Left 4 Dead 2: Roadkill
Category: General
Tags: Left 4 Dead 2, Valve, Billboards, SyFy is a Ridiculous Way to Spell Sci-Fi
They’re beautiful.
Towering over the concrete highways and
blistered asphalt, the blinding Arizona sunlight reflected off the
stories-high splatters of blood and decaying tendons, they make me
smile every time. Billboards. For Left 4 Dead 2.
Beautiful.
And
Valve does it again—this is the first time that I’ve seen video games
advertised in such a public arena, one much more diverse than
television. TV caters to a specialized audience, with video game
commercials shown only on specific channels that marketing execs know
we watch. We expect ads for new games on IGN, SyFy (illiterate
bastards), Comedy Central and Spike. But a billboard? That is a truly
public space, reaching viewers from every class, race, industry, and
interest set who happen to get in a car that month. So far I’ve seen
three different billboards scattered across the Phoenix highways, a
20-foot hand lit sickly green, forming a demented peace sign with a
missing thumb and protruding ligaments next to a graffiti-style “L4D2”.
Simple, yet highly effective.
I have to wonder what the ignorant
population sees when they look at a billboard like this one. Of course
I don’t mean that these people are “ignorant” in the word’s most common
use, though you have to admit, if they don’t know what Left 4 Dead
is, they’re missing out. Maybe “naïve” would be a more appropriate
term, or “unenlightened.” Either way—perhaps the uninformed masses saw
the billboard as simply another Halloween gimmick, next to the sexy
Fascinations witch and signs for seasonal Spirit stores. But as
November drags on and the gore of Halloween is replaced with images of
loving family values and poultry, will drivers glance out of their
windshields and wonder, “What the fuck is that?” We’re bombarded with
thousands of advertisements a day, so maybe they’ll ignore it, block it
out of their consciousness while their subconscious files it away as
another of the day’s random images. They might get angry—“Get that violent image off of my freeway before it turns my children into angry homicidal maniacs, you @#!$*%^ assholes!”—but it’s not like we haven’t dealt with that before.
This
isn’t the last of the video game billboards. A national viral ad
campaign for an increasingly popular form of entertainment is only
going to grow. So what does this mean for us, the informed masses? The
video game industry is growing daily—we know that already. But the
billboard campaign helps reveal where it is growing, in which direction and toward what audience. We, those of us who smile when we see Left 4 Dead out of our windshields because that makes the zombie apocalypse that much
closer to being reality, are a dependable demographic. We’ll buy the
new games, no question. But in a company looking to expand, attract new
customers, there’s an entire population—remember, the Ignorant
Masses—that they’ve yet to attract. Valve isn’t Nintendo, they don’t
have much for the everyday family demographic. All I hope is that Valve
sees that as a good thing, as I do, and doesn’t change the fine work
they’ve been doing so far.
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