Nichols: How to avoid seeing Fergie
EA is making it hard to escape overused Hollywood faces.
By Alex Nichols
Friday, August 29th, 2008
These days, celebrities ooze out of every pore of the face of American culture. Gossip about who’s dating who or what was found in which actor’s glove box or which actress adopted a baby from what impoverished nation has infiltrated our TV shows, newspapers and the Web in a slow, sad march toward ubiquity. Celebrities have created a giant zit that no amount of Clearasil will be able to vanquish.
There is one medium that has remained largely untarnished by this scourge, until now.
“Surely, Alex,” you may be saying aloud to the newspaper while everybody around you stares in confusion, “I can still play video games without seeing Fergie’s face!”
How wrong you are.
Earlier this month, Electronic Arts unveiled a Nintendo Wii game called “Celebrity Sports Showdown.” Gamers select a star from a vaunted roster that includes Nelly Furtado, Avril Lavigne and Keith Urban to compete in sports like slalom skiing, curling and “smash badminton,” so called in an apparent attempt to make badminton sound exciting. That succeeds about as well as calling a live session of Congress on C-SPAN “smash filibustering.”
The necessity of this game is questionable. The convergence of these two cultural forces has been unseen since the maker of Reese’s Cups was accused of witchcraft after somehow getting peanut butter into chocolate and vice-versa.
The creator was later vindicated after his creation was proven to be delicious, but EA is unlikely to receive the same validation.
EA’s concoction of celebrity and video games is more akin to a combination of sewage and pure sugar: Neither serves much of a purpose alone, but together they go beyond being pointless and become harmful. Each element removes whatever redeeming qualities the other may have had before their unholy marriage.
If you’re wondering what redeeming quality sewage has, try teaching young mutant turtles the way of the ninja in a dry sewer and get back to me.
To be fair, inane celebrity competition is far from a novel concept. America has always liked to see its famous folks do random, stupid crap. Look at the 1970s, when “Battle of the Network Stars” pitted Mr. Kotter and Kojak against each other in an epic tug-of-war battle that until that point had only been a reality in the feverish dreams of television addicts. Look back even further to 1804 when Aaron Burr competed against Alexander Hamilton in the pistol duel as part of an ill-conceived “Get Out the Vote” campaign (a publicity stunt that would serve as a predecessor to Diddy’s less literal “Vote or Die” movement two centuries later).
But never has the idea of putting big names in ridiculous situations been so interactive, so immersed in our daily lives. The same faces that stare back at us every time we wait in line at the grocery store now threaten to invade the activity many of us use to escape them. The same people who sell pictures of their newborn children for millions of dollars are now licensing their names and likenesses for more cash and exposure. If “Celebrity Sports Showdown” is successful, sequels are sure to follow, and we’ll see Lindsay Lohan and Shia LeBeouf blasting each other with pixellated paintballs at future Wii parties.
Our society doles out fame to people desperate enough to keep themselves in the spotlight. We’re letting people profit just for existing. This all points to a culture that worships names rather than accomplishments. We award recognition to people because we recognize them. It’s a trend that must be stopped.
But it’s not as easy as just not buying the game. We need to make sure nobody buys the game when it comes out this holiday season. The celebritocracy is spreading its jurisdiction over every corner of our lives at an alarming rate. If we don’t march on Best Buy with picket signs that read “Get outta my Wii, LeeAnn Rimes!” soon we will have no choice but to obey our celebrity overlords as they destroy the
Constitution and replace it with People magazine.
Fight the star power. Pop the zit.
Nichols is an Overland Park sophomore in creative writing.
Discussion
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I lol'd.
But what's funny is, I would buy that game, depending on how it was constructed
like, it depends on the celebs, and what KIND of games
for example, if it was celebrities that were so stupid, and the media loved them so much, that I enjoyed watching them duke it out in a boxing ring, or see who could stand longer in a fire pit.
Then, I could see myself buying that game. I mean imagine it, you had to jiggle the wii controller as john mccain, while your friend played as paris hilton. But Paris doesn't have the military tolerance to pain like Mcpain does, so she ends up getting fried.
There would be more interesting sports, sure. I'm just brainstorming.
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