Critique of “Examining the Influences of Telepresence on Spectator and Player Processing of Real and Fictitious Brands in a Computer Game"

The article was well organized. It stated the reason for the study, the methodology, and the results clearly. I found that the writing style for the literature review got to be a little wordy, and this made it a weak point in the article. It seemed like there was a lot of great information in the review, but the way it was worded made me loose track of the sentence’s meaning before getting to the end of it. Thus, having to do a lot a rereading. Given that the psychological effects of product placement in games has not been widely studied, the literature review DID do a good job of using research from film and television to legitimize and back-up game research. What I found to be the strongest part of this article was the clear explanation of all seven of the hypotheses and the research question. After the hypotheses were clearly stated, the results were also stated in the findings section along with the statistics that proved/disproved them. Because of the real brand, the fake brand, the player, and the watcher the 2 x 2 factorial design was a perfect way to study this subject and to explain the results. Given the fact that there were so many hypotheses, the findings section was great because they broke down each one into results for the player and the watcher, or the real and the fake brands. The methodology seemed to be solid, and whatever the researchers couldn’t account for in the actual study, they took into account for in their equations for the statistical results. In today’s society this research topic and article are very relevant. More and more people are playing video games and computer games. Having more research on this topic gives advertisers and companies more information to make good decisions on where, how, and if they are going to advertise in games. What I would like to see research on in the future is how variables such as age, gender, game genre, and type of product have any effect on product placement in games.