Cultural Musings

A great deal of marketing in the industry right now seems to be committed to making sure the "other guy" is beaten down or made fun of.  It almost smells of politic advertisements.  I'm thinking specifically of Battlefield and Call of Duty and their negative campaign ads.  They are actually pretty good spots too (I'm remembering the "fight against grenade spam"), but I feel like it creates an unfair and unnecessary comparison.  I don't think the two shooters are exclusive enough to be put head to head.  Sure, they both are super serious, semi-futuristic, first-person, hoo-rah, shooters, but they off enough to the market that differs from the other that to make a strong comparison doesn't actually do either justice.  If the ads work, then the COD fan who picks up Battlefield might feel let down, which doesn't help sell your product in the future.

I've actually been playing a fair amount of Battlefield 3 lately, and the fun times I've had in it have only solidified my resolve to also pick up Modern Warfare 3 because I'm not able to meet the same need I have in a shooter with BF3.  Battlefield is an intense, borderline overwhelming experience that puts a specific focus on team play and group focus.  It does it not only as an objective, but as you work as a team to accomplish said objective.  Capturing the control points may be the focus of the match, but you get more points on a personal level by using your class to help your teammates.  Not coincidentally, helping them will help your team carry on farther and more effectively.

Call of Duty doesn't even come close to that stuff.  Everything in COD plays like a quick team-deathmatch, but it doesn't reward the player with anything by playing as a teammate.  TDM may as well be a free-for-all match... the only difference is not being able to kill half of the lobby, but if you play hardcore you can do that as well.  That sounds a little bit like a complaint, but it's COD's strongest card, and frankly, it trumps most of the others.  COD does deathmatch killing so well that it's got countless folks hooked on doing the same thing over and over again.  It knows just the right buttons to press, and then it presses them constantly, creating an incredibly deep experience, albeit, a relatively shallow one.  If COD is a one trick pony, the trick it knows involves roller-skates, a flaming hoop, juggling, and quite possibly sword swallowing.

I guess it isn't a big deal, and it surely isn't a surprise that these big game companies are going after each other's throats, but as a retailer of these games, its a tough conversation to have over and over again.  It's already difficult enough to convince even the most-serious of gamer to pick up the new version of the franchise they already play each year (These things come out like Madden now...), but now I have to find a way to ease the fanboy tension that the marketing of these triple-A titles naturally create.  You wouldn't believe the harassment I got in MW2 the other night when I put 'HALO' as my clan tag... It was like I punched their mother.  Of course, now I publicly opened the door to get ripped on Halo again...

I think I'm gonna sell it all and buy a second Wii so I can play Zelda and Mario at the same time.  But thanks to Smash Bros, even they are out to kill each other...