Universal has published a new advergame, Go, Fish, Go! promoting the Pay Per View/On Demand release of The Cat in the Hat. It's a Frogger or Chicken-inspired cross-the-road game; you play as the fish in a bowl. The game adds some interesting variations on Frogger, including a low-friction bowl that loses water if you steer too quickly.

The game has high visual production value, but it has major design flaws. For one part, it's quite hard; it took me several plays to actually get the bowl across the road. There is also poor balancing of vehicles, speed, obstacles, and water upgrades, making the game just plain impossible at times due to the random placement of objects. Once I started to get good, I got across several roads, only to discover when I ran out of lives that the game said my score was zero. I think this is why no one is on the high score list ;). It's called testing. Try it.

Criticism aside, I've noticed a number of DVD release advergames over the past year. I used to do a lot of film marketing, and the home video divisions usually have both very small marketing budgets and very little influence on theatrical marketing campaigns. So, perhaps they perceive games as inexpensive solutions to online promotions.

That said, Go, Fish, Go! promotes the cable Pay Per View release of the film. I'm not sure the game provides an effective promotion. There is a linked but highly detached sweepstakes for -- wait for it -- a talking fish pot. Does the pay per view campaign really benefit from a game like this? It's frustrating for the average player, provides no direct incentive to participate, and offers limited correlation with the film.

What would make a game like this successful? Perhaps one achievable goal for a post-theatrical film advergame is to remind the film viewer why they enjoyed the film in theaters, or why they're sorry they missed it. A good example is the game i-Frontier developed for Universal film Meet the Parents (hmm, maybe it's just Universal Home Video that likes games). It was a cat milking game, created to refer to the amusing scene in the movie where Ben Stiller says he milked a cat on his parents farm. I can't find the game online anymore, but it was very simple: you milked a cat. Even though I'm deathly cynical about self-congratulatory ad industry accolades, the game won a gold ADDY award in 2002.

In other words, the rhetoric in a successful post-theatrical film marketing game recreates or reminds the player of an emotional response to the film. This, after all, is why we pay for DVD or Pay Per View versions of films.