Videos Game as an Advertising Medium

So last week I spoke at the American Marketing Association on a panel about video gaming. The panel also included members of other agencies, a client, and a gaming developer. The panel proved to be very interesting, but I think the biggest challenge is how are we as marketers going to work with the game developers/studios to develop the right metrics which will allow us, and our clients, to understand the medium and compare it to other media vehicles. I mean let's be honest, we need to quanitify the medium, apply the same business criteria to it as we do to any other media.

There is one small stipulation, we can track time spent, usage, brand awareness, preference, recall, unaided recall, etc. But the question becomes what is the "variable" that we can use to account for the experiential level of participation? If you can drive the new Aston Martin, how much more likely are you going to be to purchase it versus seeing someone else drive it?