Game Advert Grotesques

You might have guessed from my pieces about deathmatch wrestling, drill rap and the Conservative Party but I have an interest in morbid subjects. This could sound like a boast — an attempt to cast oneself as worldly. Actually, I think that it can mean the opposite. One remains naive enough to be taken aback by the grotesque.

Anyways, what am I introducing? A piece about serial killers? Cannibals? Necrophilia.

No, video game adverts.

Video game adverts?

Yes. You see, I am being haunted by adverts for a game called Hero Wars. Whenever I go on YouTube or Twitter, I can’t escape them. It’s like a nightmare that begins the moment you close your eyes.

Then the adverts disappear and no trace of them remains. I almost wonder if I’m going mad. Did I imagine them? No, online reviews are full of complaints about “infuriating, relentless, awful advertising”.

Allegedly, most of the footage in these adverts is not reflective of the action in the game — but that isn’t what interested me. I don’t play video games. I’m far too busy doing important adult things like browsing Twitter until my brain bleeds.

What interested me about the adverts is how weird they are — childishly simple yet full of gruesome body horror. There’s a little cartoon knight who seems to be the hero, and he’s always being plunged into deranged situations. He has to save a princess, for example, who ends up swallowing the poor bugger and then excreting him into a pit full of bones. He’s confronted by a mutant beast who somehow encases him in a gigantic worm made of snot. He teleports through a man-shaped hole in a cave while being watched by a leering giantess.

Picture credit: HeroWarsDominionEra

Each time, our hero escapes his predicament and lets out a cheerful “wooooo”, only to be plunged into an equally absurd and disgusting situation. (There’s a sort of Camusian edge to these adverts. Our hero never gives up, whatever lunatic ordeals he is faced with.)

The whole thing seems bizarrely fetishistic. Toilets and flatulence are often involved. Genital punishment is a common feature. Giantesses populate the bizarre landscape. I’d like to think that kids aren’t seeing these adverts — but why wouldn’t they?

Hero Wars is not alone in trying to stun the viewer into giving it their time. There’s a whole industry of bizarre marketing. In adverts for Lily’s Garden, a pregnant woman is abandoned by her boyfriend. According to Brian Feldman of New York Magazine, the actual game is about a woman renovating a house. “Not only does none of [the] information [in the advert] have anything to do with the game play,” writes Feldman, “It’s not mentioned in the game at all.”

This is comparatively innocent, though, compared to some of the ads being featured on the subreddit r/shittymobilegameads. Rape can be heavily suggested. Babies seem to die. There’s a whole world out there, it seems — a whole world of pure garbage.

It would be exciting to say that this is all some sort of Chinese psyop. Some of the developers — though not those of Hero Wars — are Chinese. But the explanation for these marketing practices is more mundane: economics.

Game developers are hugely invested in the science of “user acquisition”. Basically, if you convince people to download your game by snaring them with something that isn’t in the game, enough of them might stick around to pay for your adverts and still leave you with profit.

Neil Long of Eurogamer writes:

The game developer pays the [User Acquisition] company per install, and the trick is to acquire users at a lower price than their expected lifetime spend. Now imagine this process at eye-watering scale: if your user acquisition cost is $1, for example, and your average player spend is $2, you can pump a million dollars into UA now and you’ll — probably — get two million dollars back over time. Bingo!

The big mobile game developers that crack this formula have near-infinite UA budgets, because the more they spend, the more money they make. The really vital part of this high stakes, big money gamble is that the ads have to actually work.

Sometimes, you can make an advert “work” by showing something that looks exciting. But that “something”, it seems, can also be gross, perverse or sad — or all three! Whatever it takes to get people to stop scrolling and to click “download”.

That there is an argument for more regulation here is so obvious that it might go without saying. (That there is a case for me installing an adblocker should definitely go without saying.) But I find myself gruesomely fascinated by the shamelessness and creativity with which people attempt to capture our attention.

In the endless shopping mall of content that is the Internet, attention is extremely hard to acquire. Morbid sensationalism might not be a good answer — but it’s an answer.

The sexual, and the hideous, and the tragic, and the mysterious are all very human qualities, which can be shaped into all kinds of valuable forms, but mashing them into a big inhuman ball of freakery is effective in an age where the inherent cultural value of a product is so beside the point. You don’t really have to capture someone’s heart and brain — only their time.

In a dream, I am being seduced by an enormous leering giantess who wants to draw me in to her mobile game.

I fall through a trapdoor and am faced with an enormous snot-caked mutant who wants me to join his social media app.

I flee — but fall again into a dungeon. A dark wiry figure stands on the other side of the room.

“Will you sign up for my Substack?”