Drive-thru billboards...

I pre-ordered Criterion Games' 'Burnout Paradise' for the PS3 on the strength of previous versions of the game, plus the excellent down-loadable demo. Since then I've enjoyed many a happy hour driving extremely badly around a gorgeously detailed, non-existent place, bumping into other virtual cars, doing stunts that in reality I'd never attempt, and generally messing about in cars (and on motorbikes) in ways that you only normally see at the movies. Enormous fun!

You might have detected from my blog posts that I'm a bit of a completist, a perfectionist, a collector... Now those smart people at Criterion cater for many tastes in their video games, and they have got me sussed very well. Amongst several other 'collect these' challenges, is one where you have to drive through advertising billboards, or hoardings, as they are called in the UK. Note here that Burnout's Americanization is so complete that I now call them billboards, and that 'ization' crept in too. Not bad for a team of programmers from Guildford in Surrey in the UK: a county town more normally regarded as one place where stockbrokers live when they aren't working in the City of London.

There are 120 billboards to drive thru, and they vary from obvious, in plain sight, and easy to demolish, through to deviously hidden and virtually (!) impossible to reach. But I've managed to find them all and driven thru every one of them. I hasten to add that in the real world I've never done this, nor have I ever felt any need to do this, and I'm definitely not encouraging anyone to do it.

So you've got a game where people cruise around a city and its surrounding environs, looking for billboards... Sounds like a cue for adverts to me. And this is indeed true, because there are adverts for a number of well-known brands in the game. This is not that unusual these days, and I had more or less dismissed it as a way of making the virtual environment look more like the real world without descending to the fake adverts that you sometimes see that are funny at first, but soon start to pale.

So I was more than a little intrigued when I read that one of the contenders in the US presidential election had bought advertising space inside Burnout Paradise on the X-Box 360 in specific states in the US. In a delicious twist, you have something that shows very eloquently just how clever some people can be:

In a game where you drive around looking for billboards to drive through (thru), you don't/can't ignore the billboards!

Luckily for symbolism, the advertising billboards in Burnout aren't the same as the ones you can drive thru, but this doesn't change the brilliance of the concept. In most games with in-game advertising, you ignore the adverts in just the same way you ignore banner ads on web pages. But in Burnout Paradise, the game-play itself forces you to look at them. If I was speaking, I'd be lost for words in awe at this point, but luckily, I'm only typing.

I'm now wondering just where this leads next. Just how many ways can you weave adverts into the actual fabric of the game-play of the video game itself?