I'm Sorry, Did you say Gaming or Gambling?

A friend of mine had heard about my work woes and called me up yesterday. Apparently she had mentioned me to a friend in the gaming industry who needed a web and online marketer. He was interested, and wanted to talk to me.

"No obligations," she said. "Just meet up with him and you never know." I was intrigued. Having recently started Never Winter Nights gaming with my financial planner, I was soon enthralled with the technology in producing a game. Especially now when it was almost like producing a mini movie with cut scenes, voice talents, character profiling, etc.

And there are some very smart cookies out there in the gaming industry for online marketing. Capturing an already existent fan audience, they created comprehensive walkthroughs of the game, how to gain influence on characters so that they wouldn't betray you in the final battle, how to craft weapons and armor, etc. What they then created was a huge hit stats for their web page, which equalled huge advertising revenue. Using DHTML and layer style sheets, these ads splash over the contents of the page and you are forced to view it while it plays out. It could be hugely annoying, but site owners keep the ad to 5 seconds, and only once in 24 hours. So if you regularly return to the site within a day, you will see the advertisement once only. In addition, the ads are hugely graphic and visually engaging, so the pain is minimized. They also give you options like the "X" button, or "click to skip the ad". Small price to pay for the number of spoilers in the site. And given that the ads are of other games in the same category, you might just click on the ads out of interest or simply to support the thoughtful people who created the site so you can win the final battle against the Lord of Shadows...

Anyway, I was looking forward to the chat to dig up the expose behind the gaming industry, and agreed to talk to him. He was considerate enough to call after office hours, and he went directly to what I was doing and my qualifications as an online marketer. I mentioned to him my previous positions and scope of my experience, and then he went into what he was doing.

"We are a company that does games for gambling. We don't actually collect bookings, but help our clients to market gambling in online gaming."

"I'm sorry, did you say gambling or gaming?" (that's me seeing all my excitement and fantasies of getting into the gaming industry as an online marketer being smashed like godzilla crunching his foot on them and viciously pounding them into the ashes...)

"Both. Of course its all legal and approved by the government...."

I didn't hear much of the conversation after as I couldn't quite decide what I felt about working for a gambling industry. While it is legalised here, there is something in my moral upbringing that is glaring at me with disapproval and heaping tons of guilt on me even being part of this conversation. You can blame my parents for that - I would have been filthy rich by now if not for my morals.

I politely followed the rest of the conversation through with him asking me to take a look at their website, and meeting for coffee later. I don't think our appointment will survive the week, as I don't think I can last the moral glare for an entire week. Oh well, back to the classifieds...