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"My Favourite Game" is an alternative rock song written by Peter Svensson and Nina Persson for Swedish band the Cardigans' fourth studio album, Gran Turismo (1998). The song is the album's eighth track and was released as its first single on 14 September 1998. Lyrically, it is about a failing relationship and the attempt made to better the significant other or save people from themselves. "My Favourite Game" found minor international success, reaching number three in Sweden and number 14 in the UK. It also charted within the top 40 in several European countries and New Zealand. While it failed to chart on the US Billboard Hot 100 and its radio counterpart, it peaked at number 16 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart.
The accompanying music video was directed by Jonas Åkerlund and features Persson joydriving on a desert road. It caused controversy due to its imagery of car crashes and reckless driving, and resulted it being recut to tone down the violence and appear on music channels. The song is featured in the 1999 video game Gran Turismo 2.
The music video for "My Favourite Game" was directed by Swedish director Jonas Åkerlund. It was filmed over a three-day shoot in the Mojave Desert near Barstow, California, at a reported cost of £220,000. Nina Persson reported on requiring oxygen several times during the shoot, saying the 110 °F (43 °C) temperature was "hot enough for a Swede to fall down."
The video opens with a scene of lead singer Nina Persson, at the side of a desert road, trying to find a suitable rock. Meanwhile, the radio DJ, who is heard from the car radio, warns drivers that desert temperatures are very hot that day so they must remember to drive safely. When Persson finds a rock, she walks over to her car, a dark blue 1974 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, places it on the accelerator to keep the pedal down and drives off as the song begins. During the video, she weaves back and forth onto the wrong side of the road, forcing many other drivers off the road and causing some to crash in the process. At one point in the video, she throws the Felix the Cat stuffed toy out of the car which was then run over by another car. In some versions of the video, the Felix the Cat doll is blurred out. At one stage of the video, she is also depicted using her feet to steer the steering wheel. There is a large and colourful tattoo on Persson's arm that was added for the video which can be seen rubbing off on the car seat as the video progresses. She also drives at pedestrians causing them to jump out of the way while driving through a small town. At the beginning of the last chorus, she turns the car around and drives back down the road where she caused so much destruction. Towards the end of the song, she stands up in the car seat, leaving the car driving seemingly in a steerless mode and heading into a collision course with an oncoming van, containing the other members of The Cardigans, with drummer Bengt Lagerberg as the driver. While the van's occupants react in horror, she calmly stretches out her arms and makes a cruciform for a moment before the two vehicles collide as the song ends. The DJ sounds the State Patrol's warning "on a high-speed out-of-control vehicle on Route 666" and passes on to commercial.
There are four different outcomes of the car crash at the end of the uncensored video. In ending one, Persson's body goes flying out of her car into the air and over the van roof where she is then depicted as being dead on the road. In ending two, she also flies over the van roof, except she tries to pick herself off the ground but gets knocked out by the rock that was used to keep the car pedal down. In ending three, she also flies out of the car and over the van roof except she manages to pick herself up from the ground and walks away from the accident, and wipes the blood away from her face (this version is censored). In ending four, Persson is depicted being decapitated by the top of her car windscreen and a mannequin head is seen in the next shot, rolling along the road. In the fifth edition, it is censored all out, along with the car crashes, and Nina still is in the car, bloodless, driving and nodding along to the radio.
The music video caused much controversy when it was first released. Many European channels, including MTV UK, only played an edited version of the video where all of the car crashes and depictions of reckless driving were removed despite director Jonas Åkerlund's attempts to meet the censorship standards by making five differently edited cuts of the video with varying degrees of violence and blood. The reason MTV UK rejected the video was because of fears that the video could encourage joyriding and cause car accidents amongst teenage drivers, so ending five was most played on MTV UK. A more graphic cut was shown on the Cardigans website on a one-time-only basis four days before the single's release. But, in the U.S., the music channels were noticeably less restrictive as many of them either played the completely uncensored version of the video or a slightly censored version with only a few of the car crashes removed.
Despite the controversy, the music video managed to debut at number twenty-nine on MuchMusic's Countdown in October 1998 and peaked at number twenty-three on 27 November. Also, the video has appeared on many "Greatest Music Video" lists including ranking at 68 in Slant Magazine's "100 Greatest Music Videos" sharing the position with U.N.K.L.E's "Rabbit in Your Headlights", and ranking 95 in Channel 4's "100 Greatest Pop Videos".
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