latter will help in that regard.
While no study has proven a causal link between violent video games and violent actions, they have made a pretty convincing case for aggression, and I'm not sure that having games deliberately designed to increase consumption of goods at the cost of a little higher aggression is a good thing.
I enjoy violent games in spite of knowing this, but I feel a little queasy thinking of this in the hands of marketers. I'm not sure that I'd feel comfortable having that extra edge of callous psychological manipulation behind a title.
If you think about our biological behavior or suspect evolution had something to do with how we got here, then the ability to remember _everything_ about a violent act is probably a survival trait. At first creation, beings would avoid anything that had cars or pedestrians or billboards, but species with so-called higher consciousnesses could distinguish (possibly) between which items are associated with the violence and which are simply co-located in time and space with the violence.
.
But you still have to remember everything first in order to make the distinction.
Was anyone else reminded of Carmageddon
The article doesn't clearly state what the differences between the two games are. Is the non-violent version more challenging in which I need to pay more attention to the road in order to meet the objective? Is the violent version easier where they've placed the pedestrians right in the middle of the road and I don't really need to try to hit them? I'm sure if they actually made it so that both versions had the pedestrian/checkpoint in the exact same position, then we'd see a difference. Even if they're in the same position, which did the players play first? I'm sure we can all remember back to how the first time we played any Need For Speed title, how we didn't really notice the background and were more intent on the other cars and the road. Once we played it enough, we'd start to notice the background and potential shortcuts. What if I missed an ad in a particular area because I happened to do a poor job navigating a corner and wind up facing away from the ad? Too may variables exist between each person. There doesn't appear to be a good control to balance it out. (Sorry for the formatting.)
When is my free ad supported version of Carmageddon coming out?
That's an odd expectation: I would expect attention to ads shown during violence as part of the same scene to operate very differently than attention to ads shown in between scenes of violence, in breaks from the main teleplay. In game ads are (pretty much exactly) like product placement in TV or movies, not like normal TV ads.
Here's my hypothesis to explain the "contradictory" results.
In the case of a violent TV show that is periodically interrupted by an ad, the brain perceives these
as two different situational episodes or contexts.
Another analogy would be if you were both reading a crime novel set in London, and periodically glancing up from your book
to look out the train window at the sweeping mountain vistas. The brain/mind can separate those episodes, similar to how they
would be separated if they followed each other in time.
In the case of the billboard ads in the driving game, these ads are impressions that are part of the in-game world, seen while
your brain/mind perceives you to be in the driving situational episode.
Why this distinction is important is probably that your brain adds strong-emotion-related "tags" to memories of the traumatic
situational episode. These tags (first biochemical, then reflected in the structure of the long-term memory) assist to prioritize
later recall of important memories. Of course, this recall may be somewhat uncontrollable (as in PTSD), but there is no
doubt that these memories will be recallable for longer than memories of unrelated and unremarkable episodes near in
time to the traumatic episode. This is as it should be for our survival through avoidance of future similar situation function.
So, to sum up, the billboards are part of the situational episode context for the traumatic incident, so are included in the
emotion-tag-enhanced strong memory of that incident, whereas the interstitial ads (which take your brain/mind to a different
situation in the world of the ad) are committed to memory as uneventful situations worthy of only moderate recall. And it
is even probable that situational episodes near to (but different from and not causally related to) the traumatic episode
are in fact inhibited, because memory-commitment resources are being used to strongly commit the traumatic episode,
or perhaps to set it in sharp relief to the irrelevant nearby episodes, for more distinct and more certain recall of the "correct"
important episode around that time period.
Just a guess.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
What about putting the advertisements on the pedestrians' shirts? Then we might remember them better AND be able to run down walking advertisements with satisfyingly bloody results!
"In the Shirt Test, the test subjects did not fare quite so well in the game portion of the test, score-wise. What they seemed to prefer to do is hit pedestrians with advertisements on their shirts, back over them, and repeat the process until either the pedestrian was removed from the game or time ran out. However, the subjects DID remember the ads better, if not only in the sense of, as one subject put it, the satisfaction of hitting 'that stupid-looking tool with the Coca-Cola shirt on'. Further research is needed. Here's our grant application."
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
"An unreleased follow-up study by Melzer reveals another undesirable result: that violent play can negatively impact a player's opinion of a brand."
Perhaps the subjects were exercising some kind of innate (as opposed to imposed) subconscious aversion to violence, even as their conscious "do this task and get paid" desire was driving.
Television is passive so such an aversion is easy; you are not physically participating in the (depicted) violence anyway, so the brain uses the Numbing Technique. The result is that associated imagery (advertisements) are also blurred.
A video game is active so such an aversion is more difficult; your brain is directing your muscles to do the (depicted) violence, which is incompatible with Numbing. The way out then, perhaps, is to use the LookAside Technique; averting your "active" attention, even if not your eyes (as mentioned in the summary). The result is that associated imagery in your peripheral vision is soaked up and its recall improved.
In any case, this spells trouble for Ender Wiggen wannabes...
There have been so many references to Coke on this page that I'm thirsty. Do discussions about violence in games count towards effective advertising, too?
I didn't RTFA.
When I'm playing a driving game, I'm looking at the road and don't see the signs much because my focus of attention is narrowed to the road.
When playing the same game for running over pedestrians, I'm looking all over to find where they are.
They want to do advertising, then put it ON the road.
It's interesting that this research is going on. We know that sex sells and now we are showing that violence sells. Will this line of research result in even more violent video games? And if so, will the advertising/marketing people be held accountable for any of this? After all, violence in video games is a subject of much controversy already.
And how much REAL violence will be employed for the purpose of selling things? What works in video games is quite likely to work in reality as well. Should we start arranging for homeless people to run out into the streets so they can get run over?
Well, if they plan to put ads in games, they better lower the damn price. No one wants to pay $50-60 to see ads.
- From a PC.
The simple fact is that the game where you hit pedestrians may simply have been more entertaining and thus the ads more memorable.
There was a great Onion TV spot about a "Shoot people in the face" game which while violent also looked as boring as hell. So what they really need to do is have a boring, yet violent game, and use that as a control.
They failed to separate if the results was due to the game being more entertaining rather then just violent.
Case point, solitaire with violent images on the cards, do they improve the ad recall?
While it is at least a fruit to fruit comparision they still need to figure out if people perfer oranges to lemons because of taste or the fact that they were rubbing the lemon juice on open cuts during the study...
Correlation doesn't imply causation because of this very scenario. We cannot tell if the results (despite the obviously biased report) were because the pedestrian game was violent or merely more entertaining.
A great example would have been to compare a poorly done "Road Killing Game" with bad graphics to Grand Turismo. I'd wager a bet that ad recall will be better on ... well... a better more entertaining game.
Clearly if the killing version of the game is more entertaining then that goes a long way in briding the gap in the TV inconsistency...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I'm glad that it's not every pedestrian whose scream is Yahoo!(TM)
I bet you, if you ran over real pedestrians you would remember what was on the billboards.
(actually you would have years in prison with only that to think of.)
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
This article would mean more to me if it included more specific data supporting this claim.
How many test subjects where there?
What percentage of subjects playing which version displayed better ad recall? ETC
Without any specific data in the article it seems kind of meaningless. For all I know they may have had a very low number of test subjects, and those who played the bloody version just happened to have better attention to detail than those who played the clean version.
My own guess is this - when hitting a non-person, nothing special happens. However, when hitting a pedestrian, the brain takes stock of who else might have seen that vile act, which is when you also notice the ads. I suggest we're hard-wired to look around after committing a 'crime' and THAT is why there's a difference.
Just a guess, but if I'm right, you'd also get better pay-off out of ads in games involving other acts where you'd not want others watching you...
Other than straight up, behavioural, response mechanisms there's more room to maneuver when manipulating a game player. The OCW intro psych course will introduce you to love on a suspension bridge. There's a study that was conducted on a suspension bridge over a deep gorge. The object of the study is to demonstrate the correlation between circumstance and the way the brain overlays states to arrive at different conclusions given different inputs. In the suspension bridge study the fear engendered by being on a high suspension bridge is used to reinforce attraction to a potential sexual partner. The faster heart beat fear engenders on a suspension bridge will reinforce the degree of attractiveness we find in another person because the faster heart rate is no different than the increased heart rate engendered by an encounter with someone we find very attractive. The same person encountered on a suspension bridge is found to be more attractive than the same persons encountered in more mundane surroundings.
ideopath @ play
The study omits the fact that it is much more fun to watch the replays of mowing down people...
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
The advertisers for quake live won't even tolerate a bullet-hole decal on their ad... businesses won't pay for destructible ads.
If you ever asked "How can we get our product negatively associated with violence?" then this is the answer!
Perhaps we could have a show where people call in to violently electrocute one of an array of adorable animals. Behind each animal, obviously, we'd place an advertisement. Fluffy goes boom, return on investment goes up, PETA cries like a little girl as always, and suddenly the recession is over!
PS - I will be patenting this process. To any TV studio seeking to use this patented new revolutionary business model, I wish to mention that I accept checks and PayPal.
Thank you.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
does nobody else remember the in game radio ad on GTA II or III "Calorific Juicy and Delicious, CJDs" Such a sweet harmony, kept me thinking of all the bovine madness I was catching everytime I ate a burger.