I'm interested in the question you raise about branded products in games becoming fetishes or archetypes. I don't know of any studies that address this, of course, but I think it raises an interesting counter question: what would it look like for a branded object to not be an archetype (power up, etc.). The answer might drift into some kind of Baudrillardian simulacrum of use, but the idea of interacting with branded objects in a game's space (casual, mainstream or otherwise) needs some kind of justification.

I mean, on the one hand, Powerade Billboards in Enter The Matrix make sense because they work like any other billboard (I don't think they work quite like the briefly seen Powerade ads in Matrix:Revolutions or similar product placement) and since the game's airport needs ads in it to look like a real airport, it makes sense to have real products being advertised.

I'm not convinced that Dole bananas in Super Monkey Ball 2 make me want to buy Dole bananas, however. Maybe I'm more inclined to buy bananas, but I don't think of bananas as carrying brand loyalty or anything. At any rate, I'm not sure if a product like Mountain Dew needs anything more than having its colors and name flashed onto our retinas 300 times to successfully advertise.

There's something entirely different at work, though, when one buys Quiksilver stuff to play Tony Hawk.

I agree that product placement in console games has some value. However, I think the advertising market hasn't yet shown what that value really is -- they haven't quantified it. Of course, they've arguably never done this for product placement in films either.

Like you, I am also suspicious of pure representational use of products in games, or what advertisers call Demonstrative Advertising. Most advertising in games, especially advergames, is Associative. This reminds me that I really need to post my paper on persuasive games and advertising.

Quicksilver in Tony Hawk, or Nike shoes in There start to blur the lines between Demonstrative and Associative ads. Here's a corrolary question: Nike and Levis are convinced that they can do product testing in persistent worlds like There. The idea is, if I buy a specific pair of jeans in the virtual world, I may also want to buy them in the real world. In your Powrade example, one might ask, does the billboard really function the same as any other billboard? Or is there a psychological, phenomenological, or other difference in reception in a game? This is a topic worth further consideration, and I'll post on it separately soon.

However, I think games give us an opportunity to reevaluate the utility of brand exposure. Personally, I'm not convinced that casual games provide any real branding value. Part of the reason for this is that most of the time I have to go seek out the advertising to play the game (e.g. visit the Mountain Dew website), in which case the branding value is incremental at best, redundant at worst.

Super Monkey Ball 2 is a ripe (har) example, and I'll have to think about it more before I comment.

Still, one of the issues that interests me is precisely how to do advertising in games outside of the branded archetype. My position is that branded objects are a cop-out, and the real potential of games is to communicate or simulate experiences. There's nothing wrong with branding in games, but branding is a passive activity and games are an active medium.