Talking to the Wall (5): The Lying Game

Advertising might be an easy target, but that doesn’t make it any the less worth shooting at. It’s also no surprise that, when advertising and games go out for a date, neither one comes out of the promotional meat-grinder looking any the better for their dalliance.

You might spend months looking forward to Call of Duty VII: Shootyboom Headfuck, say, and avidly download every cranium-splattering trailer you can find, but when the advert finally blarps its way onto your telly, you’re most likely to end up looking the other way and shaking your head, like a pornographer presented with his actors’ urology bills. In magazines, most ad pages might as well be advertising G-String Warrior II: Legends of KrackHaus as any real game, given their propensity for googly-eye-inducing lady-dumpling overload. The breasts in most games’ splashes are still so overloaded that they’d probably make a baby scared of contracting diabetes.

These children are cuddling a bottle containing morphine. It's for coughs, you know. What do you mean, no shame?Even by the ‘standards’ of a marketing industry predicated on barefaced lying and misrepresentation for cash, games adverts are universal in one particular quality: how embarrassingly pitiful they are. However, the saddening point isn’t that blockbuster adverts are terrible per se; it’s what their particular brand of pitiful says about how the industry sees itself and, by extension, you.

Let’s get to know the main enemy. Excluding Nintendo (who’ll get it next time), the most traditional formula for a blockbuster TV game advert runs on tracks made from pompousness, unoriginality and disappointment. They start like a Final Fantasy game, panning and sweeping over CGI vistas while orchestral scores pound out the impressiveness of their world with all the subtlety of one of Stalin’s five year plans. That’s pretty, we think, but irrelevant; I’ve seen this at least twenty seven times before, and I still don’t know who I have to kill. What’s next?

Well, what’s next is for us to zoom down to the personal level, where we meet dramatic, dynamic characters (bland, hatefully gruff ciphers) blurting out snippets of what, if I’m feeling charitable, might almost be describable as dialogue. Usually it’s haplessly-chopped drivel that makes no sense without having already played 10 hours of the game, but it’s included in an advert all the same, just to insult your intelligence with their stupidity: ‘The Gnomen are infiltrating the BPS! Send in the Arachtinators now! We need psych-rangers or we’re all frelled!’ You know the kind of thing: distressing pseudo-jargon assembled from a dictionary of stupidity by the kind of halfwits who might use sellotape to make a jigsaw.

“Exciting” things like explosions, simulated peril, and talking continue to happen while review quotes pop up on to the screen like some kind of moronic slogan bingo has begun. I’m doubtful, you know, that this is the kind of bingo anyone can win. But don’t worry about that, because the speed of the cuts is increasing and soon the screen will go black with a final triumphant orchestral parp. And then the advert will end with a date, much like the Mayan Calendar (which is due out on Xbox 360 later this year, by all accounts).

And every single one of them has the same text in the bottom of the screen: not actual gameplay footage.

In order to use this image to attack advertising, I have to acknowledge it is from threadless.com Why not buy a T-Shirt today?

You may have seen this a few times and ignored it, much like the warnings about seizures when you boot up your Wii. Given the quality of most Wii games out there, a seizure might actually be preferable to playing the game that’s loading. But I digress: Not actual gameplay footage. Oh. Erm. Right. Well, it’s not like I want to see what the game actually looks like when I play it, is it? That would be completely irrelevant to my decision whether or not to buy the thing.

To be fair, sometimes it says ‘footage representative of gaming experience’. But all the same, what does that actually mean? Well, it seems to mean ‘we’re still not showing you the game we’re advertising. At best we’re showing you a cut scene, which is the one part of the game you probably would skip given a choice. But this advert for a game does not include any real footage of the game it is advertising. Why don’t you buy our game?’

Not actual gameplay footage? Doesn’t that seem a little odd? Have you ever seen a trailer for a film which said ‘not actual film footage’ and featured scenes that aren’t even in the movie? Or featuring actors that aren’t in the film? No, you haven’t. Because that would be stupid.

When being advertised a car, are you sometimes warned that the car shown is not, in fact, a car? Not a different model, but simply not even a car. Erm, no, no, you aren’t. Because that would still be stupid.

You know that bit when they have a food challenge to see, for example, if you can tell which butter is the most butteriest butter ever buttered? Have you ever seen that with the caveat ‘not actual butter’ appearing? You may be asked if you believe it’s real butter, and it might in fact turn out to be margarine. But even that isn’t accompanied by the slogan ‘not actual margarine’. So no, you haven’t seen that in a butter advert. Because it would be absolutely stupid.

Sure, advertisers might airbrush the pictures, or miss out referencing where the product is a bit shonky, or use a bit of CGI to jazz up the mundane crap with pseudo-science, but at least the adverts for other things feature the things they are advertising in them. They may lie about how delicious the hulk of crap they’re selling is. They might use body doubles to make the breasts of their starlets appear even tastier, the better to be ogled by proles like us. But entirely avoiding showing any representation of the actual product simply isn’t possible in any other advert. Or, if it is possible, it makes so little sense to avoid showing the very thing you’re trying to sell during the act of trying to sell it that no one would do it. It’s like trying to sell pornography with pictures of genital-less dolls failing to be able to have sex, and then weeping.

That's you weeping, not the dolls. Dolls can't cry. Obviously. Otherwise that's all they'd ever do. Can you imagine spending that much time in the company of children?

But surely, compared to selling genital medicines, sanitary towels, junk food, insurance, and yoghurt, it can’t be that difficult? Most of advertising is about telling us that something ugly is actually beautiful, yet games already are more beautiful than we ever imagined they could be. Often the ugly thing being persuaded about their beauty by adverts is the consumer himself, but gamers don’t have to care about ugliness any more when their avatars could win modelling contracts, and when gaming is no longer a secret shame for furtive geeks. Isn’t half the battle already won?

This is not a caption. (Image from http://www.psfk.com)

You’d think so. But only until you start thinking about what the choices these adverts made say about the game industry’s self-image. And they are choices, not mistakes, given the millions of dollars that are spent on the adverts and the television airtime. Red Dead Redemption managed the unwanted feat of outdoing the adverts by making an interminable special out of stitched together cut-scenes, the better to bore you in advance of even playing the game. And given that far more money is spent on the promo budgets than, say, usability testing, or on working on something that would directly improve the experience of playing the game, they clearly think this approach works.

What this all means is that the companies who make games think the best way to sell them to you is to show them being anything other than what they are. They want to sell you games in the same way they sell you movies, through drama (not involvement), action (not activity), spectacle (not immersion), through watching a pretty thing, rather than playing an exciting thing.

And sure, these adverts may not be aimed at hardcore gamers, because most of them have already decided if they’re going to buy it or not before the console was even released, and are probably already arguing on message boards about what the sequel will be like. But all the same, isn’t the industry proposing that the best way to sell games to everyone outside the hardcore is to hide the actual game? That doesn’t suggest any status-insecurity on the part of the industry that made them, does it? And it doesn’t at all suggest that they think that the gaminess of games is its least attractive selling point, either. It’s not at all patronising for the people in charge of making games to treat their own products and consumers as if they should be anything other than the things that they are…

And it’s not merely patronising – it’s absurd. It suggests that the ambition behind the game, as ‘shown’ in the advert, isn’t necessarily for the studio to have made a good game, so much as to have made a blockbuster movie. That’s despite the fact that the ‘movie’ scenes they showcase are almost universally dreadful. Perhaps, and this is just a thought, people who can’t tell the difference between good and bad movies should be disqualified from being allowed to make any movie? After all, watching Goodfellas a few times doesn’t mean you’ve learnt how to direct a gritty cut scene. It just means the scene you do direct is likely to do no justice to either cinematography or gameplay. Or Goodfellas, for that matter.

And every attempt to sell gaming through these kind of pompous, slack-jawed, badly scripted scenes – scenes that are almost universally regarded as one of the worst abuses of the technology available to modern games - just underlines the gulf between what a game can do, and how different that is from how they present themselves. It’s arguable that game adverts have less self-awareness than the agent for a naked royal man on a horse. Christ, even people selling Spectrum games never had the nerve to suggest that the cover art represented the game, so why is the industry even less perceptive than it was at its beginnings?

At the same time as console manufacturers are trying to push their product as some kind of wonder-portal capable of removing the barriers between different media, and open up a whole new world of interaction, the people making the biggest cash-cow-games for these consoles seem to be stuck somewhere between a parody of Hollywood and a made-for-TV movie. It’s a shame, and it’s a bigger shame than just being a superficial symptom of advertising culture. Because the same processes that are used to target and sell games through adverts are also used to decide which ones to greenlight in the first place. It means that the misrepresentation used to sell games might actually damage the range and type of games that can be made in the first place.

And so it’s perhaps worth remembering clearly what games are: not only visually rewarding, but also fundamentally shallow, testament to our ability to make even the most degradingly miserable experiences outshine their banality. Games – when they’re allowed to – can speak in a visual language that has evolved into the most stunning eye-hug, and is overflowing with hypnotising examples of our capacity to be enthralled by contentless style. If that isn’t translatable into ad-speak, then nothing is – it practically is ad-speak already.

So why not sell them for what they are? It’s got to be better than pushing the torpid, digitised offcuts of a bad movie as if it was the answer to all your gaming needs. Especially when the only thing current adverts are an answer for is where games lead themselves astray… 

It practically advertises itself, you say? And strangely more-ish, too...

Postscript

Of course, blockbuster TV adverts are just one element of the lack-of-confidence trick perpetrated by the industry on its consumers. Next, it’s time to squint miserably at Nintendo's 'ideal' family.