Angry in the Great White North

From the Gizmo Cafe:

In recent years, industry giant Electronic Arts (EA) has placed an increasing number of advertisements in its gaming environment. Some of the worst culprits include the Need for Speed series, which has lambasted the gamer with fast food billboards, cell phone logos and auto accessory brand names. EA also forces the gamer to listen to its pre-selected songs, or "Trax", which are undoubtedly the tunes being pushed the most by money-waving music industry moguls behind the scenes (the worst case may be NHL 07, which only includes 10-15 songs. That can get awful old after just ten hours of game time).

Currently, EA is facing its greatest backlash over the use of advertising in games. According to some reports, the company's online mass-multiplayer release, Battlefield 2142, is tracking gamer information. By connecting to the internet, gamers are opening their log of personal information to EA, and some have accused the company of using that data to stream specified advertising.

What sort of advertising? From the insert included in Battlefield 2142:

"The software may incorporate technology developed by IGA Worldwide, the advertising technology. The purpose of the advertising technology is to deliver in-game ads when you use the software while connected to the Internet. When you use the software while connected to the Internet, the advertising technology may record your IP address and other anonymous information. That advertising data is temporarily used by IGA to enable the presentation and measurement of in-game ads and other in-game object which are uploaded temporarily to the your PC or game console, and change during online gameplay. The advertising technology does not collect personal or identifiable information about you."

Advertising inbedded in games is nothing new. Advertisers have paid to include product placement in games, but this is a new twist -- dynamically generated advertising based on personal (if anonymous) information.

EA responds by saying they are only targeting regions:

The advertising program in Battlefield 2142 does not access any files which are not directly related to the game. It does not capture personal data such as cookies, account login detail, or surfing history.

BF 2142 delivers ads by region. The advertising system uses a player's IP address to determine the region of the player, assisting to serve the appropriate ads by region and language. For instance, a player in Paris might be presented with ads in French. The information collected will not berepurposed for other uses.

Battlefield 2142 also tracks "impression data" related to in-game advertisements: location of a billboard in the game, brand advertised, duration of advertisement impression, etc. This information is used to help advertisers qualify the reach of a given advertisement.

Whatever EA says is essentially irrelevant, since tomorrow it or some other company will be downloading cookies and surfing history. Indeed, that might already be happening.

The guys at Gizmo Cafe have a good response:

For a gamer who abhors legislation, it's tough for me to admit that there needs to be some sort of regulation on this. If companies like EA - the game publishers who certainly don't need the extra money - want to pound our eyeballs with advertisements, then perhaps we could see a drop in the price of affected games. Knock ten, even fifteen dollars off of the title.

We made you rich, EA. We deserve it.

I'd agree, but I'd go one step further. EA should offer two versions -- one with and one without dynamic advertising. Make the price differential explicit, transparent, and significant. Let the consumer choose which to purchase. I think EA would be pleasantly surprised by the number of people happy to pay less for a game and allow the dynamic advertising.

A move like that would do much to inoculate EA against the anger that is coming its way, especially when the next big EA comes out with far more intrusive snooping designed to please voracious advertisers.