Crowd gaming revamps cinema advertising?

Human beings become “human joysticks” in the latest MSNBC.com invention to entertain spectators waiting for a movie to begin. Adage today has an article on what is called “crowd gaming” and looks like a group Wii experience. Motion sensors throughout the theater track the audience’s collective movement and use them as human joysticks to play an arcade game on the wide screen.

Crowd gaming could be an interesting (but expensive) new option to refresh advertising in movie theatres, but personally I would appreciate it (maybe) only as a one-shot experience. Also, it could fit only a certain kind of movies, blockbusters such as Spiderman or the Fantastic 4. I can’t imagine playing such a game before watching for example, The Lives of Others… In the end, kudos to MSNBC for creating a PR story (yes, I’m also writing about it) but I definitely hope “crowd gaming” in theatres becomes a trend!

The idea is part of the MSNBC.com “A Fuller Spectrum of News”, and presents also an advergame Newsbreaker, which is an updated version of the sticky arcade Arkanoid.