What Playing Video Games Taught Me About Advertising
About storytelling, narrative dissonance & the cult of tech
Since their very beginning video games have found ways to market and upsell themselves from within.
Like the arcade machines of old, where flashing high scores on idle screens would challenge anyone passing by to beat them.
Or the 30 seconds to insert another coin or lose your progress forever.
Video games have always been at the forefront of UX and have gotten particularly crafty at selling additional content by adding perceived value via the main experience.
Games have grown bigger and are more expensive to make — but not to buy. That’s why video game developers have become experts at upselling.
For many modern games, this means building large and living worlds with hundreds of characters, storylines, and missions: So you’ll buy additional chapters and overpay for in-game gear.
I worked a decade in gaming — and signed an awful lot of NDAs to prevent me from spilling the beans about the good stuff.
Fortunately, I’ve been a nerd for even longer and always loved how games could make me do and enjoy things I otherwise wouldn’t.
Here is what being a fan of gaming taught me about the importance of storytelling over mechanics.
The Unique Challenge of No Inflation
Video games are fascinating because they have kept down retail prices for more than 20 years and still managed to grow into the commercially biggest entertainment industry in the world, now making more money than Hollywood and the music industry combined.
If you’re American, you can go out right now pay $60 for almost any AAA game — the exact same sum you would have paid in 2000.
When I go get milk, I pay twice what I did 20 years ago. Actually, I can’t think of any industry that has forcefully held down inflation and somehow managed to grow so explosively.
An AAA game can easily contain 30 hours of entertainment and still rely on additional content and “vanity items” (in-game visual merchandise that serves no gaming purpose) to bring home profit.
This creates a challenge: The core content has to be good enough for the end-user to want more, and the vanity items have to seem meaningful in the make-belief world. No one buys 20 additional hours of content if they didn’t enjoy the first five. And buying costumes to play dress-up with your pixels requires perceived value from captivating storytelling.
Video games need to be their own “bonus marketing” because the real profit is made from additional content and micro-transactions. The immersive nature of the game compels the player to venture further on the consumer journey, and purchase new chapters to the story along with colorful outfits for their in-game character. A good game up-sells itself.
Mechanics & Illusion
Video games use narratives and world-building to camouflage the mechanics underneath. In that regard, games have more in common with advertising than with art.
Until the 20th century when modernism rolled around, art and literature built imaginary worlds where viewers/readers could dream themselves away. Modernism changed this and turned art into a challenge; it was no longer an invitation to fantasy but a rejection of expectations.
Since the early 2010s, artistically challenging video games have become more commonplace — but are usually small indie titles with limited audiences. The vast majority of games still rely on illusion to conceal the technical mechanics with beautiful graphics and narrative coherency. A good game motivates the player and creates enough psychological value to conceal the sometimes primitive machinery underneath.
“Go to four places and collect an item from each” sounds pretty dull. “Travel to the four Elemental Cities and find the Keys of Doom” sounds a little more important. Maintaining the illusion can make trivial activities engaging and add meaning to the overall experience.
Yet it seems that all too often developers misunderstand the use of storytelling as something disconnected from mechanics — as if any story and any mechanics will work together.
You see it all the time — but I can’t think of a more annoying example than the narrative dissonance of Fallout 4.
My Fallout With Fallout 4
It’s a normal day at home with your spouse and newborn child.
You live in a Jetsons pastiche of the 1950s — there’s even a flying robot!
Sh*t hits the fan when the TV announces that a nuclear bomb is on the way.
You rush to the protection vault where you are placed in cryo-chambers to wait out the radioactive fallout.
The glass door to the chamber is closed and you take one last look at your spouse and baby as they are placed in the cryo-chamber opposite of yours.
At some point during your century-long slumber, you are awakened when strange men enter the vault. They kill your spouse and kidnap your baby. After which you conveniently pass out.
Eventually you wake up, make your way out of the vault and come to a small settlement of survivors — maybe they can help you find your lost child.
But then something strange happens.
One of the survivors asks you to build a bed for them. And you have no choice but to do so.
What? Why?!?
Until an hour ago you were minding your own business in the 20th century, then the bomb dropped and you slept for 200 years while someone kidnapped your baby.
A: How could you possibly be more qualified to build a bed than someone who has lived in the post-apocalyptic wasteland for years?
B: You need to find your f*cking baby!
The description above was my experience during the opening hour of the videogame Fallout 4 from 2015.
It’s how a chasm of narrative dissonance made me doubt the game from the get-go — and after another two hours of underwhelming gameplay made the Fallout brand lose any and all meaning to me.
The point of building the bed is to introduce the player to the homestead mechanics of the game, where you get to create a small settlement and interact with NPCs. It has little to do with the actual storyline but back in 2015 homesteads in video games were all the rage.
I don’t mind the concept. If done well, it can make the world richer and feel more alive.
But in this case — where I’m engaging with my character and the storyline of my lost child — it seems absolutely ludicrous that I’d stop and help some rando build a f*cking bed.
I love video games — but I am constantly amazed by how poorly otherwise good mechanics are exposed by lackluster storytelling.
When a game makes me care about the storyline and then interrupts the narrative with a ham-fisted introduction of features, I lose faith in the experience. The mechanics of building stuff seem wildly irrelevant when you’re trying to find a kidnapped child.
And if the mechanics are actually important?
Write a story to support them and make them engaging — not make me laugh out loud in disbelief.
Grand Theft Auto and Even Grander Details
Multiplayer games need a big and fast influx of players to give social proof that the game is worth the investment — both time and money. And they need to hold on to their players to keep the hype rolling.
Big single-player titles need vast worlds with heart-gripping dramas, amazing detail, and clever Easter Eggs for YouTubers and fans to create their own content and keep the buzz going.
Both are a dance with storytelling, mechanics and economics.
Grant Theft Auto 5 is the best-selling entertainment product in history with more than 90 million copies sold and over $6 billion in revenue.
It did so by the controversial strategy of simply being really good.
The core single-player game has great gameplay and some of the funniest writing I’ve seen in a game — and the post-release multiplayer mode built a platform for microtransactions without disrupting the core experience and angering the community.
GTA5 wins on its amazing attention to detail — that lets you know that your time spent won’t end in disappointment.
An imaginary world falls apart once you start noticing the cracks.
If you stray from the main story and explore the open world, only to find empty scenery and unconvincing side missions, you start to lose faith in the experience.
Game developers are creators of epic worlds — but bad writing is akin to letting false prophets have the word; once you start noticing the contradictions, you stop believing in the magic.
I’ve played a lot of open-world games in my life — and mostly gotten 5 hours of interesting gameplay and 25 hours of repetition, barely held together by clichéed story arcs and generic dialog where grim heroes say “Time to end this” — but never do.
In GTA 5 I can drive to the farthest corner of the map and find secret side-missions with hilarious dialog like this:
GTA5 isn’t a perfect game, far from it. When I first played it, I encountered many little glitches. But the high quality of writing and attention to detail made me trust the experience and spend my most valuable resources — time and attention.
When video games rely on up-sales from within, they have to build trust via immersive storytelling to cover the mechanics.
That’s how Rockstar Games have become one of the absolute top dogs in gaming… Pardon the pun.
Choose Wisely
Anyone who’s tried Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch knows that the feeling of choice and agency in games is largely an illusion. You might argue that’s the case in life as well.
Yet it’s the feeling of freedom in open-world games that make users spend 30+ hours and additional resources on DLC.
If the world starts to dissolve with incoherent writing, the machinery underneath is exposed and not always in a flattering light. Much like the chasm of narrative dissonance made me quit Fallout 4 prematurely and lose faith in the brand.
Fallout 4 hard a pretty creative character generator — but that was about it.
Like a bad slasher movie can take narrative shortcuts to get to the gory bits (that’s why it’s bad), video games sometimes focus too much on cool mechanics and forget how they are perceived.
Game mechanics like psychological mechanics can seem crude if they aren’t motivated by storytelling. Without the right context and narrative, otherwise persuasive tools for engaging consumers fall flat — in video games as in marketing.
Bad horror movies have poor effects, worse stories, and no immersion to distract you from the first two. The good ones have writing so clever they may not even need effects.
For more than 20 years Rockstar Games have set the bar for well-written worlds with amazing attention to detail. Because they build from a creative vision, not from mechanical fetish or the fallout of too many engineers.
Heck, their attention to anatomical detail even gave them a boatload of free advertising when they released Red Dead Redemption 2:
Too much of gaming is tech first and a creative second. Storytelling joins the arena too late — and as a slave to engineering constructs and technological trends.
Similar to advertising, good creative work begins at the core of the experience, not when a thousand media decisions have already been made.
During my decade in gaming, I got to work with a lot of interesting people. And I still can’t say very much about them — NDAs and all. But a major challenge to the industry is this:
Too many engineers. Too many decision-makers believing that superior specs and trendy mechanics will both sell games and make them enjoyable. Too many incoherent storylines slapped on top of last year’s fad — now only bigger and in higher definition.
It’s the pitfall of technology and too many developers dive headfirst into it.
You can choose to settle for the middle of the market because tech is measurable and good storytelling is intangible and hard to come by.
Or you can work from narrative attention to detail and build a brand like GTA.
Why do less?
