66 Media International Australia Mark Andrejevic Abstract Online video games are helping to pioneer the use of interactive advertising that targets consumers based on information about their behaviour, consumption patterns, and other demographic and psychographic information. This article draws on the example of in-game ads to explore some of the ways in which advertisers harness virtual worlds to marketing imperatives, and equate realism and authenticity with the proliferation of commercial messages. Since video games have the potential to serve as a model for other forms of marketing both online and off, the way in which they are being used to exploit interactivity as a form of commercial monitoring has broader implications for the digital economy. Two suggestive events for the future of online gaming took place in the spring of 2007. One was news that Google had iled a patent for a system that would allow it to target advertising to players based on their style of gameplay and other demographic information. According to one press account, Google’s patent envisioned a marketing scheme whereby: User dialogue (eg from role playing games, simulation games, etc) may be used to characterise the user (eg literate, profane, blunt or polite, quiet etc). Also, user play may be used to characterise the user (eg cautious, risk-taker, aggressive, non-confrontational, stealthy, honest, cooperative, uncooperative, etc.). (Adam and Johnson, 2007) In other words, video games, in Google’s world, have become a way to proile consumers. The second, related development was the announcement that Google had purchased the in-game advertising company AdScape. Google had both a plan and a company to implement it. The plan was in keeping with Google’s strategy for targeted advertising that it is implementing not just online, but also via satellite TV and mobile telephony. It is a model that relies upon capturing detailed data about consumers, viewers and now gamers in order to design and serve targeted advertising. The company that developed the most successful algorithms for searching the vast infoscape of the internet is betting that it can also make sense of the tremendous amount of information it can collect through its various interactive applications. The Google patent is expansive, noting that the interactive applications it envisions could ‘also monitor people playing on any game console that hooks up to the internet, including the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft’s Productive PlAy 2.0: the logic of in-gAMe Advertising