It's Such An Imperfect Ad

It’s become a trend in video game commercials to have ordinary people - presumably representing the average gamer - acting out the games, with the gamer plunged into, say, a battle-torn hellscape.

I think it started with this ad from a few years back:

Though in that case I'm sure it was less about trying to illustrate the video games as an immersive fantasy, and more about trying to enthral people with the idea that they can shoot Kobe Bryant.  Presumably they couldn't afford LeBron James.

Showing the average person in the game sounds like a good idea; they’re visually depicting the idea that the games allow you to do things you wouldn’t have the chance to do in real life. But really, it just looks silly. Today’s video games are already at the far end of believability, so putting a dorky guy in the middle of it just makes it look that much less believable.  In the above commercial, I have to stretch my believability as far as it will go just to accept the idea of a guy walking through a gun battle shooting in both directions at once without looking.  Making the guy a chef snaps my disbelief like a cheap elastic.

Or maybe the chef's Mario-like moustache was a dig at Nintendo.  It’s too bad Nintendo doesn’t do commercials like this. You could see ordinary people stamping on turtles, bashing their heads into boxes, eating mushrooms etc.