Ithaca College

Arhlene A. Flowers, assistant professor in Integrated Marketing Communications in the Department of Strategic Communication, and Katalin Lustyik, assistant professor in the Department of Television-Radio, published "Virtual Junk Food Playgrounds in Europe: Advergames in the UK and Hungary" in the December 2010 issue on Virtual Worlds and Kids in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. Flowers had presented the paper at the International Communication Association's annual conference in Singapore in June 2010.

This article presents a cross-cultural perspective on junk food advergame strategies in two European Union countries: the United Kingdom represents a country with the highest Internet usage by children and the most developed online advertising market in Europe, while Hungary, a post-socialist country, represents an emerging market with a smaller but growing number of young Internet-users eager to play online. The authors examined the most popular games targeting children, as well as policies and initiatives attempting to address concerns regarding unhealthy food advertisements in cyberspace. It can be downloaded at https://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/1893/1162.