this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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Honestly, it puts me off completely. I'm a woman and this is what gaming used to be: women are sluts. The ad isn't even trying to be clever or anything. Like wtf is this this trying to say?
The ad is saying PlayStation is as good as drugs? I'm assuming that the little tabs are supposed to be exctacy or something.
Ecstasy.
Exactly
eccentric
Eggcelent
sexelent
Exstacltsy
Ayyyooo you don’t hafta be a slut to love MDMA
Doesn't hurt though.
"Playstation is a drug"
It's edgy marketing. You're not wrong it's also clearly sexualizing her, but they're pushing a console like a party drug.
On the one hand, it's a very dated ad, on the other I really wish marketing companies would do weird shit like this more. Just maybe with a bit less sex appeal?
There’s nothing wrong with sex appeal. Removing sex appeal, drugs, whatever else is how you get boring corpo bullshit ads instead of edgy corpo bullshit ads.
Listen I'm not going to respond to a woman saying an ad is gross and off putting by telling her to lighten up.
That’s why I responded to you and not her 😅
Nah this is still corpo bullshit. It's also one of the tamer specimens of that era. The only difference is, the corpos in charge of advertising at that time were all sentient hardons who heard stories about how drugs are and peaked at 14. None of them lived in the real world and they just churned out knee-jerk sexist bullshit because they wanted to appeal to boys going through puberty and men that never left that headspace.
I ended up chasing gameplay and trying to ignore how fucking awkward and immature most of the shooters were in that era and I don't think I was alone. I think a lot of gamers grew up and drove the market in a slightly more mature direction. Some people blame woke bullshit, but for me it was just being utterly sick of how fucking juvenile everything was and voting with my money. There's still a vocal minority out there that wants the good old days back, but I'd stop playing if the industry went back to exclusively 3xtr33m l33t 4ct10n d00d bullshit.
Sidenote: I played the demo for some Cliffy B game a decade ago on my XBox and hard-quit and deleted when the guy on my comms told me to "fire a rocket directly up the bad guy's poop chute." I was in my 30s and Cliff was probably pushing 40 at the time. What the hell? Are we nine years old again? Then again, he was the guy that threw his cat into his scanner and posted a picture of it every day until the internet told him to stop. Ugh. Let's never go back there.
It really took the industry a long time to get out of that, too. It was all through the early 2000's, and people forget, also had wonderful shit like:
this, which should have taken that franchise down. People just gloss over it now like 'oh yeah, haha, people were just like that back in... 2009!? Oh, shit, uh...'
(EDIT: Feel free to explain your downvote, you miss ads like this?)
Not the downvoter, but i appereciate how the punchline of the ad wasn't explicitly spelled out, despite the punchline being "slur funny."
I feel like we tolerated the assholes of the time because, immature though they were, they were the life of the party, which was "the point" of gaming for a demographic, to be the exact opposite of work in every way.
We need high-energy, charismatic, boundary pushing people if we want games that are fresh and innovative. Unfortunately, those tendencies can amplify the worst in us. But we don't need to tolerate asholism for the sake of entertainment, its never worth it.
Hard disagree there, particularly as someone who worked in the industry, has a gay kid, and worked with women in the industry. The 'frat boy' stuff was amusing to 13 year old fans, sure, but it was abusive, cruel, and awful to be anywhere near. There's a billion different ways to achieve the same objective without being homophobic, sexist, etc, like say this masterpiece response to said ad.
I’m 41 now, so I was around for all that stuff. I must admit, I love those old ’90s and early ’00s games like Duke Nukem. I was also going through puberty at the time, so there’s that nostalgic factor.
I don’t think those days are ever coming back, and I’m okay with that. I enjoyed those games at the time, but I can now see how others may have found them offensive—something I never really considered back then. Many of those ads and games were a product of their time, reflecting the MTV era, which, as we know, eventually gave way to reality TV, for better or worse.
These days, it seems like we’ve evolved in some ways but regressed in others, with thousands of porn games on Steam, which is definitely not my thing. I appreciate that the industry has matured and is now more inclusive and diverse. While there’s still room for improvement, I’m glad to see that gaming can offer more sophisticated and varied content that appeals to a broader audience.
I dunno if corpos hiding under sex and drugs to lure people to their corpo products is a great reality either.
Maybe not but it’s certainly more entertaining. This ad doesn’t make me want a PlayStation, it makes me want to go out and party
...and let's be fair, it's an ad so the corpo bullshit is mandatory.
Counter point: sex appeal is fine.
It's the people who are pushy irl who are the problem. IMO you can still be very "sexy" and as long as you don't push it, that's not a problem.
Said to another commenter as well, but listen I'm not going to respond to a woman saying an ad is gross and off putting by telling her to lighten up.
Seriously, that is not the message this ad is putting out. It's about PlayStation being a drug, like ecstasy pills
Your right it's not clever but it's pretty clear it's nothing to do with woman being sluts.
Why is this saying the woman is a prostitute?
What is wrong if she was one?
semi trolling.
No, the imagery was supposed to invoke the rave culture at the time. Lots of men, women, boys, and girls doing X, and the pills usually were white like that.
Oh yeah, the culture was toxic af. Lots of folks never grew out of the toxicity. Granted it was preexisting toxicity coopted and reinforced in the gaming culture, not created by it. We're in a much better place in that regard these days.
It was a serious problem for a long time. Late 90's/early 2000's E3 and game shows were greasy.
I remember gaming magazines running whole sections just on the "best booth babes" of the season.
I posted this elsewhere, but people pretend like that just ended abruptly in 2005, but I want people to always remember this shit. That's 2009, not 1999, gross.
People arguing with you without acknowledging that this was just an ad in a sea of sexist as fuck ads. Maybe is not as sexist as the average one, but still.
Our games are as good as drugs.
Your homophobia/sex negativity is noted.
Given this is a print ad, I think the primary payload is just "SEX DRUGS AND ROCK & ROLL" shouted as loud as it can to get the reader to stop flipping through the magazine and actually look at it, and then once it's got the reader by the foveas it then says "Sony Playstation 2. Circle Cross Triangle Square."
PS2 launched in late 2000 so this ad would be targeting tween, teen and young adult millennial boys and men, so the secondary payload here is to associate the PS2 brand with thoughts and imagery that demographic is interested in or curious about, such as clubs/raves/parties, girls, sex, party drugs, and sex with girls on party drugs at a club or rave and thus transfer some of that interest/curiosity to itself.
The tertiary payload would be to use association with more grown up imagery (also during this time were ads featuring four condoms in see-through packets bent into the Circle-Cross-Triangle-Square shapes among others) to set themselves apart from Nintendo, who generally maintains an all-ages friendly image, and especially during the GameCube era when they revealed The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker to much fan backlash at the "childish, cartoony" graphics. The PS2 looked more like a piece of AV equipment than Nintendo's Barney The Dinosaur purple box, and could play audio CDs and DVD movies, VERY important socializing tools for teens in the 2000s.
Bottom line is it FUCKING worked. The PS2 sold like toilet paper. Sony sold 155 million PS2s worldwide, Outselling the GameCube (21.7 million and the Wii (101.7 million) combined And they did it with ads that said "Hey, if you're grown up and with it enough to recognize what this chick is doing, ours is the game console for you."
You really didn't need the ads. PS2 absolutely dominated because they were the ones with the all of the huge publishers. Sega, Nintendo, and Microsoft couldn't hold a candle to the sheer amount of great exclusives. It was only when Xbox 360 and later the Wii came out did the console wars start to shift.
You could present your valid argument without calling in homophobia.
It’s not even a real ad, btw.