Sin To Win Being Gamed
In July, GayGamer's very own PixelPoet reported on EA's publicity stunt concerning Dante's Inferno and the inappropriate use of booth babes for their Lust portion of Sin to Win. After being selected as a runner-up, he even sent a letter explaining why he refused the prize.
At the same time, Alex Raymond of the blog While !Finished gathered up links to what was dubbed #EAFail (the hashtags used to keep informed on Twitter). This compilation was a list of other news source blogs that had reported on it, resources concerning harassment, and a list of complaints concerning the contest. People were not happy. People were very not happy.
EA is not yet finished with its publicity, though, preferring to fall further from grace. In a very thorough and exact manner, Simon Ferrari at News Games outlines how the interaction between this PR team and the sites that report these continuing contests is Gaming the Game Press.
EA has followed the booth babe fiasco with two more PR stunts as of this article. First was Gluttony, for which certain publications were sent a severed arm cake. Avarice saw some publications being given a $200 check, cautioning them that cashing the check would be to give in to greed; not cashing it would result in prodigality (read: wastefulness). Joystiq, in a particularly clever move, cashed the check and donated it to The White House Project, a nonprofit specializing in advancing women's leadership roles at all levels.
We've only begun to descend into the circles of Hell.
As, Ferrari notes:
But the fact of the matter is that the superficial binary choice posed by EA, between avarice and prodigality, was in fact a straw man for a deeper dilemma. EA didn't care what the journalists did with the check, so long as they wrote about it: a post with nearly 100,000 views (the count on Kotaku as of this writing) is worth far more than $200. Unlike a banner ad, an article contains meta-data that can be accessed by search engines. Every time some poor kid with a paper on Dante's Inferno (the book) due tomorrow Googles it out of desperation, they'll see these articles right alongside relevant resources. Assuming these writers knew that for marketers any news is good news, and considering the fact that a number of the sites that received the checks had been critical of the marketing campaign since Sin to Win, we see that a second dilemma arises: to publish or not to publish.
Continuing in this manner, Ferrari also notes that the gaming press is then presented with a Nash equilibrium. In essence, the gaming press is given moral choices which can often feel hollow in even the more impressive games we have at our hands (ahemFallout3cough). Given the example of the prisoner's dilemma, these publishing sources can all participate for minimal effects, keep mum and risk one publishing about it and receiving those hits, or all opt out of the situation.
All of this at the assertion that EA is attempting to drum up interest in a game that does not particularly advance anything, seemingly inspired by games such as Devil May Cry or God of War and eschewing its source material in one fell swoop--trying to grab a piece of that particular genre. This entire PR stunt seems wedded to complete all the seven deadly sins, and to grab as much of our attention as possible, though it seems to be fighting an uphill battle, with very few sites actually reporting Gluttony (which seemed particularly uninspired), though gaining traction by making gaming sites be prideful about their actions concerning Avarice (no repeats, EA). Along with staged Christian outrages, one can only hazard a guess at what else may be attempted outside of the infamous seven.
In a final moment, it is noted that there is an important game design lesson to be learned: obscuring the intent of a moral compass or decision. However, unlike in games, where EA would present us two options and we'd choose between them, the participants in this puzzle are allowed a nigh infinite amount of options--they are allowed to cheat the system.
According to The Divine Comedy, we still have Discouragement (better known as Sloth these days), Wrath, Envy, and Pride left. Based on these four sins, what contests with tricky situations for game journalists can you imagine?
VorpalBunny
Posted to Video Games on 17 September 2009
· Comments (6)
Other stuff like this: advertising, avarice, contest, Dante's Inferno, ea, gluttony, lust
How about all the major gaming blogs band together and pledge to block all Dante's Inferno-related articles in their robots.txt files, thus preventing their reporting on this crap from giving the game a better Google rank?
I'm really trying to understand but I honestly don't get what the problem is here. It's a silly ad campaign based on a topic that seems to play into the theme of the game and I'm just not seeing why fans taking a picture with models who are paid to have their picture taken with fans is automatically misogynistic or homophobic.
Yes, some fans may take things too far and cross into that territory but that doesn't seem to be what EA is aiming for. There's only so much you can hold a company responsible for the action that their customers take while participating in a contest or using a product. Meanwhile, this very site has featured several pictures of "booth boys" that are considered all in good fun, so why is it wrong for the breeders to do the same thing? They even accepted and attempted to reward his same-sex entry, so obviously they're not trying to discriminate.
Furthermore, I would hesitate to blame EA for encouraging misogyny or homophobia with their games because this very much conflicts with the common sentiment that violence and vulgarity in games doesn't create that behavior within players. It's unfair to say "we like these things so we don't believe they have a negative impact on the player but we don't like these things so we believe they do." Again some player may take things too far after a little "GTA" but that doesn't mean that we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Again, I'd really like to understand your point of view but even after reading the letter, it feels like this is a straw-man for other problems that, while important, have little or nothing to do with this specific event. I'm all for fighting for equality and all that, but no one likes a Debbie Downer either. It does more harm than good to make such a ruckus over what was an innocent mistake (if even a mistake at all) and one that is tacitly hypocritical at that. Do we need controversy so badly that we have to go making it up? I don't believe so.
Vorpal, thank you for covering my piece so thoroughly. This may be the first time somebody has done that with something I wrote, and I'm glad it happened here at a site that was largely critical of Sin to Win to begin with.
30th Century Man: Where you invoke the possible hypocrisy of simultaneously holding that videogames don't make one violent and that they *can make one a misogynist... you're completely right. Yet we're not talking about Dante's Inferno the videogame here, we're talking about its publicity campaign. Sin to Win wasn't just a problem because it objectified women, but because there's a history of booth babes being stalked and threatened. Also, the women who were hired to work other booths at the Con did not give EA permission to involve them in their stunt.
@Zac Green is totally on the money here: the point of the piece was to try to persuade the gaming press to stop allowing EA to manipulate the benevolence and desire to share information that journalists have in order to coopt them into supporting a product that at this point has absolutely no claim to goodwill--an intellectual property legal term referring to the public image of a product.
I think it's splitting hairs a bit to say that the distinction is a problem with the campaign rather than the game itself. Still, to your larger point, I do appreciate the fact that some women have been harassed at these events but I'm not sure that what EA was asking for constituted harassment. There would have been plenty of ways for a reasonable person to send in a suitable entry without doing something offensive to an unwilling participant (for instance, the same sex entry in question) and the largest majority of people probably did just that.
The few who may have crossed the line were probably prone to such behavior anyway, and what I haven't seen in this discussion is anyone reporting that they were in fact harmed or harassed as a result of this campaign. Therefore, I'm not sure it's fair to rake EA over the coals because a few people may have theoretically taken their silly little contest too far, especially since weeks later, there doesn't even seem to be any evidence that any such incident ended up occurring.
Again, I can respect what I'm sure was a well intentioned attempt to stand up for the rights of the so-called "booth babes," but I wonder if basing that defense around something that is arguably a non-issue is really the best way to bring anyone into your ranks. My concern is that this is the kind of thing that makes the indifferent majority think "they're just whiners" and tune us out.
Besides, there's a good chance this game will suck anyway so the poor sales will be the ultimate deterrent ;-)
Hey, I can help with the promotion of this game! This sounds like fun! :D
Hate - you need to beat up a person to a critical condition and have someone videotape it.
Jealousy - you need to bring a stranger to your house and have sex with him/her in front of your spouse. That'll make them reeeally jealous! ;)
Pride - you have to march to your boss and tell him/her to fuck off, then take the boss's seat and act like an ass until you are promptly fired.
Sloth - you have to stay in bed until the game comes out.
See, marketing is easy!
Do I think that EA intentionally meant to be homophobic and/or misogynistic? Not at all. They were trying to be creative with their marketing, and they just didn't think it through. I could see the concept of the lust contest working if they changed it slightly. Maybe something like "Take a picture of yourself with something that you feel lust for". It could be a booth babe or a booth dude, or it could be the new Mario game you'd kill for. Ultimately, a saying that my mother used to love to spout comes to mind; "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". EA should've thought through their first promotion better, but I don't think they're the evil empire for making that mistake.