Battlefield 1 is an excellent game that manages to handle its subject matter tastefully, but the marketing behind it hasn’t always been as respectful of its source material. This has never been better exemplified than in EA’s recent attempt to kick off the hashtag #justWWIthings, which attempts to juxtapose the horrors of war with millennial slang and, unsurprisingly, fails to do so.
The tweets were posted by the official Battlefield Twitter account, with one of them featuring a soldier setting his enemies alight with a flamethrower accompanied by the caption “when you’re too hot for the club.” Each tweet is accompanied with the hashtag #justWWIthings, because apparently no one in EA’s social media department thought that this would be a bad idea.
Unsurprisingly the ill-advised hashtag campaign has been widely ridiculed, with many either mocking EA’s forced efforts to appeal to their target demographic, or condemning the developer for trivializing war:
Wilfred said he was going to write a poem called Anthem for Doomed Youth, he only went and did it the ABSOLUTE MADMAN #JustWWIThings
— Alice Bell (@BabyGotBell) October 31, 2016
literally, dying #justWWIthings
— ＤＡＭＯＧＯＲＧＯＮ (@demanrisu) October 31, 2016
https://t.co/8VtmJFYoh6 #justWWIthings pic.twitter.com/KVBDE01Xhg
— ben (spooky) (@housetrotter) October 31, 2016
“I slept daily in dread of bullet, shrapnel, mine, and deadly gas; and nightly in fear of mine and gas and man-eating rats.” #JustWWIThings
— Phil Savage (@Octaeder) October 31, 2016
#justWWIthings was a mistake https://t.co/kfdCIS6S63
— Spilt Milk (@SpiltMilkStudio) October 31, 2016
Fortunately Battlefield 1 does a much better job at honoring its subject matter than the game’s social media team, so hopefully someone can tap whoever is in charge of the Battlefield account and tell them that their latest campaign is more than a little uncomfortable.
