For whom the bell tolls?

[Anonymous]

it tolls for thee!

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/03/19/asa_gaming_advert/

Interesting article on the interpretation of advertising rules.

[Anonymous]

How times have changed…
I remember the good old days, when the tabloids used to print articles accusing video games of everything from direct murder (epilepsy) or causing direct murder (gta) and the main response of the games industry (esp. nintendo) was to go to ground, and censor games.

Now, someone says that a kid with a sedentary lifestyle risks an early death (which, afaik, is correct) and vaguely implies, by having the kid hold a controller, that video games are sedentary (which, afaik, they are), and people are up in arms.

Here’s the ad, with text good enough to read:
http://www.pcformat.co.uk/blog-entry/risk-early-death-just-do-nothing-10-03-09

I mean, I wonder how many of the complaints about the ad were from makers of couches?
The kid is clearly sitting on the couch doing nothing, and really, if he didn’t have a couch he’d be standing, which is much more calorific.
Really, the wounded party here is the couch industry, and all the small businesses that make couches – the relevant industry bodies really shouldn’t be taking this whole thing sitting down.

Thing is, some kids are probably playing video games where they used to be active. I don’t think you can blame video games for that. But the ad doesn’t try to blame video games for that; it just says that doing nothing (implying nothing physical) causes earlier death, and implies that playing video games is doing nothing physical.

A cleverer response from the games industry would be to have welcomed the Ad, acknowledging that obesity was a real problem, and that while video games provide great mental stimulation and learning, kids should also play sport etc.

[Anonymous]

Agreed.

At worst it’s agreeing with all those statements that games are bigger than tv, movies etc for younger people. They are popular so they get put in adds like this. Put a kid reading a book in the add and it’s just unrepresentative. It’s clearly an add against poor lifestyles and wasted youth; whatever that might contain.

[Anonymous]

Yup.

But I think that image is a bit outdated, at least in my opinion. Any of my mates are either jumping around the room (Wiimote), or pushing shoving, jumping and bragging against the losers in the room.

And also, isn’t this Ad equally apt for the IT industry? How many people sit at their PC doing their work for 8 hours a day?

Or just give me something like this:

[Author]

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