The Benefit of a Creative Vision

George Kokoris wrote an excellent post about the necessity of “personal inspiration” in game design, inspiration that needs to come from outside our own industry, he argues. He highlighted Dead Space: Extraction in this IGN interview with executive producer Steve Papoutsis as an example of what happens when a game is completely devoid of personal inspiration. Watch the interview.

George’s response:

“We have a variety of different mechanics that other games don’t have. We’ve got our zero-g, we’ve got branching paths, we’ve got camera control… And each weapon has an alternate fire mode, which a lot of other games don’t have.”

This is where the wheels started coming off for me. There is nothing in that sentence that helps me differentiate this product from any other 3D shooter. Plenty of games have those features, sometimes in exactly the same combination. But the unfortunate truth is that this really is what constitutes originality for a lot of developers. Extraction isn’t necessarily aiming all that high, so it may be an unfair judgment on my part, but I still feel it perfectly illustrates the limited scope of creativity in the game industry.

In a way, it’s unfair to judge the game and its dev team based on what the producer said in an IGN interview, since he’s basically been given a PR script to memorize.

On the other hand, as a PR person (whether he likes it or not, that is his role here), he hasn’t been given a very good script. One of the first things you learn in an intro marketing class is that you communicate benefits, not features. People don’t care that the car you’re trying to sell has built-in GPS with all this functionality, they care about the benefits of that feature: that they’ll never get lost. Or, in games, people don’t care that you’ve got 20 weapons and 10 maps in your multiplayer game, they care that they can play in diverse environments where no match will be the same as the last one.

Sure, you need to talk about features in some capacity, especially in a 2.5-minute interview (as opposed to a 30-second spot on TV), but Papoutsis never translates a lot of those features into benefits. What’s the benefit of zero-g, or branching paths? If you watch the Dead Space: Extraction trailer, it’s just a mess of shaky-cam and quick cuts. There’s no clear message, and the game barely has an identity.

All of this may seem like a bunch of Marketingspeak, but I’d argue that it’s far easier to identify and communicate benefits when the game is driven by a unified creative vision (which often comes from personal inspiration, rather than design-by-differentiation). Papoutsis said in the interview, “I think when people get a chance to get hands on with [Extraction], they’re going to see that the game is very different, and that we are branching out and trying to innovate within this genre.” So, as a consumer, what I’m taking away is that Extraction is “different” and “innovative.” Not exactly the strongest pitch.

On the other hand, take a look at this interview with Ken Levine. He’s cofounder, president, and creative director at 2K Boston, but he’s also a great PR man. Not only does he grab interviews and guest star on podcasts,* he skilfully communicates the benefits of his game. Watch this GameSpot interview with Levine from June, 2007.**

Of course, Levine isn’t purely a PR person, so we get some tech talk at the end that isn’t really interesting for anyone beyond the most enthusiast audience (which, to be fair, is GameSpot’s target audience), but he still does a great job of wrapping the features up into clear benefits. “Everything in the game speaks to everything else in the game,” said Levine, before talking about how the game deals with “the heart of the human experience” in the form of a failed utopia. Now watch the BioShock launch trailer from August, 2007.

Notice how the trailer shows off the key benefits mentioned in the interview. The star of the show is the dynamic interactions between player, enemy, and environment, but the ad is also bookended with the ocean, and a tinny 50s-era Sinatra-like soundtrack plays over the whole thing, reminding you that Rapture isn’t just another derelict spaceship.

Now, Levine may or may not have taken any marketing courses in college, but the creative vision for BioShock not only made it easy for him to communicate the benefits of his game in an interview, it also gave 2K’s marketing team clear points to convey to a larger, television audience. Everyone wins.

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*Though good luck finding him talking about BioShock with any mainstream publication—a problem that videogame PR needs to start addressing.

**BioShock launched August, 2007 on Xbox 360 and PC.