Advertising Advertising!

 

One of the most weirdly dystopian aspects of the world today is the concept of 'advertising' and how weirdly consuming it has become in modern culture. Everything needs to be wrapped up and sold to everyone else in as neat and persuasive a manner as possible from products to ourselves. (How often have you heard about how you need to 'advertise yourself'?) And it's the sheer over abundance of everything that makes this a necessity. How are you going to stand out from the shouting crowds if you don't make yourself known as having the best so-and-so to solve the most problems? Hence marketing becomes more essential, marketing executives become gods, and eventually we start getting them represented as the sympathetic protagonists in children's movies and have to pretend like that's not supremely weird, like it absolutely is. Hence advertising evolves to the point where it is advertising itself as a concept. What a world.

But still, we have our limits. Our thresholds past which the encroaching hand of the 'marketing infiltration' overrides our internal 'normalisation' switches and just sets people off. Advertise too hard and people start to get mad. They start to rebel. And you'll get your fame, in the form of red-hot infamy. There's nothing worse than the feeling that you are the subject of manipulation. The rat in someone else's maze, the fiddle being manhandled by some loud madman who won't get off the damn roof. And in the world of ever sought after returns, advertisers are always pushing ways to eek past that boundary in a way that shifts the needle rather than shifts people's patience thresholds. That is something we're starting to see more and more of in the world of video game advertising- and I suspect it's only going to become more of a talking point as the years go on.

Right away perhaps the biggest example I can pull from would be the very short-term attempt by Microsoft to justify their recent multi-billion dollar purchase of Activision by forcibly subjecting all of it's European players to a full-page add for 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3' in the times they chose to turn on their console. This was a dry run rather than a fresh mandate, tentatively presented to a small number of users in order to taste how bad a wider adoption might backlash for them, and they managed to make industry-wide news in a matter of minutes. Needless to say, people didn't really like the idea of being asked to buy a game fresh to turning on their very expensive consoles, and treated this like the insult it was designed to be. Microsoft quickly withdrew their attempt with the prototypical modern apology for over-stepping the bounds- lying about how this was an accident. Funny how many accidents modern advertisers get into these days, isn't it?

For example, what about the 'accident' that Ubisoft recent got into regarding the advertising of Assassin's Creed Mirage over gameplay for the entire mythology trilogy? (Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla.) For a brief time whilst playing those games one could pause to access the menu (the only way to navigate through worlds as cumbersomely designed as those) and be greeted with a full-screen slide begging a purchase out of people, needing to be dismissed before play could be resumed. This one, according to spokespeople, was an absolute mistake for a splash screen that was intended for the main menu. Now I've never coded for an Assassin's Creed game, so I can't confirm how insanely moronic that sounds- but I can't really imagine the injection sight for a menu screen before the map interface and before the game booting are right next to each other. I'm going to go ahead and assume that was another one of those 'bold faced lies' this company prides itself on.

Here's one that annoys me to no end- So I recently brought the full collection of Life Is Strange games (Sans 2) because apparently I want to roleplay as a gaggle of teenage girls for some reason. I bought these games, buyer's ownership. And yet whenever I try to log on to play Life Is Strange 1 I'm met with a splashscreen asking me to buy Gamepass. I don't have Gamepass, nor do I need it; but I guess because Life is Strange is one of the most Gamepass friendly styles of game out there Microsoft just assume I would be interested in signing up so that I can play, I dunno- Life is Strange? Seriously, what is the point? And why is it every time? Can't you at least put a cool down on the thing so I can the game unmolested just once? What did I possible do to deserve this level of constant harassment?

In all of these situations the real line being crossed here is the physical barrier between the player and the game. None force themselves on the player, preventing access for any longer than it takes to press the 'dismiss' button, but that smooth transition between deciding to expend free time and actually engaging with the act is a particularly temperamental moment in which interruptions are rarely tolerated. Visual media has established itself in this field well enough, but when it comes to the interactive realms- well, let's just say we take our agency a lot more seriously, and are willing to get a lot more vocal when that agency is robbed of it's momentum. Of course, it is the Assassin's Creed advert which takes it one step further to invading the game, but what if I told you that's not even nearly the worst such advertising I've seen?

There was a time when Street Fighter V experimented with In-game ads such as clothing items and background prints to promote their upcoming events- a shattering blow to the immersion of the game heightened by the apparent threat of penalisation towards any player who took the impetus to turn them off. (How petty.) UFC 4 took thinks a step even further by taking the commercial break in the game and slotting in a video advert for Amazon's The Boys- before that prospect was spat at by the public enough to make those developers reverse course. There's never an end to the amount of people out there frothing at the mouth to push the boundaries just that step further at the cost of their reputation and morality, all to try and score some cheap marketing points. And it all supremely sucks.

There is room for marketing in gaming, sure. But I think it's fair to all to insist it remains squarely within the realm of Free-to-Play games. Sell your ads slots to Fortnite or Apex Legends, sure the returns won't be that high, but they're never that high anyway. Digital advertising is such a bizarrely wasteful money sink that the only reason it exists as largely as it does is because the world of marketers has grown big enough to advocate for itself against within a larger market that really should know better. (But don't let the people in charge know that. Youtube and everyone else online really needs their money.) The realm of a purchased game is a seal between the buyer and the maker, and anyone who tries to insert themselves into that relationship is declaring open season on themselves for all the world to pounce on.