This post is definitely going to be a non-sequitur considering my last one was like, “Yay I have a literary agent!” And then the post ended with a rejection factory? I guess I was trying to temper expectations, but I think I just did a bummer, so… sorry for doing a bummer. Suffice it to say, I still have a literary agent, and things are happening. I’m not sure what I’m allowed to say about those things yet, so I’m being cautious. But they are good things.
In the meantime! You are not gonna believe the trigger warnings for this post, but I promise they are real and should be heeded.
TRIGGER/CONTENT WARNING:
– Domestic Violence/Violence Against Pregnant Women
– Child Endangerment/Death
– Pregnancy/Difficult Pregnancy
– Miscarriage/Stillbirth
– Poverty
– Death/Freezing to Death/Hypothermia (human and animal)
– Starvation (human and animal)
– Disturbing Medical Imagery
I play a lot of stupid little iPhone games while I’m going about my day-to-day, and often these games are free with ads or they offer bonuses if you “watch” an ad. Since I usually have the games running while I’m doing something else, I tend to just “watch” the ads. Whatever.
Except… I noticed a terrifying trend. You may have seen this yourself at some point. A woman who is either pregnant or has a child (or both!) gets kicked out by her husband/boyfriend/??? and has to suddenly walk uphill in the snow against the wind to find a dilapidated shack in the middle of nowhere to survive and raise her child(ren) in. Then the ad implies only You can save these women by matching three things or merging two things or pulling a pin out of a thing. Often, the ads feature the women literally kneeling as if in supplication as they beg You (the viewer) for help. I took screenshots to help underline my point, so again I urge you to look at the Trigger Warnings above.
There are so many things wrong with this ad trend that I am going to fall back on a classic Internet tool: The Numbered List (Number 1 may surprise you!)
1. This is not the game…
Look, you saw the title of this post. You know I’m getting there. Just give me a second to get to feminism. I want to start with the more practical stuff.
One of the things that baffles me about mobile game ads (and something that many other people have pointed out) is that they very rarely show actual gameplay. It goes further than that, though! It’s about regulations. It’s about the fact that they’re not required to show actual gameplay. Occasionally, Candy Crush will put “Not actual gameplay” or something similar in teeeeeny tiny font at the bottom of the screen, but no one else does!
It goes further again! These are all different games! Look at this:
If you play mobile games, this image may be familiar to you. Like me, you may be so used to seeing this woman and this little girl being desperate for warmth that it doesn’t even occur to you that the above image is not from the game you’re thinking of. More likely, you’re thinking of this game:
No. Regulations.
I’ve thought about this and thought about this. I have put more thought into these ads than the people making them. They don’t deserve to live rent-free in my head, yet here we are. Not only are the games blatantly plagiarizing each other, but the ads are copied and pasted. If I were any good at research, I would look into the ad companies, not the games. I wonder if all these games farm out their ads to the same company, or if ad companies are copying each other. I have literally seen ads for Royal Match one day that suddenly have a character from Toon Blast in them the next. Literally the same ad, just a bear from Toon Blast subbed in for the king from Royal Match. To add insult to injury, the “level” portrayed in the ad does not accurately represent the gameplay or imagery in either game.
And there’s also this:
Sometimes the mom in this ad is a completely different woman (the green-haired woman who is the actual mother in the game being advertised), and I think the Black woman above is from a different game from the same company. They just swapped the two female characters out for some reason??
People say (I think) that the reason there are no regulations is that a lot of these game and/or ad companies are outside the U.S. To this I say, the Internet has existed for a long time. Probably over ten years, at a guess. It’s time to maybe start thinking about how to address internet issues, domestic and international, with something other than: “It’s the internet…” *shrug*
Also…
2. I didn’t agree to see this sh*t
For every horrifying image I posted above, there are a hundred I didn’t dare screenshot or post here because they are literally too horrific to share. I don’t even want to put the words together that would describe them. But I kind of have to, so… REMEMBER THE TRIGGER WARNINGS, but know that there will be no images accompanying this section.
“ASMR” games that involve pustules and the lancing thereof. Foot fungus. Ingrown nails.
“Hospital” games that involve miscarriage and/or stillbirth, including little baby ghosts flying out of their mothers.
Surgery on children while their parents weep and wait for the outcome.
A starving baby cow trying desperately to suck on the frozen udder of its mother, who has frozen to death.
A woman being assaulted by her husband, getting shoved into a glass table, and lying on the floor while blood pools around her head. (She later wakes up in a body bag.)
Pregnant women being physically assaulted by their partner. Yes, you read that right. Pregnant women (plural) because multiple games have ads that feature visibly pregnant women being physically attacked. (In at least one case, this scene precedes yet another version of the pregnant woman fighting her way through a blizzard towards an abandoned shack.)
I. Did. Not. Sign. Up. For. This.*
Just because they are cartoons does not mean they can’t be morbid, horrifying, unsettling, triggering, or any combination thereof.
In a world where sane people are starting to realize that it’s best to include warnings for sensitive content, and where more and more literal children** are playing on their or their parents’ phones, we have ads for sex games popping up on our phones. We have ads with horrific medical maladies or imagery that makes you want to retch. No warning. No way to report ads (in some cases) or request not to see certain ones again. This is number 2 on the list, but it might make me the most livid. Well, maybe it’s tied with the misogyny bit. Speaking of…
*Your counterargument may be that I did sign up for this by agreeing to watch an ad and/or play a game that is free with ads, but I would argue there’s a certain expectation of censorship for an ad that can have literally any audience. Ads are regulated in other contexts. You don’t go to see PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie and expect to see a preview for Cocaine Bear.
**I don’t disapprove of children playing on phones or tablets; this is an outdated criticism of “kids these days” and/or their parents. I don’t limit my screen time, so why would I limit my child’s? I also don’t think it’s up to an ad company to regulate content my child sees. Screen time should be supervised. But things happen, don’t they? We do our best.
3. Okay, it’s time for the feminism now.
Look, I’m not saying men come off great in these ads. They are often cheating on the “protagonist” of the ad, or they are abusive. At the very least, they are inattentive and unsupportive. That’s not a great look. But… I still need to point out that not one of these ads features a man kneeling before you, desperate for you to solve a puzzle correctly so he can avoid dying of exposure.
Strangely enough, when the ad includes an animated hand doing the puzzle (usually poorly, so that you will be so infuriated by the incompetence that you’ll download the game just so you can do it better), it often is a well-manicured uh… female-presenting hand?
So one thing I will say is they’re not explicitly sending the message that only men can save these women and children. In fact, in the lore of the ad, men are the ones who put them in that situation in the first place. Damn men. Always making their exes live in shacks in the middle of the tundra.
But (I’m saying “but” a lot, I know) they sure are saying these women are helpless without a man in their lives. The equations they present are:
Woman + Man = Home With Working Heat and Electricity
Woman – Man = Living in Squalor
I cannot stress this enough: This isn’t what the game is about. These scenes aren’t featured in the games. Or not all of them anyway. They are explicitly using this as a marketing technique, or worse (somehow) using it as a marketing technique because they’re copying someone else who used it as a marketing technique. Again, the frustration stems from not being able to do anything about this. Some ads have a button to report them for one reason or another, but I swear some of them do not have such a button. Even if they did, I’m not sure a complaint would change anything. Sure, I could rate the app one star for its ads alone. That would accomplish… nothing. These games have thousands of reviews. New reviews will have no effect.
And there isn’t enough space here to complain about how much real money these games push for on a regular basis.
Maybe I will look into these ads a little more for another post, figure out the who, what, when, where, and why of it all. It sure does make me mad.
At least now I can finally delete all these screenshots from my phone.
Potato Lady Blogs 