Blog FeedAwful Gamer Branding
True and funny story. Friday night, I sit down to play Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter Chapter 2 to try the new coop missions. I’m playing with my usual group of friends, and having a great time running around in a pistols only match in Old Town. We’re laughing and joking, until sometime into the second game, I realise that people don’t seem to hear me any more.
My Kitten, sat in my lap, had chewed through the headset cable.
I sent a few messages telling people what had happened, and everyone had a good laugh about it. One of them recommended that I pick up the Plantronics headset as my replacement, which is what I did… and I can say after testing it out Sunday evening, that it’s a great headset.
What isn’t so great, is the pitiful attempt to appeal to ‘gamers’ on the back of the packaging.
I’m sure there are countless examples of this kind of stupidity, but never before have I seen so much stupid in so small a space.
Not only does it seem to say a lot about what the marketing people think of gamers, but it also shows you what they think appeals to gamers. It’s patronising and hilariously inept at the same time, and all this for a headset.
Take this blurb for example. Do we as gamers pride ourselves on our ability to ‘deliver the innocent’? I can’t tell if that means that you killed them or that you escorted them to safety.
We’re gamers. There is no ‘bench warming’ in gaming… and for some gamers, bench warmer is a term they’re already familiar with being called in the high school environment. I don’t think they’re pushing such a stereotype here, but I do think they haven’t played an online game in their life.
Which gamer would call themself an armchair warrior? And anyway, what kind of bitter retribution would you come up with. You’ve just kicked ass. They’re making fun of you despite that…
Whiny and lame come backs like ‘but I killed all the enemies guys’ aren’t going to taste bitter to anyone.
But on to the break down of the incredible features of this admittedly rather nice headset. Up first… the amazing benefit of it just going in one ear.
Oh dear god.
No really. Nothing can excuse this. No amount of being detached from gaming or ‘kids of today’ can excuse this horrible mangled bullet point.
See, the whole reason one ear piece is great, is so that while you’re trash talking your ’so called bench warming online buddies’ your real life actually in your house ‘fridge raiding buddies’ and you can freestyle rap?
What the hell?
I suppose it sounded better than ’so you’ll be able to hear your Mum tell you to stop playing your games and go to bed.’
And kids, what chaffes your baby soft ears more than an all-night kill fest with an inferior headset?
Sometimes I have all-night kill fests so long and so hard that my ear used to start bleeding before I got this baby, and I tells you, it had nothing to do with the quality of rapping from my fridge raiding buddies.
What about team work? Honestly, someone needs to tell them that the main strength of a headset is ease of communication, not ease of smack talk.
A headset lets you work together as a team better. Why not talk about that? Ensure your team mates hear your orders clearly, and first time thanks to the noise cancelling microphone. Heck, I’d even go with ‘Don’t piss off everyone playing the game with you by forcing them to listen to the god awful music you play games to these days’.
I don’t know if I’m disappointed or encouraged by the fact they couldn’t come up with some hardcore crack about inline volume and mute. To be honest, there’s not much to say when the biggest benefit is ‘Don’t force your buddies to listen to you eat Cheetos and guzzle Mountain Dew (I’m not stereotyping here, I actually DO eat Cheetos and drink Mountain Dew while gaming… tragic I know) or hear your wife saying sappy things about how much she loves you when you’re trying to get your kill on and deliver innocents, with inline mute!’.
Hip. I could just leave it at that and we’d all have a good giggle about it. Sure we didn’t need a text book demonstration of how out of the loop whoever it was that wrote this (probably a panel of fifty year old guys in suits smoking cigars and pipes) didn’t have a clue about what would appeal to the people this product is aimed at, but we got one.
Thinking about it, this actually goes to show that whoever is responsible hasn’t known what was ‘hip’ since the seventies.
For those that don’t know what ‘hip’ really means, let me explain. Hip: A word old people use to try and prove that they know what’s cool with the kids these days. See also ‘down with it’.
.
.
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My trash-talking maw is speechless.
How do you surmise an article like this? Probably best to say, if you don’t know the lingo, don’t bother trying to talk it. A sensible and straightforward list of bullet points is going to get you a lot more respect than trying to fit in and failing hopelessly will.
It’s still a good headset…
But dear god. This is the most hilariously inept thing I’ve seen on game packaging since I bought that ‘gaming chair’ a couple of years back that featured someone holding the controller upside down.
And now a bonus picture of my cat eating my old headset.
27th June | Reply
I don’t have much of an opinion on the topic at hand but I do have one with Plantronics. I bought a headset a few months ago from them to use with Skype and got one of the noise-cancelling ones with a folding headset for portability.
At least, that’s what I thought I was buying
As it turns out the portability is myth. Yes, the headset does fold up but then it also comes with 16Km of cable and a small house brick attached to the cable itself that (I presume) does the fancy noise cancelling.
All this additional cabling and stuff was cunningly hidden behind the cardboard packaging section of the packaging itself (i.e. the bit where they write the marketing blurb). I have since learnt to not trust any product where I cannot see the complete product. A Microsoft mouse that I was intending to buy for my laptop was avoided when it was noted that, while the wireless mouse was certainly portable, the receiving unit that was again hidden behind packaging most certainly was not.
27th June | Reply
I love rapping with my fridge-raiding buddies.
27th June | Reply
That is classic. Last year I bought a plantronics gaming headset (a full one with 5.1 headphones, for Quakecon). There was just one little blurb on the back about “Dominate your online competition with crystal clear pin-point sound then rub it in with the boom mic”. That alone makes me wish the UPC code was on the front.
“Ok sir will there be anything else aside from this tool of online verbal domination?”
I myself have been playing a great deal of GRAW lately, about a week before the new pack the fever started. My first play through of the game I balanced SP with MP. This time it is mostly all MP.
Sadly enough though reading some of those bullets on the back I can only think of scenarios where people have used the mic for just that. You may think Plantronics is off with their advertising but they might not be. For some reason I get “Freestyle rapped” to all the time on Xbox Live. I am not kidding.
They should actually add another point there about “Tell those puuuuuny mortals you are playing with how good you are at Halo 2. Tell them your Halo 2 rank. Tell them how many kills you had in that Halo 2 match last night. Tell them about that one time when the score was like totally 50 - 5, you are serious!”
Ah well, speaking of GRAW though, I tried to play with you last night several times but after launch things would crash. I got a brief conversation with whoever was hosting and I think he said his connection couldn’t handle too many people, or was just shaky in general (something about his router). Just to let you know I wasn’t purposely jumping in and out all the time.
27th June | Reply
Damn you…my apartment won’t let me have cats despite the fact that they’re better company than most people. And your cat is incredibly cute btw.
Honestly this advertising seems just right for a lot of the people on Xbox Live. I mean seriously it sounds like it’s aimed right at that detestable element of Xbox Live you run into in a game of mech Assault or Halo 2 Slayer. Not like the totally regular guys on Xbox Live who are just trying to have fun playing Crimson Skies or GRAW or whatever, not the silent kind who play NBA 2k6. The totally annoying type who play all the uber-popular games like Halo 2(fortunately not on the teamplay list so much) you know who take every oppurtunity to tell you that you’re gay or how high they are, or quit games of Madden after 10 of 20 minutes because you’re actually decent at the game and they can’t deal with losing with any dignity. The marketing seems dead on for those vermin.
28th June | Reply
well, hopefully we’ll get to play again soon Holliday. i figured that was what was happening though.
and vermouth, i guess i just have this misplaced belief that those people are just the vocal minority of xbox live users. most of the people i play with are nothing like that, but then i play with the people i play with instead of random people, because of people like that.
28th June | Reply
My Xbox Live experience is usually positive more often than not. In PGR3 it is actually rather difficult to ruin the game for others (if you try to race backwards your car looses its collision).
I have noticed a night/day difference between the times you play(har). If I played ranked GRAW games in the morning/afternoon I find myself playing with a lot of brits and a lot of people like myself. 20-somethings with a second shift job. The gameplay is much slower and more tactical, everyone is less aggressive, people use voice communication/drones/classes properly. Basically it is just fantastic gameplay.
At night however it is a mixed bag. Any of the adversial games usually have one or two people in there who are just constantly irritating. I’ve noticed a lot of times the hosts will stack the teams based on rank to create uneven odds. I usually try to play Co-Op at night because people there are generally of a different mindset. I am so glad co-op does not get included in the ‘TruSkil” ranking.
What i’ve ended up with after a few weeks or so is finding some people who are enjoyable to play with (mainly met through co-op). With co-op you can tell a lot more about how a person is because you really need to work together. Sometimes theres a guy who runs off to try in kill a bunch of people but he usually dies quickly and leaves because he doesn’t want to wait. It works itself out
Overall the co-op in GRAW is far more compelling than the adversial (although I still fancy me a game of siege or team elimination).
29th June | Reply
Who says Marketing execs are not in touch with today’s youth culture? (BTW my Nan has industial strength hipness, but not in the way they mean…)
If you took all the marketing buzz words which these people fell they have to use to justify their existance (which incidentally just proves they’re STUPID) you’re left with:
* Comfortable headset with easy to use features * - why say more?
30th June | Reply
Look on the bright side: your CAT loves the headset
Maybe marketing folks have found a new customer segment for their headsets…. cat owners 
4th July | Reply
Perhaps they should fear the trash-eating meow.