Adventure Game Revival

One of my favorite gaming genres has always been the point and click adventure game. In North America, it’s been tough to point at a game in the last few years that was on par with the offerings from Sierra On-Line and LucasArts in the 90s - both studios that have since been eviscerated.

Europe, on the other hand, has generally been known as a more casual market, and maybe that’s why most of the scant few adventure games of any quality that have emerged in the last few years have come out of Europe. I’d love to throw some attention at FunCom’s masterpiece - The Longest Journey, but it came out eight years ago, and the sequel Dreamfall wasn’t up to par with the original. While it might be premature, I have a very good feeling about an upcoming title from Daedalic called The Whispered World.

The Whispered World follows the adventures of a young clown named Sadwick and his companion Spot through a melancholy world doomed to crumble and fall. The artwork and music are beautiful, and I suspect good things will come of it, but we’ll have to wait until launch I suppose.

Although, perhaps I have reason to hope yet. One of the critical factors that killed off the Adventure Game genre to begin with was the emergence of 3D graphics, and the games that technology ushered in. We’re now seeing a reversal in fortunes as the gaming market reaches out to those who were once outside their domain. That the industry is trying to gain appeal with the masses is one of two things that have changed in favor of adventure games. I suspect as the casual masses explore the new land they’ve found, interactive adventure stories are going to become interesting again.

Secondly, platforms now exist to market games which have niche appeal for reasonably low cost through digital distribution networks. Services like Gametap, Steam, Xbox Live Arcade, and Nintendo Virtual Console has created a space where these freaks can be shown in the daylight, without offending their muscular, brawny siblings. Creating these spaces is important - not just for adventure games - but for the future of the medium. Without these spaces, the story of game development becomes eventually more like the science of creating an addictive drug - increasingly refining only to what is known to work - and less like the exploration of the human psychology that it should be.

Targeted Advertising

I was just reading an interview with Peter Moore (The head of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Division, and coolest ’suit’ of 2007) and came to two realizations.  Firstly, Peter Moore is really awesome.  He has a way of articulating answers to questions which is at once both professional and clear-cut, unfettered by marketing jargon.  Secondly, developers used to pay companies to obtain licenses to use their brand!

You’re looking at companies that are just lining up down the street to be involved in the game environment.  I look back at the old days in my previous life at Sega, when we were actually paying for licenses of consumer-product companies to put in the game. I think about Crazy Taxi [Dreamcast], things like KFC and Pizza Hut…. Boy, the shoe is on the other foot now, no pun intended. The ability for us to be able to have control of this demographic and bring that to consumer-product companies…it’s a powerful tool.

It’s somewhat ludicrous that a development company spending the millions of dollars it costs to make a game would fritter that money away to place brands inside their game… especially brands like KFC or Pizza Hut.  In theory, the only reason you want to do this is that in some way the inclusion of those brands will sell more of your game and earn you more revenue than it cost you to license those brands in the first place.  Nobody wants to buy a game just because they can deliver a tasty pizza to someone (although that’s not universally the case).  Product placement in a video game feels the same way it does in movies.  If done well, the fact that you’re essentially being marketed to doesn’t detract from the experience of immersion, in fact in certain cases it can add to it.  If, on the other hand, what you’re delivered is a garish, in-your-face product placement, my reaction is one more of disgust:  not an emotion you want tied to your product brand.

Two examples that come springing to mind of horrible product placement would be the iPod and iTunes in Blade Trinity, and Reebok shoes in I, Robot.  Blade Trinity contains a lengthy shot, what felt like around 30 seconds of Jessica Biel loading music onto her iPod, which she always uses when she’s killing vampires…

Yeah.  At this point in the movie you pretty much want to get up and leave.  The experience is so out of touch with what you’re looking for in a vampire movie that all suspension of disbelief is lost, and you’re irate at both the producers of the movie, and the product itself, causing exactly the opposite reaction intended.  This effect is so profound that politicians should place ads for their opponents in movies coming out near voting time.

In I, Robot, Will Smith is putting on some sneakers for an entire shot, in which one of his buddies comments on how nice they are, whereby Smith replies “Thanks, Vintage 2004 [The year the movie came out]“.  If ever you wanted to smack Will Smith, that was the time.

These pitfalls can just as easily happen with video games, if not more so.  There is a place for such ‘in your face’ use of brands, and that place is parodying the brands themselves for comic effect.  Sierra did this to great effect in the Space Quest series with Monolith Burger, satirizing the stereotypical behaviours and appearance of McDonald’s employees.  The effect, rather than bringing you out of the game, made you laugh, which was the whole point of the Space Quest experience.

It’s about time things have turned around financially, and that product companies have realized the huge potential of marketing through video games.  Video games are a particularly powerful channel because the target audience is generally of more narrow scope, and the brand exposure is more prolonged than a movie (hard to find a game only two hours long).  As a result, marketers can acheive a significantly deeper penetration with a target group that genuinely might want to buy into their product; and they should have to pay through the nose to for that privilege.