Sarah Hyland is not a gamer. Let’s just get that straight before you go jumping to any wild conclusions. Heaven forbid she let us think that she’s a gamer; it would be disastrous to her no doubt blossoming career. Gamers are obese, sweaty losers who live with their parents. Everyone knows that. Even Nintendo…
US teen star Sarah Hyland has just popped up in a new ad designed to widen the Nintendo 3DS’ demographic, by insisting that the console isn’t just for gamers. And it’s more than a bit odd. In the ad, Hyland sits in every teenage girl’s dream loft apartment, blabbering on about ‘Style Savvy Trendsetters’ – a 3DS game that acts as a virtual wardrobe. All’s going swimmingly, until she drops the following clanger:
“I’m not a gamer.”
Erm… Right. Except, well, you sort of are a gamer, because you’re playing a game on a Nintendo 3DS. The old-fashioned notion that a ‘gamer’ is someone to be looked down on by society is just that – old fashioned. Gaming is one of the biggest media industries in the world, and since its inception it’s managed to successfully escape the confines of your parents basement and climb into the land of the socially accepted.
And then Nintendo goes and does this – insisting that Hyland placate the worries of the teenage girls it’s trying to attract by insisting that, ‘hey, don’t worry, owning a 3DS doesn’t make you one of those people’. Instead, it means you’re a style icon. You’re still cool; it’s fine. You are not a gamer.
It’s a bizarre misfire for Nintendo – a company that has built itself up at the heart of the gaming industry. Why not be proud of that?
The top comment on the YouTube page sums it up perfectly: “I’m not a gamer, but with my 3DS, I’m an overweight Italian plumber with a mushroom only diet who can jump 5 metres high and has an extremely hard head that can break bricks.”
