Are you a fan of FPS like Call of Duty, do you like shooting at everything that moves? Don’t wait any longer and join the National Gendarmerie! This is the astonishing message of a new advertisement which plays on the codes of video games.
“No need to spend money to get the best skins. Mounties have been available for 300 years.” There is no denying that the latest advertisement from the national gendarmerie to recruit new faces is making a lasting impression! The video shared on social networks uses the codes of famous first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Rainbow Six Siege And Call of Duty, the police to try to seduce video game enthusiasts. We see different gendarmes belonging to several classes (defender, investigator, investigator and observer), who parade before our eyes – as before starting a game of Call of Duty , when you have to choose your character -, before the spot indicates that a Gendarmerie Pack will soon be available. A strange and clumsy comparison, to say the least, in both form and substance, which amounts to saying that joining the police is comparable to playing a war video game. And which made Internet users jump in the comments…
Gendarmerie: a recruitment advertisement that is causing debate
The video quickly sparked strong reactions on X (formerly Twitter). Many do not understand the link between the profession of gendarme, which requires great discernment and is accompanied by heavy responsibilities, to a violent video game whose goal is to kill as many people as possible. “No, but seriously? We spend our time telling our kids to take a step back from what they see in films and what they do in video games and you come up with these kinds of messages?”, can we read under the publication. Some Internet users point out the irony of the statement, while the Government had made a connection, which was clumsy to say the least, between the violence of the riots which broke out this summer after the death of young Nahel and video games – Emmanuel Macron’s famous phrase “We sometimes have the feeling that some of them are living on the street with the video games that have addicted them”, which had provoked strong reactions -, while others make a link with police violence during the demonstrations. Not to mention that the gendarmerie is using a video game code that is problematic to say the least: microtransactions (see our article).
This is not the first time that the gendarmerie has tried to seduce the public by using gaming and taking codes from video games. At the beginning of November, the institution was one of the exhibitors at Paris Games Week, where many uniformed gendarmes demonstrated their talents on various FPS games. We even had the right to a “Gendarmerie gaming” cap on the stand!