Game thinking from Adam Clare

Tag: consumerism

Leaders of Hyperreal Civilizations

Hyperreality is the inability to decipher which is real and fake in the real world. The concept comes from Jean Baudrillard and he sees consumerism hampering our ability as a culture to see the real. I accidentally found one the best examples of hyperreality when I Googled the other day for Mansa Musa.

For some context, when you search a famous person on Google the site will pull in an image of that person like so:
Ada Lovelace

Pretty nice feature right? Look at the image below of the search results for Mansa Musa:
Mansa Musa

You see that? Where Google usually puts an image of the person in question they have parsed the web and found that the best image to use is from the game Civilization IV!

I wondered if the other leaders from Civ IV and the newer Civ V (leaders) suffered from the same fate, and below are other leaders that get the hyperreal treatment:

Pachacuti (Incan):
Screen Shot 2013-01-12 at 12.17.24 PM

Huayna Capac (also Incan):
huayna capac

Gilgamesh:
Gilgamesh

Hammurabi (Babylon) gets a Civ 4 screenshot only in the thumbnail of his pictures:
Hammurabi

All the other leaders are too popular or too well documented to have Google deem a screenshot from a video game is the best image. If I’ve missed any leaders please let me know!

Creepy Consumerism

People complain that video games are ruining the kids or society or whatever. I’d like to point out to people that think that way that there are far worse things that ruin children. Among those things are a toy tazer:

And from the land of creepy things H&M is using a CGI model with real people’s heads to sell things online:

fembots

Hyperreality here we come!

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