Playing Conceptual Pac-man, Consuming Text-ural Dots
Playing Conceptual Pac-man, Consuming Text-ural Dots
Late to this 'truth or dare' pot luck, so pardon if this is old stew. Just allow me to set the blender on 'frappe'.
BN reported @
http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=50127
and quoted the Gamasutra 'text filler'.
Oh, 'text filler'?--well when the tapings of hired scribblers are strung out through 3 web pages,
the 'literary stuffing' can become a page shoveling - mouse clicking hook,
sic semper -- marketing,
but / and a lot of dots here waiting to be connected by the roving eye,
and more crumb trails in other interviews, if that so serves one's hungry mind.
Chris Remo said:
...
With Oblivion, you obviously tried a number of different things. There was some backlash with the horse armor and all of that, which at this point I guess has been discussed to death, but you also went to the other extreme in terms of volume of content. Did you learn some big lessons from that experience?
PH: Definitely, because we did the entire spectrum for the most part. We did small things and then we did the really huge thing [with The Shivering Isles]. We did what I think was the first ever full expansion on a console for download. We looked at what we liked and what we didn't, and what the people liked.
What we discovered was that we want to be able to do stuff that doesn't take a year to come out.
All these people are out there playing our game by the hundreds of thousands on a daily basis and we want to be able to bring those folks something they could do in a much shorter time frame, rather than just saying, "See you next year." That instantly ruled out doing a big expansion because those things just take so damn long to do.
So we started looking at the biggest stuff we'd done that people really liked, but that we could do in smaller, digestible chunks.
That's where we came to the Knights of the Nine model -- it's substantive and it adds multiple hours of game play and new items, but we can do it in a time frame that allows us to get it out without waiting forever. That's what we've gone for with Fallout 3.
...
DLC, and perhaps Fallout:New Vegas will keep the Fallout Intellectual Property out and about making a buzz.
The more bandwidth and spilt ink, the greater glory for THE BRAND, and potentially gargantuan gold for the brand bearer.
How much 'grooming' would foster a permutation of Fallout, and B-Soft beyond the small tributary of computer games and into the wider navigable reaches of our world wide entertainment culture.
How long in pulp print before a comic figure like Superman was ripe for the big and small screens?
If FO:NV takes the brand into new circles while holding the shiny bauble before the eyes of the self hypnotized, then marketing has done 'what it does best'.
B-Soft prides itself on keeping to the production schedule.
Page 2 of Gamasutra presentation:
... PH: ... We have always been really good at what you're talking about, which is managing the game's life cycle -- what are you doing with the game three months out, six months out, one year out, two years out?
I think it's actually something we do better than most publishers, if not all publishers. ...
Consider, if plans for linear production and fewer surprises, how well does this forced march exploit happy accidents?
We learned from Emile's candor,
http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=1&cId=3172024 that the B-Soft corporation may not know how to improvise OUT of story plot holes, to a lot of their consumers' satisfaction, ...
1Up said:
...
EP: ... Let me try to shed some light on why the game is like that -- it's a pretty interesting look inside the development process.
All of the followers were implemented into the game fairly late in development, after the main story had already been nailed down. So, you know, we had the scene at the end of the game, with deadly radiation, and never really compensated for the fact that you could have a Supermutant, or Ghoul, or robot, who could possibly turn the purifier on for you. We'd only ever planned for you sending Sarah Lyons into the purifier, because we knew, from a story standpoint, that she'd definitely be in there with you.
What we could do -- and what we did ultimately do -- is cover that stuff in dialogue. You can ask those followers to go into the purifier, and they'll tell you why they won't. We felt that fit with their personalities, but really, they didn't "sell" that to the player in a single line of dialogue. So, in the end, the player's left with a, "Huh, why the hell can't they do it?!" sort of feeling.
So the story does kind of break down. But you know what? We knew that, and were OK with it, because the trade-off is, well, you get these cool followers to join you. You meet up with Fawkes near the end of the game, and it's true you can go right with him to the purifier. So we could've not had him there as a follower, and that would've solved the problem of him not going into the purifier -- because, at that point in development, that was the only fix we had time for. But we kept it, and players got him as a follower, and they seem to love adventuring him with. Gameplay trumped story, in that example -- as I believe it should have.
So if we'd planned better, we could've addressed that more satisfactorily. But considering how it all went down, I feel good about the decision we made there. ...
... but the winner of entertainment industry writing awards can roll out a box with a game in it,
a *total* product that motivates off shelves, and into consoles and PC's,
a commodity that perpetuates beyond the average bargain bin event horizon.
And, a drum beat that repeats and repeats and repeats in many venues and medias in a relentless advertising indoctrination, sic semper ... marketing.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/bethesda-softworks-pete-hines
gameindustry.biz said:
...
Q: How are you reaching out to a broader demographic?
Pete Hines: There is no magic thing that you can do. There is no magic number of ads, there's no one place, there's no one aspect of your campaign. Part of it is what is the game you're doing and what is the experience, and can a more casual person get that?
For example, with the experience site we put together for Fallout, the whole idea for it was to present Fallout in a way that people will think is cool regardless of whether they obsess over it daily or they had never heard of it. We present the game to them in a way that is cool, interesting, and engaging. It doesn't matter what their level of knowledge was coming in; they were simply able to get it.
The key thing is that once they get it, it is something that they actually want to get. If Fallout was a game about riding pink ponies through an enchanted forest, you're going to fail because that's not something cool or fun. A more casual person still wants to play games. You're marketing an Xbox 360 game. Even if you're trying to go more casual, you're still selling it to somebody who owns a 360. They have some knowledge of what gaming is.
...
Q: With such a powerful list of senior movie execs {in ZeniMax Media}(also including Jon Feltheimer of Lionsgate as an advisor) involved in the firm, are Bethesda properties going to wind up as movies or TV shows?
Pete Hines: Who knows. It's something we've gotten a lot of inquiries on over the years. But our thing is if we were ever to get into movies, we would want to do it in the way that we do videogames. Our stated goal internally is that we want to do something that is really great that people notice and stand up and pay attention to. If we do a film, we would want to do a film in that same vein. But there are no immediate plans for anything like that.
...
Gee, the FO IP's " ' future's so bright, I think I need shades ' ".
Page 2-->
Gamasutra said:
... {P.H.} ...
We don't give up on our stuff, ever. There is always a market and a niche and people out there who are willing to buy it. DLC is just another component of that. We make games that have legs and that stick around and that people will continue to be vested in and play for a long time.
This is just another way to reach out to those folks to say, "If you really like this, here are some more things that you might like." It's the lifecycle of the product as a thing you sell, as well as the game as a thing you play. It allows people to keep coming back to it.
...
If one would cherry pick, in this business context,
if Bethesda knew anything about the FO Intellectual Property, relating to what they "do best", it just might be the potential for extended *life cycle* of sales.
FO a long wandering IP in the wasteland of fan forums, replayed and replayed by ... thousands(?) - ten's of thousands(?)...
on a cyclic basis ... know to hundreds of thousands or dare we say more?
FO replay, too long a time to be like a mere single song,
more like a favorite movie, no, a series of movies ... say Inagaki's --> Samurai Trilogy ...
FO the ronin IP?
Well consider FO:NV the building of a brand, and the building of any mythic tale, or marketing legend.
Maybe another entertainment industrial writing award awaits ... only time and sales will tell.
4too
