Putting Brands into Play: How Player Experiences Influence the Effectiveness of In-Game Advertising

Herrewijn and Poels examine whether the emotional and cognitive experiences players have while playing a video game shape how well in-game advertising is remembered and liked. Drawing on hedonic contingency and limited capacity theories, the authors argue that player emotions (pleasure, arousal, dominance) and specific experiences (challenge, competence, tension) determine how players process the advertisements embedded in gameplay. Their central hypothesis is that easier game difficulty, which generates more positive and less arousing experiences, should produce stronger brand outcomes than harder difficulty.

The authors tested this through a between-subjects online experiment with 99 participants playing a 2D platform game containing five fictitious billboard ads, with difficulty manipulated across easy, medium, and hard levels. Easier levels produced significantly higher pleasure, dominance, and competence and lower arousal, tension, and challenge. Easier difficulty led to significantly better brand recognition and marginally higher brand likeability, with the easy-versus-hard contrast reaching significance for both outcomes. Competence partially mediated the effect of difficulty on product and billboard recognition, while pleasure was a significant mediator of brand likeability in simple mediation tests but not in multiple mediation models.

The study's conclusions emphasize that player experiences are meaningful contextual factors in determining advertising effectiveness, and the authors suggest that advertisers place messages at moments when players feel highly competent. The scope is limited to a single casual 2D game, a relatively small sample, and retrospective self-report measures, which constrain generalization to other genres, platforms, and player populations.