Penny Arcade - Comic - Marketopathogen Mist
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Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Marketopathogen Mist
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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That's some real bullchit.
Is there a completely different E3 that's about "social good"? Because I've watched / followed the E3 convention since I was a kid and this all sounds like a lot of hot nonsense.
Well it's all stuff for the planning of the next E3.
That's what this is all about.
The last decade has been an interesting transition for me. I went from being right in the target demographic for video games and genre entertainment to ageing out of it. Not begrudging it, I had a good run of twenty plus years were video game, comic, and sci-fi publishers were actively making product to appeal to me. Not many people get that privilege. But now they have moved on to Millennials and Generation Z ( don't worry guys, we'll eventually get a better name for you, remember Millennials were call Gen Y for close to a decade) And I have to wonder. Do these companies think the younger generations are incapable of recognizing disingenuous bullshit? They make an entertainment product whose prominent feature is the ability to continue charging escalating sums to the consumer. They talk about social good out of one side of their mouth while honestly believing the kids don't recognize the fact that they would gladly sellout their own mothers to keep government from passing lootbox regulation. These companies are more than willing to get into bed with the worst of humanity if it lets them maintain their business model. So, seeing them advertise meaningless drek about social good when half their CEO's had Epstein on speed-dial makes me despair for the state of the industry as my generation hands it off to the next.
Isn't that the fundamental assumption of marketing, regardless of who they are targeting?
To paraphrase a marketer, "Our favorite target is the people who think marketing doesn't work on them. Because they will believe they are fans of their own logical choices and will become the most fervent advocates for a product."
This is why con people target "smart" people, because people who claim to be smart are some of the dumbest people around. Pyramid schemes have thrived for years on the "Look I can spot a con from a mile away..." folks.
pleasepaypreacher.net
But the "chits for future use" thing cracks me up with how ineffective it sounds. "Why yes, another country just declared it illegal for us to sell gambling vehicles to ages 3 and up. But hey, remember last June when Detlef Schrempf played games for charity or last year when Ellen Page talked about gender in games? What slot machines? I don't know about you but I've already forgotten about them."
I think it's even dumber than that. It's more like thinking "we got some good press for paying a minority influencer to talk about E3" is going to provide some cover for the next time there's a school shooting and the NRA deflects to "videogames and mental health".
The background could have worked if they had something in front of it to make the text readable, but then they would be hiding the background and we want to see E3 people, not read it!
What bothers me the most is the bullets being outside of the margin that the rainbow bar the slide master uses probably had. But what probably happened was they were fighting the font size decrease, because they manually made the bullet area wider between the two slides to avoid just that. Powerpoint should have scaled those down. Though they are kind of wordy in and of themselves... but still.
edit: yeah, an evil person made that slide deck.
edit2: an absolute villain.
Chimaera Protocol was my D&D-themed prog-synth band in college.
They could also just not have giant walls of text.
I can picture whoever made this ignoring the audience so they can read off the slide.
"Here at Vaught Industries we believe it's a great time to be in the Super Hero business."
Seriously.... a really light blur pass and a bit of desaturation on the background image and add a 1px outline to the text. Presto you have a slide that that doesn't look like shit. Really just the text outline would make it readable. But who are we kidding, they know nobody actually reads this crap.
E3 doesn’t control the whole industry right? There are still going to be developers who deliberately don’t align with E3’s social good goals and it just means they probably won’t be showcased there. But it means they can’t fully control public perception of games
Like the whole point of 'doing good for goodness sake' would be utterly alien to them.
Have you played any Final Fantasy games? Because the answer is usually some kind of world-ending monster that combined the souls of humans with monsters from the moon.
This isn't new. Being a good person isn't new. It's not a generation thing. Gen X has hearts, Boomers have hearts, literally every other generation has good-doers. Millennials simply have very powerful communication tools that allow them to get their message far and wide in a way that generations before may not have had.
It takes an extraordinarily bad group of individuals to not have sussed out that basic goodness isn't some new thing. When they put the words social good and giving back in quotation marks, that's where the my alarm bells went off. Who does that? Who puts those words into quotation marks as if they're some kind of bizarre new fad concept? These things read like the slide of a super-villain bred by other super-villains, whose life of evil has been so insular that the concept of humanitarian work and altruism are these strange and novel things.
All this to say, these slides were written about a generation of people, but funnily enough, it more strongly reflects how bad the people writing the slides are, as a microscopic (versus macroscopic, not like bacteria) group of humans, while saying nothing novel about the generation in question.
This is a super weird take because the people with the finances to whale out and support this industry change are the older generations.
Though honestly this whole thread is kinda tiring. Businesses operate like this, they talk like this about everything because they're presenting it from a maximum gains perspective.
At least get a little joy from the fact that "what if we financed not acting like assholes as our brand?" implies a given amount of investment in actual good causes rather than whatever else they'd push money on.
EDIT: And no, I'd put money on them having the ability to source why they think this marketting strategy will work vs old marketing strategies. It's not some magic mirror that you can just turn around with 'this just mans they're evil, everyone else is great!'
"That, sir, is called a window. All the kids are looking through them."
corporations want to have a positive public image, and one of the ways they achieve that is by actually doing laudable things. The part people seem to be unaware of is that in a boardroom somewhere, someone is doing a cost-benefit on funding those laudable things
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
there's nothing really inherently nefarious about cause marketing, but as with anything else watching the sausage get made sometimes makes people uncomfortable
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
It's the latter point I think. This sort of thing is generally understood, but to have it brought into such stark relief can be amusing.
It's like Delzhand said near the beginning of the thread:
-Tycho Brahe
Just consume product, and then get excited for next product.
Shit, I've seen most of you cheering the exiling of the most stalwart, uncompromising, stubborn, paranoid, dies on every hill, advocate of keeping software free of corporate control that ever existed. Sure he was a bastard. But you need bastards at war. It's why he was so good at what he did. IMHO with his loss the fate of open software platforms is sealed. Less assholish people will compromise. They'll be "reasonable". Then welcome to your brave new world of everything being software as a service, and there is no escape from having all your personal data harvested 24/7. And if you don't like it, you're probably a nazi.
They have no shame in being this open about how they are using "social good" to loot the commons, because at this point they know they already have you by your souls. They can tell you exactly what they are doing, and you'll still repeat the arguments they've given you about how only bad people dislike the product.
Yeah, it's when you have a special spot to do some quiet mediation, but you don't really want anyone else to know about it.
You know, Favorite Oratory Mentioned Obliquely
Also, I don't care whether this is new or not, it doesn't make this slideshow any less yikes.
I feel like this should be self evident but when you're arguing for the necessity of bad people but can't describe what they did or even name them it's kind of a red flag.
I don't know who it just from the description; I doubt he has been this necessary. I have a few possible guesses in my mind of equally interchangeable and unimportant guys.
It's Richard Stallman, who was more than just a bastard, he was a disgusting creep, and his free software zealotry went far beyond usefulness into self-parody.
Yep, he's that guy we all know that could have actually gotten way more of what he said he wanted accomplished if he was a little less of a uncompromisingly pigheaded pedant. Also, he kept saying that there's no excuse for censoring actual child porn. And hitting on every attractive woman with which he came in contact. Imagine that guy, only given a position of power so that people covered for his behavior, and you couldn't complain about being on the receiving end of it because you don't want to make it a choice between you or him.
And this example says a lot about the rest of the post from which it originated.