Persuasive Games, based in Atlanta,
is one of many companies that create online games. Sometimes it does
this for name-brand clients, including Cold Stone Creamery and
Chrysler. Earlier this year, however, Persuasive Games released a game
about the copy-shop chain Kinko's that was rather different. For
starters, Kinko's is not a client. And the game, called Disaffected!,
is not a typical example of an "advergame." In fact, it's billed as an
anti-advergame. As the company explains: "Disaffected! puts the player
in the role of employees forced to service customers under the
particular incompetences common to a Kinko's store." Since January, the
game has been downloaded more than 150,000 times from Persuasive Games'
Web site, one of several places it can be obtained for free.
Ian Bogost, a founder of Persuasive Games, acknowledges that
Disaffected! was partly inspired by one too many annoying experiences
at a Kinko's, but his goals are a little more complicated than a simple
consumer vendetta. Consider the way his company's site promotes the
game experience: "Feel the indifference of these purple-shirted
malcontents first-hand and consider the possible reasons behind their
malaise — is it mere incompetence? Managerial affliction? Unseen but
serious labor issues?" (A Kinko's spokeswoman says the company has no
opinion about the game, but "takes exception" to any potentially "hurtful" characterization of its employees.)
Skepticism about, and mockery of, the claims of commercial
persuasion has a long history. And "Disaffected!" shows how the
sophistication, goals and tactics of both admakers and anti-admakers
have escalated in tandem. It can also be seen as an example of what
Sonia Katyal, a Fordham University
law professor, calls "semiotic disobedience" in an article to be published this fall in the Washington University Law Review.
As a term and a concept, semiotic disobedience is a riff on two
earlier ideas. One, of course, is civil disobedience. The other is "semiotic democracy," a coinage of John Fiske, a media scholar whose
1987 book Television Culture described the ways in which audiences
create their own interpretations of mass entertainment. Katyal's
combination, then, refers to the reinvention or subversion of logos and
other symbols of commercial persuasion as part of a battle to redefine
their meaning in ways that are frankly oppositional. Her research, she
told me, evolved out of her interest in the way certain artists alter
billboards with antibrand or anticapitalist messages. While this
practice (variously referred to as brandalism, subvertising, culture
jamming, adbusting, etc.) has gone on for years, it's often dismissed
as a nuisance, agitprop or, of course, a crime.
Katyal's paper makes clear that she is not calling for, say,
the legalization of billboard alteration. Instead, she offers a
different intellectual framework for thinking about such acts. Her
point is to consider whether some antibrander tactics are not simply
vandalism or trademark infringements but rather acts that break laws
partly to question the assumption behind the laws themselves. "Acts of
semiotic disobedience," as she puts it, "actually try to disobey the
meaning of the sign itself" and to redefine that meaning in the
process.
Her paper does not address Disaffected! or other online
versions of anti-advergaming (including one simply called McDonald's
Videogame, which lets players decide how much rain forest to clear in
order to raise more cattle for slaughter). And Ian Bogost says that he
believes Disaffected! is a legally protected parody. Along with being a
founder of Persuasive Games, Bogost happens to be an assistant
professor of media studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology,
with a particular interest in how games can facilitate cultural
dialogues. In the case of Disaffected!, he's most pleased when he sees
it referred to in online discussions of Kinko's — and he loved it when
somebody (not he or anyone at Persuasive Games, he says) added a link
to the game from the Kinko's entry in Wikipedia, the user-edited
encyclopedia. Although Bogost makes advergames, he is ambivalent about
the way marketing has colonized computer and video games. Disaffected!,
he says, sends a message: "We're sick of seeing this colonization
happen, and we want something out there that makes the advertisers
realize that games can bite back."
Marcel Neundörfer’s On Target urinal has a pressure-sensitive screen
recessed into it — score points by shooting the moving images onscreen.
Not only does this add much-needed entertainment to otherwise dreary
elimination functions, but it also improves aim — if you stay on
target, you’ll avoid splashback and misses. 