Dragon Power! WiiPod

Call it a sign of the times, or just a sign of the fact that I've lived too long, but I swear advertising firms have a list of only fifty or so ideas to use in ads. What's more, I swear they've used every idea on that list, and have come around full circle back to #1. What is #1? The simplest, most boneheaded way to try to get somebody to buy your product: by convincing the target audience that you are cooler than your competition, and that anybody who says different is a NERD!

I'm simultaneously baffled at why anyone would think this tactic would work and aghast at the fact that it does work a lot of the time. For instance, this year I can't go anywhere without seeing at least ten people wearing this hat:

Fur-collared parka and baggy, extra-low-rise pants sold seperately.

I've never seen it before this winter, but this year it is THE HAT, and everybody is wearing it. It looks a little silly, like a ballcap that accidentally stumbled into Granny's World of Knitting and didn't make it out alive. Regardless, if you don't have that hat, you are not one of the cool crowd. You're one of them. And they are totally not with it.

Anyway, I'm not here today to talk about hats. I'm going to talk about videogame and computer advertising. What I've noticed is that even the makers of electronics are trying to convince the general population that buying a certain brand of videogame console or computer system is cool, while buying another brand is uncool. This just fills me with all varieties of giggles inside, because as we all know, videogames and computers are not the realm of the popular, good-looking people, no matter how some of us nerds wish they were. A computer that will make you cool is like a Big Mac that will make you thin. And even though everybody knows it, it still kind of works, on some level. Although the arguments are far more transparent in technology than in other venues, I think they still work because their target audience in particular wants much more desperately to be hip and dominant in society.

I'd like to take a trip back in time, if I may. Consider this magazine advertisement by Sega, circa 1993:

The sad thing is, that ad is from an old GamePro magazine that I still have kicking around in my room.
So I know there is nothing I can do or buy that will make me cool, ever.

The ad is making the claim that the people who work at Sega are regular joes, not computer geeks at all. They are laid-back, down-to-earth folks who don't know much about programming or hardware, but somehow have made a game system through the power of wearing blue jeans and having their leather jackets hang open no matter how cold it is. However, I really don't care about the social graces of the people who build my game system, or how badly they want to be the James Dean of the programming world. Frankly, I want the nerdiest of the nerds to build a machine for me, which is pretty much what happened at Nintendo, and which is also pretty much why Nintendo won the system war for that entire generation.
Sega had this whole mentality that "cool" was more important than "functional," when it came to making games. Their version of Mortal Kombat was notoriously bloodier, but it was also not as good as Nintendo's for just about every other reason you could imagine. Sega designed Sonic the hedgehog to be a hip, in-your-face character with vaguely-defined "attitude" -- and then built a game around that. Nintendo made a game first, and then figured out a mascot later. I mean, come on, Mario the Italian plumber? That's not going to resonate with kids the way a ninja turtle can. But it didn't matter, because the games Mario was in were just too damn fun to ignore. Mario became popular because of his games, but Sonic's games became popular because PR companies fooled kids into believing Sonic the hedgehog was "edgy." ...Which, being a hedgehog, I suppose he was, in the literal sense.
Anyhow, long story short, Nintendo stuck to their guns, never pretending to have a "cool" bone in their body, and eventually they won the fight. Sega's tactics of making Nintendo into a social pariah ultimately failed, because at that time, virtually all gamers were social pariahs anyway. What makes it extra silly is that Sega's employees were undoubtedly just as nerdy as Nintendo's must have been. Except that now Sega is making games for Nintendo, which still makes me laugh every time I think about it. I'm not saying Nintendo's closet is devoid of skeletons, but that's another story for another day.

That is not the end of my little anecdote, however. Oh, no... indeed, the plot thickens from here on. Let's zoom on back to present day, and see how things are doing in the computer world...

You know what they say: "The higher the groin, the cooler you are."

Oh look, if it isn't the stars of the almost-funny television commercials Apple is putting out these days. One of them is a nervous, shaky business man in a grey suit, worried about his unstable future. The other is a sloppily-dressed hipster dufus who thought The Matrix was a documentary about what goes on inside his computer. One of them represents Microsoft Windows and its PC-based ways, and the other represents Apple and its "Mac" line. Can you guess which is which?

He's got his father's eyes!

That's right! PC is the depressed, world-weary man waving goodbye to his former glory. Mac is the HMV trainee whose bad-boy apathy is so monumental that his hands never leave his pockets as a display of disinterest. Mac may leave the front door of the house open when he stumbles home at 4:00 am drunk every night, but just chill man, it's all good, do you have any cheetos or something, cuz he got the munchies, dude. Yeah, he got fired again, but so what? McDonalds is always hiring, right?
Okay, it's not that I love Microsoft or anything, but let's just say that I don't respond well to ads that are so transparent in their pseudo-psychological mind games. Buying a white, ovule-shaped piece of electronics is not going to make me the king of Frosh Week, nor is using Windows going to cause me to spaz out and become obsessed with spreadsheets and asymptotes. Personally, I was too much of a weenie in university for the former, and far too stupid for the latter.

So, we see another example of how "cool" tactics have been used to try and scare you into buying a certain brand of electronics. But now for what I think is really bizarre -- the striking similarities between Apple's product designs, logos, and interfaces, compared to Nintendo's:

iPod is Latin for "one pod."

Well, well. What have Wii here? Nintendo's newest system, the Wii, versus Apple's iPod music player. Both companies employ sans-serif fonts, and are absolutely in love with the lower-case letter i (Nintendo perhaps a little too much). What else is the same, I wonder?

The light! So bright, it burns!!!
Another funny caption might be "Don't shoot until you see the whites of their is." Man, I'm on a roll.

Both systems look as though they've come out of the white, sterile cityscapes of what the year 2000 was supposed to look like, as seen in a 1950's-era sci-fi movie. It's almost feels like the design equivalent of hubris, like these companies tried to capture the essence of God's heavenly perfection in an electronic device.

So, the whole ironic thing that I'm trying to get at is this: Nintendo, once the victim of high school-like popularity rituals, is now trying to become cool by association with those who would make fun of others. History Wiipeats, and the circle of life continues.

I dunno, companies just keep trying the same old things to win people over to their side. They've done it for longer than I've been alive, I'm sure (the tobacco industry comes to mind), but still I become nostalgic when I think of better days... when a videogame system was basically a square, grey box that you had to cram a plastic cartridge into, and if it didn't work you had to blow in it and look like a total dork. Maybe some gamers pretended to be cooler than most, but they were only fooling themselves, and the rest of us knew it. Nowadays, it seems everyone wants an iPod and a Wii -- whether they're 6 or 60, and whether or not they even know what it is. It's almost like people really think it is cool to own one of those. It's a status symbol now. I suppose I should be happy about that, being a videogame advocate and all. But it's all a little too eerie. A little too artificial and constructed. It's as if the "marketing-first" philosophy behind Sonic has come back, and this time it's snow white and connects to wireless networks. iWiip for the future.