The 6 Stupidest Video Game School Commercials

If you watch TV during the middle of the day or late at night, market research has discovered that you're stoned, broke, lonely, uneducated and unemployed. For a for-profit college with a video game design program, that's like discovering your blind date is a sex addict. These colleges were so excited to tell you about your "future career in gaming" that they didn't have time to look up what any of those words meant. The confusion that followed led to these ridiculous commercials.

#6. Mindfire Academy Video Game Design Bootcamp

Mindfire Academy takes a unique approach to its advertising. They bring up an aspect of electronic entertainment that most of us forget about -- poontang. They hired a spokesgirl to casually invite you inside her, but only after you've created your own video game. In a mere 15 seconds, the school makes it clear that they know nothing about gaming and less about women. Here are the actual words from their actual ad, in their entirety:

Because you're a contentious homely girl with a 14-inch TV?

Wait, what are you talking about? You know that throwing in a random gaming term doesn't magically make sense out of the rest of your sentence, right? If it did, then Donkey Kong for into my ping pong banana.

Speaking of video games, that one will probably work better if you turn the controller on.

The promise of cheap sex with unpleasant bitches does seem more realistic than the promise of a career, but does Mindfire Academy actually have some kind of vagina placement program for its graduates? Because I've read that most non-accredited schools don't even qualify you for an entry-level position in a fat girl. Hell, according to one poll, 87 percent of Everest College students have to close their eyes and finger a burrito.

#5. Collins College Game Design

Collins College knows that you have no interest in things as fleeting as sex or money. You are only watching commercials at 4 a.m. because you want to change the future. They produced an ad they called "Game Evoluation," because there is nothing more cyber than spelling everything like an idiot.

Sitting jobless at home with a Collins College Interactive Design & VCR Repair Certificate and $70,000 in student loan bills is depressing, but not as depressing as finding out the next wave of cool games is going to be shitty robots in a warehouse firing rockets at nothing. That's worse than a future where those robots are the next wave of cool everyday problems.

Before I send in my tuition, I have a quick question: Are the games of the future being sarcastic? Because that's a freaking gorilla shooting graph paper with lightning bolts. My present-day brain is having a lot of trouble figuring out if that's awesome or retarded.

Holy shit, what am I looking at, Collins College? Is that ape celebrating because it lost? But ... but that means you made a game where gorillas electrocute an empty floor and the object is to fail! Fuck your dark hearts if that's what you've done! Or wait, is he the enemy and we're the floor? Because that doesn't make any sense either! Look, you had one job -- make something that looks like a game -- and you managed to pick the one possible combination of words and shapes that doesn't. I'm not saying all people with a basic understanding of video games are smart, but Collins College is dumber than every single one of them.

#4. Minneapolis Media Institute

The strangest thing about these commercials is that each of them is targeted at completely different demographics. You've already seen Mindfire's ad for gamers too horny to make rational decisions and Collins College's ad for gamers too moronic to make rational decisions. Minneapolis Media Institute seems to be trying for an entirely different market -- senior citizens who aren't quite sure what these young people and their calculator watches are blooping and bleeping about.

You might have noticed that most game design school ads begin by mocking Pong. That's because the people who made them haven't thought about games since the exact moment they were invented. I mean, what is the actual point here? That some industry has come a long way in 40 years? I'm not even sure how to pay attention to something that obvious and pointless. And if you want me to think you know anything about technology, maybe don't lead with the exact conversation my grandma starts whenever she sees an iPad. I'll tell you the same thing I tell her: "There's not much time -- one of your doctors isn't real! Find the imposter! Destroy him!"

So to continue his point, yesterday's games were high-tech then, but today's games are state-of-the-art now. Sweet! That means I've been reading my calendar in the right direction!

And while I agree with him that Pong is old, at least it had a goal. It's better than say, a game where you jump around in a spaceship drifting aimlessly through an asteroid belt. I'm talking crazy, though. A game like that would only be useful in making a struggling actor look like an asshole.

Holy crap, Minneapolis Media Institute just named all four types of video games. I guess the reason Pong is so reviled by today's critics is because it's only three of them. Honestly, this ad is such gibberish that I'm starting to think it was written by putting a gun in a terrified kid's mouth and shouting, "Tell our copy writer about video games or die, GO!"

Science can't explain why photographing a woman holding a game controller causes it to electrocute her, but it is the most documented phenomenon in all of metaphysics.

You know, if you're unindustrious enough to let a TV commercial plan your life, maybe an 80-hour-a-week job developing games isn't for you. What is it about video games that inspires this logic? Other industries don't make commercials like this. I've never seen an ad saying, "Hey, obese! Can you believe chicken meat used to be served on the skeletons of dead birds? Not today! Modern nuggets combine the nutrition of discarded colons with the shapes you crave! So here's an idea: Take your love of fried chicken and see if you have what it takes to hand a bucket of it to someone else! Fryer accidents, diabetes and even vengeance from the chickens themselves ensure that there are always job openings in this exciting field!"