What factors do you consider when purchasing a new video game? Do you consider the storyline of the title? Critical reviews of the game? How about the developer’s reputation and price of the title? These are all important factors when shopping for a new game, but if you are like most gamers, the quality of the graphics plays a huge part in a game’s attractiveness. In fact, many gamers will pass up a game just for having so-so to average graphics, even if everything else about the game is appealing.

With this in mind, it is easy to understand why some gamers place heavy value on the advertising campaign for a title. Games depicting great graphics and an exciting story are likely to attract a wide audience. But as recent complaints from some U.K. gamers have shown, looks can be very deceiving when it comes to video game advertising.

This past week, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (the ASA) announced that complaints from television viewers regarding advertisements for Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 2: Big Red One were legitimate and that action needed to be taken to protect viewers from misleading commercials. Specifically, gamers argued that commercials for both Call of Duty 2 (for the PC and Xbox 360) and Call of Duty 2: Big Red One (for the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube) used graphics that were far superior to the graphics used in the actual game. The commercials led viewers to believe that the scenes depicted in the advertisements were taken directly from the game itself, with little to no graphical enhancement. As it turns out, though, Activision developed computer-generated scenes had been produced solely for inclusion in the game ads. These rendered scenes were used without the knowledge of the ASA and the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre (BACC), who were also under the impression that the advertisements comprised scenes taken from the games themselves.

None of the ads under investigation made any reference or included any disclaimer that would inform viewers that the images shown did not reflect the actual graphical quality of the games. As a result, the ASA faulted Activision for concealing this information and criticized the developer for using scenes that communicated the themes of the game, but “were not accurate representations of the graphics in the games themselves.� The ASA considered this to be blatantly misleading and ruled against the developer. As a result, the media advertisements for Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 2: Big Red One may no longer be run in their present form.

Activision defended its actions and revealed that using pre-rendered footage for video game marketing was “common practice” in the gaming industry. The company expresses the opinion that nearly all game developers used enhanced or pre-rendered graphics for marketing purposes. Company representatives admitted that they were shocked by the outcome of the investigation, noting that the company “had not been told that it was not acceptable to use material created specially for an ad in this way” and had acted “in good faith”.

This ruling has the potential to impact the entire video gaming industry, not just Activision. Now that the appropriateness of pre-rendered footage in media ads has been questioned, game developers and distributors need to come up with a response to their own use of pre-rendered images. While such images may be a higher quality deal and present a more attractive media package, the potential backlash from consumers who charge that they are falsely advertising the game or misleading the public may not be worth the added risk. This concern goes for print advertisements as well as broadcast ads, since consumers could make the same compliant about newsprint or trade magazines ads as they have about Activision’s television ads.

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