Dust off that tinfoil hat and read this account of reverse-engineered advertising in the game
SWAT4 from Vivendi.
In the 1.1 patch of SWAT4, Vivendi "Added Massive Streaming Ad Support" to their game, according to the patch notes that were distributed with the game. Gamers Andrew Smith and Peter Wood analyzed the packets that the game was sending back and forth, and produced this detailed write-up.
Part of the outcome is expected. Ads for real products were replaced by ads for fake products. The unexpected part comes when the gamer is done playing, at which point the game:
"contacted madserver to tell the advertisers how long the gamer spent with each advert in their view. This is mapped to the gamer id, so they know which player in the game saw the advert, and when, for how long, and from how far away (by virtue of the size attribute). Even the average viewing angle is passed back."
This level of data is an advertiser's dream, but raises questions about privacy. Still, we can't say we'd mind if some advertiser noticed us spending more time ogling the ads with bodacious bodies (male or female) in them and served up more of the same in response. Now that's a win-win.
[via Tony Walsh's Clickable Culture]
