• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, September 1, 2011

The debates over the social and psychological effects of video game violence are as longstanding as they are tedious and fraught with axe-grinding and vested interests. Don't get me started on that one. But for advertisers a less debated area is how viewer perception of brands in and around violent video ads may be affected by the nature of the content.

Researchers at the University of Texas, Austin say their tests of gamer responses to in-game advertising suggests that brand association with violent experiences during game play negatively impacts their perception of the advertiser. In a study to be published in an upcoming issue of Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking (I could not make that title up, I assure you), Communication Assistant Professor Jorge Pena and grad student in the Department of Advertising says that violent game material "diminishes brand memory and primes more negative attitudes toward the brand."

To test the thesis, the researchers used a game engine and play experience that included gun wielding characters shooting at the player and blood-soaked walls. Another group played the same engine but without the weapons and blood. Both games had embedded advertising of familiar brands. The game play experiences were the same except for violent imagery. This was an experiment rather than a study, Pena tells me, so the sample was a manageable 68 players, half male and half female. Pena and Yoo asked players to recall the brands advertised in the games and perceptions about the games. On all key metrics, brand recall, recognition and attitude, those who played the violent version of the game showed "significantly lower" responses than those who experienced the non-violent version. Curiously, purchase intent was unaffected by the violence. One puckish take on this is that the players involved in the non-violent experience were so bored they had to pay attention to something - why not the ads?

Pena and Yoo say women especially had more negative reactions to the advertised brands in violent experiences.

The two researchers interpret all of this as an indication that violent gaming "diverts" the gamer from the advertised brand, "limiting players' mental capacity to process in-game ads. Additionally, the suggestion of violence in the form of blood and gore results in players subconsciously linking negative attributes to in-game ads. This echoes the way violent programs hamper ad recall relative to nonviolent TV programs, according to previous studies."

The counterpoints or alternative explanations for this phenomenon are almost too obvious to point out. What the researchers call limited mental capacity to perceive ads in violent content could also be called "engagement" in the content. When virtual enemies are shooting at you that tends to happen.  The researchers argue, however, that the effect is more a result of how types of media content affect people's attention and influence how they evaluate other elements in the scene. "Advertising in violent media is not only morally questionable but also perhaps an ineffective advertising strategy," the authors conclude.