ethanThomas

I'm going off the rails on a crazy (hype) train

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Here's an article written by the Scoops of Hotness himself, Steve Gaynor. Go read it and come back.

Finished? If Gaynor's claim about exploration and discovery being one of the core values is true, where does this leave the previews hype train?

If you follow the pre-release coverage of a given game, you will know a fair amount of what that game will contain by the time it's released. There will be much less in the way of new things to discover and unfamiliar places to explore. Much of the value of the game will already have been leeched out.

Or is the above claim mistaken? If video-games are a fundamentally interactive affair, then wouldn't the words, pictures, and videos that make up a preview not not sap the novelty and excitement? (Also would this mean that film critics who say a film 'feels like a video-game' would be guilty of rather violently misunderstanding both video-games and film?)

Please discuss.

(Or don't I guess, I'm not the boss of you):mock:

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No, I think you have a very reasonable point. I always feel far more enthralled by a game I've never heard anything about that one I've bought into the hype for. Compare, for example, a few recent PS3 releases:

When I saw Noby Noby Boy videos, I had no idea what the fuck they were. I didn't bother to look at more than a couple, and decided that I'd just trust Takahashi and pick up the game when it came out sight (mostly) unseen. I love that game, and every time I fire it up again (every month or so) I discover something new that I could do and love it even more.

Flower I got after hearing people talk about how great it is, but had never seen so much as a screenshot before I started playing. It totally blew my mind as I played and discovered more and more interesting things that the designers had come up with. While I was playing I was doing nothing but discover, and despite the game being beaten in a sitting, I still think back on it as one of my favorite experiences this year in games.

By the time I bought LittleBigPlanet, I'd been watching trailers, gameplay footage, and pretty much anything I could get my hands on. I was actually drowning in hype. The game just hasn't stuck with me as much as it should have. It's a fantastic game, don't get me wrong. I just had this sense as I was playing it that it didn't have anything new to show me. I don't know if I can entirely articulate it. It felt like I was replaying the game, not like I'd just set out on an adventure. I still love that game, but I can't help thinking that I soured myself somewhat on the experience by following the prerelease stuff.

Anyway, I picked up two DS games today after (I think) successfully ignoring all that stuff, so we'll see what happens with them. I have confidence that both will be good, but that's about all I know.

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I think half of the reason I play a fuck ton of indie games is that often, all you'll see is the title screen and a summary of what it's about.

Flower was used by Stephen Poole for one of his Edge columns. He rightly says it's nothing like a "poem", and was glad that he just played it without listening to any of thatgamecompany's guff about it - I believe the phrase he used was "I just thought "wow" instead of "what is this conceited bullshit?!". No disrespect to them of course, Flower is good, but that's a tangential example of where the developer creates their own hype for their game and plants these preconceived notions that may not be true in the audience's mind. Sort of unrelated, but relevant because you brought up Flower, Miff Miff.

I agree with the point on exploration vs. hype, though. Sometimes it can work in the opposite direction too - well, I suppose the direction the publishers intended. Far from being disappointed because I'd seen it all in previews and trailers, I thought the world in Assassin's Creed was a bit shit because what I'd created in my own head from the limited info was far more exciting and awe inspiring than what was actually there.

I'll agree with Scoops' fundamental point about exploration, though. I think that's why people loved Oblivion so much; it treated the journey, the discovery, as an end in itself. Others hated it because it had poor mechanics or "dumbed down" the RPG, but I'll keep making this half-baked point until I can one day flesh it out into a proper article. Pen and paper and tables and dice and stats were there to help the player imagine a fantastical world, with video games, these systems don't need to be employed on the frontend. Oblivion's lack of focus on abilities and decent combat geared it straight to exploration, and that was an absolute joy. I'd argue that gameplay doesn't have to be treated as an end in itself all the time, despite many a gamer's insistence that mechanics are the only part of the experience that counts.

Tighter, more linear experiences often struggle to offer the same sensation. Wonderment at Ocarina of Time as a kid was partly fueled by my thinking about it every waking second. My schoolwork suffered for months because I just sat and daydreamed about what was coming next. What was in the desert? What creatures inhabited the mountain? What could I find at the bottom of the lake? I even spent hours just imagining what lay beyond the world boundaries. I was particularly fascinated by the bit behind the windmill because the terrain continued for a while.

I don't know where I'm going with this. Previews, then, can spoil the joy and in more ways than one. We always like to think of the best possible experience from our games, and we never fantasize about running down corridors forever or repeating the same structure near-verbatim nine times over, but we want the most awesome, user defined shit in the world. We can work against ourselves by buying into hype, and I think Remo's spoken about it on the podcast before - undiluted entry into a game and discovering it's an awesome experience is the best way to do it. I try not to buy into hype, but it's difficult. I've made a pact with myself that I'll do my best to avoid videos or even too many screen shots in the lead up to the inevitable TESV.

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I think previews definitely take away some of the wonder and sense of discovery. It's just awesome to start playing a game you've heard nothing about and discovering it all yourself (if it's a good game). Unfortunately it's the really great games that we usually hear a lot about beforehand.

In an ideal world, games would be announced on their release date.

I think I already know more of Brütal Legend and Heavy Rain, for example, than I would have wanted, but I'm avoiding reading and seeing anything else about them before I play them. Almost watched the opening cinematic of Brütal Legend today, then realized I want to do that only when I play the demo (probably can't wait till the release, hehe).

I don't know much about Dragon Age besides what those somewhat stupid trailers showed and what was discussed on Idle Thumbs, but I'm hoping that game will end up surprising me positively.

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Flower is good, but that's a tangential example of where the developer creates their own hype for their game and plants these preconceived notions that may not be true in the audience's mind.

That hapened to me with Shaun Of The Dead. Pegg and Wright described it as "Spaced with zombies", which it most definitely is not. But I went in there expecting that, and even though the film is better than that promised conceit, I still felt disappointed because it wasn't what I was expecting and geared up for. The trailer was also cut to make it seem a lot more flippant than it was. On second viewing, it was much much better.

So, this preview problem feels very similar to the problem of film trailers making you think "yeah, that looks good but you just summarised all of acts 1 and 2, and showed me bits from act 3 so I can't be bothered to watch the thing now."

Also: aren't gameplay videos getting too long? I swear we must have seen 50% of Unch2rted being played through by now...

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Yeah, hype is almost always a bad thing. I will browse early trailers to see if something catches my interest, but after that I tend to make a decision to either avoid all hype or be swallowed by it.

For instance, with The Dark Knight there was really no choice, I had to be swallowed by it. The lure was too great. With Brütal Legend I'm more careful, only taking in bits and pieces. Other things I avoid completely, like Mass Effect 2 footage. That's also possible because I already know I'll get it, so checking it out will only spoil things.

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I'm wondering how much this has to do with my love for Arkham Asylum. I had no interest in it at all, didn't read any previews or anything, and then bam.

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Well, they're spoilers, but not only in the classical sense of revealing plot points, characters, etc, but also in that they adjust your expectations.

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I think that's his point, they are spoilers so they should be expected to spoil the experience :P

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Well, they are called spoilers. I don't know, maybe I'm missing something here, but this thread and Steve's article seem like exercises stating the bleedin' obvious to me. :erm::getmecoat

Fair enough. It's just that sometimes I (and likely others) lose track of this and I find it worthwhile to keep these things in mind.

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