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 a forum for the uses of videogames in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment
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Raiders of the Lost Mouth December 18, 2006 - by Ian Bogost This is one of the weirdest advergames I've ever seen. Fuel Industries has created a fairly involved graphical adventure game in support of Reach toothbrushes for the Canadian market. The game, Mr. Reach in the Mouth of Mystery, features the Reach mascot on a sort of Indiana Jones like adventure throughout Canada. Canadian residents who create an account will be eligible for prize drawings, but the rest of us can only, uh, enjoy a truly bizarre advergame experience. The production value is very high, but the game is completely absurdist. For example, you have to use Reach products to solve (embarrassingly simple) puzzles -- clean totem teeth to reveal secrets, use floss to pull levers. The creators are probably banking on a tongue-in-cheek reception of the dramatic music and melodramatic story as an invitation to play more, and admittedly it sort of works. Unfortunately, choosing which product to use feels completely arbitrary much of the time (who says the In-Between Toothbrush is a better lever for extracting rocks than the Clean & Whiten Toothbrush? And why does Clean & Whiten clean the coin but not the locket?). That said, it's an interesting strategy: take a commodity product and recontextualize the features of the products in other, perhaps more game-like situations. It's an advergame design technique that might have legs, but that also strikes me as very, very precious one. POST A COMMENT
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