Thursday, October 3, 2013
Bioshock Ad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbRUTSeafcc
Here is a link to a commercial for a game called Bioshock Infinite that came out a while ago. This isn't the most relevant commercial anymore but it works. My initial response to this advertisement is excitement, because I have played the first games in this series and I thought they were great. Of course, if I hadn't played the first two games and I was not familiar with the series, then excitement would still be the emotion that the advertisement is attempting to evoke in the viewer. The music and the action are both exciting, peaking the viewer's interest. A line in the song is even “Stand tall for the people of America”, which may even evoke subconscious some patriotic emotions, or something of that sort. The ad is fairly short, running at only about one minute, and the message seems to be fairly clear. Developers want people to buy their product. Spreading the word through an advertisement obviously gets more people ready to buy a product, leading to more sales and more profit. The ad does initially make me feel like I need to buy the game, but that is mainly because I know from past experience that it should be of high quality, based on my knowledge of the past games. If I had never seen any of these games before, however, I am not sure how I might react to this ad. Only after some thought could I decide that I don't need the game as much as I first thought, but I would imagine if I had more money, I might not be able to think as clearly before making the purchase.
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Raymond, thank you for your post. I have never played computer games, but I think that they are very interesting. I know people play. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough time for playing, because I’m studying. The Study takes a lot of time. But I watched advertisement. It is really nice and interesting. I have never played Bioshock that is why I watched the ad like a short movie.
ReplyDeleteTatiana
It's very interesting to note that the commercial seems to sell Bioshock Infinite more on the action and spectacle aspects then the more intellectual portions of the game, IE its story, its satire on cultural mythmaking and the violence within its own medium, its commentary on how the cycle of violence is kept going, and so-on.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think this speaks to one of the larger problems in the videogaming industry, which is the over-emphasis on spectacle and mindless action to the detriment of everything else. Note how the grey-brown "realism" style has drowned out the more whimsical visuals of eras past in the bigger games, note how most of the games that excite me are being published in the indie scene, note how there seems to be a bubble building in the almost-certainly unsustainable Triple-A sales model for games; so much so that some are predicting another industry crash like the one in 1983.
This ad points us to a problem in videogaming, and that problem is us, and how we are seduced by flashy visuals and not by the deeper things in this emerging medium.