Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Show me the money ...

Or what's actually the object of the advertising.

I'm listening to The Game Station podcast at the moment, or at least the Video On Demand youtube video of the one last week. One of the main topics so far has been E3, which is an entertainment expo. It's supposed to be a trade show where the industry people take their bits and pieces and show them off to journalists and trade people in the hope of getting interest.

The journo's have gotten very cynical about how useful it is. The presentations tend to be canned footage of what are supposed to be games. It's an interactive art form, or at least it's supposed to be. What it really should be is something you can play with. It doesn't have to be complete, sometimes doesn't have to be stable. But it needs to give at least some confidence that there's a game hiding in there somewhere.

I've got quite cynical over the years about games as well. Too often we get shovelled incomplete garbage that's broken.

The main ways of selling games tends to be :

Tits & Arse - yeah, I'm interested - I'm a normal red blooded male. But not in a game. Some stuff is for real life, some stuff is for pixels. Tits & Arse are far better in real life than in pixels. Keep your booth babes, keep the softcore porn adverts, it doesn't add anything to the game.

Canned video - keep it. It doesn't tell me anything about stability (the most frustrating thing in gaming is when it crashes out) or gameplay. One of my criticisms of Skyrim is that the quest system railroads you into doing things you don't want to do. The only way to avoid becoming a cannibal is to ignore the quest.

Still screenshots allegedly from the games - come on ! It's photoshopped. If the game looks great, put it up on a big screen driven by a live demo.

There was an exception from E3. The Totalbiscuit coverage of Planetside2 has convinced me that it's a game to be very interested in. It ignored the T&A and Canned Video presentation routes and went for live gameplay. Ok, over a limited area but :

Live servers
Many players
Claimed "alpha" state but beta level feature level

It passed the tests of "looks great", "gameplay is something I'd be interested in", "will deliver the promises". Canned videos like XCom don't give that, actual demos do in a "You say this works : PROVE IT" way.

How is that relevant outside the games world ?

Last year, when I was looking at cars, I wrote something about looking around the Bristol Motor Show. (Here's the link). There was a bit of variance in how the car people went about things :

Lexus - come see ! Have a seat, let us tell you how awesome we think our car is
Ford - good cars, open to look at but not much interest from the staff
Alfa - some good, some bad - but still open for checking out
VW & Audi - locked cars with no one in attendance

Are they scared of people checking out their stuff ? That's the only explanation for that disinterest. It didn't give me any cause for visiting the Audi garage for sure. Can't remember seeing Honda there but they fell down with the interest level at their garage. It was basically zero interest in selling a sporty hybrid coupe to a young professional male.

I'm the target audience for the CR-Z ! Why no interest from the sales people !

And there's me in danger of ranting again.

It's a more cautious world these days. We don't have as much money available as we used to. We have less disposable free time. There's more quality competition. If you're wanting to sell something to us, make us think that you believe that our time is valuable.

Still rambling today. I'm pretty bashed feeling after yesterday. But what made me think "wow, I'd like to write more like that" is reading one from 3 years ago (someone randomly found it and I got curious). It's me writing nice things about someone very special. Sadly I didn't hear from her again - but I can remember how I felt when I wrote it.

Think head over heels. I've had possibility of that feeling a couple of times over the past year or so but not lately. But I'd love to have it back again. It's that feeling that someone matters more than life ... and that they might feel the same about you. Not had that feeling for a while.

There's a distance between "possibility" where you might have the head over heels feeling and where you realise that the other party might be completely oblivious. I didn't believe that the BYT / Miss AB who left us 3 years ago was oblivious (woulda loved to hear from her again) but I've had that from others.

Maybe they've been waiting for something :-)

I'm waiting for something - this episode of NCIS to finish and then I'll be in the shower washing out some of yesterday's tiredness.

PS Another thing that cheered me up today - Finance Angel K spotting me walk by with teacake -> Smile + "Hello Pete!", which led to a cascade of "Morning" "morning", "Allo", "mornin'", "Wotcha" and so on and so on as that smiling Hello Pete ended up in me saying hello to half the office. Next step - I need to learn their names ... :-)

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