Don't mind this, I need to send this to myself some how so I'm using the forum.
Why go with gaming-
When it came time to pick a path to go down and company to spoof I eventually decided on video game companies, specifically Microsoft, but why.
This is my second time through the subject, my second time doing this peace of assessment so I have been through this process of pick companies before and I have learnt one thing. Don't go for the middle of the road. Good ideas come from strong opinions so I knew I had to pick a company I had an opinion on.
The first company I though I would do was PETA. An animal rights organization that uses comically overt sexual advertising to raise brand awareness. They justify there advertising as a spoof, a critic of the advertising world so they both get the benefits of evil and can still call them selves good. The problem with spoofing PETA is that I would be spoofing a spoof so if I didn't make it extremely clear I knew they where a spoof then I risked looking like I misses the point of PETAs ads completely. A risk I would rather not take.
After more brainstorming, looking at the music and book industries, alcohol and energy drinks I eventually came to the topic I am most familiar with, gaming. I am studying design and 3d specifically to get into the gaming industry, I spend hours reading, watching videos and listening to podcasts to get a better understanding of he medium.
Part of being an enthusiast is hearing the other side of the debate, understanding and discussing the negatives of gaming. These negatives are what I plan to focus my ad busting designs on. I just needed to find a house style to spoof. My first though went to Nintendo, specifically the way they marketed the wii when it came out. The image of people looking like goofs playing in front of there TVs. The problem is that that isn't how nintendo markets themselves anymore and finding old print ads was an unexpected challenge. I could find ads from the 80s and ands from last week but nothing In between. That's when I saw the exact ad I was looking for. Children playing, mum watching, the beautiful house, the big tv, the product shot down the bottom. The ironic Nintendo wii ad. Only it wasn't selling the wii it was selling Microsofts answer to the wii the kinect.
Once I found evidence that this was the house style for the kinect I decided they would be the target for my spoofs.*
What's next -
Now that I had a company to spoof, a house style and a list of possible reasons to spoof them (developed in the brainstorming stage) I needed to decide on how to go about it.
The spoof I most wanted to do, because it reflected my experience researching the topic was about drawing attention to the way the kinect was heavily influenced by the Nintendo wii, along with the play station move. The idea of "you are the controller" (the kinects main tag line) is not a new concept. It's a rehashing of an idea that has been seen before several times. Calling attention to this fact is strong ground for a spoof.
For my second spoof I had 3 high level concepts I could choose between. Violence, sexism and obesity. The question is which to go with. By process of elimination the first to go was the obesity issue because while gaming and obesity can be linked the kinect and products like it are at least making an effort to get kids moving.
The next issue with video games I looked at was sexism and the way people are portrayed in video games. While this is a big problem with games, people almost always have perfect body's and the guy usually has to save the damsel in distress and all sorts of other outdated cheches are staples of the game industry but they don't apply well to the kinect because it's only hardware. They don't make the games so blaming them isn't the path a want to go down. It would be a challenge but not imposable to have them look bad for the shortcomings of the industry as a whole.
That leaves the violence issue. The big argument against violence in video-games compared to say violence in movies is that you don't just see the violence happen, you make it happen. This goes to a whole new level when we look at the kinect because you don't just push a button to make it happen, you actually have to make the motion. Not only is the violence in kinect games more realistic and impactful its also more appealing to children because that's who the kinect is marketed at. *
Last edited by C0XY; Jun 6, 2012 at 09:16 AM.
