Week 8- Discussion

First off, as I read through this section of Bogost's book, I was caught when he says "Advertising shifted from a minimalist, rationalistic strategy to a spectacular, emotional one." (p. 150) The first thing that came to mind, and maybe it is just my sappy side, but the first commercial/advertisement that came to my mind was the ASPCA commercial featuring Sarah McLachlan's song Angle. (I have included the commercial below for those who have not seen it.... it definitely is of the emotional type....)

(from youtube.com... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EYocy_DN60)

Bogost goes on to discuss three different types of advertising- Demonstrative, illustrative, and associative. This section reminded me of some examples in the game The Sims 2. (I think the examples from The Sims 2 come from the fact that I am not a gamer and this is the only game I have ever really played) In recent years, The Sims 2 developers have added expansion packs and objects that are of a specific brand. For example, originally, the cars in The Sims 2 were generic. You could buy a van, a truck, and junk car, a sports car, or a hot rod but none were a specific brand or ever really resembled in body lines a specific brand of car. Then, Ford partnered with The Sims 2 where you could download new Fords including the Ford Focus, Fusion, Edge, Mustang, and Escape Hybrid (gotta get in with all those "green" people...), and all but the mustang can be modified to several different colors to suit your taste. While I am not totally sure what form of advertising this would be, it is advertising. It is clearly the goal of Ford that people will see their sims "buying" Fords which will make the consumer want to have the same car their sim has.

(The images below are all from The Sims 2 Web page) Another example from The Sims 2 is when they partnered with the store H&M to do a fashion based "stuff" pack- basically an expansion pack that just added objects and stuff your sims could buy or objects you can use to build new H&M stores in your sim's town. This would be another form of advertising. While the clothes you can buy are not exactly what you can but in H&M stores, the styles were the in looks when the expansion pack came out and resembled clothes you can buy in actual H&M stores.

(Above image from : http://thesims2.ea.com/about/sp5_index.php)

Bogost mentions in the chapter Licensing and Product Placement that "Procedural rhetoric takes advantage of this tendency to make claims about how things work in the world. In the domain of advert sing, video games, deploy procedural rhetoric when they simulate player-consumer interaction with products and services, rather than merely simulating advertising through the application of images into virtual environments." (Bogost, 173) This is where I would expect that The Sims 2 examples I mention above would fall. Players interact with the clothes and the cars and what not as opposed to there just being billboards of H&M stores in the sim's town, which would be just the application of images into a virtual environment.