Mountaineering astronauts and bad spelling? It's advertising's future

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Feedback is often both baffled and intrigued by the tricks advertisers will pull to try to sell things, but the latest gambit seems designed to wrong-foot: deliberately odd capitalisation and bad grammar.

During our time spent mucking around on our smartphone, Feedback has repeatedly seen ads for a mobile game that promises the “Hardest LEvel in the HisTory”. We have SPent days tRYing to Work out wHy it looks like thaT.

The game in question is called Go Climb! It is a puzzle game in which a group of mountaineers ascending a peak have got their safety lines tangled and the player must untangle them. So it is, essentially, the back of Feedback’s TV, except it has been gamified and is also at least somewhat possible to solve.

Feedback initially wondered if this was a case of non-English-speaking developers skimping on translation costs. There is precedent for this: back in 1991, the Japanese space shooter Zero Wing was released in Europe with a notoriously shonky translation. As a result, in the introductory cutscene, an alien invader announced: “All your base are belong to us.” After this was rediscovered in the late 1990s, it became one of the most widely shared internet memes of the time.

However, a closer look at Go Climb! suggests something else is going on. It is made by a company called FOMO Games. The firm is based in Turkey, but its staff clearly have an excellent command of English, as evidenced by the information provided about all its other games, not to mention the gloriously corporate text on its website explaining that “FOMO stands for Fear Of Missing Out, which defines our product vision and culture.”

Instead, Feedback suspects the bad English is intentionally designed to get our attention. In line with this, the advert has other odd features that add to the off-kilter feeling. Notably, in it, the mountaineers from the game are replaced with astronauts in spacesuits drifting around against a starry backdrop, so the game’s title makes absolutely no sense. It was only when we looked at the game in an app store that the mountaineering theme was revealed and things became clear.

This seems to be a new and devilish way to advertise a product online: purposely make a complete hash of your ad and hope this intrigues people enough to get them to click through.

And on some level it worked, because here we are. But Feedback hasn’t downloaded the game. On principle, we don’t believe in rewarding deliberately bad spelling.

Monkeys in politics

At the time of writing, the US presidential election is imminent and Feedback is trapped in an endless cycle of news stories reporting polls, pundits endlessly reinterpreting said polls, and then more polls. It is a terribly long-winded way of saying “we don’t know what’s going to happen”.

Now, our colleague Alexandra Thompson has highlighted an important new contribution to the field of psephological forecasting: a paper titled “Monkeys predict US elections“.

Sadly, this doesn’t involve placing an infinite number of monkeys into voting booths. Instead, researchers showed monkeys pairs of photos of candidates from senatorial and gubernatorial elections.

The monkeys spent more time looking at the losers than at the winners. This seems like a peculiar form of torture for politicians: not only did you lose, it says, but monkeys stared at you judgmentally.

The study extended previous work showing that children can identify the winners and losers in elections based purely on photos of the candidates. Both the children and the monkeys were picking based on face shape, with square jawlines being the key sign of an improved chance of victory.

Who would do such a study? Three of the researchers are at the University of Pennsylvania, but the fourth is based at a Portuguese institution called the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown. Feedback isn’t quite sure what to make of that.

It does seem that unconscious factors play into our voting decisions. It is often claimed that taller candidates tend to win US elections, and there appears to be some truth to this.

A 2013 study pulled data on all US presidential elections to date and found that taller candidates won more of the popular vote – although this didn’t translate to them being more likely to actually be elected. In what can only be described as double nominative determinism, one of the authors is a social psychologist called Abraham Buunk.

Readers who are invested in the outcome of the US election are hereby advised: whatever you do, don’t look up Donald Trump’s and Kamala Harris’s respective heights.

One more for the road

In such stressful times, like many people, Feedback has turned to the soothing alternative reality of The Great British Bake Off (The Great British Baking Show, if you are in North America).

There are all sorts of fascinating and delicious things to learn about the materials science of breads, cakes and biscuits, but we just want to point out that the show’s home economist, who produces all the sample biscuits, tarts and desserts for the technical challenges, is called Hattie Baker.

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