The struggles of everyday life: How children view and engage with advertising in mobile games

Tactical and non-tactical engagement

Children’s mobile gameplay takes place within textual structures created by powerful commercial interests. One part of this structure is the revenue model which is visualized through advertising messages that appear in the games. Using De Certeau’s (1984) study to theorize the commercial game space, in-game advertising can be understood as strategies which the user must relate to and cannot alter. Strategies are defined based on its access to a proper place, where relations with defined targets can be established:

I call a ‘strategy’ the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an ‘environment’. A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, ‘clientèles’, ‘targets’, or ‘objects’ of research). Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model. (De Certeau, 1984: xix)

While De Certeau (1984: 39–40) argues that everyday practices are tactical in nature, one must also be open to the possibility that practices also may comprise moments of similarity, when users do not actively create difference with respect to the strategies. These practices can be conceptualized as non-tactics. Discussing risks and opportunities online, Sonia Livingstone touches upon the idea that children’s everyday online practices involve both moments of opposition and independence as well as moments when children give in to the structural pressures put on them:

[We] shall explore how children exert agency online, but this will also show that they do so in the context of structures set by others – usually powerful adults.…Children creatively resist some adult pressures but at the same time they succumb to others – commercial pressures that entice and entertain, normative pressures that reward certain kinds of behavior (e.g. exam revision) over others (e.g. file sharing). (Livingstone, 2009: 32)

Digital game experiences

As Kallio et al. (2011: 327) state, digital gaming is ‘a multifaceted social and cultural phenomenon that can be understood, practiced, and used in various ways’. Playing games can evoke several different experiences. Poels et al. (2012: 122–123) categorize game experiences into enjoyment, flow, immersion, suspense, competence and control. Among these, the experience of immersion has been much discussed within game studies. Immersion is an experience that players commonly seek from games (Cairns et al., 2014: 339), and denotes the feeling of ‘being drawn into a game world’, and is related to other positive experiences such as enjoyment and fun (Poels et al., 2012: 118).

Mobile games have been thought of as less immersive than other digital games and understood as a shorter and more superficial experience (Hjorth and Richardson, 2014: 46). However, Hjorth and Richardson (2014: 69–70) question this idea and propose that we should think of mobile gameplay as ‘ambient’, namely, something that is incorporated into the activities of everyday life, and that crosses the boundary between online and offline. The integration of play into daily routines does not necessarily imply less investment by people in mobile gaming, and gameplay on capacitive and motion-sensing touchscreens can give the player an immersive game experience (Hjorth and Richardson, 2014: 4, 52–53). Similarly, Juul (2010: 5–10) argues that ‘casual games’ (such as mobile games) that are easy to learn and integrate in everyday life do not automatically imply less dedication and time investment compared to ‘hardcore video games’ and writes that: ‘a casual game is sufficiently flexible to be played with a hardcore time commitment, but a hardcore game is too inflexible to be played with a casual time commitment’ (10).

The notion of ‘ambient play’ is closely related to embodiment. Hjorth and Richardson propose that ambient play is ‘contingent and embodied; in a phenomenological sense, it becomes an aspect of our soma, an ambience in-the-hand’ (2014: 160). Mobile media and mobile games are integrated with ‘routine bodily practices’ (Beer, 2012: 361) and ‘co-opted into how we negotiate and manage our corporeal being-in-the-world’ (Hjorth and Richardson, 2014: 160). The specificity of embodiment in relation to mobile games also relates to the haptic intimacy and the ‘up close’ nature of the touchscreen and the connection between what is seen on the screen and the movement of the hand (Richardson, 2011: 424–426).

In addition to the positive experiences, gameplay can also involve negative dimensions. While reaching a particular goal gives a positive sense of competence, not reaching the goals result in negative feelings such as anger and frustration (Poels et al., 2012: 123). Johnson (2015) states that frustration is an experience that emerges when the game does not work as wanted and expected and relates this negative feeling to the concept of agency: ‘Distinct from related sensations such as difficulty, frustration is perhaps best characterized as when the agency of the player becomes obstructed’ (593). The player starts to experience a sense of losing control when the game does not represent the actions as intended by the player. In these situations, the game is experienced as a ‘disobedient machine’ (Johnson, 2015: 596), and the relationship between the game and the user feels unsatisfactory and confrontational.

The (haptic) struggle of everyday life

In the group interviews, the children expressed how they found it difficult to adapt the game space to their own interests and purposes. Children in both age groups described how they engaged in involuntary haptic interaction with advertisements on the touchscreen, in other words, they involuntarily touched advertisements as a result of the advertisements’ design and sudden appearance in the games. This haptic interaction sometimes took the form of a tiresome struggle, where children moved back and forth between involuntary non-tactical engagement (pressing advertisements) and tactical engagement (tapping their way back to the game).

This struggle involved situations where children accidentally pressed advertisements that appeared suddenly and unpredictably when they were about to touch the screen to perform some form of activity, such as starting the game, driving or feeding an animal. Due to this, the children came out of the game app and into App Store, Google Play or the web browser Safari, and they had to tap their way back to the game. Some children thought these strategies were intentionally designed to lure them:

In the quote, the 12-year-old girls express how they experience this situation as frustrating, and how their goal-directed activities in the games are obstructed by advertisements that appear suddenly. These ‘surprise-based’ strategies can be said to impede the users’ possibilities to avoid commercial messages and make the user act in line with the intention of the strategies, namely to press the adverts.

According to the children, advertisements did not only interrupt their gameplay and lead them away from their gaming activities, but sometimes also changed the course of events in the games. Due to unanticipated adverts that blocked children’s abilities to play, or adverts that suddenly disappear, children’s goal-directed activities had unexpected and undesired outcomes. Children described how they died in the games, got lower scores, or had to replay the games to catch up with previously achieved scores. In this conversation, three 9-year-old girls describe how they die in a game due to appearing adverts:

The children also described how moments of challenge-based immersion (Ermi and Mäyrä, 2005) were interrupted by adverts that lead to lower scores in the game:

In the quote, the 12-year-old boy Amir says ‘it’s very tiresome, because you are so focused on the game’. This indicates that interrupted immersion is a highly negative experience for the boy. A 9-year-old girl also expressed how advertisements that interrupt immersion are particularly bothersome: ‘If you are absorbed in something, it [advertising] can really bother you’. The quote above also shows how children’s achievement and the pleasure of succeeding and winning were hindered in the games by appearing adverts, thus interrupting important motivations for gameplay (Hamlen, 2011, 2013: 112; Olson, 2010: 180–181).

When children loose or get lower scores due to appearing adverts it can also be argued that children’s agency is obstructed in the games, something which commonly leads to frustration (Johnson, 2015). No gender or age differences could be seen in the present study as both boys and girls in both age groups mentioned how they were annoyed by adverts that impeded their achievement in mobile games.

The children also expressed how they struggled with advertisements which hindered their avoidance tactics. According to the children, the adverts’ close buttons were often so small that they accidentally pressed the adverts instead. One 9-year-old girl described the close button as ‘smaller than a finger – it’s like a breadcrumb’. In the following quote, two 9-year-old girls explain what happens when they try to click away adverts:

In the quote, Maria describes how her haptic struggle with advertisements results in ‘chaos’, which constantly leads her away from the place where she wants to be, namely, the game. De Certeau speaks of tactics and strategies as the ‘everyday art of war’ (De Certeau, 1984: 39). In the quote, Maria reveals how ‘you have to hit it [the close button] precisely’, reflecting a sense of conflict between her and the strategy. Other children spoke about their struggle with tiny close buttons in even more explicit warlike terms, something which can also be understood as part of a gaming rhetoric: ‘It’s bad. You have to be able to defeat the advertisements and play [laughter]. It’s fighting spirit’ (boy, 9 years old).

The children also described how dysfunctional close buttons impeded their avoidance tactics, as told by this 9-year-old girl:

In the quote, we can see Malin feels the strategy deliberately intends to lure her. Another girl (12 years old) revealed a similar experience of being enticed:

Sometimes they do such ugly tricks. That in the middle of the game adverts appear that you want to click away, but there is a cross that is a fake cross, and when you press it you enter the advert. And then there is a tiny cross that you can’t see, which is the one that actually takes it down [laughter].

Tactical engagement with advertising through avoidance

In the interviews, the children also described how they were able to evade advertisements that they felt interfered with their gaming activities. By performing avoidance tactics, the children produced a distance and difference with respect to the strategies, as they opposed one central purpose of advertising; to gain and keep the media users’ attention (Li and Leckenby, 2012: 205). These avoidance tactics were described in relation to the abundance of advertising in mobile games and also with regard to advertising that put the user in forced exposure mode (Edwards et al., 2002). The children, for instance, revealed how they deleted games that had too much advertising. One 9-year-old girl said: ‘I have had games where adverts appear all [emphasis] the time, and then I just delete them’. One 12-year-old boy described how turning off the Internet connection blocked adverts: ‘If the internet is not needed to use it [the game], I usually turn off the Wi-Fi. Then it [adverts] doesn’t come out’. Drinking a glass of water was an option for one 12-year-old girl: ‘I ignore them [adverts] and go and drink a glass of water instead. It feels much better’.

Avoidance tactics were also described in regard to advertising strategies within mobile games that encourage children to press a button and thereby allow advertisements to be shown on the screen. In exchange for this, the player receives an award that has value and creates new opportunities in the games, such as game currency, more energy and the possibility to advance to a higher level and to get extra chances or extra lives. Some children perceived this as a voluntary ‘opportunity’ to gain advantages in the games while others saw this as an involuntary ‘must’ that they had to do to be able to play. When discussing this advertising strategy, some children revealed how they pressed the button and then avoided watching the advertisement. One 9-year-old girl said:

In the quote, Maja describes how engaging in other offline media usage is used as an avoidance tactic. Other ways to avoid advertising included putting away the telephone or tablet, going to the toilet, social interaction (such as talking with siblings), or turning off the iPad.

While some of these avoidance tactics involved bodily movement in the offline space, other tactics were haptic-based avoidance tactics performed within the virtual space, as described by this 9-year-old girl:

Alicia expresses how she moves around in the app ecology and sighs. She describes how it feels tiresome to go in and out from the game app in order to avoid advertisements and how this can result in her leaving the app for another game. However, there were also children who described their avoidance tactics in more neutral terms and who did not seem to be so bothered by these pauses in the games.

Avoidance tactics can be said to create a gap between the individual and the strategy in the more concrete sense of the word, as the children distanced themselves from the touchscreen device. A spatial and visual distance was created through bodily movement, such as going to the toilet or putting away the iPad. Some of these tactics appear to involve a movement back to the game, while other tactics, such as deleting the game or turning off the iPad, made the distance to the game space and the advertising strategies more permanent.

Non-tactical engagement with advertising

When discussing their experiences of advertising in mobile games, the children also described how they sometimes just ‘sat there’ and waited while adverts were shown in the games. The children often used words like ‘sit’ and ‘wait’, and the modal verbs ‘must’ and ‘have to’, when they spoke of in-game advertising. The modal verbs ‘must’ and ‘have to’ express a sense of obligation and enforcement placed on them by the commercial strategies in the games. These descriptions clearly contrast to the more active ‘doing’ words that were used in relation to avoidance tactics.

One 9-year-old girl said:

It’s like this: ‘From 11 seconds and down’ or ‘20 seconds and down’. Then you have to wait until you are allowed to press the ‘X’. Because you must see it, because they want you to have that app, inspire you to have that app. But it’s very tiresome because you just sit there. I want to play instead of watching apps that I don’t want to have, advertising.

The children also expressed a sense of being enforced and steered by the advertising strategy which encourages children to watch advertisements in exchange for an award. When asked if they watch the advertisement after pressing the button, one 12-year-old boy said:

In the quote, Maxim expresses how he feels forced to watch the advert, and how he is unable to perform avoidance tactics. The statement ‘It just makes me watch’ indicates a sense of being steered by an outer force. The children also described how they watched the advertisements because the advertisements told them to do so. When asked if they watch the adverts after clicking on them, one 9-year-old boy said:

The boy expresses how he has to watch an advert to get the ‘gems’ and refers to a text clearly stating this condition. Remembering these words, in English, indicates that the boy has paid considerable attention to this text, and stressing this quote in this context may indicate that the boy took these words literally, and thus refrained from performing avoidance tactics. When watching adverts against their will, the children can be said to act non-tactically with the strategy, and in the words of Livingstone (2009: 32), the children in these situations succumb to the commercial pressures.

Moments of ‘sitting and waiting’ were also connected to a sense of resignation among the children. Resignation is here understood as an act of giving up (Waite, 2006: 733) and involves a feeling ‘that something unpleasant is going to happen and cannot be changed’ (Merriam-Webster, 2016). When talking about advertisements that appear suddenly after entering a game app, one 12-year-old girl said: ‘I always, I sit and wait around 10 seconds before I dare to touch anywhere [laughter among the children], because I can’t stand it’. The girl describes how she refrains from touching the screen because of adverts that appear without warning, indicating a feeling of mistrust and a moment of resignation with regard to the commercial game space. A sense of resignation was also described in the context of advertisements that directly interfered with and changed the outcome of the gaming activities. One 9-year-old girl said:

When adverts appear, then you want to go [in the game], but you cannot do that so you press the ‘X’, but then you have already been caught by the police. So it’s not worthwhile to play again then, because it’s always the same.

These moments of sitting and waiting, and the sense of enforcement and resignation, contrast to the more active struggle and the performance of avoidance tactics described above. Important to stress here is that no difference in terms of gender or age could be seen regarding these different modes of engagement. Both boys and girls, and 9- and 12-year-olds, described how they struggled, resisted and resigned in connection to advertising in mobile games. The same child could also describe these different forms of engagement, showing that there is a fine line between resistance and resignation. In the quote below, a nine-year-old girl describes how she can sit, bored and watch advertisements, but how she can also turn off the game:

On my iPad at home there is a game called Littlest Pet Shop, and to get hearts that make the pets feel good, you have to watch a film that takes about 20 minutes, and then I just have to sit like this [showing how she waits and is bored]. Many times I just turn it off.

Children’s use of advertising as information can also be understood as a form of non-tactical engagement. The children said in the interviews that they sometimes actively and voluntarily watched advertising in search for information about new free-to-play games. This shows how advertising functioned as a vehicle in the commercial app ecology, promoting further (free) mobile gameplay. When asked if they had pressed adverts, one 9-year-old boy said: ‘I did it the other day when I wanted a game that I like, and then my little brother also played it’. By using advertising as information, the children create a similarity with the strategy by fulfilling one goal of advertising, namely, consumption (Li and Leckenby, 2012: 205–207). However, the children expressed how they selectively choose to press adverts that advertised games that they liked. By making selections in the mediated material, the children can be said to introduce a difference in the overall web of strategies, thus lending a tactical component to the use of advertising as information.

Discussing their engagement with advertising as information, some children also described how they felt that this form of engagement was not entirely voluntary. One 12-year-old girl said:

There are some adverts where you think ‘This looks fun’, and when you have seen it, like, 20 times, you just think: ‘Oh, okay, I’ll download it then.’ Then you download it and try it, and very rarely it’s fun.

Tactical engagement with advertising through critique and laughter

As discussed above, through their avoidance tactics the children produced differences that in various ways opened up spatial and visual gaps between the individual and the strategy. In addition to this, the children produced differences by performing what could be called ‘tactics of the mind’. These tactics did not involve a spatial or visual distance to the strategies, but rather a mental distance through critique. This critique could, for instance, be produced by thinking of swear words. Two 12-year-old boys said:

This quote shows that when advertisements appear suddenly and the children are unable to make a difference on the screen, one possibility to create a difference is by mentally opposing the strategies. This quote also reflects the interpretive community (Schrøder, 1994: 344–345) that seems to exist in relation to advertising in mobile games, as Fredrik knows ‘exactly’ how his friend experiences these situations. The use of the expletive ‘Fuck off’, just like the sensation of being ‘bombarded with advertisements’ (girl, 9 years old), reflects the idea of advertising as an unwelcome guest in the game.

The children also performed ‘tactics of the mind’ when they described advertising as annoying, tiresome, boring and deceptive. Through these descriptions, the children opposed and countered one of the main persuasive aims of advertising, namely, to create positive feelings and attitudes (Li and Leckenby, 2012: 205–207). When analysing children’s non-tactical engagement with advertising the following quote was discussed above, which we will now take another look at:

It’s like this: ‘From 11 seconds and down’ or ‘20 seconds and down’. Then you have to wait until you are allowed to press the ‘X’. Because you must see it, because they want you to have that app, inspire you to have that app. But it’s very tiresome because you just sit there. I want to play instead of watching apps that I don’t want to have, advertising.

The children also produced ‘tactics of the mind’ by formulating a more elaborated critique towards in-game advertising during the group interviews. The children, for instance, criticized advertisements that put them in a forced exposure mode and stated that there should be a close button so that they can choose whether or not to watch advertising. This was discussed by three 9-year-old girls:

In this conversation, the girls make a moral statement regarding the right to be able to press away advertisements, and thus be able to make a difference on the screen. Critique and concrete suggestions were also formulated with regard to advertising as a source of information. The children were critical of advertisements that did not clearly show if the game was free to download or had to be purchased. One 9-year-old girl said: ‘Sometimes it doesn’t tell you what it costs.…It would be better if they wrote the price’. Information about price was considered important by the children as they mainly wanted, or could, download free-to-play games. By expressing the importance of showing the price, and by stating that they should have the possibility to press away advertisements, the children can be said to evoke a moral economy (Thompson, 1971) concerning what are fair and unfair marketing practices in the attention economy. ¹

The children also produced difference through laughter in the interview situation. There was sometimes laughter among the children when they narrated their struggle with in-game advertising or described how they just sat and waited. When talking about advertisements that appear unexpectedly, one 12-year-old girl said:

The quote shows how the girl laughs after saying ‘Not funny’. This may seem paradoxical, however, this laughter can be seen as a way to further express how she experiences these situations. Gordon proposes that absurdity denotes the dimensions of our lives that ‘are incongruous and do not make sense’ (2014: 24) and that people sometimes respond to absurdity with laughter. The children’s laughter can, thus, be interpreted as expressing a sense of absurdity in relation to these struggles, and a feeling that things are not really as they should be or as they want them to be. This laughter reinforces the critical distance to the advertising strategy, and can, hence, be understood as a form of tactical engagement with advertising.

In addition to this, the children also sometimes laughed when they talked about their avoidance tactics. When describing how he presses an advert to get game currency or other virtual objects, one 9-year-old boy said: ‘I put away the iPad…and I do something else. Then I come back when it has finished [laughter]. Because some of these adverts I have seen 3000 or 4000 times, it feels like’. This can be seen as a form of laughter which further accentuates the oppositional character of avoidance tactics, and the boy wants to express the impression that he ‘fools the system’ when performing avoidance tactics.