Examining the Influence of Telepresence on Spectator and Player Processing of Real and Fictitious Brands in a Computer Game

1) Research topic and researcher(s):
Examining the Influence of Telepresence on Spectator and Player Processing of Real and Fictitious Brands in a Computer Game, by Nelson, Yaros and Keum. Journal of Advertising, (winter 2006), pp. 87-99.

2) Rationale of the study:
Advertisers have noticed that they have not been effective at reaching the male population with their advertising on TV. This study takes a look at how real and fictitious brands are recalled by both players and spectators.

3) Literature review:
• In the past there have been studies that have shown how media context influences individual, subjective mental states of embedded commercial messages.
• Past research has yielded results of a positive relationship between telepresence and advertising effectiveness.
• The definition of telepresence is: The impression of being present at a location remote from one's own immediate environment. “Transported into a virtual mediated environment.”
• Telepresence is measured by six things – social richness, realism, transportation, immersion, social actor, and medium as a social actor.
• The two parts of telepresence includes: departure and arrival.
• Interaction is the greatest way to create telepresence; however, all media can create it.
• Because of the interaction level it is important to look at games. It allows for a greater interaction than a movie or a television show. The game allows a person to control perception by controlling point of view.

4) Research method:
These researchers created a case study using a racing video game. They also analyzed the recall of both the player of spectator of real and fictitious brands using a questionnaire.

5) Subject of the study:
This study included 63 video game players which consisted of 45 males, 14 females, and 4 people left their gender undisclosed. These participants were ranging in age from 18-30. All in all this study was about real and fictitious brands and how players and watchers were able to recall the brands.

6) Research finding:
During this research it was found that the spectator recalled more of the fictitious brands than the player. However, this was a very limited study because it only focused on racing games. More genres need to be tested to see if these results are constant or if they only apply to racing games. Also, the researchers could have tried to have a more consistent exposure time; they did not record the number of laps that each player completed. This was a good starting point but more needs to be done.

7) My position on this scholarly essay
This article is somewhat clumsy and at times can be hard to read. It is hard to take this study as a good example because of the lack of participants. I feel as if they could have included more people into this study and it would have made the results more concrete. Also, this study was only limited to one genre of games and it was a racing game. It would have been interesting to see other genres studied because there are many choices for consumers. In addition to the one genre they did not even keep track of how many laps each player completed. Therefore, you will have different exposure times for all the players and spectators which gives less validity to the varied results of peoples ability to recall the ads. Over, all it was a good start but I think there are many things that can be improved upon in further research that takes several aspects into further depth.