Everything Wrong with the Internet in One Gaming Banner Ad Campaign
If you believe technology is rapidly turning us all into hedonistic degenerates, these advertisements for an online video game give you a perfect case study. The game, Evony, is about empire-building strategy. The ads, increasingly, are about boobage.
Web entrepreneur Jeff Atwood, who first highlighted the ads, writes that they "take advertising on the internet to the absolute rock bottom," and toward the moronic, hypersexualized future foretold in Mike Judge's movie Idiocracy.
Yes, sure, inevitable cultural and intellectual decline of America, whatever. Vulgarians that we are, we're far more burned up by the game's false advertising: After all that flesh, there's not actually a "queen" to "save" in the game! The boobage was strictly for "marketing purposes," according to Evony. Now that's something you can (probably!) sue over.
The first ad emphasized Evony's pedigree as a clone of the strategy game Civilization, in which the player must "build an empire to stand the test of time."
The next picture used a stolen catalog photo to emphasize the game's ample... opportunities for adventure!
But that ad really didn't convey the teamwork aspect of the game. To get across the "cooperation" theme, what could be better than hot twins?? The word "lover," perhaps. There's your ad!
The words "my lord" in prior ads really didn't properly convey a player's dominion over buxom females as well as a kneeling woman with an exposed bra and a sword pointed at her chest. But we'd have gone with, "buy our game or we stab this hot lady" for the tagline, here, as it's really more direct than "Help! Save the Queen," but without distorting the original message.
Oh, forget about saving the queen. So much work! Click here to just have wench sex and rule the world, already.
The orgasmic wench-elf and the kneeling queen and the lusty court twins were all too subtle, it turns out. Click here to play the boob game!* (*Game does not actually involve boobs). (This is an actual ad.) [Coding Horror]