Tra Advergame e Mappe Online: Contaminazioni tra Street View e Discorso Pubblicitario

This issue of Critical Notes (Issue 02, 2013) contains two essays on how online mapping services and video games intersect, both written in Italian. The first, by Gabriele Ferri, examines three advergames from 2011 and 2012 that borrow the pseudo-three-dimensional, 360-degree panoramic aesthetic of Google Street View and similar services: Mercedes-Benz's Escape the Map, Unilever's Magnum Pleasure Hunt 2, and State Farm's Chaos in Your Town. Ferri argues that these games remediate the visual language of online maps, reusing features such as blurred faces, interface elements, and the immobility of street passersby, while also adopting the map's instantaneous feedback to represent movement as teleportation. He concludes that the games are effective as persuasive advertising, since they embed brands in compelling narratives and anchor gameplay in a familiar everyday practice, yet they are weak as games, offering little real challenge and functioning more as shareable viral content than as persuasive play.

The second essay, by Luca Papale, analyzes the dream sequence set in Shadow Moses in Konami's Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (2008). Papale argues that the scene, which deliberately presents the protagonist's younger self in the graphics and controls of the 1998 original, functions as a metareflexive commentary on the video game medium itself. By confronting the player with the stark visual and control differences between generations of games, the sequence exposes the artificiality of the medium and critiques the industry's dependence on recycled formulas and the illusory promises of technological realism. Papale situates this within the series' broader pattern of self-quotation and repetition, and within a wider argument that graphical fidelity matters less to emotional engagement than narrative and character.