More than playing games

What do a white supremacist group, an Islamic resistance group, and a superpower army have in common (besides their guns)?

Computer games, it turns out.

When Hizbullah's "Special Force" became available in stores in the Middle East in February, the group joined the United States Army and the West Virginia-based National Alliance among the growing ranks of organizations now using games to spread political messages and recruit new members. Together, these titles are pushing the frontiers of a practice that's sweeping the $10 billion US electronic game industry: "advergaming," or using computer and video games to sell products and ideas.

"We want to reach young people, and this is the medium that will do that," said William Pierce of the white-power National Alliance, on the release of its "Ethnic Cleansing" video game last year. "As long as [electronic games] are out there, as long as they are affecting most people, we have an obligation to use them to spread our message."

Forget billboards; forget Super Bowl ads. These days just about anybody with something to sell to teens is doing it through games. Nike, Pepsico, McDonald's, Nokia, and ESPN are only a few of the companies now using games to sell their products. Forrester Research, a firm in Cambridge, Mass., that studies the use of new technologies, predicts advergaming will be a billion-dollar-a-year industry by 2005.

If it's teen boys you're marketing to, online is especially the way to go. ComScore Media Metrix, which tracks online gaming, says 60 percent of boys ages 13 to 17 and 72 percent of young men 18 to 24 now head to game sites when they go online. Though companies can't track sales due to advergames, they've been very pleased with the results, says Charlene Li, Forrester's principal analyst, because online registration forms allow them to collect consumer data from players. "Do you know how hard it is to get market research out of teenage boys?" she asks.

From there, says Michael Zyda, one of the designers of the Army game, it takes no great leap of logic to imagine that games also have the potential to sell young players on careers, ideas, and identities. (In the eight months since the release of "America's Army: Operations," roughly 1.3 million players have logged 7 million hours of online play, and Army recruiters report the game has been very effective in attracting new recruits.)

In the commercial-game industry, though, that leap is controversial. For years, developers have maintained game play has no impact on what players think, or how they behave. But these days, as everyone from fast-food chains to separatist groups scrambles to invest in games' advertising and propaganda potential, industry executives are finding that a difficult position to maintain.

"They're really talking from both sides of their mouth," says David Galiel, executive director of Planetary Arts, an independent studio now working on a new online game. "When they talk publicly, or they testify before Congress, they'll talk about how games don't have any kind of profound impact. But when they talk to a major corporation, then go and have their [game's] protagonist walk around with a soft drink of Brand X, they're telling that company that games can influence people's behavior."

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