Through the magic of MetaFilter we recently came across a new branded experience from the California Milk Processor Board (the “Got Milk” people). When it comes to nurturing a brand, these guys get it (see the second comment), are very good. Note the chocolate chip cookie on their site. They don’t even have a picture of their main product in the chrome on their home page. Instead they just put an image of the thing that makes you crave it the most. Restrained and smart!

It’s no surprise that these folks are spending time and effort (and plenty of money) to have interesting and engaging experiences on the web. Their new game is called Get the Glass, and frankly it’s breathtaking. Built by North Kingdom, and interactive design agency in Sweden, it’s a gorgeously rendered 3d board game with various little micro arcade-ish game interludes. There are many little cute touches, and fantastic details. The most notable is that when you get put in jail (adorably called “Milkatraz”) one of the options for getting out with no penalty is to invite a friend to bail you out. Super clever viral mechanism. There are tons of other small cool notes in the experience. You roll dice in the game and you can hear them bouncing around the board in stereo. As you move from one section of the board to another you get this beautiful cinematic camera movement across the rendered landscape. You get the point, the game is beautifully done.

As you’ve probably figured out by now, this game is heavy on the product placement. There are crime files in the game where you see the characters’ bones and the effects on them from lack of milk. Cute. Normally I find product placement so heavy-handed that it reduces the authenticity of the experience. But in this case, the milk brand is so strong, that I don’t mind embracing the experience. It’s so well done and adorable that you don’t mind the propaganda since you can’t take it that seriously in the first place.

When we first saw this game I knew I had to write about it. At the time I could only envision writing reams of positive thoughts about how lovingly the game was crafted. But after the first time I got sent to Milkatraz, I started to get annoyed. Not because I’d landed in the slammer, but because even though they made it so easy to keep playing, and so attractive, I really had no desire to keep playing. (And it’s not like I’d get in trouble for playing videogames at work.) I was kind of torn because I wanted to see the rest of the rendered environments and the cool camera movement. But I still turned it off.

The more I thought about it, the more annoyed I got. Here’s why: if you’re going to spend the money they spent to create something this beautiful, why not go an inch further and actually make it an experience someone might want to return to. (Yes, I know that making a game good is easier said than done, but they clearly didn’t even try with this game instead relying on the graphics, which btw are not easy to make this beautiful either.) From a gameplay perspective this is a bad game. The board game isn’t horrible on its own but the micro challenges are almost offensively stupid. I have nothing against simple games on the web. I love a good Bejeweled session. In fact, lately I’ve been checking out games from Retro64. Basically, they take old game concepts, dress them up with great new graphics and depth and put them out for cheap. A game like Fairy Treasure is a clone of Arkanoid (which was an innovative descendant of Super Breakout, Breakout, Pong, etc.). It’s definitely a casual game as opposed to a state-of-the-art game for gamers, but it’s still way way more engaging than Get the Glass. Ironically, it was developed by GameOn, a little company that’s also in Sweden. Maybe the North Kingdom folks could have talked to the folks at GameOn and gotten some gameplay help.

How much do you think it cost to produce Fairy Treasure? $100,000? $200,000? I bet it’s closer to the former. How much do you think it cost to produce Get the Glass? $1,000,000? More? I’m just speculating of course, but even if they cost the same to make, the point is still valid. If you’re going to spend all that time and effort lovingly crafting a piece of software (the dice roll in stereo!!!!!) why not go the extra mile and make it something that people want to spend more than five minutes engaging with. Frankly, if the graphics hadn’t been so beautiful on Get the Glass I would have been there for no more than one minute. In contast, I spent an hour playing Fairy Treasure the other night.

I’ve said before, that I suspect that the market for branded software experiences is still so new that people have no idea how to measure it. My guess is that the California Milk Processor Board who footed the bill for this thing are patting themselves on the back for the five minutes they got from me. From my perspective they could have gotten an hour for no extra cost. When more brand advertisers understand the real opportunity that branded software presents, it will expose Get the Glass for the missed opportunity that it is. A beautiful app, but a missed opportunity nonetheless.