Yesterday we posted a lengthy interview with Alex Dulude, chief creative and technical officer with First Person Plural, Inc. His company has developed a new technology that will allow advertisers to better target ads delivered through video games. FPP's advertising model also encourages advertisers to reward gamers by offering discounted or even free product. It also means more ads. In the interest of furthering the debate, here are some of your responses.

(We'd have posted more in favor of the new approach. We just didn't get any.)

-- Steve

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This article got me thinking (after I got done laughing at this caffeine addled Dulude guy's tendency to stomp all over the interviewer's questions, that is). If companies want me to pick up their "free" games, they'd do better to use talented game designers to create AAA content for already existing game worlds. I play HL2DM, for example, so what if Nike assembles a small, uber team of mappers from the mod community (or wherever) to put together 5 beautiful, balanced, loaded-with-custom models maps? I'd go download those, and as long as the brought-to-you-by-Nike elements that pay for that content aren't overt or impacting my game experience in a negative way (like maybe they only grace the load screen or something), I'm pumped to have the new Nike map pack. This would obviously require negotiations with Valve, but more money in Valve's pockets = millions of happy gamers. You can also factor into this equation a possible explosion of jobs for hired gun game designers who heretofore have plied their beloved trade for FREE as modders.

I want the heavy hitters, Valve, Crytek, Epic, creating the engines that run the worlds I love to escape in, but I'd tolerate advertising if it brings deeper, quality experiences into those worlds. Now, where do I go to download that new Onslaught map set that Google dropped this weekend?

-- Andrew

Yeah, we're not sure if he'd had too much sugar water or what but he seemed a little eager to get his point across.

I like the idea about using mod-level content for this kind of sponsorship. It allows games to maintain some kind of integrity while still letting sponsors reward gamers for their time. That the extra levels would already enjoy the benefit of a solid engine and game concept makes it even easier for the sponsors to develop. I think that there's also a lot of room to work with in terms of point-of-sale giveaways. I mean, who wouldn't want to get some new Need for Speed levels just for taking a test-drive in a Chrysler? Or a couple of Battlefield maps for ordering a pizza from Domino's? To me, that's a hell of a lot less obnoxious than being forced to endure games like Grand Theft Aflac or Prince of Pepsi: Brand Warrior Within.

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I just read your interview with Alex Dulude. Wow. How did you restrain yourself from punching him in the head? Maybe I'm wrong, but in my mind (twisted as years of gaming has made it), everything he said was what's going wrong with the entertainment industry, video games in particular. Ultimate Spiderman? Great game (little buggy). The Nokia ads on every frickin billboard drove me up the wall though. And he wants to make it worse? Does he play games? For real? Cause he said he does. But I think he lies. I mean, he works in marketing. It's what they do. Anyway, you're more patient than I could ever have been.

Keep up the good work.

-- Hannah

Whether he's a gamer or not, his message is much more skewed towards marketing than gaming. It seems from the interview that he's spent a fair amount of time figuring out how to please advertisers and then just tried to fit that strategy around his own ideas of what gamers want. He seems to have the advertiser's perspective nailed perfectly -- build brand loyalty through giveaways and target ads to the right consumers -- but whether or not that marketing plan intersects with your ideas of entertainment remains to be seen.

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After reading the article "Advertisers at the Door", I was interested in the concept; it sounded like it would work. Advertising we (the gamers) looked forward too. This contextual advertising would work great in games set in the here and now, or near future. That's all well and good. Thing is, I play very, very few games set in modern settings. I play games set in outer space, another world or another time.

Still, the advertising could be unobtrusive and logically places. Halo, for example, could be used to create brand awareness. I wouldn't be illogical to see a billboard with "Coca-Cola" written on it. What would be stupid is seeing the main character drink a can of the stuff and gain health or speed. It's just silly. While this form of advertising does work in some games, it's just annoying and insulting in others. Like a fantasy game, or a game set in another galaxy, or something similar. How will Alex Dulude's advertising that we like show up in these games? Because if his advertising isn't in there, then the present day spam will be. And that is something I will not accept, and I'm sure no one else will either.

Bottom line is this: How can you possibly integrate unobtrusive (or even interactive) advertising into an abstractly set game without insulting the gamers?

-- Jackson

Yeah, that's one challenge that hasn't been addressed yet. Since the majority of games aren't set in the modern world, how do you incorporate modern brands into them? While you could argue that a Coca-Cola billboard in Halo isn't necessarily illogical, some gamers would find it distracting. Perhaps we'll be mollified when in three days we receive a free six-pack of Coke in the mail.

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They may put "Witness" in glowing terms of improving and customizing a game experience for each individual, but the bottom line is it's about ads. They're soliciting sponsors, and developing a game and an entire game technology around delivering ads.

Ads aren't going to make for an improved game experience, or for an interesting game.

-- Frank

I think you're right: the only thing Witness is certain to deliver is a higher number of ads than we're currently seeing. First Person Plural says that games are going to be filled with ads within five years anyway, so why not at least get something out of it? The trick here is that getting the advertisers to agree to give us something back requires us to give them more and more access to us during our leisure hours.

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Just if ever fronted by another Alex, you're welcome to tell him about me...

I am a reserved man, 23, in my final year of college, and a large time gamer, multi-consol and pc, I go out with my friends, I am a father, I have money, and I buy things. I just might be the perfect model for an advertiser to sell to. Despite a single thing:

I violently object to advertising.

To think of how it may creep its way further into games, and likely creeping it's ways into how things are produced (like other medias) make me burn with a fury.

If advertising goes as far as it does with other medias, then I'll stop playing games, just as I have stopped watching television.

-- Joshua

While First Person Plural can't promise fewer ads, they hope to deliver ads that you're much more likely to be interested in. Of course, if you object to advertising of any kind, you're not likely to be happy with the compromise. Our pal Kevin in engineering put it best when he said, "It's like customizing the Val-Pak; it's still going in the trash."

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I was skimming through the article where you guys interviewed a Mr. Alex Dulude regarding his advertising game, and I thought I would throw in my 2 cents.

First off, Mr. Dulude sounds like a pompous ass. Just by reading the transcript, I could figure out how the interview played out in my mind. I think his strategy in the whole thing was to interrupt Steve or whoever was interviewing just long enough to throw in another baffling point before the interviewer had a chance to ask a question about his prior points.

Mr. Dulude fulfills his agenda as an advertising consultant. He makes a virtual world where people will look at his clients' products and he gets paid for it. What he didn't answer in the interview is what motivation does his target audience have to use what he's offering? When asked if there were any people interested in the concept, he states that "When I went to Ad Week I saw massive interest on the side of the marketers and the advertising world. There's even more interest here." The question wasn't "are advertisers interested?" it was "are people interested?" You need to look at whether consumers, mainly gamers, are interested in the product, not the people that are paying you to push the product.

I pay a yearly fee of $19.95 to IGN for their Insider content, but the main selling point for me is the ad-free web browsing. I could log on and read most of the IGN pages for free, just like Mr. Dulude's game, but the major selling point for me is ad-free pages. I might use AOL instead of Verizon because it's advertising better spam filters. In this cyber day and age, millions of people including myself are willing to spend money just to get away from advertisement. How he plans to make a game world riddled with it and expect people to play because the game is free is baffling to me.

Another point I would like to make is I'm really curious to see how this "game" is going to work. The game he is proposing is tailored to the advertisers. So that means that when a new advertiser comes along, the game is going to have to change to accommodate the products need.

Say for example, that my character is a cop. Dunkin Donuts might advertise with Mr. Dulude so that means that now my cop has to stop at the donut shop on his way to a burglary. Ok, I guess that makes sense, cops do it all the time. But then you have a sponsor like lets say hefty trash bags, and I really really like hefty bags for some reason. Now I have to take out the garbage before I go to work, which means I have to open the kitchen drawer, take out the bag, blah blah.

I don't think Mr. Dulude knows what he's doing when it comes to gaming, although I'm sure he could sell me a kitchen sink if he wanted to.

-- Max

The needs of advertisers and the needs of gamers aren't completely compatible but they're not completely incompatible either. First Person Plural is striking what they feel is a fair balance between the two. Based on the mail we're getting, most of our readers tend to think it's weighted a little more towards the side of the advertisers.

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Your interview with Alex Dulude was quite painful to read. Are you sure that you were interviewing a real person? You would ask a question and he would point blank not answer it. I love the honest work IGN does, but when confronted with complete morons like Alex, I appreciate IGN even more. The interview is an instant classic for empty shirt double plus good Newspeak!

-- John

Well, I wouldn't call Alex a moron. I actually think his heart is in the right place but I still think he's working under a fundamentally incorrect assumption -- that gamers want better ads and greater rewards for viewing them. What gamers I know want are fewer ads. That point of view doesn't fit with First Person Plural's business strategy.

We don't mind paying for games and we don't expect every corporation to reward us for buying their product. As long as a company provides a good service or product at a fair price, we have no right to complain that they're not giving free crap away every time we watch their commercials. I have a pretty elevated sense of my own worth but I'd feel like a complete ass if I demanded McDonald's pay me fifty-cents every time I saw one of their ads.

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This guy Alex Dulude sounds like a complete jackass. Your interview was really nice. Who the f--- wants advertisements in their ass based on how the play a video game?

-- Ben

Not me!