British Airways is sponsoring the 2003 Rugby World Cup, and they've just launched an advergame to promote thier sponsorship of the event.

The game was hard for me at first, but when I realized I'd misread the instructions I was able to make progress. The mechanics are somewhat complex; the player has to use the arrow keys and the mouse to play, and I doubt that most casual users could handle the arm-pretzel necessary to compete.

Brands that sponsor sporting leagues or events often try to take advantage of games as a way to promote their sponsorship. This is meta-advertising at it's best, and I'm usually very suspicious of it. Usually, the purpose of such sponsorships is to align a brand image with the values or characteristics of the sporting activity as indirect advertising. I'm not sure if it is BA's goal in this case.

At any rate, my suspicion usually turns to cynicism when I actually play these games, since most of them do a poor job of representing either the sport or the brand. One common technique is to take a small subset of the sport and represent that single element in the game. This is the technique BA chose, and it comes in the form of a kicking game.

The most interesting thing about the game is that British Airways is giving away prizes for top scorers. The prizes are top-notch, including a Sony WEGA TV. Cheating and hacking are always big challenges in this kind of a contest, and I'm curious about the prevention techniques the developer built into the game. This is a tricky thing to do in an advergame, but BA is hoping to capitalize from the potential for word of mouth dissemmination. As reported by Revolution Magazine, BA's UK marketing chief Jayne O'Brien said the following of the game:

Impressively, BA offers a commission for send-to-a-friend style referrals (3% of their top score). I haven't seen this before, even though its consistent with most other referral programs for online services. However, I think it has an unexpected result.

Personally I've never been able to make the high score/prize payoff work in an advergame. Inevitably, power-law style growth will emerge, with very few players going absolutely crazy with the game and emerging the victor. The chart below shows the high score list points for the top individual scores in the BA rugby game.

The results generally follow a power law, a type of curve in which the value for the Nth position in the sequence is 1/N. Power law scenarios are heavily weighted toward top performers, unlike the more familiar Bell Curve, which is evenly weighted across the entire graph. Here's a chart of the team scores (remember, you can create a team whose score increases by a factor of all the players' scores).

What you can't see from this graph is that the winning individual member is a part of the winning team. This isn't surprising, since power laws arise due to scarcity, and they favor top performers. The team leader prize (British Airways travel vouchers) appears only to go to the top team, so a small group of people will probably walk away with most of the spoils.

I think when the average casual player sees the high score list, he or she will probably stop playing out of frustration. Unfortunately, I suspect the casual player is much more likely to purchase British Airways tickets, since their frustration is probably mediated by real-world obligations like jobs, kids and so forth.

In short, advergames that perpetuate rich-get-richer emergence scenarios are bound to alienate the majority of their players. This isn't always a poor design decision, as the inequality of the winnings is precisely what makes it possible to offer highly desirable prizes and drive further gameplay. But I'll bet that British Airways isn't crossreferencing their play stats against a map of the network of players and who referred them. I'll bet such an analysis would show that the purported results of the campaign are much narrower than they expected.

This is why BA marketer O'Brien's comments underscore the widespread naievité in advergaming medium. "Spreading the word" with a campaign like this doesn't mean that the distribution of that spread will benefit the brand.