This Title Brought To You By Nabisco!

My explorers were underdeveloped, but I’d spent my meager gold supply on the strongest armor and weaponry I could, and spread it amongst the party to minimize collateral damage as they endeavored into a dungeon they might not all survive.

The going was treacherous but manageable; the healers, in back, tossed regenerative spells to the truncheon-wielding marauders on the front line, as my ranged-weapon users chucked arrows and bombs into the fray from safe distance. At once we came upon a mighty dragon, and I was unprepared for its fiery countenance, and breath. Down went my front line of fighters, at which point one of my clerics yelled out,

“Quick, use a Red Bull™-Brand Phoenix Down to revive our ally and fill him with the necessary vigor and energy to make it through the battle, and the rest of his day!”

Ridiculous? Oh yeah. Unthinkable? Not for long. Real-world advertisements are creeping into gamespaces at an alarming rate, regardless of the comfort of the fit, and every few months a new story crosses the wire about some ad agency inking a deal with a major game company to install ads in their games.

Granted, the game industry is a business first and foremost, with responsibilities to shareholders and the bottom line. And the cost of game development has skyrocketed in the last decade, as 2D gave way to 3D and photorealistic graphics went from “attainable” straight to “expected at the bare minimum” in order to stay competitive at retail.

But the happy medium is being giddily ignored, for dubious reasons. Sure, it adds to the realism to see billboards for real-world products whipping past my car at 150 mph in a game of Burnout, and on banners and signs in the stadiums in a game of Madden. And some developers even pursue ad opportunities that genuinely make sense within the context of the game, as with the Guitar Hero series licensing actual name-brand guitars to appear in-game to let budding faux-musicians further lose themselves in the rock-god fantasy.

But what of completely unrelated ads that pop up during loading screens, or as actual in-game powerups, or even worse, as flow-breaking obstructions akin to an Internet popup ad? Does a virtual world feel more real if I can stop at a vending machine every thirty feet, no matter how insane or dangerous the location, and buy some Bawls energy drink? Who are the unlucky short-straw-drawing Bawls drivers who must make supply runs to refill the machine just outside the dungeon of some superpowered enemy?

For that matter, how on earth could a group of human beings, assumedly each with consciences that now keep them awake nights, greenlight a platforming game based wholly on Skittles?

Yes, it happened. Yes, it was terrible beyond comprehension. And it raises a question of whose hunger is being fed here. Are developers reaching out to anyone they can get to smear logo feces across a game and completely pop the delicate bubble of immersion that games can hold over the player? Or are corporations researching games, sussing out where best to expose unwitting gamers to their occasionally related products?

When Electronic Arts’ 2008 title Army of Two was still in development, the publicity mavens made a big deal out of the (since discarded ) mechanism where your in-game avatar could shove a tampon into a bullet wound on his body as a makeshift field dressing in the heat of battle. Do you suppose Tampax lobbied to be mentioned by name by the two grizzled, muscled killers-for-hire during in-game cinematics, just in case a previously untapped demographic could be addressed?

The biggest crime here is that the rise of in-game ads violates the whole purpose. As consumers, we tacitly allow ads because they make a product cheaper (or free) to us, since the advertised companies are footing some of the bill. But gamers aren’t seeing any of these savings passed onto them. Quite the opposite, as any of us can attest who remember buying new games for forty bucks a pop on the original Playstation, and now shell out sixty for sequels to the same games on the Playstation 3. Or paying for the privilege of wading through ads on Xbox Live in order to access downloadable content (that, again, we’re paying for without any recompense that an ad should allow).

It’s all so wearying after a while that it’d almost be easier to just shut off the game and go see a movie, were it not for the 20 minutes of ads someone has managed to unspool on the big screen before so much as a coming attraction trailer starts.

Speak with your wallets, gamers. And not like the ad buyers want you to. Let enough ad-lousy titles perish at retail and maybe, just maybe, the message will get across that The Legend of Zelda: Reebok’s Awakening isn’t a fantasy world anyone wants to visit.