1200: It Was Just a Joke

Playing Robot Unicorn Attack 2 on the toilet earlier, a question came to me. It’s been lingering in my mind for a few days, actually, but as I was there attempting to better my score and ensure supremacy for Team Rainbow in the twilight hours of the second of May, 2013 — Team Inferno probably have it in the bag, sadly — it struck me that perhaps Robot Unicorn Attack 2 is taking itself a bit too seriously.

And then this, naturally, led my mind on to ponder “how far is too far?” for things that are, essentially, jokes, memes, gags, whatever you want to call them. Because that’s what the original Robot Unicorn Attack was — a joke. An immensely popular joke, yes — one million plays within a week of its release, apparently, and plenty more since then — but still a joke. This much is probably self-evident from its title. It is a game called Robot Unicorn Attack. No-one has called a video game something quite so literal and ridiculous and meant it since the 1980s.

And yet here we are in 2013 with Robot Unicorn Attack 2, a surprisingly well fleshed-out expansion of the original’s “endless runner” gameplay that features online asynchronous cooperative “community” goals, an upgradeable unicorn, a levelling system, downloadable content, a bonus level unlockable if you either progress far enough in the game or stump up enough in-game currency, and all manner of other things. It’s not the deepest game in the world, but it is a mobile phone game — and, more to the point, it is a mobile phone game that understands the sort of experience that is sensible and practical to put on a mobile phone. (It’s also one of the less offensive examples of the “freemium” model I’ve seen recently, though the pop-up adverts are a bit gross.)

It’s hard to explain, but it just feels a bit “wrong”. It feels like it’s not a joke any more. I hesitate to use the words “sold out” but… well, yes, it’s sold out. It’s Robot Unicorn Attack, but monetised out the wazoo to be profitable, whereas the original was a freeware Flash game that anyone could play without having to pay a penny.

I think that “monetisation” part is the key defining characteristic that determines “how far is too far” when it comes to jokes — particularly ones which started on the Internet. By the time money gets involved — i.e. it gets incorporated into something which is sold, or used to advertise something else for profit — it is probably already well past its sell-by date.

I can think of a number of examples where this has happened in advertising in particular. Take the advertisements for the price comparison website Go Compare, for example. For quite a while, these featured an irritating moustachio’d arsehole singing the service’s jingle over and over again in various different styles. Everyone got immensely irritated with it. So, naturally, what the “clever” marketers did was leverage the fact that everyone was irritated with the “Go Compare Man” and put out some ads in which he was subjected to various indignities. But by that point, everyone had already pretty much just moved on to wanting to fire everyone involved with Go Compare into the sun and never hearing of their stupid company ever again. (Any time I need insurance, I will not go to their stupid site on principle any more.)

See also: the number of pointless mobile apps that have attempted to incorporate any combination of Nyan Cat, Gangnam Style, the Harlem Shake or any other “viral” sensation out there. Viral sensations are a marketer’s dream — they provide a ready-made audience, so long as you can inextricably link one annoying thing with a specific brand. The audience doesn’t even have to like the annoying thing — they just have to start thinking of these things not as “Gangnam Style” but as “that music off the [Brand X] advert”.

I often wonder how a lot of marketers sleep at night knowing that their career is, essentially, to irritate people as much as possible. It surely can’t be satisfying to flick on the TV, see a Go Compare advert and think “I did that.”

Still, I guess they’d probably say the same about a games journalist’s output. Oh well. Each to their own, I guess.