VISI, Minnesota's largest managed hosting provider, has released an advergame to clarify the benefits of their service offerings to small businesses. In the game, called Interstellar Pizza Express, the player runs a pizza delivery store offering online orders via their website. Each round, the player must make hosting and infrastructure decisions in an effort to keep up with the company's rising popularity, traffic spikes, and other hosting infrastructure hurdles.

I'm a proponent of advergames that simulate experiences with products and services, and Interstellar Pizza Express definitely falls into that camp. It's not perfect, however: the choices available are few and therefore feel less meaningful, despite an interesting possibility space offered by the various types of server investments the game affords. It's fairly easy to guess how the purported consequences of choosing self-managed hosting instead of VISI hosting will play out. Still, one of the more interesting advergame specimens I've seen in a while.

In addition to better understanding VISI's service offerings, the company is also running a promotion via the game; each month until March 2009, the highest scoring player will win a 16GB iPod Nano.