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What Can Ads Teach Developers?
Is it false advertising when commercials strongly imply that a game is more narratively or emotionally engaging than it actually is?
This isn’t a subject I ever thought I’d be writing about, but while scanning my RSS feed, I came across a video blog entry on this subject from game designer David Jaffe. The object of his ire was the trailer for Ubisoft’s newest Prince Of Persia title, which leans heavily on the melancholy pop song ‘Breathe Me’, along with slow-motion game footage to evoke the intensity of the relationship between the Prince and his companion Elika.
This in turn prompted Jaffe to recall the ad campaign for the original Gears Of War, of which he says: “When I saw everybody going nuts over the fucking ‘Mad World’ trailer I was like, ‘Oh, come on fucking people’. They took a song, a pretty good song, and put it over this footage. Again, I liked Gears Of War 1, loved Gears Of War 2, and I’m even somewhat emotionally invested in the characters in Gears 2, which is a pretty hard feat for a game that’s as over the top and action-oriented as Gears. But I’m sorry, there’s fucking nothing in the trailer that I think I’ve attached to this post that reflects what that game is.”
It would be easy enough to dismiss Jaffe’s complaints by saying that all advertising is false; after all, that beer isn’t going to get you laid by supermodels, nor is that laundry detergent going to make your children love you. But to quote a famous slogan, we’ve come a long way, baby. Surely I can’t be the only one who’s thankful that publishers have moved beyond the ’90s-era ads that screamed at us through the telly with ‘extreme’ live-action footage and pounding rock music, followed by a few desultory seconds of in-game footage and a box shot.
Microsoft has been one of the publishers at the forefront of this shift, most notably with its stellar work on the North American TV campaigns for Halo 3 and both Gears Of War games, and good on them for it. Nowhere is it written that a television ad has to be a literal note-for-note reproduction of what players will see in the associated game.
In fact, ads represent an opportunity to expand our experience of the game’s fiction, because film and video are a narrative medium in a way that videogames are not. I particularly liked the testimonial videos that Microsoft filmed as part of the ad campaign for Halo 3 because they grounded Bungie’s propulsive sci-fi adventure in a reflective ‘Band Of Brothers’-ish documentary tribute to Master Chief.
What would have been an incongruous fit had Bungie attempted to shoehorn it into the actual game became a smooth, eloquent companion piece when served up in 30- and 60-second spots. Having said all that, Jaffe makes another point worth considering when he indicts himself for the way he tried to make the car combat game Twisted Metal Black seem more, ah, twisted than it actually was.
He says: “We used a bunch of fucking easy buttons to try to make it seem all depressing and dark. It wasn’t. If I really wanted to stand behind my statements… I remember at the time I [said] to the press – why did I say this? Because I was full of myself – I said, ‘Oh, this game is a metaphor about depression’. It’s like, come the fuck on, man. It’s an action game with a neat art style, really well-made… If I was really trying to make an artistic statement, I would have made an artistic statement through the gameplay, which I wasn’t capable of doing at the time. The team was more interested, as they should have been, in making a great game, and I didn’t fucking know how to do it anyway.”
Jaffe may be a bit too self-flagellating here; after all, he and his team at Sony Santa Monica were responsible for the unexpectedly moving sequence in God Of War where a trapped-in-the-afterlife Kratos must periodically share his health with the wife and child he inadvertently killed in a delirious rage, all the while fighting off a horde of murderous Kratos doppelgangers.
Not only does this prove that emotion can be evoked honestly through gameplay, it suggests that the solution isn’t for videogame publishers to dial back their advertising, but for videogame developers to instead step up their craft; to figure out how they can translate the efficient ways in which 30- and 60-second spots instil emotions into analogous methods that will work in games.
The dialogue-free ‘Last Day’ ad for Gears Of War 2, for example, is far better than just about any of the cutscenes in the game itself, from its opening in an idyllic, Valhalla-like field to the close with its protagonists’ descent into the bowels of Sera.
So, part of what makes this spot work is the blessed absence of the series’ signature B-movie grunt-speak. But it also presents a series of short, sharp vignettes outside of Gears 2’s meat-grinding combat, which eloquently isolate emotional states and group interactions, ranging from melancholy and camaraderie to steeling oneself for the carnage to come – sentiments that it would behoove Epic to mine in the future. So don’t get mad at the Mad Men, developers. They have much to teach you.
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Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
England and Wales company registration number 2008885
>>Jaffe may be a bit too self-flagellating here; after all, he and his team at Sony Santa Monica were responsible for the unexpectedly moving sequence in
that's not an easy button in itself?
SUICIDE, MY FAMILY IS DEAAAAAAAAD, THE GODS HAVE ABANDONED MEEEEE, RAAAAGE
I thought God of War was suppose to be an over-the-top B-movie storyline, I didn't know Jaffe took it fuckin' seriously.
Advertising in general is a tool that was invented to siphon money out of people who wouldn't necessarily give it to you in the first place without some "convincing". Your friendly neighborhood "weed man" doesn't necessarily advertise, and he probably does just fine. If someone already wants whatever it is you're selling, advertising to them would be a waste of energy and money. In fact, if they want it, they will seek YOU out and eagerly hand over their hard earned cash. So, at the very least, we can see that advertising is fertile ground for abuse because it's based on coercion. Of course, maybe I just say that because I can STILL remember cereal commercials from when I was 5 years old but I can't remember the name of the girl I had a crush on in first grade.
So yes, advertising "wants" to be "bad", and it usually is and here's an example of how and why. You even alluded to it in your write-up:
"Look at me! I'm solemn, and I'm and old war vet, and Master Chief saved my bacon in the big epic battle of Thermop...err...The Battle of What-cha-ma-call-it Hill. This big playset from a 1980's GI Joe commercial demonstrates it perfectly. Go Joe! Err, I mean 'Yeah Master Chief'."
Now I agree, that was a very good commercial. You could even say it was a decent piece of visual art or whatever you'd like to classify it as. My problem with it is: What the G-golly-Darn did that have to do with the game?
I see this commercial and I think: "Wow! They went to all this trouble to make this really cool GI Joe playset with all the soldiers and all this stuff going on in this epic battle, so there must be some point in the game when I get into this HUGE epic battle. JUST LIKE THEY'RE INFERRING IN THE COMMERCIAL. Sweet! I bet there's explosions, and lots of enemies on the screen! It'll be pandemonium!"
-Was there a big epic infantry battle in Halo 3? No. Not really.
-Were there big explosions on a hectic jam-packed battlefield torn asunder by the ravages of war? No. Not really.
-Were there tons of soldiers around in trouble for me to save and generally impress with my "Bad-Ass-ed-ness"? No. Not really.
-Was there anything that even really looked like the the cool GI Joe playset from the commercial? No. Not really.
Can ads teach developers anything? Yes, but not really anything that I think will help make games "better". Advertisers believe in "tricking" people into buying stuff that they don't need. It would be unreasonable to think that developers would have any large impact on how "honest" advertisers are as they ply their trade, so in my mind, developers can only learn how to be just as dishonest as marketing people.
P.S. - The ads for Assassin's Creed were at LEAST ten times better than the game in my opinion, so maybe this is a "thing" with UBISOFT. Who knows.
You're so postmodern Mr Croal.