When Gillette introduced a razor specifically for gamers, gamers around the world rolled their eyes and groaned. What on earth do they need special razors for, and why would a tennis player be the guy to pitch them?
Still it’s a strange trend. Unrelated stuff gets targeted at “gamers”, and it somehow winds up being linked to “Xtreme” imagery, as if the average player is chugging energy drinks and skydiving during Bioshock load screens. Penny Arcade occasionally lampoons these offerings when they come up.
I know plenty of gamers in varying degrees of physical fitness, but few of them are people who you would look at and think “You know what this person would enjoy? Kayaking.” (I actually do, but it’s not an activity that gets me thinking about playing video games, and from there thinking about shaving.)
A suggestion I read elsewhere makes more sense to me, Advertising agencies are marketing to the same demographic they always have: The frat daddies*. Somewhere along the line, someone dimly recalled that white guys in backwards baseball caps enjoy Halo and Madden. So the word “gamer” gets tossed in to the same ridiculous testosterone posturing that gets used to sell everything to males aged 18 to 25.
Now, these people play games, and therefore they are gamers, but they’re not what I think of as “gamers.” The Front put it, they’re people who never quite fit in, and turned to escapist entertainments to get away from the real world.
Appeals to coolness and popularity, like the kinds in the “Xtreme” ads, aren’t going to work on this demographic. Why try to sell them things with imagery of what they’re not? Even well-adusted gamers with jobs and girlfriends and such don’t exactly aspire to being Tad from Delta Kappa Tau.
If PAX and Penny Arcade are any indication, this is a sizable demographic. You certainly don’t have to travel far on the Internet to find them talking jargon and living in their own worlds. It’s an expensive hobby, so they must have money to blow. So how come appeals to its followers wind up so horribly hamhanded?
A theory I like was put forward by The Washington Post in an article about the founder of 4chan.org.
He has it harder than, say, Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg. Poole’s followers are not smiley joiners, posting endless self-portraits and 25 random things about themselves. They are an unruly, anonymous bunch, and they can come across like the pimply dweeb who sat behind you in English and made lewd gestures when you passed him handouts. So Poole has managed to wrangle 5 million of them together in one place. So what? Maybe advertisers don’t want to monetize them. Maybe they want to keep them away from humanity.
That’s probably not totally true, but the thought of Madison Avenue being too embarassed by actual gamers to even portray them makes me snicker.
And actually, if they could make a snack food that wouldn’t get any food dust in the keyboard, I might even buy it. Lord knows we have an E-can in the fridge. I’m not immune to pandering.
*Disclaimer: Fraternities are upstanding organizations that organize charity fundraisers and contribute hauguahggauaugaugh
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