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Shock Game Advertising
Lost Garden has a good look at some of the more tasteless media marketing that has been foisted on gamers, and what the willingness to shock for sales means to the industry as a whole. From the article: "When I look at many games and the sorry advertisements that reflect back their pitiful value, I see people mechanically spewing out 'more for the sake of more.' A game that only offers perfectly modeled bullet paths or the ability to murder beautiful women is a waste of talent and a blight upon our industry. I say this not because I'm morally opposed to such content, but because it doesn't accomplish anything worthy for the customer, the industry or our industry's wonderful developers." The ad that specifically caused him to write this was one for 'Hitman: Blood Money', in April's EGM. It's pretty darn tasteless; Why would a beautifully made up woman with a bullet in her brain make you want to buy a game?
When I saw that in PCGamer.. my first thought was "That looks like the chick from Sin City, I wonder what game this is?"
If the ad makes you stop and look at it, they win.
Weren't you the same people saying "Games aren't real"? Well, they're not. Stop bitching.
And how is this any different than showing monsters being shot in the face area by our manly hero's giant gun?
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I like how he actually called the customers "customers" instead of "consumers". That's right bitches, we're not just mindlessly consuming your bullshit. We're fucking PAYING for it!
I don't know where this distinction got lost but it seems to be part of the problem we face of corporate executives feeling entitled to our money whether we want to pay for their products or not.
The Farewell Tour II
...it starts off talking about the marketing, yeah, but ends up saying the content of the games should be different so they can be marketed better.
It really *is* just that games are often marketed very badly, in particularly tasteless ways. For instance, here in the UK: whoever was responsible for marketing the Burnout franchise pre-EA pulled off some stunts like a "Top Ten Celebrity Car Crashes" featuring Princess Diana and Mark Bolan. Public outcry, free publicity, and a lot of negative coverage in the press. Followed up by an offer to pay all speeding tickets on the day of the game's release, to even more outcry including from the police and government.
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I was flipping through my copy of EGM with my fiancé just the other day.
Really, what is his name? Come on, outrage over gratuitous violence is one thing, but this is a little bit pansy isn't it. Along the same vein as the UK banning the Austrlian 'bloody' adds, a backlash by the over-sensitive crowd. Just what we need.
The fact is that a lot of games are about violence, and shooting people. If it is the advertising that bothers you - then that is a problem for you. Perhaps it is the fact that you are faced with what gaming is in a very different way, perusing a magazine with your fiance, rather than hidden in your darkened room, firing away at people.
People play games because they then become powerful....
Have you EVER, EVER played a game where the world DIDN'T revolve around you? Where you wern't the guy that had to pull the trigger.... Where you wen't the guy that if you didn't deliver this scroll to the dragon knight by the first full moon the entire world will die?
Even teh sim games (sim city, etc) do this, if you fail, the people blame you, not the rest of the goverment, or other gods whom they could worship.
Games make us feel like we make a difference.
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I'm still waiting for John Romero to make me his bitch.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I would prefer having a look at it, so I can understand what the ruckus is about :-)
... but the entertainment industry in general.
Anyone else notice that movie previews are becoming less and less reflective of the actual movie?
For example, take the recent film Jarhead. Anyone who saw the preview of that, with it's thumping "Jesus Walks" soundtrack and huge explosions, would probably be expecting to see a Blackhawk Down style action-oriented war film. Anyone who saw it knows this is *far from the truth*. While it was a great movie, it was absolutely nothing like it was portrayed in the preview.
This is just one example. I can think of other times where the same film was made to look like an action movie in one preview, and a romantic comedy in another.
It's kind of sad that nowadays you really have no idea what the premise of the film is until you go see it, or look it up on a trusted review site. All it takes is for you to be burned once this way before you become cynical about films at the theatre altogether.
And who has asked for a link before me? Not everybody has read the magazine in question, nor even has access to it!
Just that simple.
The target audience for those games is quite easy to spot. It's for one the young, pimple-faced not-yet teenager who wants to show off that he can stomach it when he's ripping some guts out of someone's body (well, virtually at least). And that he gets away with playing a game that's 18+.
The other target audience is the gamer that doesn't care about content as long as there's enough blood dripping out of his screen. He enjoys the shock elements. To a point, so do I, but for example Doom 3 (or was it 4? They start to get blurry when they're essentially all the same) was no shocker. Yes, it was dark, yes, it was jumping me, but it was PREDICTABLY doing that. Open the door and yes, a monster WILL jump you.
It's no suspense and shock when you KNOW it happens.
But making guts sputter out realistically is easier than making a good game with content. Flying guts "only" need a good graphics artist (not wanting to belittle you guys, good artists are rare, but once they know their trade, they're really good at creating freakingly real effects).
For good and exciting gameplay, you'd have to invest more work. You need someone who designs the balance. Is (thing A) in balance with (thing B), comparing their strengths, weaknesses, availability and hardships in aquiring them? You have to spend time playtesting, you have to double and triple check for bugs, loopholes, cheats and exploits.
No such thing if all you concentrate on is eye candy. Worst thing that could happen is a pixel error, a faulty texture or a blur where there should be none. But nothing that disrupts gameplay altogether. And all that without lengthy testing.
Or worse, risking creating something REALLY new and having it bomb. Game studios rely on tested, well selling genres. Shooters and strategy, strategy and shooters. Mix in a handful of sports game (one per year from a well known sweatshop in western USA) and you have the current lineup of computer games.
Adventures? Take massive time for scripting and making an actual adventure.
Turn based strategy? No market and incredibly hard to make interesting and balanced.
Flightsim? Try to hold a candle to MS-FlightSim and INCREDIBLY risky while you need a ton of GOOD and physics-savvy proggers to make it fly (literally).
So face it, we're stuck with shooting things and building stuff up to bomb it down. With the occasional gem, which invariably gets bought up by EA and milked 'til you can't stand it anymore.
Or does anyone still play The Sims?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...by staying far, far away from gaming magazines. Except "Computer Games Magazine," since they tend to be tasteful, and the articles are very competently written.
As for everything else, I've even stopped buying PC gaming magazines to read during long flights. It's EMBARASSING to be reading something with 'hawt decaying undead chix' splayed lewdly across the front and back covers, especially in a crowded airport.
This is Hitman. Have you ever played any of the Hitman series? For people who like stealth games there's nothing wrong with "more of the same" and they aren't really interested in the brain splatter and visual effects. All the ad needs to tell them is "New Hitman is to be out really soon." All the rest is a filler.
The specifics of stealth-based games is that they have pretty low replayablity factor but are really one of a kind experience the first time you play. Thing is each mission is unique, but there are only so many ways to solve it and once you learn them all there's no reason to try again. So simply the more missions the better. The improvements to previous Hitman series are moot. A good mission pack would do.
These games are great in the way they provide thrill, fear. They require finese, not power, caution, not speed, thinking, not shooting. They are puzzle games, not FPS/3PS. So we all already know and love Hitman and we don't give a shit about a beautiful bitch killed. We know the gore is not real, the bitch is just a bunch of polygons and it's all a game. But we don't give a shit, it's a challenge of wits between us and the level designers, following small hints, trying to solve their puzzles, timing actions, acting responsibly and cautiously. The challenge is everything, and each level is a new one. Shocker factor? We don't give a shit. Maybe some kids will get attracted, maybe some journalists will get repulsed. For us, hardcore stealth games players one thing is important in the ad: new Hitman is out.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
(continues screaming, see above)
I was flipping through an early 90s game magazine the other day and saw a doozy. The ad was for a pinball game called Balls of Steel. It showed a woman's arm holding 2 large steel balls and the caption said "You need these to play". That one spawned a lot of complaints.
You have to apprciate the reasoning of such ads, though. They're placed in magazines and they know people just flip right past them so they have to put something engaging enough to make them stop flipping for 3 extra seconds. That Hitman ad is indeed pretty bad though. Their previous ads just showed the bald monkey protagonist looking placid. I guess you need sex in ads even if it's, er, dead sex.
*pfff* I have posted frost pists, found dead in his home and other troll texts, as well as answered to trolls, taken part in flame-wars and my fair share of off-topic strolls like this one. Nearly half of my moderations are meta-modded unfair and I rarely use my meta-mod-points. Still for years I have not sunken below Excellent Karma. How does one actually achieve lower Karma (Not that it would make any difference)? :-P
Well, shit.
Taste my sad, Michael.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
It's pretty darn tasteless; Why would a beautifully made up woman with a bullet in her brain make you want to buy a game?
.o.
What a mornoic statement. I keep thinking more and more that except for Taco, its the editors that hold slashdot back. If it weren't for the great user base and the comments, I'd be on digg all the time.
And why is this statement moronic? Because its just a throw away. Why would you want to buy a game where you put a bullet in ANYONE's head? This is simulated murder. Once you get past that, it can be women, children, animals whatever. And that whatever is whatever sells
I mean really, Zonk. Have you not seen GTA? Have you not at least heard about it? Have you not played Duke Nukem 3D? What rock are you sitting under? First Person Shooters are all about this. Third person shooters are about this. People that play these love to kill. Even casual users love to play these sorts of games from time to time. And first person shooters, and lets be blunt here, is mostly about murder. And GTA has show that women are a great target as well.
I say all of this because if it comes as a shock to you that someone would want to shoot a "beautiful" woman in the head (as if she is more worthy of not being shot than anyone else), then you're really missing something, and shouldn't be an editor on slashdot. Give us something with a little more depth please. We're not that dumb.
(And I didn't even need to make the other obvious argument that people play games because of what they "can't" do in real life, and since there's a very clear distinction in most people's minds between games and reality, morality is not much of an issue. )
Sheesh.
"Finally, we happened about a vivid image of a violated female corpse with a bloody bullet hole gaping in her forehead. Ah, the delightfully rank odor of publicly condoned misogyny"
And you wouldn't bat an eye if it was a man. Ah, the repugnant stench of publicly condoned hypocrisy.
Just because a woman is killed doesn't mean the murderer is misogynistic. Maybe her sex had nothing to do with it.
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Not to mention a shitty speller.
The previews for "Fight Club" made me completely write it off. The only reason I watched it was that an online rating system said it was certain I would love it, and I found that so unlikely I had to test it out.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
That masterstroke was by none other than Akklaim, the company that had some seriously depraved advertisments before they went bankrupt about a year or so ago. Case in point - they asked cemeteries if they would be willing to put advertisments on tombstones for "Shadow Man - 2nd Coming". And then they offered a $10,000 reward for one set of new parents to name their kid Turok. Oddly enough, they were very effective at advertisements a decade ago - one of the major reasons that game releases are now treated like events is due to their "Mortal Monday" campaign, for the home version of the white-hot (then) Mortal Kombat I.
First, I have in my hand the ad in question. As to its content...well, anybody who thinks that they're trying to sell sex in this game is an idiot. The image of the woman is to play off the headline which is "Beautifully Executed". Yes, the woman is their to catch your eye, but in reality the goal is to make you see the bullethole and read the headline. The sex appeal is merely a side-effect. The reason this ad does not go deeper than that is because this ad is CLEARLY targeting existing fans of the game. Otherwise you would see your typical release ad which has screenshots and nicely rendered images that try to trick the gamer into thinking "Holy crap it looks that good?!".
Forgive the lack of a link to the post, but somewhere in the story thread someone posted that people who are fans of the series just want to know when the next one is coming out, which this ad does very well.
Now...as for the issue of gamer advertising as a whole...yes, it sucks big fat donkey balls and I will be the first to admit it. I have a folder on my desk for all of the bad advertisements I come across and a good portion of them are for gamers. Just leafing through here for a couple examples will find the one for Magic: The Gathering where the headline was "The geek billionaire lifestyle begins with Magic: The Gathering"...and while it was probably made to look intentionally bad...it really just falls flat and plain out sucks.
The next two crappy ads stink of some copywriter who knows nothing about gamers playing a couple online games to pick up jargon and making it sound like it couldn't be more canned if they tried. The recent ads for Sound Blaster have the copy: "You with Sound Blaster X-Fi. Them with Motherboard Audio. Them...PWNED!". The other example is for BF2: Special Forces...and while I love the BF series (aside from the horrendous glitches and bugs and EA) this ad just just made me laugh at how horrible the copy was...."Zipline, flashbang, teargas, grappling hook. So many n00bs, so little time."
Honestly...if these people had done any research they would know how corporate and idiotic they sound. This doesn't encourage gamers to buy your game, it encourages them to mock the hell out of you. If a company doesn't know how to communicate with its customers, how can the customer think that they'll be able to make a product they'll like? Thats the entire point of advertising.
If any game companies or agencies of those companies are reading this, I'd love to discuss it with you in more detail and invite you to email me at mlsrsvp@aol.com (yes...AOL...but its an old account, cry me a river). Seriously, gamers are not idiots. Many of them are young and impressionable, but this new generation has become acutely aware of how companies try to "be like one of them" and they can spot this garbage a mile away. In the end, they might still buy the game, but it sure as hell won't be in any part due to the current advertising out there.
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Marketing in general can be very despicable. But it really is all about shock value.
In college I had a classmate in my design class who lived by this. His point was that he wanted people to notice his work. If you've got a magazine crammed full of ads your want yours to stand out. It takes far less effort to create something graphic and shocking than it does to create something compelling and attractive.
I've also dealt with ad agencies who are exceedingly arrogant. It's like they think they're the rock stars of the design industry. I think those attitudes are reflected in advertising.
Marketing, of course, extends beyond advertising and defines the content of these games. Thats why we're flooded by games that are nothing more than an orgy of guns and violence. It doesn't help that it seems like a lot of these creative directors have all had identical upbringings and appear to have been influenced by the same exact things.
I guess humanity hasn't improved at all from the time of Roman gladiators. People still seem to enjoy watching an axe bury itself into someone's skull. I enjoy a good sword fight or gun battle as much as the next guy but some people really don't seem to know when enough is enough.
This sort of thing is based on the same principle that causes people to stare at a car wreck. Marketing people, unfortunately, have no taste whatsoever and seem to enjoy taking things to the extreme.
Early in the history of games, developers realized that the emotional impact of the games feedback can be easily magnified by using visually rich and shocking imagery. The introduction of faked dangerous stimuli makes your reptile brain react in a physical manner is not so different than the thrills of a rollercoaster ride. You are never in any danger, but critical portions of your brain react as if you are. The brain evolved to deal with real threats, not 3D video cards pumping out super realistic explosions complete with force feedback. The flow of blood in your brain changes, your heartbeat increases and the excitement builds. The game play goes from interesting to thrilling. I call this visceral feedback.
Assuming he means that there is no threat present in the game (as opposed to "the threat in the game is just virtual"), that effect is lost on me. Unless I know something can hurt my game character I'm not worried about it, no matter how scary it would be in real life. FEAR seems to rely on harmless spook imagery a lot but while blood running down the walls would be scary in real life it's not in a game because that's just the game setting up the atmosphere. In a game these things happen, you see ghosts, visions, etc. If they don't hurt your character they aren't scary. Fear comes from thinking that you might get hurt or die if something that you consider likely happens.
In a game you're usually a lone hero slaughtering hundreds of enemies, feeling fear in such a situation is difficult because, well, you're the killing machine, they should be afraid of YOU. In fact it'd make more sense if enemies instead of boasting about their strength trembled in fear when approaching you, panicking when they know that you are near but don't know where (e.g. hearing a noise you caused but not being able to locate it). There's a good reason the space pirates in Metroid call the player "The Hunter".
I suppose I'd appreciate if any jRPG let the player character talk smack instead of being frightened of the evil guy. Just like the smack-talking badass is a clichee in FPSes the whiny emo guy who's scared so much he can't move when the bad guy takes his girl hostage is an overdone clichee in RPGs (especially the japanese kind). I know, someone will drag out some niche SRPG now...
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
http://www.hitmanforum.com/forum/index.php?act=mod ule&module=gallery&cmd=si&img=717
It's Startling, but not terrifying.
The whole shock-ad thing started years ago. I can remember seeing awfully gory ads in game mags back in the early 90s. Once things like DOOM and Mortal Kombat came out, which had (for the time) rather realistic violence in them, it seemed that game advertisers seemed to be on a mission to out-shock the other.
There was an ad that featured a 2-page spread of a bloody, severed human arm. I don't remember what game it was for, or even what the ad-copy was (if there was any) there just this centerfold-esque closeup of a bloody arm.
I'm surprised that game-mag advertising hasn't gone for the smut factor. After all, didn't UK game fans end up with an ad for BC2k which featured a scantily clad women holding the game's box between her legs with the caption "All you'll ever need." or something like that? Equally tasteless, just not as vomit-inducing as showing a closeup of a bullet wound.
A more fitting movie reference would be Un Chien Andalou since that relied on the exact same shock value.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Having now seen the advert in question I think it was an incredibly poor choice to make his point. (Although from his over the top description you wouldnt think so.) It would appear his only grievance is with the fact it is a woman. While it is true that its possible to play on the fairly hypocritical impulse for most men I know (including myself) to be shocked by any woman being killed, this advert was perfectly suited to the game it was connected to.
It was not gratuitous, the blood was subtle, the damage amounted to a dark spot on the head. The layout and the title perfectly matched the style that the Hitman games have oozed since day 1.
My only concern about this advert is that its presented in a magazine that younger children may look through as well and it really is too mature for a young kid to be looking at. (but then you could argue the same for a large chunk of everything in these magazines.)
I stress mature though. Its a far cry from the blood and guts or big boobs bouncing everywhere of many other adverts. Its most certainly nothing like some of the other adverts that have been posted about on this thread, that including Gary Glitter and the death of Princess Diana.
This was only the beginning of what I found wrong with his views.
He claims that visceral rewards remove longevity, thats odd because games like GTA, Painkiller, Quake (which even invented a word for its viscera) and even Carmageddon2 have massive longevity purely down to a good old fashioned slaughter fest.
He claims the adverts have gotten increasingly grotesque. Yet I remeber when Doom was around and the adverts were flooded with gore. (I believe one scheme involved them posting pieces of meat to people...)The whole argument reminds me of people who say cinema has become far too horrific while forgeting films like last house on the left or chainsaw massacre. (There are dozens more examples.)
His paragraph on the game causing a decline in the standard of advertising, therefore make more family friendly games is absurd. Its kind of like saying dont ever write a horror novel because its blurb might be shocking. Or dont ever make a horror film because its trailer might be to frightning.
His alternatives and solutions essentially cut off any possibility of having adult or gory games. (You cant really make Hitman without the viscera...) As ive made clear before these simply shouldnt be removed they are a valid area of gaming. Sim City or Tetris are fun but sometimes its fun to Gib some people too.
His point that the industry is producing to much of this is also incorrect as the top charts typically have The Sims and such in them. Even if a lot of people are making visceral games (Which looking at a list of PC games at metacritic I could also dispute), the're not getting very far with them.
Finally his conclusion (and article as a whole) is also deeply flawed. Once again raising the issue of killing women, he has absolutely no basis for his complaint as the hitman games are regarded as a good series and the community at large are eagerly awaiting the next one.
It makes how wrong he is very clear. If it takes bad games to make bad adverts then why is the bad advert, he picked out himself, for an already well respected game series. Ahh well im sure people will spot plenty of flaws in my post as well.
Adverts may have become to crass, but if they did, they did it a long time ago and whatever advert you see its really no reflection of the quality of the final game, shocking or otherwise.
Don't worry. They can't offtopic all of us.
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These days you go to the flicks and get hammered with spoliers for 6 to 7 movies plus ads. I'm sorry I missed several good flicks because of this (I refuse to go if I've already seen all the 'good' parts). I would have liked to have seen several movies, including Go and HellBoy at the movies.. but never did. Ah well. Never mind. One day soon I'll have a home cinema and not think about it ever again.
I'd really like to see a return of the old style of advertising... where they give you an indication of what the movie is about without completely spoiling it. This is especially true when they are doing something (Superman anyone?) that everyone already knows and recognises.
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Hm, that might actually work :-D On the other hand I'm an anarchist at heart, so I probably can't bring myself to do that :-P
I think any post that i actually grep for should be modded up. Ad in question, thanks parent.
++ good.
My opinion is people don't like the idea of female form depicted in a violent way. I say get your finger out of your ass! People are overly sensitive. If it was just an issue of violent imagery, the bullet hole, how many people would complain?
People should stop having a biased sensitivity to violence and women, I don't mind sensitivity but not if is it misdirected in that way.
Also the advert has a great play on words, although, personally, I don't like the advert.
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26 times in this article. Twenty Six times. Here are twenty six less academic and more common words for visceral.
Wikpedia: Visceral literally refers to the viscus - the internal organs of an animal.
The term is now often used in a more metophorical sense; a visceral response is one that arises more from instinct or emotion than from rational thought.
10 other ways to express the concept of a physiological response.
So here goes: Emotional, subconscious [is the subconscious tied to visceral ticks?], gut-feeling, persuasive, heart-felt, feeling, intuition, primal, urge, desire.
OK, IANAT (Thesaurus), but I do not appreciate the vesceral response I got from reading that word twenty six times.
*cough*
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