I've been traveling and attending conferences for more than a week, including DiGRA 2005 and Supernova 2005. I gave a paper at DiGRA on political games and a workshop talk at Supernova on games and advertising. More on those later. For now, it's time for a lousy environmental advergame.

French energy company Totalgaz has created an advergame to promote their GPL Premier fuel (site in French), which offers the dreamy promise of costing less, polluting less while still "preserving your driving pleasure." The game is also couched as a contest with several prizes, including year of free fuel, a vacation, and €20 fuel vouchers.

Now, the combination of cost, pollution, and driving pleasure are really the makings of a terrific videogame. Typically one has to balance cost against performance, and performance against pollution, and I can imagine a handful of game designs that might take advantage of this core mechanic. Most notably, it would be interesting to have to use limited funds to choose between different fuels, each of which would provide different combinations of pollutants and performance. This way, the player would really see the tradeoffs between fuel cost, clean air, and vehicle performance. If GPL Premier really does what it says, the advantages would be palpable.

Of course, that's not the game they made. Instead, in typical advertising agency fashion, Totalgaz and agency Crossvalue made this GPL Premier game. The game represents a city with cars congesting the streets. A grey sheen over the city indicates how polluted it is. The gameplay is simply absurdist, almost a satire of the worst kind of contemporary advertising. The player uses a pair of binoculars to search around the city looking for -- wait for it -- GPL Premier logos! Logos! I wish I were kidding, but you can see the proof in the screenshot detail inset at right. That's the entire game. If you find all six logos, you get 3 credits toward the prize giveaway. Even worse is the setup for the game:

God save us from the advertisers.

(via Adverblog)