A while ago I blogged about the celebrity presence a certain game company decided to indulge in, Artix Entertainment's AQWorlds to be exact.

The gist of it was that the company would ask Goth celebrities to perform and insert them into the game's main stories. At one point, they got a few non-Goth "mainstreamers" like George Lowe and They Might Be Giants to show up.

Now, with the success of Kim Kardashian's Hollywood Adventure, I'd like to know if celebrity-based games or games with a sizable pandering to celebrities are relevant to today's gamers. Or are we already tired of them?

I personally believe that unless your game is about superstardom, you shouldn't try to shoehorn celebs in situations that don't mandate them, like during a hero's attempts to stop a world-destroying menace. What sane hero would want to be involved in a Disney-esque musical sequence when a threat's on their mind?

They Might Be Giants and Goth used in the same sentence? Whomever is classifying them as such needs to seriously learn what Goth is.

I always have the problem that I have no idea who they are in the first place. Too old.

Oh no, I meant that besides Goth celebrities, AQWorlds would have the token non-Goth perform on occasion as well. I'll edit my OP to clarify.

Personally, i'm tired of a world that's revolves around celebrities and the worship thereof. People who probably wouldn't give you the time of day if you passed them in the street. And people give so much devotion to them. I don't understand it. Keep them out of my games, thanks.

Don't care how businesses choose to advertise. Advertisements are intended to generate interest, if you hate them then they succeeded.

I find it odd to follow celebreties outside for what they are famous for. I also don't really know reality soap celebreties, mainly because I don't understand why they are famous. I never seem to be able to catch them in showing any particular skill apart from being loud. And I despise most advertising, so I make an effort to avoid it most of the time. Everything about it just rubs me the wrong way, how they are recorded in a way so they sound louder then tv programs, how they lie using semantics so you can't call them outright liars in court. I am also one of those people who doesn't buy apple products because so many others seem to do it blindly. That just annoys me

So yeah, buy a game that has celebetries in it? Sure, if it is a good game that I would also want without celebreties inside.

Oh, and I live under a rock.

Oh and for the person above me, you can't simply apply statistics to individuals. There are always people who actively avoid products because they hate the advertisement of it. And not all people care about brands, or even associate it with a measure of quality. Ofc marketing departments or ad agencies would never admit this. They need to sell their ad after all.

I've never heard of George Lowe.
Sometimes I think it's cool to have celebrities in a game. I was a fan of Mad Men when LA Noire came out, so it was kind of cool to see Aaron Staton in the game, not just his voice but his entire likeness.
I also loved Michael Hogan in the Battlestar Galactica TV series, something about the way he sounds, just sounds cool to me, so I enjoyed hearing his voice in Mass Effect 2,3, and Skyrim.
My wife loves Daniel Dae Kim, so she really enjoyed hearing him play Johnny Gat in the Saints Row games.

Sometimes there are benefits to having celebrity voice actors in a game, and that's they are usually quite good at it. Some games I've played in the past, like Oblivion, had just awful voice acting. Granted, there are a lot of voice actors who aren't celebrities that are fantastic, but with a celebrity voice actor, usually you know the voice acting isn't going to suck.

I know that celebrities lend their voices to games and for the most part I am not really impressed. It's a voice of a character. What would impress the heck out of me is if the celebrity actually played the game and talked about it like most players do. ~~shrugs~~

I agree. Only one I can think of is Felicia Day. She voiced Veronica on Fallout: New Vegas and was the voice and face of Tallis, a DLC character for Dragon Age II. She's a self-described gamer and talks about games on her blog.

Speaking of celebs who performed video game voice acting, Tara Strong (acted in My Little Pony, Teen Titans, etc.) dabbled in it as Lollipop Chainsaw's Juliet Starling. I haven't actually played the game so I don't know whether I'd enjoy it, but I think Tara is a decent voice actress.

The bit about Felicia Day being a gamer and celeb surprised me, as the celebrities that AQWorlds hire aren't really heavy gamers, even if they're obscure icons of underground geek culture.

I like some celebrity voice acting too. Like Sean Bean playing Martin Septim in Oblivion. He has a great voice and made Martin come alive. But the thing is, that Martin Septim wasn't about Sean Bean. It was about Martin Septim. That is the difference between making a great game and adding celebrites to try and make it great. Celebrities don't make great games. Integrity, great minds, great programming and great leadership (producers) do.

For the record, I think the sims 3 Katy Perry expansion and stuff pack was a failure. For all her signature CAS stuff, i had to download hider mods for all but 2 pieces of clothing. And there was a lot of clothing, mostly useless. I would look at some of the KP things and think, did she really endorse this stuff? I think the mistake was trying to make the expansion and stuff packs about Katy Perry instead of making the sims 3 game better. The sims don't need celebrities to make it great again. It needs less greedier CEO's and better leadership.

EA, if you don't like making the sims series...sell the rights to a company who will like it.

So the key to inserting celebrities in a relevant way is not to let the celeb's real-world fame dictate how much attention the (initially non-celeb-based) game should devote to them?

That depends, Avril Lavigne appeared in The Sims: Superstar and is now a popular celebrity alongside her husband, Chad Kroeger. She even covered "How You Remind Me", Chad's song, for one of the movies in the One Piece universe.

Andy Warhol, a celebrity even in death and originator of the term "Everyone will one day have their 15 minutes of fame", appears in the aforementioned game and is mentioned in "The Urbz: Sims in the City" as an influence to Crispin Black, (who in his likeness resembles Warhol) and Crispin is a resident Urb in The Foundry, referring back to Mr. Warhol's studio "The Factory".

I can go on...But Zennia has a point. The celebrity in the game can either make or break the game or celebrity. Also, integrity is one of my building blocks in my company, also with greatness in writers, programmers, media and producers and the building block that completes it is that of mutual trust between the consumer and the company.

In short: Celebrities are a mixed bag.

Shoehorning a celeb and expecting them to carry the game for you through an imitation of Disney's random musical events, however, not so much.