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?

Comments

customers

[aichpvee]

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.

Power... in all its forms

[djsmiley]

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.

Re:Power... in all its forms

[AlXtreme]

Games make us feel like we make a difference.

Except maybe MMORPG's? In games like EQ, UO and WoW you are just one cog of the machine. In these games, the world doesn't revolve around you any more than the real world does.

Maybe that also explains the addictiveness of MMOG's: everyone is trying to make a difference, yet only few can actually accomplish something new. Quests et al are nothing more than synthetic sugar: they eventually reset anyway, so others can accomplish exactly the same.

Not just Games

[brunes69]

... 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.

Because it's the easy way out

[Opportunist]

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?

You hypocrite bastard

[DesireCampbell]

"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.

Advertising

[Lord_Dweomer]

As an ad exec, I'd like to comment on this story and some of the posts I've seen.

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.