If you read the Guardian's technology section every week you may have caught my column a fortnight ago which alleged that EA has gone insane. Not in a bad way (though opponents to the company's uber-aggressive DRM tactics with Spore may disagree). It's just that the mega-corp has been making some odd decisions of late - like not making a Dark Knight game and doing another Godfather tie-in even though critics laid into the first one like Mafia henchmen clubbing a police informant.
So it came as no surprise to me last Friday, when the company borrowed a petrol station in Finsbury Park, converted it into a military fuel dump complete with soldiers, jeeps and camo webbing, then proceeded to give away free petrol. Yep, that's New EA, alright. The bizarre enterprise succeeded in generating lots of publicity for Mercenaries 2, but it also accidentally enraged a significant proportion of the local population, including MP Lynne Featherstone who uttered what should go down in history as the world's most entertaining anti-video game statement:
Trying to recreate Venezuelan-style fuel riots on the streets of London is completely irresponsible and downright dangerous.
Anyway, the real point here is, EA's stunt was brilliant because it works on so many levels of media manipulation and disruption. We know that companies have to go to extraordinary lengths these days to reach a populace that is adept at tuning out the daily advertising bombardment. But to engineer an actual news event, a news event that somehow pastiches a historical drama (the 1989 fuel riots mentioned by Featherstone) and one that causes considerable discomfort to a significant number of people, is really agenda-setting stuff.
This was not just a standard PR stunt that might get in at the end of a local news bulletin - It was a fuel riot within a fuel riot. It was both real and staged. Post-modern philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who writes at length about the seamless interactions between 'reality' and simulation, would have a field day. He famously posited that the Gulf war of 1990 never actually happened, or at least it needn't have happened, because the blurry night-site reportage and missile-cam explosions beamed back to to the gawping masses, created a simulcra of war for home viewers that was every bit as convincing as the real thing.
EA, then, didn't just hijack a petrol forecourt on Friday, it hijacked the very notion of news. The company, like many others in highly competitive consumer markets, has realised that the only thing people watch and believe is the news - so the news is, in effect, a channel of communication. Which makes 'real' news stories competition. News is a rival brand.
In its recent Tiger Woods video spoof - which shows the golfer walking on water to mimic a bug in the game - EA conquered religious iconography. By subjagating and subverting the news, the company has now symbolically conquered reality.
