This little tidbit from the Washington Post brings yet another interesting political advertising strategy to the forefront. The Obama campaign has purchased a billboard in the virtual Paradise City of racing game "Burnout Paradise." Apparently advertising isn't new to this game, which features so many billboards and product placements that it mirrors real life (unlike what I remember from the few times I played one of the "Grand Theft Auto" games where the ads are all for fictional products.
It makes sense for the candidates to go into realms of entertainment other than television, but it also kind of kills the escapist point of that entertainment. Don't most players want to race around on a virtual motorcycle or in a digital sports car to get away from things like the economy, politics and other stresses? On the one hand I'm impressed with the Obama campaign for jumping into the virtual world in order to reach young people, who, for the first time I can remember, actually care about the election, but on the other, I'm not sure branding our leisure time isn't at least partly to blame for some of the economic issues we're facing.
OK, so if we came up with a list of things that I do on a normal weekend it would include things like: 1. Eating breakfast at a French restaurant. 2. Reading the Sunday New York Times online (usually on Saturday) 3. Starting/finishing a book by some foreign author (usually Japanese), often dead. 4. Buying more used books. 5. Going to the fabric store/sewing.
Things that a normal weekend doesn't include: 1. Playing video games.
Sure, that list could go on and on. But let's stop there for a moment. In college, at various times, there were both a PS2 and an N64 at my house. On the PS2 my game was very similar to the mulit-player part of the James Bond games where a person wandered around trying to shoot their friends. Only the characters were teddy bears. On the N64 I played, of course, Bond. I sucked at both. A few times I tried my hand at Gran Turismo. I was good at one thing in all of these games, dying rather quickly.
My point is that I am in no way qualified to discuss the merits or the difficulty of any video game. I sucked at Mario back in the day and Pac-Man. Forget it.
However, when I found myself in front of an HDTV that probably cost about as much as I paid for my first car with a controller right there and the new GTA on the X-Box I thought, what the hell. And wow! My five minute killing spree was a blast. OK, five minutes is pushing it. First I stole a helicopter (thanks to the cheats and a friend giving them to me), flew that around for awhile and the crashed it into the ocean. Swam for shore and the capping began. (I also had a great stockpile of weapons thanks to those cheats that were mentioned above.) Yeah. Despite being a big, squirmy mess when it comes to killing on a movie, doing on the video game was fun. When the fuzz started to show up I pulled out the grenades. Bad idea. Or at least, throwing them and then running directly in that direction was a bad idea. Yup, I'm so bad at video games I went out in an unintentional suicide bombing.
So the low down: The graphics are amazing! Killing people (including oneself) is easy and I'm sure my feminist sensibilities would be hugely offended had I gotten to the point in the game where the ho's begin to show up, but since I didn't, I can say I loved it. And I'll probably never play it again.
Yeah GTA4.
Oh, and, yes, I really, really wanted to ram my car into someone on the way home. No, the game probably isn't a great idea, but it is a lot of fun.
