Hot Lesbian Amateurs

The standard joke here would be something along the lines of "now that I have your attention..." This post is obviously not about hot lesbian amateurs (or should it be, hot amateur lesbians? I guess not, as that suggests there must be professional lesbians, which sounds strange, but anyway...), but the post's topic does have some connection to the headline. I should say now, though, that there are no pictures, no links to pictures, or pornography of any kind on this page. I wouldn't want someone who found this page by searching for 'hot lesbian amateurs' to actually read the post, only to not find what he was looking for, and leave nasty comments.

If you have been using the internet at all to look at English-language pages–and if you're looking at this page, it seems likely that you have–then you will have seen ads for the online game called Evony. Evony is apparently (I haven't played it) a game in which one builds one's own city, then empire. Evony is a lot less well-known for its gameplay, of course, than it is for its ads, which usually include an attractive underwear-and-bra-clad young woman whose ample cleavage is highly emphasized. The ads are ubiquitous, appearing on a substantial percentage of the websites I tend to frequent (which generally have nothing to do with either online games or porn).

At first, I wondered what the young woman had to do with the gameplay, then I realized that I was being naive. Nothing, of course; apparently, women (much less scantily clad ones) have no connection whatsoever to the game. Then again, bikini-clad women have nothing to do with cars or sports, but one sees them in car commercials and in one very popular issue of Sports Illustrated. The well-known site The Huffington Post started as a political blog, but it gets a lot of traffic through celebrity skin and nipple-slip photos. Whatever brings in the eyeballs.

I was moved to write this post while looking at a movie review website called Reelviews, written by a guy named James Berardinelli, who I think writes far-above-average reviews that I like to read whether I plan to see the movies or not. He writes reviews as a labor of love, and unfortunately can't make a living from the income from internet ads on his site. His most recent column was accompanied by two Evony ads, which much to my surprise did not include any breast-related photos. Each had a few short, pithy phrases, and while reading them, it occurred to me that advertising attempts to tap into and exploit fundamental human desires. Some ads do it subtly, while others are far more blunt. Even without female flesh, Evony ads run much more towards the latter than the former. Here are the phrases in the ads:

Be A Lord. Appeals to the desire to have high status and to rule over others.

Conquer Your World. Appeals to the desire to feel powerful. Humans have been trying to do that since the dawn of time. Since it's difficult and dangerous to try to do it for real, maybe a virtual world is the best we can do.

Our City Is Under Attack, Come And Save Us! Appeals to the desire to be a hero, the white knight who rides in to save the day. And maybe if you save them, they let you have the underwear-clad woman in gratitude?

Build Your Kingdom. A combination of the desires to build something lasting and rule over others.

Make New Friends. Appeals to the desire to be popular, to have many friends. Maybe you can make alliances in this game, or maybe the phrase is trying to tap into the fact that some people do make friends online, and making friends in the game has as little to do with the game as the busty babes. I don't know.

10 Million Gamers. This is along the lines of '50 Million Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong.' (I believe that is an actual album title I saw once.) If so many people are doing it, it must be good. Get in on the trend, another strong human tendency.

As I mentioned, there were no women in these ads, but another page I happened to be looking at did have one. It included the phrases:

Play the New Game Everyone's Talking About. Similar to the 10 Million Gamers one, it tries to tap into the herd mentality of the human psyche: if everyone's talking about it except us, we should know what it is. (And yes, everyone is talking about it. They're saying, did you see those ads?)

It's Obvious Why They Are. As the words move back and forth over the cleavage, I guess that's hard to dispute. They have poor impulse control, and couldn't stop themselves from clicking on the ads!

It Makes You Feel Like A King! A more blatant appeal to the ego and/or low self-esteem would be hard to find. Like I said, these ads are not subtle, to put it mildly.

Not surprisingly, it turns out that the game isn't actually that good, or at least one gets that impression by reading its Wikipedia entry, which suggests that it's quite derivative of the popular empire-building game called Civilization. Apparently, while it is a free game, in order to really succeed in the game, one must use real money to buy game-related progress and enhancements. I'd wondered at first how they could afford all those ads, but now I understand: people, especially men who clicked on the breasts, get competitive once they get into the game. Once hooked in, they try to advance over others by buying the enhancements. So, the ads use psychology to get you to play, and once you play, they use psychology to try to get you to spend money on an allegedly free game. Really, it's almost diabolical. Not that there aren't a lot of other things like it on the Web, but this one is so ubiquitous that it's interesting to analyze. And if they really have 10 million players, it seems to be working.

So, morally speaking, how bad are the ads? The ads don't lie outright, it seems: I imagine that no one expects to click on the link and suddenly 'be a Lord' in any realistic sense. They are somewhat deceptive, as the babes have absolutely nothing to do with the game, but a lot of advertising would fall into this category. I suspect that a lot of big companies do things worse than this. Anyway, I titled the post as I did partly in humor, and partly as a demonstration of a tactic similar to what the Evony people do: babes have nothing to do with their game, but are just an attention-getting tactic. In my case, part of the humor is that I'm not really trying to get more readers by shameless deception, but rather to make it appear as though I am. (Or, I could be lying...)

Even the oldest of us have been exposed to advertising all our lives, and I suppose it's like any other aspect of life: some will see things for what they are and some won't, with many in between. All except the most stupid or naive know that ads mislead or even lie, but I suspect that many don't know or don't consider the part that understanding the way the human mind works plays in creating advertising. I'm pretty sure that in most universities there are classes on advertising that explain this, but those classes are about how to make advertising. I'd like to see classes as early as elementary school that deconstruct advertising, and explain how to resist its appeal. But I'm pretty sure there's no chance of that happening. Ours is a consumer society, and the companies that run it would fiercely fight any attempt to teach children to resist their sales pitches.