"The Tester" Plays It Safe

After subjecting myself to 3+ hours of reality TV, Sony has a new QA Tester and his name is Cyrus, or more specifically, Will Powers. As an experiment in whether or not consoles could be a device for exclusive television programming, was Sony’s new PS3 exclusive reality TV program a success? From my perspective… no, but in the long-term, should Sony choose to revisit this model for delivering entertainment to the PSN, then it may be a yes.

Why do I say no? Well, in my opinion, Sony did not take enough chances for me to grant them a second chance. Before reality TV became the norm and even washed up celebrities were finding work, we all watched it. Therefore, we are all aware of the formula behind this, pseudo game-show meets “Big Brother” monster, oozing with unnecessary drama. Instead of Sony straying from this formula and letting gamers compete on a familiar playing field, it became a serious of ridiculous challenges and follies.

How many of you remember Nick Arcade? It was a delightful little game show from my youth where opposing teams would compete in time trials occasionally using such games as Act Raiser or Super Ghouls and Ghosts. That is what I was look for, a rebirth of that silliness, with a little bit of CPL. Instead The Tester brings us, LARPing in the woods, slinging footballs at people and self defense classes. I truly wanted to see these people compete using PS3’s and create an opportunity for Sony to show off a variety of their games.

How about a challenge to design a level in Little Big Planet, then have the other team compete in it to see who could score more points? Or maybe a little bit of Uncharted 2: Co-op, and run it as a time trial? Or even and old fashioned Madden tourney? These are all ways Sony could be marketing their games, using the show. In doing so, it would make the show unique and gear it more towards the audience who would actually take time to download this. The evaluation on their skill as gamers seemed less important and though the end result was a college graduate, degree in Japanese (why the fuck was this kid on here again?); I felt like I had just spent 3 hours watching the same reality TV show bullshit I could find on cable. Product placement was nice, as typically the winners of each episode were given products on behalf of Sony and some of them were highly valued. Also, some competitions made a little more sense, like the picture puzzles and the Playstation Trivia. Although, from a marketing perspective, those competitions still do nothing to help Sony sell games. It just seems to me, this was a missed opportunity.

Another thing, why are these contestants crying after they lose?! Don’t they understand that if they moved to California and have a high school education, they too can be a video game tester? Overall production quality was really good and the panel of judges was fine, not overly elaborate or outrageous. Simply did what they were there to do and were out. Even David Jaffe behaved! Episodes were at least short and had almost no commercials, save Dr. Dre’s Dr. Pepper ad at the start of each episode. After that it was a clean 20 ~ minutes through to the end. Would I recommend this? Nope. I mean, it was a free product and after using it I felt ripped off. How could I recommend it? Better luck next time Sony.

Some of you may wonder why I even watched this at all. Well, I am getting an MBA in Marketing and this stuff interests me. Since I might be able to have some influence over campaigns similar to these in the future, I felt I should have an informed opinion.

*note: all pictures are courtesy of Google image search