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.
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
The Way We Think
There are about 40,000 traffic fatalities per year in the U.S., the equivalent of about one jumbo jet crash every two or three days. Can you imagine the level of panic if planes started crashing at that rate? Or the extreme panic if these planes were being brought down by terrorists rather than mechanical problems?
A person making 50K a year whose salary is suddenly cut to 40K will bemoan his fate, while a person making 30K suddenly making 40 will party it up. Shouldn't they feel the same, since they make the same amount of money?
An earthquake in Haiti or a tsunami in Southeast Asia, each taking thousands of lives, prompt non-stop news coverage and donations of millions of dollars. A genocide in Rwanda that kills nearly a million, or a government-assisted North Korean famine killing millions, get modest coverage and no telethons. Why?
An article a student brought in the other day mentioned the concept of anchoring, which is apparently a word psychologists use to describe the fact that we sometimes rely too heavily on one piece of information (of questionable relevance) when making judgments. It was mentioned in the context of buying stock: many stockholders sell or don't sell based on what they paid for it, which in fact has no relevance at a later time: the only consideration for selling or holding should be expectations of the stock's future value, not its past value. Yet many people consider this fact. While not the same thing, this brings to mind the fact that there are many people who think that if a flipped coin comes up heads ten times in a row, the eleventh is bound to be tails. The irrelevant past events color our judgment of the future event.
The first question above is one I've always thought was interesting. We freak out when a plane crashes, but the same number of people dying on the roads in a single day would be so ordinary it wouldn't even be reported in the national media. Granted, more people are on the roads every day than are in planes (I assume), so absolute numbers may not be a fair comparison, but the point is valid, I think. We have gotten used to the carnage on the streets and highways. It's the price we pay to drive, the cost of doing business. I guess part of the situation here is that traffic fatalities happen every day, at a fairly predictable rate, and only one or two tend to die at a time. Plane crashes are unpredictable, happen irregularly, and have death tolls in the hundreds; this seems to make crashes more attention-getting. I'd bet that if three planes crashed in a week it would be a crisis; many questions would be asked. But few note the toll on the roads. Could this number be reduced? If we put more cop cars on the roads and cut speed limits by a third, would it save lives? It would almost have to, though I can't know how many. If experts agreed that it would save 10,000 lives a year, would people agree to it? Not a chance in hell. 40 mph on the freeway? Yeah, right. My feelings about this may be colored by the fact that a very close friend (best man at each other's weddings) was killed in a traffic accident 15 years ago. Our experiences cause us to look at the same events or ideas in different ways.
The second sentence at the top of the post, about the salary, is a good example of anchoring. Is 40K a good salary, or not? If so, but we got a cut from 50, shouldn't we just say, 'well, 40 is still good, so I'm not going to sweat it'? Our idea of what is a good salary tends to depend on what our salary is right now. (I haven't seen any research, but I'd bet money that people who make 100K have a very different idea of what a 'good salary' is than those who make 30K.) It seems very natural to see things this way, but I wonder why we do, or rather, why we can't 'not sweat' a drop from 50K to 40K. Does someone who made 200K last year moan and whine about this year's 150K? I'm sure he does, even though he knows perfectly well that 95% of Americans would love to have his salary; 200K is simply his anchor. Similarly, a cut from 50K to 40K would feel devastating, even though plenty in Africa, India, China, etc. would feel rich if they had 40K. Thinking like that doesn't seem to help.
The third sentence is inspired by recent events. Of course, the Haiti earthquake is terrible and has caused enormous human suffering, as did the tsunami a few years ago. People saw the images, read the stories, and opened their wallets both times. But there's always great suffering in the world, usually preventable, at the hands of corrupt and despotic governments that prioritize gold-fixtured mansions for the rich over basic services for the desperately poor. Why are we not moved by this, why do we not insist that our government do something? Because it's due to a government's actions rather than nature? Why is the suffering of a tsunami victim more worthy of help than one of the many Zimbabwean citizens scrounging through garbage for food? I guess, because we've gotten used to that, as we've gotten used to the 40,000 traffic deaths per year. Tsunamis and earthquakes, like airplane crashes, are exceptional and startling events. It's true, also, that due to national sovereignty, the million who died in Rwanda or the million-plus who preventably starved in North Korea are widely seen as things we can do nothing about. But even if we could...
Bill Clinton has said that the biggest regret of his presidency is that he didn't send U.S. troops to Rwanda to prevent what happened, and it's easy to see why he regrets that. But the reason he didn't do it was that it was politically dangerous; U.S. citizens wouldn't have stood for our soldiers dying to prevent Rwandan deaths. 4,000 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq, and we stood for that because Bush 43 persuaded Americans that our interests were at stake. Probably he should have gambled his second term and sent the troops anyway, but more importantly, ordinary Americans should have read articles about what was going on, realized that our troops could save many lives, and urged Clinton to send them. But hey, there's always some African war going on somewhere, and we can't get involved in all of them, right? Even as the slaughter happened, public opinion about sending troops didn't change. The Rwandans who died would have gotten a lot more sympathy and help if they'd died in a tsunami instead of being macheted to death.
I don't mean that people shouldn't send money to the Haiti relief charities. But it would be nice if we looked around the world to see what was going on all the time, not only when something big happens, and made it easier for our leaders to do the right thing when they have a chance.
A person making 50K a year whose salary is suddenly cut to 40K will bemoan his fate, while a person making 30K suddenly making 40 will party it up. Shouldn't they feel the same, since they make the same amount of money?
An earthquake in Haiti or a tsunami in Southeast Asia, each taking thousands of lives, prompt non-stop news coverage and donations of millions of dollars. A genocide in Rwanda that kills nearly a million, or a government-assisted North Korean famine killing millions, get modest coverage and no telethons. Why?
An article a student brought in the other day mentioned the concept of anchoring, which is apparently a word psychologists use to describe the fact that we sometimes rely too heavily on one piece of information (of questionable relevance) when making judgments. It was mentioned in the context of buying stock: many stockholders sell or don't sell based on what they paid for it, which in fact has no relevance at a later time: the only consideration for selling or holding should be expectations of the stock's future value, not its past value. Yet many people consider this fact. While not the same thing, this brings to mind the fact that there are many people who think that if a flipped coin comes up heads ten times in a row, the eleventh is bound to be tails. The irrelevant past events color our judgment of the future event.
The first question above is one I've always thought was interesting. We freak out when a plane crashes, but the same number of people dying on the roads in a single day would be so ordinary it wouldn't even be reported in the national media. Granted, more people are on the roads every day than are in planes (I assume), so absolute numbers may not be a fair comparison, but the point is valid, I think. We have gotten used to the carnage on the streets and highways. It's the price we pay to drive, the cost of doing business. I guess part of the situation here is that traffic fatalities happen every day, at a fairly predictable rate, and only one or two tend to die at a time. Plane crashes are unpredictable, happen irregularly, and have death tolls in the hundreds; this seems to make crashes more attention-getting. I'd bet that if three planes crashed in a week it would be a crisis; many questions would be asked. But few note the toll on the roads. Could this number be reduced? If we put more cop cars on the roads and cut speed limits by a third, would it save lives? It would almost have to, though I can't know how many. If experts agreed that it would save 10,000 lives a year, would people agree to it? Not a chance in hell. 40 mph on the freeway? Yeah, right. My feelings about this may be colored by the fact that a very close friend (best man at each other's weddings) was killed in a traffic accident 15 years ago. Our experiences cause us to look at the same events or ideas in different ways.
The second sentence at the top of the post, about the salary, is a good example of anchoring. Is 40K a good salary, or not? If so, but we got a cut from 50, shouldn't we just say, 'well, 40 is still good, so I'm not going to sweat it'? Our idea of what is a good salary tends to depend on what our salary is right now. (I haven't seen any research, but I'd bet money that people who make 100K have a very different idea of what a 'good salary' is than those who make 30K.) It seems very natural to see things this way, but I wonder why we do, or rather, why we can't 'not sweat' a drop from 50K to 40K. Does someone who made 200K last year moan and whine about this year's 150K? I'm sure he does, even though he knows perfectly well that 95% of Americans would love to have his salary; 200K is simply his anchor. Similarly, a cut from 50K to 40K would feel devastating, even though plenty in Africa, India, China, etc. would feel rich if they had 40K. Thinking like that doesn't seem to help.
The third sentence is inspired by recent events. Of course, the Haiti earthquake is terrible and has caused enormous human suffering, as did the tsunami a few years ago. People saw the images, read the stories, and opened their wallets both times. But there's always great suffering in the world, usually preventable, at the hands of corrupt and despotic governments that prioritize gold-fixtured mansions for the rich over basic services for the desperately poor. Why are we not moved by this, why do we not insist that our government do something? Because it's due to a government's actions rather than nature? Why is the suffering of a tsunami victim more worthy of help than one of the many Zimbabwean citizens scrounging through garbage for food? I guess, because we've gotten used to that, as we've gotten used to the 40,000 traffic deaths per year. Tsunamis and earthquakes, like airplane crashes, are exceptional and startling events. It's true, also, that due to national sovereignty, the million who died in Rwanda or the million-plus who preventably starved in North Korea are widely seen as things we can do nothing about. But even if we could...
Bill Clinton has said that the biggest regret of his presidency is that he didn't send U.S. troops to Rwanda to prevent what happened, and it's easy to see why he regrets that. But the reason he didn't do it was that it was politically dangerous; U.S. citizens wouldn't have stood for our soldiers dying to prevent Rwandan deaths. 4,000 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq, and we stood for that because Bush 43 persuaded Americans that our interests were at stake. Probably he should have gambled his second term and sent the troops anyway, but more importantly, ordinary Americans should have read articles about what was going on, realized that our troops could save many lives, and urged Clinton to send them. But hey, there's always some African war going on somewhere, and we can't get involved in all of them, right? Even as the slaughter happened, public opinion about sending troops didn't change. The Rwandans who died would have gotten a lot more sympathy and help if they'd died in a tsunami instead of being macheted to death.
I don't mean that people shouldn't send money to the Haiti relief charities. But it would be nice if we looked around the world to see what was going on all the time, not only when something big happens, and made it easier for our leaders to do the right thing when they have a chance.
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