Check this out if you want.  It’s very slow, very boring and the exact same game as any Mafia War, FarmVille Facebook game you’ve ever played.

A friend of mine sent me an invite to play this game, and my first thought was, “you’ve gotta be shitting me, is this an app to promote the same Dante’s Inferno game from EA that got second place on my Worst Video Game Marketing Campaigns of 2009?”

Yes.  Yes it is.  Despite the slowness of the game, despite the fact that it’s a clone of other popular games on Facebook, the only thing that shocked me about this is that they actually made it.  I mean, if you’re gonna piss me off, do so in a way that doesn’t bore me to tears.  Even the UI, which seems to be created with the elegance of a crowbar is fitted to promote in the most visible way the upcoming game.  I guess subtlety is not in Visceral/ EA’s vocabulary.

Click to embiggefy

Before I sound like I’m picking on Dante’s Inferno, I want to say that they’re doing the right things, they’re creating a bit of controversy, they’re making marketing campaigns based upon the content of the game, they’re expertly using the language of the story and of the game to communicate to its potential customers.  All of those things, they’re spot on.

Unfortunately, the execution of these efforts are just wrong.  From the #EAFail grope a booth babe contest, to this Facebook application.  Yes, they should be on Facebook, yes they should be leveraging social media.  Unfortunately, this effort is so slipshod and devoid of any real thought that it almost pains me to say that I miss them pissing me off.

If you’re going to offend me, do so intelligently, not by copying what EVERY OTHER FACEBOOK GAME IS DOING.

Dante’s Inferno marketing, once controversial and offensive has entered into the bland and “meh” category.

I’m a huge fan of RPGs in general.  I spent hours and hours playing Daggerfall, in fact I still have an old PC where I can play it every once in a while in all its pixelated glory.  When I fired up Dragon Age: Origins, I was lost in the stories of the downtrodden elves who were essentially gentrified into the slums of human cities.  I both envied and pitied the plight of the powerful mages.  I managed to play through every origin story until my last one as a dwarf fighter noble.

I’d remembered Nick Yee’s Daedalus project about the perception of beauty, attractiveness and race.  So I decided to find out what life was like as a dark-skinned dwarven noble.

I was immediately plunged into the intrigue and deception politics of the dwarven court, it was well written, complex and satisfying.  Yet there was something that pulled at me.  There was something wrong.

My father, my brother, my best friend… the arena master, the two dwarven girls who agree to a threesome.  All fair skinned.  Once I made that connection, I tried to find another dark skinned dwarf like myself.  While I’m sure there are dark-skinned dwarves at some point, I couldn’t find a single one in the origin stories.  It seems I wasn’t alone in noticing the lack of pigmentation in dwarven society as the blog Brain Dump also noticed.

Why was it overlooked or disregarded by the Bioware team?  Did they not notice the discrepancy?  Did market research show them that the RPG population was so completely dominated by whites that they didn’t need to represent other skin-tones in the game?  Is it really so difficult to make the skin tone of the player character a hitch to which the other familial pigmentations are attached to in a sort of variation of tone?

I ended up chatting with a few friends of mine from Spark Plug Games about the technical feasibility of making the player character’s skin tone a factor in dynamically generating any familial skin-tones.  They said it wasn’t hard to do, games make much more dynamic calculations and decisions on the fly than just rendering a series of colors.

I still couldn’t really pin down why it bugged me so much.  Then, it hit me.  Sort of.

I’m white.

I don’t live in an area where I’m the different one.  Where I grew up, my race never really was an issue.  I wasn’t the different one.  However, now that I’m in a mixed-race marriage where my wife has described to me what’s embedded in the experience of being the one that’s different, the one that’s had to be very conscious of her pigmentation, I realized I was uncomfortable because this game had made me experience something I’d never experienced before.

I became the outsider in a world separated by pigmentation.  Sure, no one in the game treated me differently, they made no differentiation to me based on my skin color.  Yet, I felt it.  My character was different than my own family, than my friends, than every other dwarf I related to.

What I experienced at that moment of revelation was two-fold.  I was drawn into an emotional and empathetical experience by a video game.  For only a few moments, I felt a fraction of what it may be like to be the outsider, the one who’s different.  It made no difference to how I was treated, I was different and it mattered to me.  I didn’t want them to recognize my difference, I didn’t wanted to be treated differently… I just ended up looking for some other character that looked like me.

The second thing I noticed was that whether it was intentional or unintentional on the part of Bioware to make the pigmentations on the families static, to not place any (that I noticed) black dwarves in the origin experience seemed to me a slight injustice.  I know that even with this slight experience, I cannot even come close to relating to anyone who’s suffered a real injustice for their race, but if a video game can give me that experience, I can recognize the amazing potential to teach people, to have them experience life from another perspective and ultimately, contrary to some punditry out there, raise more thoughtful and empathetic people… even if they’re playing a bloody good game like Dragon Age.

Update: Due to heavy traffic from GamePolitics & Kotaku… my site got broken.  I apologize for the loss of images and normal theme.  It will resume when the traffic subsides,  I never expected this much attention.

2009 was a pretty good year for video games.  It gave us Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Modern Warfare 2, Dragon Age, Assassin’s Creed 2, Scribblenauts and so many other good games.

On the flip side, we were assaulted with horrible games like NBA Unrivaled, Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust and Dragonball: Evolution.

Some of the video game marketing campaigns left us thinking “what fresh hell is this?”  2009 saw some incredibly stupid, offensive, ineffective and dumb marketing campaigns for video games too.  Here are the ones that angried up our blood and became stains on the internet.

Enjoy.

#5:  Dead Space Extraction

For a decent game that followed up a fairly successful attempt at an original IP from EA, Dead Space Extraction really pushed what the graphics could do on the simpering Wii.  The story didn’t suck, the characters were interesting and there was a surprising reaction to Lexine Murdoch (which is a pretty dumb name) as a compelling character in which people actually cared about her final fate.

Where they went wrong with this was the marketing of the game.  It was really nowhere to be found.  For a decent prequel to a decent game, the marketing was haphazard.  It really felt like EA didn’t know how to market this game.  It’s a survival horror – rail shooter game for the Wii.  Prominently featured is Lexine, but her game time wasn’t really representative of the top billing on the cover art.

Overall, Dead Space: Extraction’s marketing felt shoddy, incoherent and plug and play.  Sad, because it’s a decent game.  I felt like EA’s marketing for this game basically said, “Hey gamers, here’s Dead Space, remember you kinda liked the other game?  Well, this one’s a prequel, and it’s for the Wii.  We think you’ll really enjoy it, or not.  Either way, it’s here and you can buy it if you want…”

#4: Modern Warfare 2: Infinity Ward

There’s no doubt that Infinity Ward spent a shitload of money on this marketing campaign.  They integrated an excellent social marketing campaign through Twitter, their display at E3 was phenomenal and everything gelled at the right time, had the right message and at all times, reinforced gamers’ resolve to buy this game, twice.

Until F.A.G.S.

Or, “Fight Against Grenade Spam”.  Where you see the “Blunt Trauma” perk (get it?  get it?  It’s a pot joke! OMGLOL) Where Cole Hamels gives this incredibly stupid PSA message about grenade spam.

Wait, aren’t all videogames catered to the audience already? No not exactly. There are games for everybody, there are game genres (shooter, racing, sports), there are franchise games (Halo, GTA, Call of Duty) and then there are games that target a very specific audience. Take for example Doublefine’s new release Brutal Legend.  Sure it has all the elements of a platformer/rpg but in in looking at the game it’s clear that the folks who will get the most out of this game, are metal fans who don’t just love videogames but also metal, metal music, and lots videogame iconography and references.

Granted you’re not going to hate the game if you don’t like metal (or Jack Black for that matter — he’s the lead charcter Eddie’s voice) because when you take away the metal covering, it’s still a videogame. It’s just this one is heavily steeped in rock references, and for fans of the genre, particularly classic metal, it offers a whole other level of enjoyment. EA and Doublefine obviously would be overjoyed to have everyone love the game  but they know that there is that specific audience that’s going to really LOVE the game more than the average gamer and that’s what all this effort is for.

To get a little more generic, take a look at Beatles Rock Band. Yes Rock Band is immensely popular and the Beatles, well … it’s the Beatles. So here you have a tailor made version of the game that gets a whole new generation of Beatles fan but hooks all of the folks (kids and adults) who really dig the fab four. In fact, for the hardcore Beatle you even get to unlock a whole new batch of minutiae that was never before available. So in catering to their audience Harmonix killed two birds with one stone — they made a new Rock Band and tapped the massively large Beatle fan base. Mission accomplished.

Take look at the slew of classic arcade releases that hove come out as downloads in the last few years with everything from Monkey Island to Pac-Man — the gamers who were reared on this stuff and could only play them in the arcades or on old PCs, now immediately gravitate to these old games and for a few bucks they get to relive those happy days and keep the game on their hard drive. It’s a gimmie for the companies who figure out those “classics” to serve up because they already have an audience waiting for the next oldie to get the console treatment.

heroes for hire

We here at SOS having already commented on the success of some comic book games this year (Arkham Asylum and Wolverine) and the preponderance of gaming at this year’s Comic-Con we know this is one of those target audiences developers would love to nab full force. With that we see another entry into the fold of trying videogame direct marketing to the comic book crowd. Enter Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, the follow up to the successful first game from Activision which delivers better gameplay and graphics but for the comic book fans — the game offers up even more. Two classic story lines, Civil War and Secret Wars, a bunch of obscure Marvel characters you rarely think about as a comic book reader, and a ridiculous collection of trivia that either increases your comic book knowledge or verifies that you spend too much time reading one type of literature.

By throwing these elements into the game, it’s clear Activision is attempting to  speak directly to that loyal and enormous comic-book audience — the only problem is that not enough of them game. Instead you get the hybrid of comic book fans who also love games and maybe they can convince some of their non-gaming comic book friends to check out the game.

In all of these instances and many more what you can see occurring is that developers and publishers are starting to realize that there are opportunities make a game that targets a core albeit often very specific group,  while still making an enjoyable game that anyone can play without ever having read every issue of Civil War or have a photographic memory of every classic heavy metal album. The trick is to acknowledge your target demographic without insulting them but don’t spend so much time on doing so that you forget that the title still needs to be a game you would want to play.

EA has launched its new Circle of Hell marketing campaign for their upcoming Dante’s Inferno game.  When we last heard from EA, they were promoting their “Lust” campaign where people were encouraged to commit acts of lust on Booth Babes (or Costumed Representatives as EA suddenly decided to call them after they were called on it).

At the core of the marketing idea, basing a new marketing campaign off of each circle of hell, I think is pretty brilliant and absolutely appropriate.  The interplay of issues in morality and choice is well represented.  I absolutely respect and enjoy the idea of the campaign.  However, what I have an issue with is the execution of those ideas.

The new campaign is based on Greed.  What EA has done is send the press wonderfully designed checks for $200.  The dilemma is simple and obvious.

In Dante’s Inferno, Greed is a two-headed beast. Hoarding wealth feeds one beast and squandering it satiates the other. By cashing this check you succumb to avarice by harding filthy lucre, but by not cashing it, you waste it, and thereby surrender to prodigality. Make your choice and suffer the consequence for your sin. And scoff not, for consequences are imminent.

From a creative standpoint, I have to give kudos to EA’s Dante’s Inferno marketing team.  This is a fantastic way to engage the community, the media in a debate about the essence of greed, avarice, waste and the results of one’s actions.  Of course, this is all done in the context of the video game.

Previously, I’ve noted that “just getting people to talk about you” is dead.  Now, context matters when you’re marketing.  This shifts the attention off of EA and onto the recipients of the checks.  People will expect them to announce what they’ve done with the check, the community will want a debate about whether it’s OK to cash the check, thus relieving EA of the burden of holding too much money in their bank account, or to not cash the check and refuse a gift that could bring some betterment to others or yourself.

Personally, I liked the response from Brian Crecente at Kotaku.  They burned the check.

He mentions near the end that the ball’s now in EA’s court.  The temptation has been removed and now the moral obligation is thrust upon EA to either keep the money, giving into their own avarice or donating it to a charity like Child’s Play, and relieving them of the guilt of prodigality.

While I applaud this particular campaign, I think it’s effective and creative, there’s something about it that troubled me.

Given EA’s history of draconian DRM, alleged exploitation of former NFL players, rampant acquisitions, stupid marketing campaigns and general profiteering off of the backs of gamers, there’s a lingering sense that it’s just wrong(ish) to throw money at people and force them into a moral quandary.  For EA to try to teach people a moral lesson when they themselves have repeatedly proven that they fail on the moral front on so many occasions seems hypocritical.

I’m reminded of the phrase:

First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to cast out the mote out of your brother’s eye.  (Matthew 7:5)

So, at face value, this is a fantastic piece of marketing… but because the source is EA, the creative sheen is somewhat tarnished and ultimately becomes another reason to distrust EA.