Video Games, Wal-Mart and Marketing Environmental PR
Posted on October 8, 2007 by webteam
Leave it to Wal-Mart to tie its environmental PR work into a greater (if not disingenuous) marketing campaign. CFL lightbulbs and high-concentration detergent are one thing, but Wal-Mart has taken environmental marketing to a weird place.
Nintendo is selling a Nintendo DS (a dual screen portable video game system) title called “Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol” exclusively at Wal-Mart. The game focuses on a small little robot that goes around planting flowers in the park. While exclusive deals for video games and other entertainment are not a new thing at Wal-Mart, both Nintendo and Wal-Mart’s explainations for the exclusive deal seemed to reflect more of a green PR push, than a video game marketing effort.
Nintendo’s justification for selling the game at Wal-Mart, according to Stephan Totilo (of MTV News Multiplayer Blog), seemed a bit odd to the gamer. He got this response from a company rep:
For the new “Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol” game for Nintendo DS, Nintendo partnered with Wal-Mart because of Wal-Mart’s strong environmental program and social giving campaign. “Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol” has an environmental theme, and we wanted to make sure that it received exposure among a broad audience of consumers as we continue to get more and more people interested in the world of video games.
Environmentally-themed video games are nothing new: everything from “Final Fantasy VII’s” strong messages regarding environmental degradation and corporate oligarchy on a planetary scale to Nintendo’s own “Super Mario Sunshine,” where Mario uses a water pack to clean up ubiquitous toxic sludge covering a tropical island. What’s ironic about Chibi-Robo and it being exclusive to Wal-Mart is that it’s a game about park preservation. Why is Nintendo giving Wal-Mart – a company so connected to the destruction of greenspace through commercial development – credit for its weak environmentalism? Why is the company playing in to Wal-Mart’s PR, when it could just be honest about the actual motivations? Instead we are left with a strange chapter in video game history, where a game has become part of a green-washing campaign. Maybe Wal-Mart can take some lessons from the game itself and develop a more environmentally friendly development strategy, instead of relying on cookie cutter Supercenters, and leave the green space flowers, trees and plants, instead of the paved parking lots and massive stores Wal-Mart is so fond of.
