I’ve certainly heard this said before. Lately I’ve been thinking more about it as ads seem to be infecting more and more aspects of my life and so I’ve started to question it.

I’ve started to think that the whole “it makes you subconsciously think about the product when you’re in the store” thing might just be made up by marketers. You know, the people whose jobs entirely depend on advertising being a good investment. That does kind of self-prove the point though, because if marketers just made it up and a bunch of people now think it’s true, it follows that people will just absorb “information” if it’s fed to them from the correct place.

I figured I’d see if I could find some science research on the subject. I managed to read through six studies (at least the abstracts and the methodologies) before my eyes glazed completely over and I needed to stop.

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7498694/
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8199559/
• https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311975.2021.2000697#abstract
• https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02650487.2022.2143098#abstract
• https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249457
• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/21582440221093042

First I will say that none of them are able to draw links from advertising consumed to purchases made. The methodologies tend to focus on the immediate, how the ad makes a person feel in the moment. Generally this is done by asking people. Surveys and the like. The first one measured facial expressions and emotional responses. The PLOS one (fifth link) just asked marketing managers if their marketing was effective or not (and wow do they ever use a lot of words to say that, they turned their thesaurus up to 11). The second one is actually a bit of a side-bar in that it’s specifically looking at the effectiveness of gamified advertising, but it does investigate brand memory based on different exposures. Again, just brand memory, not actual purchase behaviour.

And all that makes sense. It would be extremely difficult to build a study that manages to track every motivation for purchasing a given product, especially if some of those motivations aren’t known by the purchaser. So what I’ll say is that while it’s likely that advertising can prod us one way or another, the wisdom that it’s an effective subconscious driver of sales is not evidence based.

Do with that what you will.

Goddammit Steve Jobs, you’re dead! Stop trying to impose your ideals on us from beyond the grave!

For me, Noita. I don’t recommend it unconditionally, but for me that game will forever be the only permanent game in my library. I expect it’s possible that I could finish Elden Ring. I know I will never finish Noita.

I posted this above, but I really want to emphasize the point. The is not new, it’s not rare, but we need to demand it and be angry when we don’t get it. Dedicated servers should be the norm.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dedicated_Servers_List

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dedicated_Servers_List

Just posting this here. No Reason.

AKA dedicated servers. They exist now for games now, but are… well not rare, but very specific. Factorio has a dedicated server. Ark has a dedicated server. Valheim, Space Engineers (windows only), Satisfactory, to name a few that I’ve dealt with myself. Demand them. Punish devs who don’t accommodate them with your wallets. No user dedicated servers, no purchase. Fuck you and the distributed info-scraping service you rode in on.

I have a list of games I will never buy because they have succumbed to the lure of hosted services with no user control, no dedicated server support. Those devs want control; they want to control you, how you play and how you interact with those you play with.

Because Fortnight. Epic cancelled development on everything else except fortnight.

https://screenrant.com/unreal-tournament-4-cancelled-epic-games-fortnite-reason/ https://www.pcgamesn.com/unreal-tournament/unreal-tournament-cancelled

I played that beta. I played that Early Access. UT4 was fun and I was stoked for it. I was shit at it, but I was having a blast when I played it. Now it’s dead. All Hail Fortnight!

No

OK. I’ve been browsing through the Lemmy comments here, and I’m drucking funk, fuck you.

Once there was a utopia. YOU Killed it. Fuck you. Um not really a utopia, but whatever, fuck you.

The beginning of the end was Gears of War or Halo. It wasn’t that they were particularly good, but they were easy. Anybody could just hop into a game. WOOOO! Game time. Then in came the corporations.

I need to give Epic a little bit of credit here. They’ve always been fighting against the establishment. So none of you remember the days of Unreal Tournament. You fucking mewling little pukes. The name Cliffy B means nothing to you. Once upon a time a game company made a FPS arena shooter game called Unreal Tournament. It was the sequel to their story based FPS called Unreal. It was amazing for its time, but who cares. They defined game engines in ways that are rippling to this day.

Blah blah blah, stuff, then they released a game called Gears of War. Ok, you’re new here. Epic was used to releasing amazing games and then engaging with their players. I know the name CliffyB for a reason. Oh, but Microsoft is a Company. They are serious business. This is a store. Epic would release MapPacks for the UT games, and they would contain some serious work, and they were available for free. Nope said MS. This is a Store. You buy things here. Fight fight fight. Don’t worry. The good guys (investment brokers) will win. Right.

But MS had Halo. Nobody here remembers the early source of Halo. The game that came before. I never played it myself, I just remember a high-school acquaintance talking about it. Something about Marathon. Yeah. Marathon, that seems like it was important. Hah ha ha ha, nothing.

Marathon becomes halo. Fuck. That’s a lot of shit to contain to one sentence. Oh Well, you’re dumb as fuck. Fuck you and your fucking modern ignorance.

“I can play Halo with my friends on my Xbos with such ease. I don’t need to smart.”

Begin the world of Consoles. This is way betterer. No brain need. Just two thumbs and some money.

“Oh, there is money here.” said the people who have MBAs and not much else to speak of. (So do you know what MBA is for? It’s for people who are fucking useless, but went to school anyways lol)

At this point, we need to lambaste Epic, because they took their success at game development and tried to turn it into power. “Fortnight FTW makes us have a store makes us infinite money!”

Ok, so now here we are. All the shitstains are in place, (including you lol, cough cough).

So now the people who are making decisions about games don’t actually know the first fuck about anything. Not about storytelling, not about non-linear storytelling, not about emergent gameplay, not about basic gameplay. They don’t understand what compels instrumental play vs free play. What they understand is that things “NAMES” sell, and you will buy.

And you’re buying. Look at all the dollars you’re spending on…

Removed by mod

A game I’m not seeing mentioned here but for me it’s one of the top games is Ark. I have so many… Ok, it seems I HAD so many glamour shots of the world as I played it. HD death has lost me a bunch of largely meaningless micro-memories. Well, I still have the memories, but it makes it harder to share them. Here have this one: