Pepsi Man
This game is notorious, I think I first found out about this game in middle school. It has a cult meme following, especially since the song is unironically kind of catchy. I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that these memes actually improved my perception of the brand. Although this was likely not the intended avenue for this to happen, it is interesting that it had the intended result. They used the wrong formula and got to the right solution.
Sneak King
I never owned an Xbox but if I did and was aware of this promotional game, I probably would have gotten it. As a kid, I bought lots of Cheerios cereal because there were pamphlets with chapters of the second Spiderwick Chronicles book in the boxes. I eventually got all of them and compiled them into the complete book which I thought was pretty cool. When Sneak King came out, I was six years old and my access to games was limited to pretty much whatever I could find for cheap. I would have definitely been in the target market for this advergame.
Chex Quest
This reminded me of all of the different versions of Doom that I have played. In middle school, I would play it on a calculator. This is all to say that I would play whatever I could get my hands on and Chex Quest looks to be far from the worst advergame that one could pick out.
M&M Kart Racing
This is not one that I have ever played, and from the looks of it, no one should ever play it. In hindsight, I don’t think that I ever had any truly bad advergames although I did have some games that were just rip offs of other more successful games that had characters from TV put into them.
America’s Army
Every FPS game I’ve ever known has to be compared to the gold standard: Counter Strike. CS was released several years before AA and in my opinion outclasses it mechanically and in terms of strategy. As a game, I see no reason that someone would choose AA. I don’t doubt that CS also had an effect on recruitment amongst young men when it was released and even today.
Vote!!!
This is a silly looking game, but amongst the ones that we discussed, probably the most compelling in terms of persuading me in any given direction. The creators clearly understood how to appeal to a young demographic.
Darfur is Dying
This is just a smart choice for something to pick as a game for change. Every time that I watch Hotel Rwanda, I feel empathy for everyone in that situation, and wish that I could help. It makes a lot of sense to develop this global issue into an interactive thing.
The McDonalds Game
I think this is pretty clever, although I also feel that I’m pretty aware of all of the ethical issues surrounding eating at McDonalds and I don’t think that this game swayed me in any way. I really just didn’t want to read the text parts of this game. I figured most of it out through trial and error and pretty quickly got a Game Over. I played a few more times and still didn’t bother to play “right”. My assumption was that it probably eventually ends in a loss since it is showing an unsustainable business growth model.
Monopoly
I had heard on John Green’s podcast about the original version of the Monopoly rules and the ironic history of the IP being stolen by a corporation and the rules changed to what they are today. The rules variant that we played in class was even less fun than the retail version of the game. I got the gist of what it was going for just by skimming the rules sheet and really didn’t feel the need to play much of it. One thing that happened with our playthrough was that since it was clear before we started who the winner would be, we each had different expectations of the play.