I miss the days when TV, movies and advertising were aware that videogames existed, but found them so impossible to understand that they represented them in only the most baffling of ways. A Doom 2 arcade cabinet; tightening up the graphics on level 3; "somebody's playing for real."
Those were the good times, it turns out, when other media couldn't yet latch onto some real but deeply embarrassing aspect of gaming culture in a desperate how-do-you-do-fellow-kids attempt to look cool. If you haven't watched the Amazon ad embedded above, steel yourself.
Not so long ago, a former vice president of Amazon gaming admitted that the company did such a bad job of competing against Steam, no one even realized it was trying to. Now the company is on to new strategies, like paying FaZe Clan co-owner Brian "FaZe Rug" Awadis to say "Alexa, I just crushed that round."
As part of a campaign to promote Alexa+, a supposedly improved version of the virtual assistant, Amazon has assembled a line-up of celebrities—Lil Wayne, Pete Davison, Rug—to have totally natural conversations with the disembodied robovoice in their empty, perfectly staged homes. The first two are famous enough that their presence immediately kicks the ads into celebrity mode, where we can innately understand that they're just being paid to inhabit their public personas while a brand throws itself at you. But the writing in Rug's ad and his profound lack of screen presence unfortunately makes us fully perceive the horrors of gaming's most terminally online vernacular.
It's almost impressive how ruthlessly the ad taints every gaming phrase it touches in under 30 seconds. There's the unconvincing "time to lock in" to kick things off; a Razzie-worthy "Let's goooo!" after some awkward analog stick flicking; and the requisite 'YouTuber plugs his casually rich lifestyle' by sending his fellow FaZe member 1,000 tissue boxes (who, incidentally, made a clearly contractually obliged comment on the ad's Instagram post, saying "imma need one of these").
Rug, who posts lowest common denominator YouTube dreck in the Mr Beast mold like "I bought the most expensive plane ticket! (Saudi Arabia)", has none of the rizz required to sell the line "This is a must cop" as he looks at a shopping cart full of tissue boxes on his phone. When Alexa reacts to his supposed win in an unseen shooter with "You are goated with the sauce, FaZe Rug," the ad ascends to the level of profound, enlightened anti-cool.
It's a staggering work. Amazon's advertising department has built its own Large Hadron Collider and smashed together two things that were already deeply swagless—AI, and a caricature of gaming filtered through the mouth of Twitch chat—at the speed of RGB light. The resulting black hole will surely pull every word uttered in the ad into its supercompacted gravitational center and spit them out the other side, where they emerge coated in irony poisoned particles. From this moment on they can only be used in direct, biting reference to this moment when they were branded by Amazon as the nadir of cool.
I mean, really, how did they think they could get away with it? Not even Don Draper could take a phrase birthed from the viral brainrotted core of the internet and wield it effectively. Cleaving off "quirked up white boy" did them no good: the core problem at hand is that even those of us who would never before have said "that's goated with the sauce" know, instinctively, whether someone or something is goated. You can just feel it.
Shohei Ohtani? You don't even have to like baseball to know Shohei's goated with the sauce.
Robert Redford's fits in Three Days of the Condor? Goated with the sauce and busting it down sexual style.
Doom 2's Super Shotgun? Shinji Mikami's Vanquish? The Best Halo 3 No Scope EVER? Northernlion's most confusing motivational speech of all time? Childish Gambino's Redbone playing while Austin Walker has cornered you at a party talking about machine elves? All goated, with the sauce.
Most of us do not say out loud that these things are goated, leaving it to an assumption of taste and good faith among the collective unconscious. But we can remain stoic no longer. This is our stupid gaming culture. This is our brainrotted internet language. Even if it means living with chronic irony poisoning as we walk backwards into hell, better to own it than give it over to the Amazons of the world to say who is and isn't the goat.
Because posing for a photo with the most-dissed man who's ever lived? Being the guy who posts his ad on YouTube with the caption "You know I had to lock in and manifest a win with Alexa+" with, seemingly, no sponsorship disclosure? This Alexa? Sauceless. Utterly sauceless, as even the ad seems to realize in its final moments.
"Hell yeah, Alexa," Rug says into the darkness. The blue and purple gamer lighting pulses softly in the background. Headphones, playing nothing, cradle his neck. He stares, eyes seeing nothing, fingers spasming on the brandless controller.
The tablet is silent. There is no one there.
