A portal for games that advertise brands and products now has a home on the web. Advergames.com aggregates the good, the bad and the ugly of viral games that seemingly every marketing team implemented a few years ago to make their websites 'sticky'. Over on watercoolergames, Ian Bogost asks if there's an audience for this site, and I would leap to say (perhaps a little sadly) yes.
As Ian Schreiber offers in the comments, it might be useful in a classroom as a resource for design debates and criticism. I imagine that it would make it remarkably easy to identify the real innovations, and the tragic copycats.
People aren't unwilling to engage in branded spaces anyway; the success (for a time) of branded virtual worlds like Coke Studios and MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach indicate that brands can be useful for pulling people to games and playful interactivity. Additionally, if the games are any good, they may go viral again. Casual is big, and a resource of branded games - with the associated credibility that goes along with a familiar logo - could be even more popular than their unbranded equivalents.
Would you go?
