Keiko

In an American Express commercial that I saw recently, tennis player Andrew Roddick enters a tennis match only to find that his opponent is a Pong paddle. The scoreboard overhead reads "Roddick vs Pong" and he appears bewildered at the thought. Throughout the match, the Pong paddle manages to win rounds. A voice-over has Roddick saying that his life is about finding a way to win, and he realizes that to defeat Pong, he just needs to hit the ball lighter, so the ball is too low for the Pong paddle to hit.

I was surprised that a contemporary commercial was using the classic game of Pong. The commercial assumes the audience knows about Pong, which shows how influential video games (namely the first video games released) have been to our lives. The commercial is complete with Pong noises and a Pong paddle that can only move in two directions. Emphasizing the characteristics of Pong, the paddle can't move closer or farther from the net, but only parallel to it. To defeat it, Roddick merely hits the ball so it is lower than the Pong paddle can hit. The paddle is forced to just watch the ball roll under itself. Although Pong was very two dimensional, this commercial displays the simplicity of the game and the lack of game play the player can engage in.

I also found the idea of combining abstraction with realism. The commercial places a "block," which is supposed to resemble a Pong paddle in a real-life scenario. The contrast is pretty interesting, and reminds me of our class discussions. Not many games or other online/television media are abstract anymore, mainly because we have the technology to make things more realistic. The commercial attempts to mix the two, displaying the simplicity of old games, and contrasting it with the complexity of the human mind. (And, therefore, new games.)