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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)
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.
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).
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
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
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.
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.
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?