I was at the Kane and Lynch website established by Eidos advertising and marketing departments several days ago, and noticed from their blurbs that both Game Informer and Gamespy had given this game perfect scores as well as at least one truly glowing comment. I also seemed to notice the same thing being said on advertisements for the game on another site which I visit regularly. Now, I simply had no reason to investigate this or question it. Gametrailers, after all, gave the game a reasonably high score though obviously no where near perfect, and not being a regular visitor of Gamespy as well as discontinuing my reading of Game Informer more than two years ago, I just assumed that the ad was reporting accurately.

Then MrCHUP0N pointed me to this article. If you don't want to read it, I'll summarize it for you. Basically, neither Game Informer nor Gamespy gave such scores to Kane and Lynch, and the comments in question were not from reviews but from previews from E3 -- made many many months ago and under a different context.

It's hard not to take information that is so seemingly false personally, especially when you are the one who has been caught by it unawares. Beyond just taking it personally, it is also bewildering that a company with such a strong record would run such ads at such a sensitive time. There's a lot of controversy regarding both that game and at least one review in particular that we at Gamespot are all very familiar with right now, so this just seems to add to the controversy. So what should we make of all of this. There has to be a bigger picture here. So I talked about this on a few other boards, and something very interesting came up on one of them in particular which I hadn't considered. Armed with this newpossibility generated by those discussions, I went back and took a better look at some of these ads to verify it. It was then that the sad truth of it all hit me.

It's a marketing ploy.

That might actually seem like the understatement of the year, since any dishonest reporting of information in an advertisement is a marketing ploy, but this one is particularly pernicious. I actually think what they've done is a little bit of advertising/marketing visual trickery. They aren't using the horizontal star bars as scores per se. They're using them as separators. In other words, the five star bars are being used to separate each "positive" comment.

It's a common thing in advertising to design an ad in such a way thatit is technically true and yet still misleading. By using the horizontal five-star bars as separators, they know that many readers will read that as a score, and yet they can plausibly deny that this was their intention. At the same time, they aren't calling any of their quotes review quotes, so putting in preview quotes can also be plausibly denied as intentionally misleading as well. Of course, they know all too well that using the star bars as separators only reinforces the illusion that they are quoting reviews.

It's a flimsy subterfuge. Anyone who is savvy can easily see their strategy here -- especially when it would have been easy to use more suitable separating bars. To use a four or five star bar as a separator when four and five star rating systems are so common from review sources of any type, not just gaming review sources, just piles intention to mislead on top of intention to mislead, all in the convenient name of visual utility. Unfortunately, and here's the kicker, this is a COMMON PRACTICE among advertisers for movies, games, et. al. Eidos' marketing and advertising departments aren't the first to do this sort of thing and won't be the last.

A lot of my friends both on and off of Gamespot know me as a headstrong Capitalist who unashamedly defends his individualist money-making ideology to its greedy end. That is absolutely true of me. I am guilty as charged! As a result, some of the ones who know me more passively expect me to defend practices like the one we are discussing here as just the acceptable status-quo of doing business. Nothing could be further from the truth, but in order to explain the seeming disparity, I am going to have to wax exceedingly philosophical for a moment.

First it should be obvious that just because it is common to do things like this doesn't mean that it is RIGHT to do things like this. But there's really more to it than that. Here's the problem I have with this sort of thing from the perspective of a staunch Capitalist -- Capitalism isn't just an economic system to me. It is rather metaphysically tied to the issue of self-ownership and freedom. Capitalism is in fact derivitive of those greater principles. It is dictated to by them. It is the only system that allows the individual to create and enjoy the product of his mind, whatever form that may come in, including profits and property which he earns. A man who cannot do that isn't a free man. To take this a little further, in order for self-ownership and individual sovereignty to be regarded in the world, two things must be completely banished from human relationships. Those two things are the initiation of force and the initiation of fraud, including all threats thereof.

Initiatory force and fraud (as opposed to the sadly necessary defensive force and even defensive fraud) are both blatant attempts to circumvent the individual's ability to apply the thoughts and conclusions of his rational mind to his daily life. Force seems more obvious as it is a direct circumvention of the individual's control of his own person and property through overwhelming compulsion, but since it isn't the culprit in this case of mal-advertisements, I don't need to discuss it further here. Instead, I'll discuss the much more subtle fraudulent means by which human beings are denied their right to self-determination. Initiatory fraud is basically an attempt to pollute the filters of your rational faculty with faulty information in order to influence the direction of your decision-making to ends it would not be guided to without such faulty information. It is much more common than acts of violence, but can have consequences which are just as dangerous.

And in my epistemological view, initiatory fraud is just as separated, even opposed, to the metaphysical properties of Capitalism as is any form of forceful compulsion.

I have no real tolerance for the typical argument that this is just "business as usual". As I rationally define "business" as the honest exchange of value for value, it is pretty obviously not business in the first place. It isn't the selling of a product or service through the passing of clean information, but an attempt to mislead to gain more sales from honest men than they would have made otherwise without passing polluted "facts". This isn't persuasion at the expense of the truth, as true persuasion carries truth as a natural co-requisite. It is a clever deception.

No, Eidos isn't the only company to blame for this type of thing. And like every other company that has pulled this advertising ploy, they would have likely gotten away with it unscathed with a few more sales to celebrate had it not been for all the attention they've gotten recently. But I can hardly complain that the present situation has helped expose these dirty practices for what they are, and as Eidos is one of the culprits, it's not really all that unfair to single them out in this case as long as the proper context isn't forgotten.

There isn't much I can do here but just point these things out. My advice? Learn from this experience. "Force" these guys by your own intelligence and through your own sheer will to keep the information they distribute for the purposes of selling their wares clean. Show them that you give meaning to the old adage "Buyer Beware!" Deny them their plausible deniability.

NOTE: It looks like the Destructoid article I pointed you to at the beginning of this now includes an edit which indeed suggests exactly what I have in terms of the use of the marketing ploy by Eidos in these ads.

NOTE 2: Looks like Gamespy insisted that Eidos change their listings. And apparently they have.