HAVE YOU caught the hot new game capturing video consoles everywhere? It’s called Sneaky Product Placement, and not even a laser-blasting superhero will outwit this corporate invasion. With television audiences dwindling as video-game sales boom, games developers are cosily selling out to big-brand advertisers. Cash from in-game branding might help to finance tomorrow’s epics — but the rise in commercial clutter is starting to seem a raw deal for consumers.

If you play Sony’s mountain-biking game Downhill Domination, your PlayStation comes alive to cycle brands that include Trek and Mongoose. Load Judge Dredd v Judge Death on your Xbox, and ask yourself why Red Bull plays such a prominent narrative role. Brands from Nike to Nokia are aggressively chasing the hard-to-reach demographic that shuns TV for games consoles. For fees that can run into six figures, they can place their products at the heart of the action — all portrayed in the most favourable light.

Last week Viacom, the media giant which owns MTV and Paramount, indicated that this trend is about to explode. Richard Bressler, its finance chief, told an advertising conference that Viacom was now targeting an industry worth $10 billion in the US alone. Suddenly it became clear why its chairman, Sumner Redstone, has been investing so heavily in the publisher Midway Games.

It is easy to understand the attractions to corporations of “advergaming”, as the phenomenon has become known. Hive Partners, the British agency behind Red Bull’s gaming deals, boasts that “situation placement” (its coy euphemism) may achieve more than traditional advertising as “it demands direct interaction and significant suspension of disbelief”. It does seem to work: Mitsubishi says that it introduced its Lancer Evo into North America only after the demand created by its appearance in the bestselling game Gran Turismo. Hundreds of the cars are now sold each month.

We have come a long way since 1989, when Philip Morris ordered Sega to remove unauthorised Marlboro billboards from its Super Monaco GP arcade game. Today, the tobacco firm might have to pay millions to reach such a mainstream audience. Yet if gaming is to become just another outlet for the multinationals’ marketing strategies, players ought to see some reward for their escapist pastime being compromised in this way. Cheaper games would be a start.

TERRIFYING statistic of the week: Gartner, the IT analyst, surveyed 5,000 web users and concludes that two million Americans fell victim to bank frauds last year. Typically, it says, their online banking passwords were stolen using “spyware” programs that can record keystrokes. It is hard to know the truth, as banks tend to keep quiet, but if the losses are a fraction of the £1.3 billion suggested, then the password is dead.

IT IS a measure of geek oneupmanship to have been invited by Google to help test its Gmail e-mail service. Inevitably, an online marketplace has emerged to trade this prized commodity . . . although, this being the web, creative collaboration is going down far better than mere cash. At a site called Gmailswap.com, offers for a Gmail account include “a haiku on a subject of your choice”, “your name in my screensaver for two years”, a live chicken, and “a picture of me in a wet T-shirt contest”.

Yahoo! and Hotmail don’t stand a chance.