I received in the e-mail this morning a the weekly sales promo newsletter from my old employer, EB Games. I get these about once a week, give them no thought, and hit “Delete” without much delay.<\/p>\n
Today? I don’t know why I read it. But I did, and it… annoyed<\/i> me.<\/p>\n
I realize, it’s ad copy, but it’s ignorant and apathetic ad copy. It’s ad copy that plays to the twenty percent of Americans who can’t find the United States on a map. Because it’s just ignorant.<\/p>\n
Let’s take a look.<\/p>\n
Apparently, the game most of us at GameStop know as soccer is known as football everywhere else, and it happens to be the most popular game on the planet. After taking a peek at FIFA Soccer 08, it’s easy to see why. The action is faster than ever, and it’s also completely authentic, with 620 licensed teams, 30 official leagues and more than 15,000 players.<\/p>\n
We’ve also just learned that, apparently, Tajikistan is a real country, and they happen to have a formidable soccer, umm… football, team.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m being overly sensitive. Yet I read this and I see something that’s condescending — “apparently… soccer is known as football everywhere else” — something that’s ignorant of the world beyond these borders — “most popular game on the planet” and “apparently, Tajikistan is a real country.” I read this, and I come away with the message that, “They don’t play real football in countries with funny names.”<\/p>\n
And that annoys me.<\/p>\n
Maybe I’m expecting too much. Some kid wrote that, an ad guy making 25k at the corporate office in Dallas. The product of Texas public schools. Garbage in, garbage out.<\/p>\n
The United States is not the be-all and end-all of culture. Seriously. We didn’t come up with Father Ted<\/i> or Doctor Who<\/i>. We don’t have wine gums on our grocery shelves. There are other<\/i> cultures out there.<\/p>\n
I wasn’t going to buy FIFA<\/i> anyway. Nothing against soccer. I just don’t like spending money on Electronics Arts products unless I can help it — they produce high-priced shovelware. I’m just saying. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I received in the e-mail this morning a the weekly sales promo newsletter from my old employer, EB Games. I get these about once a week, give them no thought, and hit “Delete” without much delay. Today? I don’t know why I read it. But I did, and it… annoyed me. I realize, it’s adContinue reading “On Cultural Apathy and Ignorance”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[228,406],"class_list":["post-1302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-video-games","tag-eb-games","tag-soccer","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}