/prostitute

i've sent the information along to most of you, but Justin found a good article on it and i felt it was necessary to put up the info regarding advertising inside the gaming world. According to the article, some serious consideration has been taken regarding successful advertising within the confines of the world of a game. this began as an implementation that Everquest is adding to their MMO next week in a patch that allows players to order pizza (in real life) via the in-game menu. a slash command is a way to interact with the game, other players, communicate, create actions, etc by using the slash key and then stating the command (like the title of the blog). EQ has created the '/pizza' command, the patch that's going in next week which will allow users, within the game, to order pizza from Pizza Hut without having to exit the game. for those of us who are MMO fanatics (i play another MMO, not EQ), this is a great addition to the game. some would say it makes us lazy bastards, and to a degree, i agree, but gamers will be gamers and why not make your customers happy by offering them everything they could want in their virtual worlds. i made the point to Justin that what needs to happen is instead of opening a browser outside of the game to the pizza hut website, the game should allow NPCs (non player characters - characters in the game, not real players, like myself) to sell us pizzas in every city in the game, deduct it from the credit card that Sony (the publisher of EQ) has on file for us and automatically deduct it from the card and have pizza delivered to us in real life. well, apparently this has been covered and is being implemented in the future, according to the article.

the article also discusses advertising in game for future games and how this could be implemented successfully and how it could be abused. they have some good ideas and if used correctly, could really benefit from susceptible people like myself.

now, if only we could do more with this . . .
/budlightsixpack