In a classic bait&switch, Unicef booked a seminar at Video Games United to present a one of a kind first person shoot to an eager gamer audience. As they begin to describe the game, everyone soon realises how different this "game" is. You play as a seven year old girl navigating the warzone. Your mother dies, your baby brother is shot, your older brother is killed, all the while you have to make it to a refugee camp where there's scant little food, trying not to starve to death or get shot along the way. <--!break-->
Hoodwinked, the audience who didn't walk out then get to hear a young woman Mari Malek who was such a refugee tell her story. And a young man, former "Lost boy" Manyang Reath , shares his. "You can help us protect the children of South Sudan" is the message Unicef wants us to take from all this, and "talk about, tweet about it, please help us spread the word".
While the venue for this presentation practically ensures viral spread right now, I'm disappointed by the call to action. Slacktivism isn't helping, and it feels like a lost opportunity to raise money for food and medicine. It's quite a bold idea for Unicef though, so props for trying a new twist in trendy prankvertising.
Shades of Kony aside, I do wish this had been edited down to a 60 so that donated media could have carried it on TV as well. Even for a web film it's an unnecessary long edit focusing too much on the game presentation, when we see the punchline coming 15 seconds in. There's no actual gameplay presented at all, just poorly drawn storyboards of awful scenes. I doubt this was discussed in favourable terms by the audience who paid to enter VGU, so this idea is reliant on viral spread alone now.
Client. Unicef
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I wonder what a critically acclaimed game designed to make players confront the sobering realities of war would really be like?
Oh wait, that exists - and it came out last month.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_War_of_Mine
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PermalinkIt's so poorly edited, it feels like people were cast for their role of someone "who looks like a gamer." Also, did we really need subtitles on the African man's two lines of speech? I hate to drop the racism word, but wow.
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PermalinkYeah, because trying to get people with hearing dificulties or just thinking his accent makes difficult to understand him is too much thinking for an idiot. Yeah, only a retarded cunt would think that's racist.
But hey, that's what's all about today isn't it? Yelling "racism" and "sexism" at every single thing we don't like or we don't agree with. I just hope this period of idiocy people is falling into will vanish soon.
And I, personally, like this kind of advertising when it's not staged. It shows the hipocrisy of people, normally of the ones that easily get offended by everything, just like you!
I hope they reach their goal, wish them the best of lucks.
Ps: I don't know if you will do this but it's likely because of how fast you yelled "racism". No, I'm not apologizing for using the word "retarded", if you think it is offensive because people with mental diffi... bla bla bla, you can hold it to yourself because I don't give a flying, shining, stunning fuck. I'm still going to use it as an insult as it also means people who think slower than others.
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PermalinkAaaaah yes. The old trick of prankvertising. For anyone who doesn't know, and is not familiar with my sarcasm, I am not a fan of prankvertising in general. The base idea of it, is to prank someone (who usually gets upset) and then we rely on their reaction to the prank being shared around the web to actually reach the intended target. Really shocked reactions or people we can laugh at being most frequently shared.
Now, prankvertising relies on actors, and at least one innocent person being pranked (but even that is in doubt in some cases). Seeing as there are literally no blurred faces in this ad, either you have a 100% success rate in release form signing, or a bunch of these peoples are actors.
All that aside, this fails to generate any money for Unicef, which seems to be massively off-brief as that's usually the one criteria you need to fulfill for Unicef. Had they made an actual game, that generated money, it would have been a better idea already. It won't spread very well either, not like the tap water social network game that both generated money AND forced spread by making you donate $5 via PayPal just so you could enlist two friends in building the functioning water network.
To top it all off, as I already mentioned, it's unbearably long, without succeeding in hitting any empathy buttons (which would make us share it more willingly).
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Permalink@TheTruth, methinks you're overreacting, and how....
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