Here's something from the "Just When You Think It Can't Get Any Crazier" category.
It seems that E.A. Electronics has a new video game called "Dante's Inferno." I think Frogger may have been the last video game I played, so I'm not real up on this sort of thing, but as I understand it, the game requires the player to fight his or her way through various levels of hell, based loosely on Dante's "The Divine Comedy."
A couple of weeks ago a church group, upset by the marketing of hell, decided to picket E.A.'s headquarters. They marched around holding up signs like "Trade in your playstation for a praystation," and even gave out brochures. You can watch a video of their demonstration here.
But hold on. We're not to the crazy part yet, at least not the craziest. It turns out the protesters were fake. According to E.A. spokeswoman Holly Rockwood (hmmm), a marketing firm hired by E.A., who evidently subscribes to the "Negative publicity is better than no publicity" approach to marketing, hired people to masquarade as Christians.
So, now people can actually get paid to pretend to be Christians. Wonder what Dante would think of that?
Despite the ethical considerations that the marketing firm clearly lacks, this seems interesting to me in two ways. First, is if they attempted this guerilla marketing tactic with any other game/religious group, I'm not positive it would have been quite as "acceptable" to engage in...regardless of the publicity it might generate (ie, I don't think they would put women in burqas to protest as it is going "to far", but I could be wrong).
ReplyDeleteThis leads me to the second. I've heard that those in "power" are the ones society can mock while the minority is protected from such activity. By this logic, Christianity is still in "power" in our society because it is the targeted group by the media. But is this really in play here or is this just an acceptable form of discrimination?