| Blog | Comments |
|---|---|
| Joystiq | 1 Comment |
| The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) | 7 Comments |
Recent Comments:
Ad critic: Hitman ad titillates, but is it a murder/sex sim? {Joystiq}
Apr 14th 2006 1:28PM As a creative director for an ad agency, and as a gamer, my reaction to this ad (the inside cover spread in this month's Play) was visceral - I found it distasteful, disturbing, and frankly, just a bad ad.
To quote Spinal Tap: "Not sex-y, Nigel, sex-IST. SexIST."
I can't believe the number of (presumably male) commenters who seemingly have no issues with this ad. It's not a matter of being overly sensitive or a girly-man or a college-boy with an MA in media studies. If you just see "a dead chick" and have the opinion that "she's not NAKED, and it's a game about a hitman, so what's the problem?" then maybe you need to think a little more about what you're seeing, and maybe to question if you're not a little bit sociopathic.
You're not seeing this ad in the context of the game or even in the context of the other ads in the series; you're seeing it alone, in the context of a magazine. My first reference point was not Sin City or film noir, but classic glamour photography, perfume or cosmetic advertising. It's not a million miles away from that Sophie Dahl YSL ad and others like it.
The model is lying in a pose that is not typically how real dead people sprawl (artlessly) but in a classic sort of glamourous, come-hither way; she's spread across the two pages in a way that is traditionally used to invite the reader's eye to travel along her body. It is an erotic pose, sexually charged. (If you think only naked women are allowed to sexy, then maybe you need to grow up a bit.) And then there is the discongruity of the bullet hole, the invitation to imagine the horror of the (offscreen) moment of death, and the bad pun of the title, "Beautifully executed." There is the promise of sex here, the invitation to view her in a sexual way, and then the ultimate violation, murder.
As Kate noted, it is a combination of someone in a sexually submissive pose, with the ultimate "power trip" of killing them, that makes this ad disturbing.It doesn't matter that there is no actual rape here; rape is about power, not sex, and this ad is all about sexualized power.
Having looked at the other two ads in the series (coldly executed, with a guy in the freezer, and classically executed, a male cellist who's been garotted), frankly, I can see why the other two ads weren't used - those aren't common phrases to begin with, so the tagline isn't as powerful, and as other posters have noted, a dead, fully-clothed, middle-aged-looking guy doesn't evoke the same reaction from the viewer as a beautiful woman with long legs lying back on satin sheets in lingerie.
As others have noted, the classic justification for bad-taste advertising is 'if this offends you, you aren't in the market for this product,' but when you're talking about an industry where games cost millions to develop (vs whatever it costs to develop Axe body spray - can't possibly be as much, compared to what they've sunk into their racy ad campaigns), you can't afford to address your product to a niche, you want to sell it to as many people as possible...one would think...so in my view, making the choice to go with a risky campaign like this is the wrong one.
Of course, you can't legislate taste, but you'd think the editors of these magazines - particularly Play, which I've thought of as a thoughtful and well-written gaming mag for grownups, and which errs on the side of sexy vs. sexist when it chooses to show female flesh, would have exercised a bit more editorial discretion. But I guess dollars speak more than integrity, sometimes.
Common Mistakes Made by New Mac Users {The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)}
Jan 26th 2006 2:39AM Sure, with any operating system there's going to be people that don't understand the Magic Gestures(tm) needed to make the computer do what they want it to do.
question is: is it the users' fault, or the designers'?
If enough people make the same error, maybe it's incumbent upon the UI designers to realize there's an implied desirable behaviour that's unimplemented.
If the maximize button doesn't work consistently, maybe the maximize function should change.
If people type URLs into Spotlight search bars, how hard would it be to link URL recognition and WebKit to actually bring up matching websites in Spotlight results, at least, or pop up a dialog that asks if they want to search the Web or the desktop.
Why *shouldn't* people expect the Apple key to open the Apple menu? Apple to apple...makes sense *unless* you know what the Command key is. I know it doesn't work that way now, but objectively...doesn't that sound useful? (Maybe Mac keyboards need another key...put a *new* Apple key next to the cloverleaf Command key. Or map a Windows keyboard's start key to it.)
Speaking of which, why can't Open and Save dialogs behave like Finder windows, and let me rearrange, zip, trash, etc. before I execute the command? It's actually useful, sometimes, when you're about to move a folder, say, that's missing something you can see in another nested folder a level up.
If we can .zip and trash files from contextual menus, why not mail them, too? Does Microsoft own the patent on that?
In short...yes, sometimes it's genuine user error. But sometimes, it's just applying other experiences or different logic to an analogous situation. A well-designed system should gracefully accommodate such errors as alternate ways of achieving the same task.
Apple Intel ad a ripoff of Star Trek First Contact? {The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)}
Jan 23rd 2006 5:20PM If any of you have ever rented the Directors' Series set of DVDs (Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham, Jonathan Glazer, etc.) you notice that video and ad directors constantly recycle their own work, styles and themes. I don't think it's laziness, but more the client asking for something like their old stuff. It's not a crime to rip yourself off, but it is lazy and unchallenging.
UK Government: Free iPods for all! {The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)}
Jan 12th 2006 5:00PM On January 24th Apple Computer and Her Majesty's Government will introduce the Mandatory iPod.
And you'll see why 2006 *will* be like "1984."
Send us your iWeb sites and your Photocasts {The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)}
Jan 12th 2006 3:10AM Yes, I noticed a lot of inline styles in the output produced by iWeb (at least in their sample blog), so a lot of repetition and code bloat...you'd think a company that makes its own dev tools / compilers could apply some of that knowledge to generating optimized xhtml/css, or optimized templates anyway. I mean, look at TypePad's drag-and-drop page design tools, and that's a web app! The bar has been set much higher already by free or low-cost web apps - I'd expect an Apple desktop app (combined with what, $100/year for .Mac, at least?) to surpass them. I mean, no commenting system?? Weren't Xserves supposed to be shipping with Bloxsom as standard, anyway?
I guess the market is still open for a consumer-level WYSIWYG web design tool for OS X, then - as for blogging tools, I'll stick with MovableType and MarsEdit...
New widgets in Mac OS 10.4.4 {The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)}
Jan 11th 2006 1:12AM The calendar font issue (also affects iCal's dock widget) is caused by having more than one version of Helvetica installed on your Mac. The stock (dfont version? I think) works fine, but if you have a PostScript Helvetica or something like that active, it'll use that and then display incorrectly - some sort of baseline calculation error. Easy to fix - just turn off any additional Helveticas using Font Book. (Note that this only applies to medium and bold weights of Helvetica, if you have an extended font set like Helvetica Neue, you can leave all the condensed / expanded / thin / black weights on.)
and hey, man, free the widgets from the Dashboard layer!!
Ten Things to hate about OS X {The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)}
Jan 9th 2006 8:53PM I'm sure Owen Linzmayer actually knows most of the "doesn't he know about X" shortcuts mentioned here - but even I, a 20-year Mac user, didn't know some of them. Now imagine encountering these annoyances from the perspective of a complete computer newbie or a Windows switcher - Apple doesn't really need to fuel the flames of the "mac suxs" crowd, do they?
No matter what OS you use, user interface consistency, plain-english dialogs, and smart error handling make for a more seamless experience, and Linzmayer's top 10 list points out some egregious examples. In some ways, OS X added many cool core features while throwing out a lot of the simple elegance of the Classic environment...
I disagree with Software Update though - I'd rather that be kept Apple-only - no one wants the core of their Mac exposed to potential trojans from a wider variety of third-party sources, and imagine the liabilities Apple might face if a 3rd-party update tanked someone's production system.
Music, audio to be heavy focus of Macworld 06 {The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)}
Dec 6th 2005 8:27PM I'm hoping for some major upgrades in Apple's music/audio apps department. Having seen Soundtrack Pro, I'd almost ditch the still-quite-complex Logic Express for it. I want something as easy as GarageBand but not as limited in terms of editing features and effects; like Soundtrack Pro, but with added multitrack and MIDI recording and the Guitar Amp Pro plugin. Surely there is a mash-up waiting to happen there - a step between GarageBand and Logic?
