Playing with Fire: When Advergaming Backfires - Gonzalo Frasca
In the same year, Peter Molyneux announced at GDC that his highly-anticipated game Fable would not include female avatars as he originally intended. He explained that the decision was made because it would save a lot of production time and otherwise they would not meet their scheduled launch date. There is, however, a big difference between Fable and the IT Game. The Intel game is not merely an entertainment product: it is a piece of corporate advertising that simulated an IT workplace for an audience of real IT workers. Unlike what happens in the fantasy world of Fable, gender inequality is a very real problem for IT workers. According to the U.S. National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), in 2004 only 29 percent of U.S. IT employees were female. The situation in the U.K. -where the Intel game was developed- is not better. According to the Women&Equality Unit of the British Government, in 2002 only 23% of the U.K. IT workforce was female. Intel attempted to use the power of a serious simulation to get closer to their audience (the game’s site described IT managers as traditionally being "overworked and under appreciated"). In other words, Intel tried to tell the target audience that they understood their problems and cared about them. However, the strategy backfired, presenting instead Intel at best as an incompetent corporation.
Players may have asked themselves how was it possible that such a complex game was produced and launched without anybody noticing that it only allowed to hire men? We can only speculate about it, but there is a likely reason: no women were involved in the process -otherwise they are likely to have noticed it. If that was the case, Intel and their ad agency should have complemented their XX-based technology with some XY units, which provide similar great features while being 100 percent compatible with their installed base. You shouldn’t need an advergame to figure that out. Advergames are more than a bunch of code and pixels: they are messages. Creating videogames is not anymore the realm of the computer technician: it is a cultural product. As such, it can reflect ideas and values. Hopefully, those should be the ideas and values that designers actually want to convey. The Intel IT Manager Game is a classic example of how serious games can enlighten and educate people. After all, it delivered an unforgettable learning experience... for Intel.
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