The Escapist Reveals an Infiltrator: Online Guerilla Marketer

For some people, gaming isn’t an escape. It’s infiltration and warfare. In a recent article from the Escapist, we find out that this is the life of online guerrilla marketers, and you can bet that you’ve probably already met some of them online.

“Jack” is an expert in a unique kind of online fraud. Jack spends weeks trying to infiltrate online communities and gaining the trust of others. Maybe he’s spent weeks giving fair, unbiased advice. Then he inserts a recommendation: buy this game. And everybody believes good old unbiased Jack. And nobody suspects that Jack has been hired by the game’s publisher or developer to pimp the game. Nobody suspects that they are being controlled.

And “Jack” is good at what he does. If the community is mostly young 15-year olds, he blends in. He says that his personalities range from a 10-year-old girl to a 78-year-old man across different ethnicities, stereotypes, and ages. “It’s evil,” he says. “I’m evil.”

“I will make you buy this commercial item or visit some site using any means necessary.”

According to our official QJ Dictionary of Mental Health, escapism is avoiding reality by indulging in an entertaining or imaginative activities. So, whenever you don’t do your errands because you are busy playing video games, Dr. Phil and Oprah would call that escapism.

So there’s a very sick betrayal there: we enjoy video games because they let us escape reality; we become somebody else in another world where we have big guns or swords or muscles and it’s perfectly healthy to blow up your enemies and it’s easy to tell who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are (yes, we sometimes bring in reality and have huge arguments about consoles or whatever, but for the most part, we just live to play).

We are escapists. And in the end, we fall prey to the advice of people who are only pretending to be escapists like us; people who have studied us, pretended to be our friends, know too much about us, and know very well which products are paying them for real.

For some people, gaming isn’t an escape. It’s infiltration and warfare. In a recent article from the Escapist, we find out that this is the life of online guerrilla marketers, and you can bet that you’ve probably already met some of them online.

“Jack” is an expert in a unique kind of online fraud. Jack spends weeks trying to infiltrate online communities and gaining the trust of others. Maybe he’s spent weeks giving fair, unbiased advice. Then he inserts a recommendation: buy this game. And everybody believes good old unbiased Jack. And nobody suspects that Jack has been hired by the game’s publisher or developer to pimp the game. Nobody suspects that they are being controlled.

And “Jack” is good at what he does. If the community is mostly young 15-year olds, he blends in. He says that his personalities range from a 10-year-old girl to a 78-year-old man across different ethnicities, stereotypes, and ages. “It’s evil,” he says. “I’m evil.”

“I will make you buy this commercial item or visit some site using any means necessary.”

According to our official QJ Dictionary of Mental Health, escapism is avoiding reality by indulging in an entertaining or imaginative activities. So, whenever you don’t do your errands because you are busy playing video games, Dr. Phil and Oprah would call that escapism.

So there’s a very sick betrayal there: we enjoy video games because they let us escape reality; we become somebody else in another world where we have big guns or swords or muscles and it’s perfectly healthy to blow up your enemies and it’s easy to tell who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are (yes, we sometimes bring in reality and have huge arguments about consoles or whatever, but for the most part, we just live to play).

We are escapists. And in the end, we fall prey to the advice of people who are only pretending to be escapists like us; people who have studied us, pretended to be our friends, know too much about us, and know very well which products are paying them for real.