Rebellion, Gore, and Sex: What’s in a Video Game Advertisment

From the young age of eight, I’d check the mail bin in our garage every Sunday morning for the newest copy of “Game Informer” magazine. I’d slobber all over the beautifully designed cover, just like with the big bowl of cereal I was eating. As I sat down in front of the Gamecube after my breakfast, I’d flip through the magazine during the loading screens: the full two page color advertisements filled with explosions and my favorite characters, the newest and greatest in gaming gear, and revolutionary new game ideas. I was almost as excited at the mere prospect of owning anything and everything that was advertised in the magazine as I was to beating the current level of the game I was playing at the same time. In my later years, the internet rolled along and reading the magazine became somewhat obsolete, but the fact remains that I’ve been bombarded to this day with advertisements about this “new media”: video games. As the majority of video games are targeted toward teenage and young adult males, the advertising seems to be directed in this direction as well. After picking out a random advertisement for a recently released game from a Game Informer magazine, it becomes apparent that my demographic’s apparent motivation to buy these games stem from our strong needs to aggres, dominate, and the extremely powerful appeal of sex.

Something that has received large criticisms since the dawn of 32-bit graphics is the way that women are portrayed in video games. It should come as no surprise to anyone that one of the easiest ways to appeal to young males are to feature main characters that are female, with unrealistically perfect body proportions and scanty attire. The front cover of this GameStop advertisment for the new game Anarchy Reigns spotlights an “exclusive character” that goes by the name of Bayonetta. Though her attire is nowhere near as scandalous as some other characters, she’s dressed in a tight black latex combat suit with high knee boots. On top of that, she’s thin beyond belief and has a gothic, seductive look about her. Indeed, looking at the rating for the game “M” (mature), two of the listed reasons for its categorization is “partial nudity” and “sexual themes”. 
What’s important about this is that the makers of this advertisement decided to put her as the main focus of the entire article. Her frame on the article takes up about over a third of the whole advertisement, and her character model is dead center. As Fowles mentions in his article “Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals”, “sexual appeal ... conventionally works better on men than women”. Indeed, immediately the male gaze, including my own, would have been drawn to her, before reading anything else on the whole ad. This kind of sexual-centric advertising for video games appears in a huge amount of ads for video games. In fact, some ads completely cut to the chase and feature near pornographic images of women with the game title over them, with almost absolutely no relation to any game information (Read more: http://tinyurl.com/cx8sadw). By putting a large figure of a seductive women smack in the middle of the advertisement, it’s sure to magnetize your attention to it immediately even if you were simply leafing through the pages of the magazine.

What’s also important to notice is how she is being portrayed. Though she is menacing with her bladed wings and weaponry, and the purpose of her design to make her seem powerful - therefore a useful extra character that would be incentive to pre-order the game - she is still presented sexually. Game companies will find a way to present someone who you’d have never thought about sexually to you sexually. This current advertisement in question is from a small time developer that I’ve never heard of, but it might be shocking even large companies focused on children’s games is not exempt from doing this. Take for example, Nintendo. Everyone knows about how they usually make age-appropriate games for younger kids. However, they somehow managed to progress a franchise like Metroid, featuring a space trooper in power suit who beat up aliens, to a revealing at the end of a game that the trooper was a girl - something that came as a huge surprise to everyone who assumed she was just male because she was in a combat suit and never spoke, to being featured on the cover of a Super Smash Bros game. Here’s the catch, she’s in a skin tight blue bodysuit with long blonde hair and a killer body (http://tinyurl.com/87h3ph30). There’s no stopping it, no matter how reputable a company is. Rampant sexual advertising in video games is far too powerful for an industry based around appealing to young males; there’s simply no better method, albeit somewhat low-handed, for instantly grabbing the attention of potential customers.

The thing that hits you straight after you finish staring at the centerpiece is most likely the overall design choice in the advertisement. For starters, the background is black. The font chosen for all the words is rugged and gives off the feeling of roughness. The yellow text contrasts sharply from the background. And the logo, an ‘A’ imprinted in a circle, looks like it’s was drawn with blood. Everything contrasts sharply with each other, and the in-game screenshots look dark and edgy. The only word that can describe the design of a whole is the feeling you get when you look at it: aggressive. It makes you want to fight. The background of the Bayonetta picture has either black ink or blood splattered on it, somewhat implying that she has just killed or defeated an opponent. You get the impression that she is strong, and you want to play as her character to defeat more enemies. Her stance in the photo is fierce and aggressive. Off to the side, we have more frames of character firing guns or rearing up to throw a punch. It stirs up something inside you that makes you want to revert to your baser instincts and fight. In fact, on the right, the game advertises “2 Exclusive Modes: Dog Fight and Mad Survival”. Notice the word choice, especially with “dog”, “mad”, and “survival”. If you were to simply read each word individually with no context in between them, certainly you’d agree to them being able to evict a savage feeling inside you. Another dead giveaway to this is, once again, the reasons for the maturity rating: “blood and gore” and “intense violence”. However, it’s completely obvious without reading the rating that the advertisement might as well have slapped those two themes in giant text right over the entire page. It’s something that pulls at our subconscious, the way that everything is laid out. As stated by Fowles, the dark and aggressive side of all of us is “existing as harbored energy”. Although in most cases “few manufacturers want their products associated with destructive motives,” video games by no means has to follow that notion. It’s simply a fantasy simulation, and any amount of destructive motives are acted out right inside the game to no harm of anyone else. In fact, videogames are an amazing place to get rid of that sort of “harbored energy”. Though the person standing next to you may cringe as you slice open the throat of your opponent in Anarchy Reigns, you can feel the pent up stress inside of you fading away. The need to aggress is inside all of us, and this advertisement, along with many games, target exactly that.

Though all of us have a certain need to aggress, there is a subsect of aggression that is particularly prominent in young males, especially teenagers. The need to rebel. This is something that is buried into pretty much every teenager’s mentality, especially male. Perhaps it might be because we start gearing up to live like adults, and the feeling that our parents are holding us back. Whatever the reason may be, the need to rebel for teenagers is very real, and is something that can be targeted blatantly by game advertisements. Anarchy Reigns holds no stops when it comes to this: it puts the word “anarchy” straight in the title. Whether or not you’re an expert on the anarchist political ideals, the word is instantly linked with the feeling of rebellion. Rising up and crushing the norms. Upon closer inspection of the advertisement, the art style is very much gothic and dark. Commonly we think of teenagers wearing spiked jackets and collars as being different, or even weird. But to them it’s perfectly clear what they want, and it’s to send the message that “we aren’t like the rest of you”. Along with that mentality means that they’re by definition one of the most rebellious teenage subcultures, and this advertisement fires straight at that. Ingrained into the background as something like a watermark is the large banner “Anarchy Reigns”. Even though this is a video game, and there’s no real revolution going on, those words fire us up and make us feel like we want to get up and do something. In this case, it’s get up and go buy the game.

Gamers are often prideful in how good they are in relativity to their peers. An important thing to note is that this is an advertisement for a pre-order. In theory, pre-ordering a game shouldn’t really make a difference: the prices tend to be the same or even higher than simply buying on release date. However, it helps the company more accurately gauge how much they need to ship out come the week before release. The ad accomplishes this feat by giving out some extra features for pre-ordering, like the character Bayonetta, and the two exclusive game modes. They also point out at the very top in bold, yellow lettering that this was a “pre-order exclusive”. In fact, the word “exclusive” is used in the ad three times alone, tied with the amount “anarchy” is used. They want you to feel that buying this game will make you special, will make your copy of the game stand out from all of your friends. Though this may appeal a bit to our need for attention, due to the nature of videogames, this mainly appeals to our need to dominate. Offering this bonus content implies that these special additions will be an addition to your arsenal and may make you a better gamer. Often game pre-orders are sold with special guns or features that are small, yet not available in a regular copy. Ironically, these extra features are for the most part never very useful, and some are purely cosmetic. Even so, gamers will gobble up this opportunity to gain an edge over their peers, especially if the pre-release price is pretty much the same as the release price. Not only do we aggres, we also strive to beat everyone.
 
In truth, I have never even heard of this game Anarchy Reigns before this, and happened to stumble upon the ad online, randomly. However, after staring at it for this long, and unraveling the appeals, I realized that had I saw this ad earlier I probably would have ended up pre-ordering the game. The way this is set up appeals perfectly to my young and male demographic, and through the use of appeal of sex, rebellion, aggression, and sex, it has been effective in grabbing my attention and curiosity. Ironically, by the time I had waded through all that persuasion, I made it to the tiny icons at the bottom and realized they only had it for Xbox 360 and PS3, while I play on PC. Had that not been the case, this example of well constructed advertisement would have surely led me to buy this game.