By browsing around on ADWEEK for any interesting articles, I found one that’s particularly interesting. With the recent launch (March 12, 2013) of Blizzard Entertainment’s “Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm” game, PETA took this opportunity to raise awareness.

For people who don’t know what “Starcraft II” is, it is a science fiction real time strategy game developed by Blizzard Entertainment where the gameplay revolves around the player building an army by mining resources to overwhelm his opponent in online multiplayer battles. This game also includes a single player story mode. Essentially, there are three factions you can play with: Terran (humans), Protoss (humanoid-like alien race with advanced technology), and Zerg (beast-like insectoid aliens).

Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm is the second addition to the Starcraft II trilogy, with this one focusing on the Zerg (first one was focused on the Terran). Since the Zerg are biological like creatures and the main antagonists in the Starcraft universe, PETA invaded the launch day by handing out anti-abuse pamphlets to urge gamers to respect the game’s “pixellated extraterrestrials.” Of course, this campaign by PETA was nothing more than a parody, but I do think it was successful (whether or not PETA wanted it to be).

Because of this “parody” done by PETA, I thought that it was effective in raising some form of awareness among the gamers. Because some were angry about PETA, word of mouth about PETA’s campaign will probably go around and will start spreading to more and more people. In a way, I suppose it was effective in getting the gaming community’s attention.

This campaign’s goal was to remind us that while “while Zerglings are not real, there are many equally “strange” and exotic animals we share this planet with who deserve our empathy.” I believe there is some truth to that goal as we humans are not the only ones on this planet, we share this planet with other organisms and that we shouldn’t “discriminate” against them just because they look “strange” to us.