by Brian "Scrabble" Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

When a company like Cisco goes into "new media marketing," it doesn't mess around. To promote the Cisco ASR 1000 WAN-edge router, it started a Facebook Group, a Second Life Site, and a slew of holiday mascot viral videos. But that's not the big one.

It won't win any praise from Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw, but Cisco created an entire video game around the router. The game, implemented in Shockwave, pits you as the lead agent, piloting an ASR1000 router - yes, piloting - across cyberspace, picking up packets according to quality of service priority, and delivering them across the network. There are also bonuses related to the router's capabilities, such as a 'throughput upgrade' that increases the speed of your… uh… "hover-router," and a "parallel processing" upgrade that allows you to pick up two different color balls - I'm sorry, I mean two different types of network traffic packets - instead of having to clear the packets from the board one color at a time. You might expect that there might be lasers or something coming out of the 'routercraft' but it's a router, so it doesn't have any lasers.

It shows that Cisco can have a little bit of fun with itself, and doesn't mind others poking fun at it either, otherwise they never would have put this out there for people like myself to poke fun at. But, as a game, it's amusing for five minutes, and certainly a great way to justify playing a video game at work, but if I'm going to be playing a video game at work, I'd rather play a game where I didn't actually learn anything about routers. There's a reason that despite the obvious pun, the Valve game developers didn't have GLaDOS go on about the relative merits of different firewall solutions as she tried to incinerate you.

The game itself may miss a few marketing targets, for example, the "space router" was frustrating to steer, even after the power-ups it was kind of sluggish, and it would frequently get rammed into the walls. Sure, I'm remembering the parallel processing thing as it's a great way to illustrate that particular feature, but I also remember a frustrating box that ran slowly and crashed repeatedly. I don't say this to knock at the router it is supposed to represent, but merely to knock the representation. Then again, the real ASR1000 can't fly around the room like a robot Peter Pan, so it's kind of a wash.

At any rate, the game is simple, amusing, and illustrates the main points, which is about as well as you can expect from a marketing mini-game, and hey, I'm talking about it and you're listening, so it can't have failed that badly.