Ayyyooo you don’t hafta be a slut to love MDMA
Comment on I miss console ads being this weird
stufkes@lemmy.world 1 week ago
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?
ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world 1 week ago
“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?
ThirdWorldOrder@lemm.ee 1 week ago
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.
ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Listen I’m not going to respond to a woman saying an ad is gross and off putting by telling her to lighten up.
SRo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Why not? A woman can’t have a idiotic opinion? That’s sexist!
ThirdWorldOrder@lemm.ee 1 week ago
That’s why I responded to you and not her 😅
groucho@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
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.
<rant> A lot of the ads from that era are uncomfortable. Hell, a lot of the games were. It was rare to see a female character that wasn’t ditzy and helpless, a thinly-veiled copy of the writer’s mom, or exactly like a dude but hot. Those were the options. I’m not saying I needed every game to be a work of great literature with complex and tormented characters and copious backstory; I just wanted female characters in games that didn’t like someone doing a ventriloquism act with their fleshlight.
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. </rant>
TSG_Asmodeus@lemmy.world 1 week ago
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.
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…’
ThirdWorldOrder@lemm.ee 1 week ago
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.
Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
…and let’s be fair, it’s an ad so the corpo bullshit is mandatory.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I dunno if corpos hiding under sex and drugs to lure people to their corpo products is a great reality too.
crank0271@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Maybe not, but damn it, that’s our reality. I kind of like it better than the hollow virtue signaling these days. And of course it would be great if corporations could actually be virtuous, but apparently that’s been litigated away.
ThirdWorldOrder@lemm.ee 1 week ago
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
nikaaa@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Just maybe with a bit less sex appeal?
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.
ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world 1 week ago
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.
FunnyUsername@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Go ahead. Down votes are meaningless here.
JohnSwanFromTheLough@lemmy.world 1 week ago
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.
Miaou@jlai.lu 1 week ago
You seriously can’t see how this is sexualizing women?
viking@infosec.pub 1 week ago
Not the OP, but I for once can’t. She’s not sexualized in any way.
Miaou@jlai.lu 1 week ago
Remove the pills on her tongue and this is your typical porn-shoot picture. Lucky you I guess for not seeing that.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I’m a woman and this is what gaming used to be: women are sluts.
Why is this saying the woman is a prostitute?
What is wrong if she was one?
semi trolling.
Omega_Jimes@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
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.
TSG_Asmodeus@lemmy.world 1 week ago
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
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.
eugene171@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Did you just mansplain how to take this ad?
AVincentInSpace@pawb.social 1 week ago
She asked a question. It was answered.
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
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. We’re in a much better place in that regard these days.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
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.”
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Bottom line is it FUCKING worked. The PS2 sold like toilet paper.
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.
kilgore_trout@feddit.it 1 week ago
You could present your valid argument without calling in homophobia.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
It was this webcomic that put this idea in my head and I just can’t stop seeing it everywhere “I don’t like this because I’m a woman” comes up. The original commenter also slut shamed the model in the ad which is why I figure it’s either homophobia or sex negativity in general.
But yeah yeah I know homophobia is bad and you can’t accuse women of being bad.
driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 1 week ago
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.
Miaou@jlai.lu 1 week ago
The answers to your comments are depressing. Good luck with everything!
SRo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
lol you stupid cunt
Maggoty@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Our games are as good as drugs.
Syrc@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 1 week ago
If you see this girl as a slut, that’s a you issue lol. Might want to do some therapy about that.
domdanial@reddthat.com 1 week ago
The ad is saying PlayStation is as good as drugs? I’m assuming that the little tabs are supposed to be exctacy or something.
dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Ecstasy.
Shardikprime@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Exactly
EverythingIsALot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
eccentric
hoss@lemmynsfw.com 1 week ago
Exstacltsy
stufkes@lemmy.world 1 week ago
And why is it a “trashy hot” woman despite the target audience being 99% young men at the time? This is what I mean. The ad speaks to a target audience that is not on the poster.
AchtungDrempels@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Oh, she’s trashy? Why? Please don’t tell us you did not get whooshed by the ad now.
TSG_Asmodeus@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The ad has combined the image of putting tablets on a womans tongue, while also having her in a pose with tongue out that is also used to imply the desire to perform oral sex. This is highlighted by the fact she is looking up, with the camera focused on her face.
That said, I’m guessing here, but I’m sure as hell not going to tell a woman she’s not allowed to be offended by sexualization of another woman to sell Playstations.