As more people spend more time with video games and less time with other entertainment media, such as television, advertisers must explore new channels for exposing their products to potential customers. For example, one growing area is the placement of products in video games. But is this a good thing? On the one hand, it provides additional revenue to support the development of games. On the other hand, it may detract from the player’s experience. This paper surveys game players and industry experts on the issue of placing products in video games for the purposes of advertising.

The paper is well written, and the results are nicely presented and thoroughly discussed. Ip provides not only statistical summaries, but also respondents’ comments that underscore key points. From this perspective, the paper is well worth reading.

Unfortunately, the paper suffers from the standard criticism of survey research: it is not embedded in any theoretical model. Instead, Ip constructed a list of questions, the respondents answered the questions, their responses were tallied, and the results were presented. There is no research question and no hypothesis, and the questions are not grounded in any way. So, the reader is left with the following sentiment: “Well, that was interesting, but where do you go with it?”

In fairness, one has to acknowledge that it is a proceedings paper--and a fairly high-quality proceedings paper at that. Furthermore, since this is an emerging area, theoretical models are limited. Nonetheless, it would be nice to see hard work such as this include some theory.