EA FTL

I didn’t think it was possible, but Electronic Arts (EA) has managed to find a new way to swindle their customers out of money. I honestly thought they had exhausted all available business tactics other than creeping into your house under the cover of night, slitting your throat in your sleep and then proceeding to steal all of your valuables. However, with the November 3rd release of Dragon Age: Origins, EA has demonstrated their willingness to do just that. The heinous act I’ve been alluding to for this entire paragraph is the jarring integration of paid Downloadable Content (DLC) into Dragon Age and what it potentially means to consumers.

Throughout Dragon Age you are able to visit the party camp, where you can recover from injuries as well as buy and sell items from a merchant. This is completely normal. There is also a character with a giant exclamation mark over his head waiting to give you a quest. Seeing as this is an RPG and questing is sort of the entire point of the game, this seems perfectly legitimate—until the character asks you to pay for the quest. I’m not saying that he wants some of your in-game gold; I’m saying he wants some of your real fucking money. It is at this point that the immersive digital environment the developer has tried so hard to create begins to crumble. Moments ago, you were decapitating darkspawn with a Chasind Flatblade and trying to get your freak on with a shape shifting mage, now you’re contemplating grabbing your MasterCard and suckling the corporate teat to the tune of seven dollars. EA has traded the potential impact of a game for the opportunity to wring every ounce of monetary gain out of a product. Admittedly, seven dollars is a paltry sum; however, at its core, this isn’t really an issue of money.

It’s an issue of how far EA will go to foist DLC on its customers. In that sense, Dragon Age represents the middle ground in EA’s vampiric approach to DLC. It was easy to decline when, in 2006, EA brazenly attempted to charge for codes that unlocked content already on the game disc, but it is more subtle than that now. Instead of a faceless corporate entity with its greedy palms open, it is a man who looks down on his luck asking you to honor a promise your mentor made to him (for the low, low price of seven dollars). By tying it into the story of the game, it becomes exponentially more difficult to resist. I fear that soon, the integration of DLC in to EA’s games will be so seamless that, like a back alley sex fiend, you won’t see it coming until it’s too late.

The Lie

There are authors whose novels feel more like math equations than living, breathing organisms. To give you an idea of the type of writer I’m talking about, consider Chuck Palahniuk’s formula: Disillusioned Sarcastic Protagonist + Outlandish Premise + “Shocking” Event – Any Emotional Resonance = Something You Read to Look Edgy in High School. See? After reading Chad Kultgen’s 2007 debut, The Average American Male, I fully expected him to become a mathematical writer, simply plugging in the unvaried variables to create a rehash of his first, best novel. You can imagine my surprise when his latest novel, The Lie, turned into something much more than I thought it could ever be.

The Lie is essentially three people looking back at their four year relationship during university and realizing the precise moments of their mistakes, moments of retrospective clarity, and the moment they crossed the point of no return and kissed their sense of morality goodbye. Despite all three characters being extreme stereotypes of the nice guy (Kyle), the jaded misogynist (Brett), and the gold-digging slutty sorority sister (Heather), Kultgen manages to combine all three (mostly) one-dimensional personas to create a story that is at once enthralling, meaningful and unsettling. The reader is made aware at the onset and throughout the novel that everything the characters do will ultimately lead them to a bitter resolution. It is this sense of futility that lends itself to the dark tone of the novel and instils a sense of hopelessness in the reader. Think back to your last relationship and pinpoint the moment you should have smothered your ex with a pillow but didn’t, and that is feeling of helplessness and regret The Lie evokes.

Kultgen’s writing is, as usual, very easy and enjoyable to read. His real achievement, however, and where his growth as a writer is unmistakable, is in the voices of the characters. Kyle speaks like a normal person with a hint of endearing idealism that gradually becomes perverted; Brett speaks like a teenage Patrick Bateman (American Psycho), obsessed with demeaning women, or as he unfailingly refers to them as: “cunts”; while Heather speaks like a vapid, single-minded Valley girl, punctuating sentences with the words “like” and “seriously”. Equally impressive is Kultgen’s ability to show the reader the flaws of every character, turning them into their own antagonists as they act against their natures because they are blinded by love or jealousy or the need for revenge.

The lie at the end of the novel is often, though erroneously, considered the lie referred to in the title of the novel. It is clear by the final three pages of the novel that the titular lie is the direct product of the falsehoods accumulated over the course of the novel. In the end, the actual lie is the lives the characters lead; lives consisting solely of desperation, duplicity, and apathy.

Ass Backwards

Reebok’s first major ad campaign in two years is groundbreaking. It is the only instance in recent memory where a company has so thoroughly failed at selling sex to their target demographic. The magnificent failure in question is for Reebok’s “revolutionary” new shoe, the EasyTone. The idea of the EasyTone is that merely by walking, I can work my calves and hamstrings up to 11% harder (!) and tone my butt up to 28% more than if I were to walk in my common, inferior shoes (!!!). Yeah, I know, who gives a fuck? The commercial features a beautiful woman with legs that are already long and toned and with an ass that would make an atheist reconsider god. The problem is that it also features a sex offender behind the camera and he zooms in on her ass every time she mentions it—which, considering the product, is often. Is she offended when he does this? Does she mace the pervert? No. She coughs politely and motions for the camera to film her face, saying, when the camera begrudgingly moves away from her ass, “I take it you agree?”

There are a couple fundamental problems with this method of trying to sell a product. First of all, treating your target demographic (women) as pieces of meat, whose sole purpose of living is to look beautiful and be stared at by unsavory men with perspiring upper lips, is just bad marketing.

Secondly, knowing who you’re marketing to is probably going to be a big help in moving forward. I was watching this commercial with a female friend and she went from complacent to righteously furious in the span of the thirty second commercial while I went from mildly aroused to…mildly aroused. I’m not a business major or anything, but I think if you make a product for a woman and in attempting to market it to a woman, the woman begins to foam at the mouth, her eyes burning like the lidless eye of Sauron, her body paralyzed with rage, you’ve failed.

The EasyTone commercial seems like it is marketing to men, but logic would dictate that if you buy a shoe that will help tone your girlfriend’s/wife’s/fiance’s calves and ass, you’re just begging to be dumped/dirvoced/a combination of dumped and divorced. It would be akin to saying, “Yes, those pants do make your ass look flat, but I bought you some shoes that can remedy with that.”

However, there is a silver lining. If you failed Marketing 101, Reebok will still hire you.

sign of the times #362

Theoretical Situation:

a.) I approach you and say, “I hate gay people” (I don’t).

b.) I approach you and ventriloquise, “I hate gay people”

Would you think a.) was funny? No, you probably wouldn’t, because there’s nothing inherently hilarious about homophobia. Would you be more inclined to laugh at b.) because I used a puppet as a proxy for my parochial hatemongering? If you were one of the 7.9 million people that tuned in to watch the pilot for The Jeff Dunham Show and didn’t ragequit it after the first two minutes, I would imagine your answer to be something along the lines of, “Fuck yeah, that shit’s funny as hell. Hyuk. I watch it right after Leno.” The sad fact is that The Jeff Dunham Show makes Leno look like highbrow humor filled with incisive social commentary.

The Jeff Dunham Show opens with a racist “joke” about how ironic it is to have a black president in the White House (sigh) and it only gets worse from there. Dunham and his crotchety old man puppet, Walter, just can’t seem to get along so they visit a therapist to work on their issues. Through the course of the conversation, it is revealed that the therapist is gay. Walter’s mouth hangs open while he and Dunham glance nervously at each other. This is followed by a string of offensive homophobic comments that ends in the realization that the only thing Dunham and Walter can agree on is that they don’t want to be homosexual with each other, and by extension, at all. This is just a microcosmic example of the horrifying world Jeff Dunham, his lifeless proxies, and the millions of slack-jawed Jeff Dunham fans inhabit.

I don’t have a problem with incendiary, unapologetic humor that a lot of people might take issue with. However, I do have a problem with humor that is cheap and hateful. There are no jokes in Dunham’s show, there are only insults levelled at homosexuals, black people, Jewish people, and women. In an interview with Slate, Dunham dodges accountability by saying that he would “shudder to utter” the things his puppets say. Yet, it is hard to imagine that Dunham has the artistic capacity to invent personalities for his puppets other than, “the old one hates gay people, the Middle-Eastern one is a terrorist, wait, no, he’s a terrorist ZOMBIE, and the redneck hates every minority.” The dodge is rendered increasingly ineffective when you can see his mouth moving in unison with the mouth of the puppet on his hand.

The worst part of this clusterfuck of hate is that we (as a society), not only allow Jeff Dunham to get on stage and spew his hatred, but we flock to see him, we pay him an inordinate amount of money, we demand he gets a television show, we actually watch it and what’s more is that we love every single goddamned second of it.

If Mel Gibson would have been wearing a puppet on his hand during his drunken anti-Semitic outburst, would it have been acceptable or funny? What about Michael Richards’ (Kramer) crazed racist diatribe? It’s depressing that at least 7.9 million people would answer “possibly” to these questions.

Digesting the Dinosaur

When Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs was first published in 2003, I had never seen anything like it. It was a book of essays that reveled in the fact that it analyzed low culture (see: pop culture) in a way that didn’t involve a thorough knowledge of media and communication theory to appreciate. The essays were written in an amusing, wry way, by an amusing, wry author. They were easily accessible and infinitely entertaining, which is what made the book so great. It was pop culture writing, written for an audience that consumes pop culture. However, it wasn’t a transcript of an episode of Two and a Half Men; it had value in that Klosterman used these essays about pop culture minutiae to illustrate points about our society. For instance, Klosterman argues our obsession with the Real World can be seen as the advent of people developing one dimensional personalities and our voyeuristic perversity as a culture. Eating the Dinosaur takes what Chuck Klosterman started four years ago and adds to it in a more mature—though still amusing and wry—way.

Through a series of what, at first glance, seem to be wild non-sequiturs, Eating the Dinosaur manages to tie together essays that compare Kurt Cobain to David Koresh (think Waco) in a somewhat offensive yet somehow convincing way, an analysis of time travel that is way more in-depth and thought out than it needs to be, a critical take on the laugh tracks employed by sitcoms, and progressive football plays into the larger, more important idea that through our love of culture and idolization of cultural figures, we create a fake reality that is far more comfortable than actual reality. This fake reality is so pure a fantasy that when we encounter someone entirely truthful (Rivers Cuomo or Ralph Nader, to name a couple of Klosterman’s examples) we are hostile and disappointed.

One of the most interesting instances of this fake reality comes in the final essay, named FAIL. Everyone prides themselves on being tough to influence, infinitely skeptical of how much they are affected by the treacherous “media,” but by quoting from Jerry Mander’s book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Klosterman provides us with a revealing example of how much media we actually internalize and how that internalization of images makes it difficult for us to differentiate from the real and unreal. In order to illustrate this inability, Mander asks people to imagine, “life in an Eskimo village,” the Old South,” and “a preoperation conversation among doctors,” and “playing basketball.” A simple enough task, to be sure. You probably already have the images in your head. Though you have experienced maybe one or two of these scenarios, you can picture them all with clarity, right? Mander says that the images conjured up are “either out of your own imagination or else they [are] from the media. Can you identify which was which?”

Yes, some of the essays are hit and miss—particularly the ones on basketball, football and ABBA. Yes, it’s written in Klosterman’s signature style, which some could argue is getting stale, but it is far and away Klosterman’s most thought-provoking and mature work to date. Besides, (arguably) stale Klosterman is still (arguably) great Klosterman.