It may not be an official PS3 ad,* but nevertheless, there’s at least a few ad men working the Chilean market who think that this would be a good way to sell Playstations:
Let me make sure I’ve got the message right. It seems to be somewhere between “Playing a game on your PS3, a system well known for its virtual Joans of Arc, is just as much fun as being an organ donor in the years before anesthesia and antiseptics” and “Playstation 3: the most fun you can have without having open heart surgery” with maybe a dash of “PS3: Get Medieval on Your Heart (and Joan of Arc’s heart [she’s got a congenital heart defect that the chroniclers neglected to mention, you see…])”?
While I don’t really dabble in the “lol that codpiece is actually 13th century FAIL!!!” school of medieval bloggery much anymore, I must admit that their vision of the 15th century is pretty odd. For one, it’s clear that for the artists Joan’s armor is just weird metal clothing, her greaves, cuisse and other such armorlogical whatchamacallits simply the medieval equivalent of aughties gamerdude’s jeans.
From this clearly representative evidence, I deduce the following principle of modern medievalishness**:
In the Middle Ages, clothing was made of metal.
Also, seeing as this advertisement’s surgical theater comes equipped with chest spacers, a bloody rag, a large metal key, a meat hook (?), chains, and stocks for your legs (but not your arms?!), I could add to that:
In the Middle Ages, they just used whatever the hell they had lying around when they had to do surgery.
But that would be being unfair. Frankly, even I’ve got no clue what doctors used for heart transplant surgery in the Middle Ages. My medieval medical knowledge goes no further than vein men and purgatives. Alas, that’s the trouble with being a medieval pedant. You have to pretend to have all sorts of expertise you don’t really have.
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*For a few days last week, this ad (and another one featuring a modern gamer giving Rommel a blood transfusion) were thought to have been part of a new PS3 print ad campaign for Chile. Turns out, it was just a mock campaign produced as an attempt to get Sony’s business.
**Before you get all St. Maurice on me, read on. Medievalishness: a word I coined just now to describe what we moderns do when we want to give the feel of the medieval era without caring much about accuracy. See also, ye olde stuffe.