God, I’m sorry, but I just hate trailers so much. A trailer appears, game news websites are obligated to post and parse it, and then we are supposed to have good feedback regarding the video of an interactive entertainment product which technically doesn’t exist yet.
“What do you think of the trailer?”
“It looks really cool. Yeah, they said it’s going to have some things they said in the video.”
“What about these things that weren’t covered in the trailer?”
“Yeah, we’ll probably find out more about that later. Cool.”
A trailer is an outline of a shape of a thing. Having people seriously expect that I or anyone might have a “reaction” “thoughts” “insight” on a trailer frequently frustrates me. To respond demands the exact kind of low, lazy language I always used to hate about games writing: “Looks cool, but time will tell!” “For now, here’s what we know”, and “it will have [vehicle], [feature], [character(s)].”
Most of all, the obligation to react to a trailer still suggests an unexamined obedience to the schedule that marketing sets. Marketing proffers you what it has decided makes it look good, and then dutifully we jump to offer our “impressions,” assistance to the propagation of a message we didn’t even author.
A weird thing about participating in the culture of games: It requires our investment in an unknown future, always. The next gen. The games we wait years for. Hovering around forums and reviews sites awaiting a verdict just prior to launch.
Even I write about games not because of what they are, but because of what I think they could be someday. I’m just as bad.
There is a lot of buy-in, a lot of breath-holding, vigorous optimism and patience required. Then you load a trailer or a Let’s Play on YouTube and hear not-remarkable dudes, the kind you went to high school with — probably, they are in high school — tossing halting witticisms and slightly-awkward jokes over some character jogging this way and that. It’s hard to feel like all the buy-in is worthwhile.
On buy-in, I’ve written a feature about what crowdfunding has taught us about game dev budgets — how hard it is to explain to gamers that an investment is not a pre-order, and why overfunding is more of a headache than a blessing.
My colleague Mike Rose also writes about buying in — here’s his thought-provoking feature on the potential dark side of free-to-play games’ reliance on monetizing “whales”. Are successful f2p games geared to capitalize on vulnerable spenders?