I really need to add a “WTF” category to this blog. I had heard about this peripherally and figured it was just an urban legend, but it's not. In the last few days Sony released its new adult-oriented video game God of War II for the PlayStation console. Recently they had a big “European launch party” in Greece for members of the press who write about video game news. They tried to theme the party to match the nature of the game, so the party featured an actor dressed up as the hero from the game (okay, you might expect this), games involving throwing knives and pulling live snakes from pits (?), topless women who hand fed grapes to the guests (WTF?), and as a centerpiece, the decapitated carcass of a freshly slaughtered goat (WTF!!?).
Now it's not the first time Sony has done something amazingly stupid to promote their wares, but, as you can imagine not everyone was cool with a slaughtered animal being used as a ”prop” at a party. Guests were invited to reach into the goat's lacerated body, pull out entrails, and eat them. The entrails had in fact been replaced with some sort of Greek dish that resembled intestines. Yum.
If a goat had been killed and served as a dish which guests could eat, that probably would have been fine… I mean anyone who eats meat is eating a killed animal. But to morbidly lay out a dead animal at your dinner party with its head hanging off as a lurid decoration? That's just disgusting, cruel, morbid, and a waste of an animal. According to Sony the goat carcass was purchased from a loal butcher and then returned to the butcher after the party.
Apparently it has finally occurred to Sony that this whole party really wasn't such a great idea. Mostly because of the backlash from animal rights groups, Sony has issued an apology.
From Sony Apologizes For Decapitated Goat In 'God Of War' Launch (InformationWeek via Yahoo! News):
…”On this occasion we recognize that we fell short of our normal high standards of conduct and apologize for any offense caused,” Sony said in a statement. “We are conducting an internal inquiry into the circumstances of the event in order to learn from the occurrence and put in place measures to ensure that this does not happen again.”…
The article goes on and quotes animal rights activists decrying the use of the goat's carcass, and a professor of marketing who calls the party centerpiece “stupid”.
Which is all expected of course, but what I find intriguing is that nobody quoted seems to have any complaints about topless women feeding grapes to the partygoers. Okay, of course they are performers, and they were paid to perform this service, but it hardly seems appropriate for a video game launch party. The use of “pretty girls” at product launches or other types of retail expositions is not a new thing, and includes some sort of compensation, typically money, but not always. But this goes beyond anything I've heard of before. I would expect something like this at say a strip joint* or something like that, but a video game launch party for the press? WTF were they thinking?
Here's an article from 1Up.com recapping the event and including a picture which is probably NSFW.
That's effed up, yo.
*: Which is not to say I've ever been to a strip joint. For the curious, no I haven't. I have no interest in watching ecdysiasts perform live. That would be way too embarrassing for me.
Interesting. I don't know much about Greek culture, but there are plenty of cultures in which toplessness for women is an everyday state. It's really only this country (although perhaps it's spread) in which breasts are so strongly associated with sex and are taboo.
I remember when I was a little girl my mom was getting her degree, and she was taking German. She had some German women's magazines, and in many advertisements and stories, the women were topless.
If toplessness is common in Greek culture, or not taboo the way it is here, then I can understand that.
The goat is also interesting. We are very far removed from the source of the food we eat, and as you point out, killing something to eat is a daily occurence for us (although we don't usually do the killing). But it always bothers me to see something treated disrespectfully, even if it's just an animal, even if it's just the caracass of an animal, and that's why that would bother me.
To kill the goat in the most humane way possible and eat it is one thing. To display its carcass as a centerpiece strikes me as disrespectful, treating it like an object, and that is wrong. It lost its life to be a centerpiece, it lost its life for entertainment. That's disturbing.
But then violent games are disturbing. Maybe Sony threw a very tasteless party, but it was the real-world counterpart to their game. Is it any wonder they were surprised that people found it distasteful? Would the target audience have found it distasteful, or really cool? Clearly some people deeply involved in these video games can't tell the difference between the game and real life.
I think this shows that someone at Sony seems to have a problem separating games from reality.
In any case, I don't find the topless women that much more disturbing than other uses of scantily clad women at tech and automotive events. The idea of “booth fluff” is degrading.
And yes I'm bitter because I couldn't get a job as booth fluff.
I don't understand Sony.
They stormed onto the market in the mid 90's and put up a serious challenge to Nintendo, and I'd imagine it took some kind of clever marketing/sales genius to do that. They really seemed like they could take over at one point; they had all the momentum.
And now, racy sales ads & promotions, boneheaded initiatives (e.g., change the purchase rights of gaming products so that you can't rent, working it much like a lease), and overall poor-as-hell decisionmaking for the PS3; and I wonder how it's even the same company.
I'm soon going to stop being surprised by this junk. =P
Actually, the company HAS changed a lot in the last few years. They got their first American CEO, for example, and he's the one who decided to shut down Sony's entertainment robot division, which means no Aibo for me.
So, in many ways, it really isn't the same company. I think the last Sony product I bought was a PS2, a while back; so I don't know if product quality has declined as well. I know I haven't felt at all tempted by the PS3, and in terms of newer electronics, I'm liking Panasonic better these days.
I like companies that strive to distinguish themselves from their competitors by producing innovative products. In recent years, Sony has become more “ordinary” in this respect, and more annoying in terms of marketing decisions. It's pretty sad.