Marketing, Storytelling, and Trust

"Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly." 

I find myself often hesitant to write on this blog because I have difficulty assigning myself to opinions unless I know them to be true.  Geoshie is in many ways an experiment, a proof of concept that you can make a good game out of a tech demo, and, more importantly, that I can make a good game out of a tech demo.

Geoshie is not merely the manifestation of many of the beliefs I have about game design, it is the first real-world test I have ever made as to whether or not any of these beliefs are, in the strictest sense, true.  So let me preface everything I am about to say with the following disclaimer, just in case I haven't made it clear already : I'm not qualified to make design decisions.  And I have no repertoire or standing that ought to compel you to listen to what I say or assume that I have any knowledge of what I'm talking about.

Now, let's talk about the relationship between narration and advertising.

I'm finding that the biggest problem with marketing Geoshie is knowing what to tell people about it.  At this point, I have the vast majority of Geoshie's back-story finalized, meaning I won't make any changes to it until I can actually play test an actually working game and get concrete feedback indicating if I should or not.  The same goes for gameplay.  Design for Geoshie has outpaced its engine development at a rather obscene rate.

And let me be clear, every idea I have about Geoshie is one that I am excited about.  There is no part of Geoshie that I don't want to tell you about.  Literally none.  There were boring parts, but I cut them out and replaced them with fascinating parts.  There were some more exciting things that didn't make it into the game, either because of problems fitting them into the narrative, or because the tech didn't allow for it.  They weren't exciting because they didn't work.  So I cut them out and replaced them with exciting things that will work.

I am excited about Geoshie.  In fact, sometimes I get so excited about Geoshie that it paralyzes me and makes it hard for me to work on it.  Sometimes, I have to force myself to stop looking at the really exciting bits and work on the ordinary bits.  And I want to tell you about all of them.

But this is extremely difficult.  On one hand, I want you to be excited about Geoshie too.  But on the other hand, what I really want is for you to play Geoshie and discover my ideas for yourself.  I don't want you to just know Geoshie's story; I want to reveal it to you.  And finding the subtle balance between keeping you interested and ruining the whole thing is a very tricky proposition.

A lot of this can be rephrased as "How do you handle depth in video games?"

It is widely regarded that depth in video games is A Very Good Thing.  And for the consumer, it is good.  But you have to understand how that feels from the opposite perspective.  I tend to think of artists as portraying their main points and slowly fading back to their less important points as depth increases.  The stuff in the background isn't as important as the stuff in the foreground.

That's not really the case that I'm finding as I work on Geoshie.  Sometimes, the subtle undertones of something I want to put into Geoshie are the stuff I want people to pick up on the most when I'm designing.  And every amount of tact and subtlety I work into the game is a chance that a player will miss out entirely on what I want them to see.

But that doesn't mean I can be heavy handed about any of it, some ideas are better suited as background details, and some ideas are better suited to be subtle.  Games are a unique form of communication, where you not only must have something you are trying to communicate but where what you are trying to communicate can not be explicitly stated.  Media is emotional, not rational, and if you attempt to bridge that fact, you will find people hating your games and your messages to boot.

Subtlety is an amazing beautiful thing, but boy does it cost to use it.

Back to marketing.

If everything is about the reveal, that wonderful moment when you as a player figure out what's been going on, when you're shocked and drawn a little bit farther into this deception that is gameplay, then marketing is the act of making consumers trust designers.  If you believe that I know what I'm doing, it's much easier for me to tell you a good story and give you a good experience.  I need to continually reveal to you small chunks of what I'm doing so you'll become more trusting of me as a designer.  But... every time I give you something, I sacrifice a potential to reveal that to you in a much more meaningful way later.

It's a fairly obvious situation that everyone is already pretty familiar with (oh, the trailer spoiled the movie), but I've never really understood it until I got this engrossed in Geoshie; it's an amazingly uncomfortable position to be in, and I'm still not completely sure I know how to handle it.  As a consumer, my want to be surprised fights against my impatience to be surprised.  That never prepared me to fight with my want and impatience for other people to be surprised.