Me and my partner, Jordie Bellaire, are going to a total of 5 images of a propagandist nature for our final project. They will tell a narrative story, use differing techniques, and will be a chronological sample of how propaganda can change over time during one event to suit the needs or mood of the occasion. I apologize if I somehow mix up some of the concepts or have them in a differing order than Ms. Bellaire may state. We've only had a couple serious sessions about the project but are very in tune with our concept and are enthusiastic to begin the project.
The First Poster:
The first poster will be very similar to what I refer to as the "passive H1N1 propaganda". While being influenced by the current coverage of such a widespread illness, I think that the digital media (such as television news) has a much more successful time inciting fear about H1N1. All print materials I have seen appear pretty passive, with the same listings of ways to prevent the disease that I believe the CDC distributed. I think the importance of listing mundane yet common knowledge things to prevent illness is a great start to a narrative on any disease outbreak.
The audience for the first poster would be the general public, anyone who could comprehend the material. I think if the same information the poster boasts were instead on a paper pamphlet, then it would be distributed at schools, government offices, and any high traffic areas (like boarding a cruise ship). However for a poster to be affective I think it would be displayed in hospitals, doctor's office waiting rooms, post offices, human resource offices, and in school clinics. In these cases the audiences would be the adults or employees of said institutions. I'm sure these posters would often be ignored.
I think our audience would have the knowledge commonly associated with these posters, like using hand sanitizers and washing one's hands. It would not be broadcast with anymore haste or importance than a regular flu outbreak in a controlled area. The intention of this specific poster would be to remind, more than teach or to provoke thought. Like a loving mother who calls to make sure you set your house alarm and turned of the stove, these posters would be a silent piece of paper that if read would perhaps give people impetus to go those little steps to prevent the onset of illness. The poster will also contain symptoms that someone might not consult a doctor over. Running noses, dry mouth, coughing, etc. Anything that could be associated with a common cold that could be treated with drug store medicine or perhaps could be a associated with seasonal allergies. Again these symptoms are listed but with no sense of urgency behind them.
The audience will most likely care about the issue at hand like most flu outbreaks. There are the section of people who will pay attention, take their vitamin C and have a preventative agenda. Then there will be those who will not alter their habits dramatically or might not even care.
It will be visually dominated by text with a simple line drawing of someone washing their hands. It will be a simple and easy to understand design that appeals to all who wish to view and or respond to what the poster will have to say. All text and the drawing will be white on blue (the predominant color of our campaign) which is associated with hospitals and other medical organizations.
(In all honesty I have forgotten what the second poster will contain! I could carry on with the third, fourth, and fifth, but for sake of surprise and buildup of our viral narrative I will post this now and edit it further later. I think the concept will come across as a much stronger sequence if this information is given. The second poster is the beginning of the turn of events and the crux on which the true propaganda begins. Forgive me, for the first poster is rather mundane but almost sets the stage for the "before" mentality of this epidemic, which is how I (and perhaps Jordie) feel is the common cultural regard to illness or epidemics from flu to H1N1.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Advertising in Video Games
No, I wasn't delaying this blog post because of video games. Okay, well maybe I used some of the time I could have been writing this playing Ghostbusters: The Video Game, but without such game player-y I would not have been inspired to write on this topic. I also have misplaced my third pair of glasses, but I am so committed to my academic obligations that I will write this while squinting.
So a few days ago I fire up my PC and decide to blow off some steam and play Ghostbusters. In this really well done game you are a rookie member of the busters and you run around with Egon, Venkman, and Ray blasting the shit outta some ghosts. It's pretty incredible. So I'm in this hotel attempting to re-capture Slimer when I go into this little alcove and their is a Doritos vending machine. A fucking DORITOS VENDING MACHINE. I got pissed. Then later on in the streets of New York I am fighting gargoyles. I see a Doritos truck.
Well at least they were using their logo from the 1990's, considering the game is set around Thanksgiving time 1991.
In-game advertising has increased in both popularity and severity over recent years. In 2005 around fifty-six million dollars went into in-game advertising. The ads target a male 18-34 demographic, and is becoming a popular alternative to television advertising (for that demographic). If a person (or an 18-34) year old man is playing video games he is not watching his television for commercials, he is either using that television to play games or he is ignoring it for his computer screen.
Now there are two different types of in-game advertisements, static and dynamic. Static advertisements are ads that are in the game's code and do not change. They are like product placement on television shows and in movies. My Ghostbusters trucks and vending machines are static advertisements. Sports games often use these kind of ads. Here is a screen shot from FIFA 09, a soccer game.
Not a very good image, but you can see the long banner of advertisements in the background. Now static advertising is often used on in-game billboards, or if in a soccer game, the running strip of ads along the stadium. I don't really take much offense to these ads because we see ads in those locations in real life. I think its much more excusable for sports games like FIFA 09, because it is a game centered on reality. As a player you are playing digital incarnations of real people on real soccer teams. Other games, like Ghostbusters, are still set in reality (New York) but other than the setting all characters and scenarios are fictional and Doritos sort of pulls you out of that gaming zone. Even the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is a fictitious character made up for a fictitious brand.
Dynamic advertising is even more annoying that static. In this day and age, most games are internet capable, played on video game systems that are hooked up to the 'net, or on PC. These connections to the World Wide Web are what dynamic advertisers love. A dynamic advertisement in a video game is one that can be altered remotely. That means a person at an ad company can switch out the advertisements in a game as they get new fodder. For example, in a first-person shooter known as SWAT (and its sequels) you were playing a part of a fictitious SWAT team and are entering civilian areas to save hostages and kill bad guys. In these civilian areas there were an excessive, and I mean excessive amount of movie posters everywhere. These posters also changed as new movies came out. I think I remember playing and there was a SAW movie poster and one of the Harry Potter cinematic opus' next to each other. As soon as new movies were released they would update the posters to be the next batch of "coming soon."
Now while movie posters does not seem like a BIG deal, I have another perpetrator of dynamic in-game advertising, and I think this one constitutes as propaganda! Barack Obama used dynamic advertising during his campaign in a racing title known as Burnout Paradise. These ads debuted January 2008 and proclaimed things such as "Early Voting Has Begun: voteforchange.com". This is the first time a presidential candidate has ever used games as a forum for advertising their campaign, and it was paid for by the campaign and not some super liberals over at Electronic Arts.
And the Obama campaign did not stop there. The ads appeared in eighteen different games, like: Guitar Hero 3, The Incredible Hulk, NBA Live 08, and NFL Tour. The ads were only offered on these games being played on an XBOX 360 and those using its internet connectivity known as XBOX Live. Furthermore these ads only appeared in Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Montana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Nevada, New Mexico, Florida and Colorado. The only states where early voting was happening.
At the time XBOX Live conducted a poll in which 100,000 users participated. The vote ended with Obama taking 43 percent of the vote, with McCain with 31 percent. Interesting...
So why does advertising in games push my buttons? You get commercials on television, print ads in magazines, and you drive home and see billboards-- so why would in-game advertising piss someone off? All of those activities are set in reality, or at least what we conceive reality to be. I am still myself as I sit on a couch and watch television, or read a magazine, or drive in my car (or at least I hope I am myself). However, in a game universe you are playing in a differing reality and as a different person. While all the activities above are escapism in varying degrees, playing video games is a little different than watching television.
You are not playing yourself in a game no matter if it looks like you, acts like you, or even has your name. If you followed all those guidelines, you would still only be playing a parody of yourself in a fictional universe. Some games do not allow you to "create yourself" so you are playing through a set protagonist. Here a gamer is the protagonist since they control their actions, but they accept that the protagonist is something separate and is not the same as the player.
Often in protagonist based games, or even in create-a-character games, the character you are controlling will be forced to do things or will need to do things that one would never conceivably do in reality. In the game-space it seems quite normal, not unlike our versions of normality during our nightly dreams. These actions give us a sense of escapism and are often fantastical like: saving the world from an unknown alien menace (Gears of War), gliding down as Batman on the Joker's goons and kicking their asses (Batman: Arkham Asylum), having six children (The Sims 3), or being a kick-ass sniper (Team Fortress 2).
I used those examples because they are some of the escapist behaviors I have engaged in playing video games. I love shooting aliens and saving the world vicariously through a male protagonist. Batman is an amazing superhero with a lot of problems, and he's got the coolest villains. I would never have six children in real life, but my sim did, because when she dies I want to have other characters to play so that I don't have to start from scratch. Although I would love to shoot a sniper rifle in real life, I cannot, so I shoot people in a wacky on-line shooter game until the whine, complain, and then finally rage quit.
All of the above escapisms make me happy. I feel good while I play these games and I understand that because of their fictional realms I can do these things and they are okay. I also don't think I would really enjoy sniping someone's head off in real-life unless they were a zombie or something. Plus, I don't have a penis, so I could never really be Batman or Marcus Fenix. I use these escapisms to balance an often confused and absurd reality (some existentialism for ya!), and although reality is fantastic (I do have Propaganda Art class with this guy named Robert Lovejoy), its nice to escape.
So imagine your reading an amazing fantasy novel by Dianna Wynne Jones and you turn the page to read the next chapter and there is an ad for Tylenol. Maybe you are an actor on stage delivering a soliloquy and the scene is interrupted with Obama walking out and saying "early voting is happening now." Those situations seem totally inappropriate right? Thus is advertising in video games. These evil corporational stinkies of reality are entering the domain I am using to escape them! They are pulling me out of the zone, leaving me to scratch my head, and make me furious that they are there. How can I not cross the streams in Ghostbusters when there is a Doritos machine in my peripheral game vision reminding me that I should take out the trash and maybe feed my cat?
tl;dr Advertisements in video games are infringing on my escapism as a gamer and are forcing me to be exposed to them. While I can mute television or go to the bathroom during commercial breaks, while I am playing a video game I cannot mute them or go to the bathroom, I simply have to keep playing.
If you don't find this funny, you are a communist. (<--- False dilemma!)
So a few days ago I fire up my PC and decide to blow off some steam and play Ghostbusters. In this really well done game you are a rookie member of the busters and you run around with Egon, Venkman, and Ray blasting the shit outta some ghosts. It's pretty incredible. So I'm in this hotel attempting to re-capture Slimer when I go into this little alcove and their is a Doritos vending machine. A fucking DORITOS VENDING MACHINE. I got pissed. Then later on in the streets of New York I am fighting gargoyles. I see a Doritos truck.
Well at least they were using their logo from the 1990's, considering the game is set around Thanksgiving time 1991.
In-game advertising has increased in both popularity and severity over recent years. In 2005 around fifty-six million dollars went into in-game advertising. The ads target a male 18-34 demographic, and is becoming a popular alternative to television advertising (for that demographic). If a person (or an 18-34) year old man is playing video games he is not watching his television for commercials, he is either using that television to play games or he is ignoring it for his computer screen.
Now there are two different types of in-game advertisements, static and dynamic. Static advertisements are ads that are in the game's code and do not change. They are like product placement on television shows and in movies. My Ghostbusters trucks and vending machines are static advertisements. Sports games often use these kind of ads. Here is a screen shot from FIFA 09, a soccer game.
Not a very good image, but you can see the long banner of advertisements in the background. Now static advertising is often used on in-game billboards, or if in a soccer game, the running strip of ads along the stadium. I don't really take much offense to these ads because we see ads in those locations in real life. I think its much more excusable for sports games like FIFA 09, because it is a game centered on reality. As a player you are playing digital incarnations of real people on real soccer teams. Other games, like Ghostbusters, are still set in reality (New York) but other than the setting all characters and scenarios are fictional and Doritos sort of pulls you out of that gaming zone. Even the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is a fictitious character made up for a fictitious brand.
Dynamic advertising is even more annoying that static. In this day and age, most games are internet capable, played on video game systems that are hooked up to the 'net, or on PC. These connections to the World Wide Web are what dynamic advertisers love. A dynamic advertisement in a video game is one that can be altered remotely. That means a person at an ad company can switch out the advertisements in a game as they get new fodder. For example, in a first-person shooter known as SWAT (and its sequels) you were playing a part of a fictitious SWAT team and are entering civilian areas to save hostages and kill bad guys. In these civilian areas there were an excessive, and I mean excessive amount of movie posters everywhere. These posters also changed as new movies came out. I think I remember playing and there was a SAW movie poster and one of the Harry Potter cinematic opus' next to each other. As soon as new movies were released they would update the posters to be the next batch of "coming soon."
Now while movie posters does not seem like a BIG deal, I have another perpetrator of dynamic in-game advertising, and I think this one constitutes as propaganda! Barack Obama used dynamic advertising during his campaign in a racing title known as Burnout Paradise. These ads debuted January 2008 and proclaimed things such as "Early Voting Has Begun: voteforchange.com". This is the first time a presidential candidate has ever used games as a forum for advertising their campaign, and it was paid for by the campaign and not some super liberals over at Electronic Arts.
And the Obama campaign did not stop there. The ads appeared in eighteen different games, like: Guitar Hero 3, The Incredible Hulk, NBA Live 08, and NFL Tour. The ads were only offered on these games being played on an XBOX 360 and those using its internet connectivity known as XBOX Live. Furthermore these ads only appeared in Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Montana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Nevada, New Mexico, Florida and Colorado. The only states where early voting was happening.
At the time XBOX Live conducted a poll in which 100,000 users participated. The vote ended with Obama taking 43 percent of the vote, with McCain with 31 percent. Interesting...
So why does advertising in games push my buttons? You get commercials on television, print ads in magazines, and you drive home and see billboards-- so why would in-game advertising piss someone off? All of those activities are set in reality, or at least what we conceive reality to be. I am still myself as I sit on a couch and watch television, or read a magazine, or drive in my car (or at least I hope I am myself). However, in a game universe you are playing in a differing reality and as a different person. While all the activities above are escapism in varying degrees, playing video games is a little different than watching television.
You are not playing yourself in a game no matter if it looks like you, acts like you, or even has your name. If you followed all those guidelines, you would still only be playing a parody of yourself in a fictional universe. Some games do not allow you to "create yourself" so you are playing through a set protagonist. Here a gamer is the protagonist since they control their actions, but they accept that the protagonist is something separate and is not the same as the player.
Often in protagonist based games, or even in create-a-character games, the character you are controlling will be forced to do things or will need to do things that one would never conceivably do in reality. In the game-space it seems quite normal, not unlike our versions of normality during our nightly dreams. These actions give us a sense of escapism and are often fantastical like: saving the world from an unknown alien menace (Gears of War), gliding down as Batman on the Joker's goons and kicking their asses (Batman: Arkham Asylum), having six children (The Sims 3), or being a kick-ass sniper (Team Fortress 2).
I used those examples because they are some of the escapist behaviors I have engaged in playing video games. I love shooting aliens and saving the world vicariously through a male protagonist. Batman is an amazing superhero with a lot of problems, and he's got the coolest villains. I would never have six children in real life, but my sim did, because when she dies I want to have other characters to play so that I don't have to start from scratch. Although I would love to shoot a sniper rifle in real life, I cannot, so I shoot people in a wacky on-line shooter game until the whine, complain, and then finally rage quit.
All of the above escapisms make me happy. I feel good while I play these games and I understand that because of their fictional realms I can do these things and they are okay. I also don't think I would really enjoy sniping someone's head off in real-life unless they were a zombie or something. Plus, I don't have a penis, so I could never really be Batman or Marcus Fenix. I use these escapisms to balance an often confused and absurd reality (some existentialism for ya!), and although reality is fantastic (I do have Propaganda Art class with this guy named Robert Lovejoy), its nice to escape.
So imagine your reading an amazing fantasy novel by Dianna Wynne Jones and you turn the page to read the next chapter and there is an ad for Tylenol. Maybe you are an actor on stage delivering a soliloquy and the scene is interrupted with Obama walking out and saying "early voting is happening now." Those situations seem totally inappropriate right? Thus is advertising in video games. These evil corporational stinkies of reality are entering the domain I am using to escape them! They are pulling me out of the zone, leaving me to scratch my head, and make me furious that they are there. How can I not cross the streams in Ghostbusters when there is a Doritos machine in my peripheral game vision reminding me that I should take out the trash and maybe feed my cat?
tl;dr Advertisements in video games are infringing on my escapism as a gamer and are forcing me to be exposed to them. While I can mute television or go to the bathroom during commercial breaks, while I am playing a video game I cannot mute them or go to the bathroom, I simply have to keep playing.
If you don't find this funny, you are a communist. (<--- False dilemma!)
Thursday, September 10, 2009
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