1. Digital Games and the Advertising Landscape: An Introduction

Abstract

According to the game scholar Ilya Vedrashko, the origin of advergames can be dated to the early 1980s, and it is even possible to f ind some precedents in the 1960s and ‘70s (Vedrashko, 2006b). However, the term was not coined until 2000, when the entrepreneur Anthony Giallourakis, owner of the domain www.advergames.com, understood that “the market for interactive casual Internet based gaming would be too appealing to corporations for them to ignore the marketing and branding opportunities associated with casual gaming on the Internet” (Giallourakis, n.d., para. 1) and decided to coin the concept and buy several domains related to it. The evolution of the game industry and changes in the advertising landscape in recent years are responsible for this increasing interest of marketers in using digital games for advertising purposes. The development of new technologies and the spread of broadband and mobile devices have facilitated the growth of the game industry1 and the popularization of digital games, which undoubtedly are related to the increasing interest in the use of digital games as a marketing strategy. One of the results of the changes in the game industry was what was dubbed by Jesper Juul as the Casual Revolution, “a breakthrough moment in the history of video games” (2010, p. 2). This revolution is a process in which digital games have become more normal and part of people’s daily routines for three reasons. Firstly, these new digital games, known as casual games, do not ask players to readjust their schedules as they can be played anytime and anywhere, thanks to their presence on mobile devices. Think, for example,