So, I was watching House the other night on Hulu, and this ad popped up. It was for a videogame, Uncharted 2.
The ad was supposed to be touting the very high quality of the graphics and rendering in the game. What it was actually touting was sexism, and it was so infuriating that I actually had to go take a time out and stare angrily into the fridge for a few minutes after watching it. Fridge-staring indicates that I am seriously perturbed, people.
I couldn’t find an embeddable (or captioned) version of the ad, but here’s a link.
And here’s a description/transcription, for those who don’t feel like watching, are visually impaired, or are hearing impaired.
The ad opens with a scene panning across a living room with a giant television on the wall, paused in-game. A kitchen can be seen just beyond. Your average hapless-looking white guy is standing in the foreground, and he says:
“Dear PlayStation, I’ve been playing Uncharted 2 for days, but my girlfriend won’t stop watching because she thinks it’s a movie.”
The ad cuts to an office with a white guy in a suit, leaning back in a chair, another big television on the wall, showing graphics from the game. As the man talks, we are shown clips of in-game footage.
“This is pretty common, Jason, I mean, just look at this game, you know, you got napalm strikes, epic gunfights, impossible escape scenes and a plotline filled with betrayal, give her an hour or so, she’ll know it’s a videogame.”
The ad cuts back to the living room, where Jason, looking haggard, says:
“It’s been two days.”
The girlfriend, a conventionally attractive white woman, comes out of the kitchen with a bowl of popcorn, and says:
“Ready honey?”
Jason, his voice slightly strangled, replies:
“Yeah.”
Cut back to White Man In the Office, saying:
“Yeah, I’m gonna file this under ‘not an issue.’”
The ad closes with a title card with the logo and rating.
So, what this ad is basically telling us is that:
A. Women are so gullible/lacking in intelligence that they cannot tell the difference between a videogame and a movie.
B. Women do not play videogames. Neither do people who are not misogynists.
C. Specifically, PlayStation does not want women to buy this game.
I think that pretty much covers it.
Videogaming culture is pretty much rife with the -isms, but this seems to be a particularly flagrant example. I personally don’t play video games because I lack the coordination and processing skills to play them well, and I do not like to do things that I am bad at. But I probably would, and I would probably enjoy it. I certainly enjoy watching people play videogames, and yes, I said “watching,” as in I am fully aware that it is a videogame and it is still interesting to me.
But I do know ladies who play videogames, including some ladies who are very good at them, and some ladies who are pretty darn famous for it. I can’t imagine what it’s like for prominent women actually in the industry; presumably women do in fact work at Sony and at the advertising agency which made the Uncharted 2 ad, and I wonder how they must feel about this ad and the messages that it sends. Not just about the game, but about their companies, and about the industry as a whole.
I wrote recently about the strangely gendered nature of advertising and how it seems like it would do more harm than good. But, clearly, I’m missing something here, because if sexist advertising was not successful, it wouldn’t be used. Advertisers and companies which sell things are smart.
This leads me to an inevitable conclusion: Is Sony actually specifically marketing to the misogynistic demographic? Establishing an all-male space with this game with the goal of selling it to men who think that women should be excluded from gaming? Whether these viewers really think that women are so gullible that they will mistake a video game for a movie or they think that the ad is funny because it plays on some old tropes about women and gaming, there’s obviously something about this ad which is appealing to them and making them buy the game.
So, Sony thinks that it will make more by being sexist than it will lose because a few people opt not to buy this game. That’s pretty cold.
I wish I normally had enough extra money to spend on video games and equipment, just so I could do something boycotty with this.
It’s a big issue for those of us who are social justice activists and like video games. The industry — from distributors all the way down to fan groups — is incredibly toxic towards anyone who isn’t part of the Tucker Max demographic. Advertising is often especially awful, even when the games themselves aren’t — the ads for Evony being a prime example. It’s a massively multiplayer real-time strategy game. The ads for it got progressively more boobocentric despite the lack of anything boob-related in the game itself.
I personally try to stay the hell away from fandoms, use /ignore and /report commands liberally when I’m playing MMOGs, and go to places like The Iris Network and GameCritics for reviews and recommendations. And I feel icky about buying games from distributors that I know engage in misogyny.
WHYYYYYYYYY?
I like games! I like cinematic, engrossing games with ridiculously good graphics and a beautifully written storyline!
Why do they have to ruin this by going “girls are dumb! Hur hur!” in their advertising? >.<
@kaninchenzero:
Not being a gamer myself (apart from a stint with free MMORPGs as a middle-schooler) — seriously, there no woman-friendly fora? [Textual marker of distress] Fandom’s half the fun for the media that I do use, and I suspect gaming would be similar.
Aoede, I’m socially-avoidant generally and I don’t play the metagames of MMOGs. So mileage may vary a lot. But in my experience, no. There are very few spaces that are safe for women, LGBTIQA folk, people of color, religious minorities (though agnosticism and sometimes atheism are tolerated; techie bias at work there), poor people*, people with disabilities, pick your marginalization. Those that are safe are either invitation only and heavily moderated or are tiny and obscure and are mostly the fora inhabited by people who know each other from other places and happen to be gaming together. Official fora almost never are safe; moderators claim to be unable to keep up with the amount of traffic such sites get and only the most egregious behavior from privileged persons is questioned.
(The reverse is often not true; Microsoft’s XBox Live has famously suspended the accounts of queer people who stated their sexuality in their profile, claiming they violated their Terms of Service sexual harassment clauses. The point that heterosexual people announce their sexuality in all kinds of ways without having to say “I’m straight” was lost on them.)
Even among people who might be sympathetic to the perspectives of marginalized persons, there tends to be a great deal of weight given to intent over outcome. My standard example for this is the ambiance of the undead-controlled areas in World of Warcraft. Among other creepifying decorations, there are a whole lot of human corpses dangling from trees by ropes tied around their necks. Having done a fair amount of work on my own internalized racism before I played WoW, the first thing that came to mind when I saw them was the history of lynching in America. Nearly everyone I spoke to about it said that they’d never seen it that way until I pointed it out and though now they did, they didn’t think that was Blizzard’s intent when they designed the areas. I never claimed it was. But it never occurred to them (Blizzard or white players) to consider the effect it might have on someone who didn’t have the luxury of considering a century of racially-motivated terrorism as distant history. My wife started crying before I finished describing these areas to her; she didn’t even have to see them.
Of course, she once spent a couple hours hiding with her brother and sister in the footwell of her parents’ car while they drove through Mississippi flanked by men on horses in white robes.
* An appallingly large fraction of gamers have libertarian/Social Darwinist leanings, more than enough to insist very loudly that poor people have no right to game and developers should push bleeding-edge technology at all times. The ones who aren’t don’t care to argue with them.
I’m glad I’m not the only other person who wasn’t thrilled with the ad. It’s made worse by the fact that 1) I AM a gaming woman and 2) Uncharted 2 is actually one of the least sexist games I’ve ever played. I was waiting for Uncharted 2 for almost a full year, and it is actually a fantastic, wonderful game with incredibly strong female characters. But this ad just ruffled my feathers, because OBVIOUSLY it’s not like the girlfriend would want to play the video game or anything.
Sadly, video games continue to be seen as a “boys club,” even when 50% of the gaming populace has two X chromosomes. This ad could have been done making the same joke but with way less unfortunate implications, but I guess someone at Sony’s ad department thought this was the way to get the most customers
@Sara:
Not all women have two X chromosomes.
This makes me so angry, People may say that its just an advert an that it shouldn’t be worried about, but it reinforces false stereotypes which in this day and age should have been wiped out.
but as it is people think its funny to use these in advertising, not knowing the potential consequences!
The next generation of children may watch this advert or other similar things on television and think its ok to have these views, and that’s just wrong.
Yes. I saw the ad and was squicked out by it, but could not put my feelings into words. Thank you for this.
God of War II once made the “What your boyfriend’s looking at” segment on The Soup with Joel McHale. Which I thought was squicky-larious, considering that I was playing it at the time.
And what kaninchenzero said.