The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Penny Arcade - Comic - All The Way Down
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - All The Way Down
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
Unknown User on
+11
Posts
And the Dating Sim he mentions is I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator. Put out but KFC (also a US fast food chain), you date different incarnations of Colonel Sanders.
How far does the rabbit hole go? Now we just need someone from Gawker (is that still a thing?) to write an article about this comic as I am pretty sure that's one of the signs of the Apocalypse and man am I ready for it!
And to give a little more backstory on the comic, Jerry and Ryan talked about it on the stream (VOD). They discussed the RPG and talked about how Wendy's should sponsor them because they talked about it so much. And then they got hungry and Laura (From Work) delivered Wendy's to them and they consumed it on the live stream. Finally, they realized they had, in effect, sponsored Wendy's and despaired.
I'm not sure if there were any more developments, like any actual twitter goings-on from Wendy's ("Senpai noticing us"). Pretty sure it just means that companies are now noticing the gamer market.
Don't forget the salad fries to dip into it.
Who remembers Chex Quest?
There was a video game starring the 7-Up Spot back in the 1990s.
-Tycho Brahe
I think you're missing the full story (check the newspost). It's not that it's brand advertisement games, but that they're approaching it in a way that's also ironically making fun of brand advertising games and even the brand itself. These companies are in on the joke with you, you see. And it turns out that ironically spent money is still money. We are weak to this type of damage.
Hmm.... deep fried salad... OFF TO THE PATENT OFFICE.
Yeah but this would kill them in real life I don't need a pen and paper RPG to tell me that
Plus hey, they don't even credit the author for their work which really says everything about the shittiness of their given quirky 'look at us' brand.
I feel like maybe you mistake my saying they are "in on the joke with you" as being my own take as opposed to the marketing front they are presenting. The joke they're laughing at is how many suckers they can get to buy their products, and you're never in on that one.
The author of the ad? It's an ad agency; their job is to be inseperable from the brand that said for the work. We how vendors to do internal work and we'd never have their name on anything.
This is Rick and Morty level meta-shilling in the same vein as McDonald's and their Sezchuan nugget sauce. I don't quite know how to process this, and apparently neither do Gabe and Tycho.
I hear they don't even have Gellar Fields in Economy. *shudder*
Buffs for eating these healthier alternatives:
Any homemade dish created from a meat substitute (Gain an additional +1 to your Strength stat, +2 if it's tofu)
Any non-fried side (Gain +1 to your Arcana stat, +2 if there's also no cheese involved)
Any green vegetable (Gain +1 to your Intelligence stat, +2 if it was locally sourced)
Any form of non-flavored water (Gain an additional +1 to your Grace state. +2 if it's tap or filtered water in a reusable bottle)
Any homemade salad (Gain an additional +1 to your Defense. +2 if the dressing is on the side)
On a serious note though, this doesn't work for you guys, does it? I mean, now we all have Wendy's top of mind, but that doesn't change the fact that it's pretty terrible food. Not that I have an inherent problem with fast food, and I eat it once a week on average, but I'm not going to advocate that as a smart or healthy choice regardless of what you eat.
So with that, perhaps the rhetoric on this sort of insidious is a bit overblown?
Scroll back a bit and read my first post. The entire point (and the reason for the comic and newspost) is that it did work on Jerry and Ryan.
Would I have gone to Wendy's if I hadn't read the article? I want to say "yeah probably" but who knows, maybe I'd have gone to Cook Out instead.
That is literally the core of marketing.
I mean you can argue what level of work counts for needing credit or not but uh, Wendy's already answered this by crediting the artists of the PDF. Just no one else.
Sorry, maybe that seemed like a naive take. Let me rephrase. I was fascinated by line at which it becomes non-obvious. I've never been unaware of Wendy's, and my hunger for burgers is fairly common. Wendy's is my default port-of-call for a burger. So the question, impossible to answer as it may be, was "was this marketing tactic effective on me" or did I still go to Wendy's in a parallel universe where they do not make a TTRPG based on their products?
That was good actually, i sink a bunch of (13yo) time into that
I've eaten Wendy's once, when a friend in high school dared me to eat the 4 stack burger. Haven't eaten there since.
I think it's entirely plausible that the countless trillions being spent on advertising are not returning their investment.
There's a billboard I see a lot, advertising the billboard company itself. It simply says, "You looked! It's working!" And yes, I did *see* the advertisement. But I can't think of any time I've actually acted on seeing any billboard. And clearly no one has acted on this particular billboard message, or they would have sold it.
Yeah but do you have a product or service to advertise? Presumably the Tampax commercials have little to no influence on men, yet those commercials are still made. Not everyone is in the target audience for every product.
I'm pretty sure that's completely wrong. Companies hire marketers (or use their internal ones) to try different campaigns (including no campaign) in various regions that are demographically similar. Then they compare results to see if it moved the dial. For the most part, these giant companies have figured out how these things worked long ago. They're not just shoveling cash in some advertising agency's door and crossing their fingers.
I personally hate advertising, and I do everything in my power to eliminate, reduce, and minimize the amount of advertising that I take in. I run adblockers on my browsers. I don't watch "real" TV, only watching streaming services with no advertising in them.
For some things, it's mere existence is enough to get me to buy into it, and anything more than that irritates me. Specifically in this regard I'm talking about movies. If Disney were to simply say "We're making a new Star Wars movie" I would buy in to that. No additional TV commercials, cereal boxes, cross-promotional branding, trailers, or anything else is required.
The advertising that works on me personally the best would be when new food or flavors are introduced at a place. And that's just an awareness thing. I need to know when a place has something new that I might like to try, otherwise I will likely never try it (unless word of mouth gets to me).
I'm not trying to say advertising is totally ineffective. It seems clear it makes a difference. But take the Super Bowl. How can a company really know that the vast cash they spent was worth it? They have no "control group", no America that watched a Super Bowl without their commercial.
I like Old Spice commercials a lot. I also buy their deodorant, because of the brands I know I will see in any store, it's the one that has the scent and texture I like. I think it's a massive stretch if someone suggested that the only reason I buy that product over Right Guard, which I don't like, is that wearing Old Spice brings me subliminal happiness by association with Terry Crews jokes. I have also found many Geico commercials to be funny and never once considered buying from them.
Im just saying that literally anyone I ask, "have you ever bought something because of a billboard, Super Bowl commercial, or wacky viral marketing campaign?" will probably say no. And yet the most common response to that answer is, "well that just means you're so brainwashed by the advertising you're not even aware of it's subconscious influence on you, you sheeple".
But to me it's less or a stretch to say that companies are conflating presence and awareness with actual desire to buy. Sort of like how companies still (erroneously) believe that all press is good press. Companies make decisions because they make money, true. But companies also do what everyone else does. And sometimes the Emperor is not wearing any clothes.
Instead, the classes are literally named after Wendy's foodstuffs with no further variation, they aren't puns or anything it's literally just your class is Spicy Chicken. The locations in the world are named after Wendy's advertising slogans. The continent is shaped like a burger, which already feels like the easiest thing to think of, but the actual relevant locations don't use the burger shape in any meaningful way to have creative and fun geography like the buns being more forested regions or having a big river where the condiments would be, just, nothin. They just kind of put stuff randomly on the general continent burger shape.
It feels like another system converted into Wendy's RPG with the absolute minimum amount of creativity and fun allowed in the conversion process.
KFC dating sim I also do not like at all. Let's take this dead old man we kinda stole the whole KFC thing from decades ago and make people wanna fuck him. That's normal. That's a fine human thing to be doing. Also you can't even fucking date him, apparently? So like, they're too scared to do the actual full creepy concept but just stupid enough to hint extremely strongly that you should want them to do the full creepy concept. No. Stop it.
I don't even have Wendy's in my country but I'm actively refusing to eat at Wendys or KFC because of how much I hate these advertising campaigns. They have successfully unadvertised to me.
I sometimes ponder what it would be like to see movies that, like you describe, I know nothing about except that they were being made. For a specific example, it's something that always crosses my mind when I watch Terminator 2. I imagine what it would be like to go into that movie, remembering that Arnold was the bad Terminator in the first movie, and then making it to the scene in the back hallway of that mall when you find out who the real heroes and villains are in T2. What a "holy shit!" moment that would be. If that movie was made today we'd probably have that scene in the stupid trailer. lol
Sadly, in this day and age, even if the makers of movies tried to keep everything under wraps, I think information would still find its way out into the world. And it's not like you can completely avoid it short of cutting yourself off from the internet and hiding in your house until the movie is released. I've seen plenty of links for articles about Star Wars 9 on the internet with pictures of Palpatine's ugly mug attached to them. I didn't even have to click to go the article. I've already seen spoilers just from scrolling down the Google News page.
-Tycho Brahe
That is exactly what happened.
See, so even back then the Terminator franchise was apparently famous for spoiling their own movies in the trailers (Looking at you, Genisys). lol
It would have been so much better to go in blind and not know that Arnie wasn't the bad guy until the crucial moment. If I remember right, you don't get any real indication up to that point that Robert Patrick is anything other than some human in a police uniform. Even when he takes out that cop in the beginning you don't see him stab the guy with a giant arm blade or anything. Sure, he seems pretty menacing from the very beginning and in hindsight we might be tempted to think there's no way we wouldn't see through him right away, but I'm not so sure if it was a truly blind first viewing.
-Tycho Brahe
Yeesh that sounds dire.
Like, it doesn’t take a lot to make some whimsical themed thing around food and D&D. Look at Kingdom of Loathing; Sauceror is a class in that game, and it’s a solid pun. And McDonalds long ago made the Hamburgler a thing. To not even try to spice things up is just lazy.