I love technology, but things may be getting a bit out of hand.

A lot of video games have advertisements designed into them — billboards you drive past, some kind of statistic brought to you by Company X or the signs at a sports arena.

It used to be that these were completely made up, generic products that just helped to give the scenes a little more feel of reality. You might see Joe’s car repair, King brand hot dogs or A-1 Auto Insurance.

But now, games have real ads, and because the systems can connect to the Internet, those ads can regularly change.

Take the EA Sports hockey game I have for the Playstation 3. I grabbed a picture of the boards this morning as an example:

That’s a T-mobile ad, and yes if you had taken the time to pause the game and type in the link the website does exist.

But that’s nothing.

A new(ish) tool in advertising are these things called QR codes, which are square bar codes you can scan with your smartphone. All you need is a simple app, scan the code, and it will take you to a website for whatever product or company.

So imagine my suprise when I was playing the hockey game and saw one of the QR codes in a Subway ad along the boards. I didn’t take a picture at the time, but I roughly recreated it:

Think about the strategy that went into this ad. Subway is banking on the fact that I will notice it, recognize what the QR code is, own a smartphone, have a bar code scanner app, and take the time to pause the game and line the screen up just right — all so I can visit the website they set up for this promotion.

(Nerd alert: The QR code I recreated will actually take you to the Subway promotion site)

That’s some incredible technology. Whether we need it is another question.