Anti-smoking ads for the new age
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Thanks to the millions of dollars spent on anti-smoking campaigns, most people are aware of the many negative side effects of the nasty habit. Whether it’s a man telling how to shower post-tracheotomy or a pair of walking hands telling you that smoking will make your penis break, you’ve probably seen some form of advertisement warning against tobacco use. But are these ads actually effective?
Some evidence would seem to suggest so, though other studies question whether or not these efforts may have had the opposite effect. According to Tobacco Free Florida “Strong evidence proves that graphic, hard-hitting anti-tobacco ads work, and those that arouse strong negative emotions perform better than those that do not.”
Good news for hopeful quitters: The recently released, FDA-sponsored game One Leaves offers strong negative emotions in spades. But is it enough to stop kids from lighting up? I decided to take it upon myself as a smoker with several failed attempts at quitting to see if this horror game had what it took to scare me straight.
If you missed the ads that were briefly making the rounds on Youtube, One Leaves is a horror game about four people trapped in a strange, dilapidated building who are racing to find a way out. As the name suggests, only one of these four will win back their freedom. It’s equal parts Saw with notes of Silent Hill if those franchises had been created by your middle school D.A.R.E. officer. The story doesn’t exactly go much deeper than that. You play as one of these four people racing to the exit, solving simple puzzles along the way. Depending on how fast you get to the exit, you either get the good or the bad ending. (I played through the game four times and only ever saw two different endings, so if there are more neither I nor the Let’s Players I watched later could find them.) The whole experience usually takes less than twenty minutes, especially on subsequent playthroughs once you have an idea of what you're supposed to be doing.
The gameplay isn’t anything to write home about, as it’s pretty much just a haunted house walking simulator. There’s one button that lets you interact with your environment and a run button, which might as well add jet thrusters to the back of your character’s legs for how fast and difficult to control he becomes. This is fiction, as no dedicated smoker has or will ever move that fast without keeling over in a heaving mess, but I’ll let this one slide. There’s also a jump and a crouch button, which imply a more dynamic style of gameplay than the game actually offers because neither are ever used. You end up using the interact button to go through vents and crawl through other tight spaces, and your character can’t get enough air to make it over even the slightest obstacles in your path, forcing you to go around when it looks like you should be able to jump over it. (A commentary on the effects that smoking has on your body, maybe? Subtle. We like it.) There are maybe two or three memory based puzzles, but they’re so simple that you can pretty reliably solve them by accident. The rest of the challenge comes from the random nature of the environments you explore, which change every playthrough.
As mentioned, the environments themselves take more than a little inspiration from the Silent Hill series. You explore schools and hospitals covered with blood and tissue coating the walls. Doors shut in front of you on their own. Sometimes a room will be upside down, with chairs and desks on the ceiling. The usual fare. (At one point you can find a gymnasium filled with burning trees, a clear commentary on how stray cigarettes can cause forest fires. Yes! A health advocate and an environmentalist!)
If you’re familiar with the indie horror scene, most of this will look pretty familiar, albeit with a slight inclination towards body horror. A pair of blackened lungs will cough at you if you go down the wrong hallway, and if you crawl through the wrong vent a yellowed, rotting set of dentures will jump out at you in one of the game’s only jump scares. It’s never really scary, and save for a few instances in which you’re immediately transferred to the previous room, there’s not really any sense of danger or urgency. (Another commentary, perhaps? That it’s hard to see how the danger is affecting you now. That you don’t notice the threat until you’ve reached the end of your journey and it’s already too late? Damn! So subtle I almost missed it.)
Another huge detriment to what I can assume was a desired sense of urgency is that the game is single-player only. While none of the advertising explicitly states that the game was anything else, the emphasis on the competition aspect of the game makes it seem like this would be something you would play with your friends. (“There is a game that for every four who play, only one leaves.”) But the other three characters are only briefly seen in pre-rendered events that sort of suggest a competition. You’ll sometimes see one of them run ahead of you and turn a corner, only for that corner to lead to a dead-end and for them to have disappeared into thin air. Make no mistake, you’re only competing against yourself and your time on the clock.
So already we’re off to a bad start. I feel like I’ve been misled, and if I can’t trust the developers to deliver the experience they showed me in the trailers, can I trust anything they tell me? Does anything about this game accurately convey the experience of a smoker? Despite the snide remarks, in a weird way, it does.
Smoking has always been a social thing for me. It was something I started doing casually, with friends outside the dorm rooms in college or hanging out the front door of a house party. I met some of my best friends by asking them for a lighter. And I knew the risks involved. But it never seemed like a big deal if I was doing it socially. The more of my friends that smoked with me, the more comfortable I got smoking. There was strength in numbers, and surely cancer couldn’t catch ALL of us. It wasn’t my problem, it was OUR problem.
That was until I tried to quit. Until I realized how much of an impact smoking was having on MY lungs, or how much of MY money was being spent a month on cigarettes. Then I realized it didn’t really matter what everyone else was doing, how everyone else’s “race” was going if I’m going to draw the extremely tenuous connection. This was my problem, and quitting was a competition with myself. Is that what One Leaves is trying to convey by placing the emphasis on personal responsibility instead. A pessimist might say that it was just way less work this way. But there is something very isolating about trying to quit. Non-smokers don’t really understand why you’re in a terrible mood, and there’s no way you can be around your smoking friends while you’re trying to think about everything besides nicotine. And if you and your friends are trying to quit together, then you get the situation One Leaves presents. You’re all going to struggle, but statistically speaking only one of you will succeed.
The random nature of the maze could also be generously interpreted as a metaphor for how there’s no one perfect way to kick the habit. Some people quit cold turkey, and I think those people are superhuman because for me I’ve only had luck in slowly waning of nicotine. But some people use patches, and some people switch to vaping. (Very excited to see the sequel about the dangers of vaping, expecting a more cyberpunk horror experience this time around, a la H. R. Giger.) But there’s no one way about it, and even if you make it out and get the “good” ending, if you play again, it’s going to be a whole different battle.
I’m being very generous here, but in some abstract ways, I’ve been able to see aspects of my own experiences in this game. But what does it get wrong? I think what the game misses is that while quitting isn’t a competition, it doesn’t have to be done alone. I came closest to quitting when I was doing it with friends, when we were all working to convince each other that we didn’t really need a smoke like we thought we did. We were helping each other through the “maze.” One study said that the most effective anti-smoking ads “occurred among students who said their friends were influenced by anti-smoking messages.” Kids who were convinced that their friends were responding well to anti-smoking ads also did. So why not utilize the same pressure that persuades people to smoke as a tool to convince them not to? A group of friends dealing with the problems together instead of in isolation has a much better chance of quitting than they do alone. That’s why they have support groups. That’s yet another reason this game missed out on the chance to have a support group. (The closest you get to any support is a laughably gravel-voiced narrator telling you to run lest you be stuck in this hell forever like he is.)
When it comes down to it, the goal of One Leaves isn’t to prevent smoking-related deaths, at least not in the short term. The goal of the game is to prevent people from picking up the habit. And if I had to guess, it’s not going to succeed. One Leaves reeks of patronizing, half-assed pandering, an out of touch adult trying to speak the young people’s language. It’s your youth group leader who has an earing telling you about how woke Jesus is, or Hillary Clinton telling you to “Pokemon GO to the polls!” The people who made this game had, at best, a tenuous understanding of what makes this genre so popular. I’m sure the developers noticed that horror indie games do particularly well on Youtube, and they were probably hoping it would get it’s own video on Markiplier or Pewdiepie’s channel. But it’s not scary, has hardly any gameplay, and the aesthetic is completely ripped from the pages of better books.
So it’s already sort of patronizing that the developers thought this was passable, that their audience would eat this barebones experience up and it would get shared around by the Youtube community. The developers clearly didn’t put in the effort to learn the language they’re trying to use to speak to a demographic that a boardroom executive most likely refers to as simply “the youth.” But maybe that could be forgiven if the message was there and worth listening to. But it isn’t, because One Leaves doesn’t trust its audience enough to have an honest conversation with them.
The game goes for the “abstinence-only” route. It completely ignores the reasons many kids light up, and instead aims to portray smoking as something literally out of a horror movie, something so scary that no one would dare light up. But teenagers like horror movies. Teenagers like doing dangerous, stupid things. Teenagers like doing everything that adults tell them not to. We know that abstinence-only education is not effective. It didn’t curve the larger problem of teen pregnancy, and it probably isn’t going to save many lives from lung cancer either.
The way the game is framed, at the start, your character already in the middle of the addiction, presumably on the downward spiral. That’s the only aspect of addiction that the game is willing to discuss: The horrible end result. But the end result of addiction is not relatable to a teenager. They’re not there yet. The end result is some far off fantasy out of a horror movie, a fantasy that drapes over the habit to make it seem dangerous and, to a teenager, maybe even a little enticing. But the game doesn’t discuss these things. It doesn’t discuss the situations that lead people to start smoking, situations that might actually be relatable to a teen. It just grabs you by the shoulders and says “I’d better not catch you with a cigarette or I swear.” The game aims to scare you straight, but essentially tells you that once you make the wrong choice, you’re on your own. No mention of nicotine patches, support groups, or any other form of anti-smoking aids. If its goal is to prevent people from dying of cancer, it’s left a gaping blind spot.
The message is noble, but no one is going to listen when it’s presented in such a lazy, patronizing way. Researcher William G. Shadel said in a Fatherly article that, among younger people, presumably the audience for the game, anti-smoking ads have a lot of potential to backfire. According to Shadel, this is because of the “the propensity for teens to essentially defy messages that challenge them.” “If someone’s trying to communicate a message to you, and that message is threatening somehow to your self-esteem, your self-worth or your conception of yourself, you react in a way that is opposite to the intention of the message.”
Teenagers aren’t as gullible as a lot of this kind of advertising seems to believe they are. If I was a teenager, this game would have been just another way to mock “the establishment” who was trying to tell me how to live my life. It would be something to scoff at while I lit up my tenth Marlboro Red of the day. “Cowboy killers? You know those things are terrible for you?” someone would say. “Yeah, I know,” I’d smirk, like that made me the most dangerous man in my high school parking lot, sitting on the hood of my car with Nirvana playing loud enough that everyone could hear. I did it precisely because I knew I wasn’t supposed to, and The Man wouldn’t like it. And when The Man comes to you with a message in such a tacky Trojan horse, it makes it even easier to rebel.
I don’t think anyone is necessarily going to light up because of this well-intentioned, but embarrassing attempt to hop on a trend to “speak to the youth.” But I don’t think it’s really going to dissuade anyone either. Picking up the habit was the stupidest thing I think I’ve done, and I’m honestly not sure what I could have seen that would have prevented me from ever buying that first pack. But I can say with a lot of confidence that it would not have been One Leaves.
