A bunch of folks have written in to inform me about Kingory. I don't play a lot of video games, but this appears to be some kind of Chinese-themed war strategy game based on the famed Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel. Great. So why does it look like some kind of shady "Meet Asian Women!" dating site?
The banner ads for Kingory, which have popping up all over the web, are even worse. Is it me, or do they look like they're not even advertising a video game? A sex game, at the very least. It's straight-up orientalist exoticization of the Asian female as a sex object. They don't even try to be subtle:
I fail to see how these images have anything to do with warfare and strategy gaming. (The game, by the way, is the English version of online game that originated in China.) It seems to me that the marketing is trying extra hard to play up the mysterious, exotic Orient, and appeal to Asian fetish dudes looking to subjugate their very own video game China doll.
Seriously, they look like really bad massage parlor ads. Internet users seeking some Asian skin are probably going to be pretty disappointed, since the game's screenshots indicate that it's a fairly straightforward strategy game. That is really some awful, terrible marketing.
