Broken Age is a tremendous
game in so many ways. It's a return to a
simpler kind of game and type of play, a storytelling oriented, quick and
simple single player experience emerging during an era of gaming where people
seem far more concerned with long term multiplayer-only or multiplayer only
affairs. It's a point and click oeuvre
that manages to dramatically improve the adventure game interfaces of old
without actually changing them all that much.
It's a place where actors used to playing to type, like Wil Wheaton and
Jack Black, finally have an opportunity to play around with their personas and
do something a little different for a change (though Elijah Wood is still in
type, masterfully voicing a teenage protagonist as he navigates yarn themed
obstacles and the pitfalls of adolescence).
The story at the core of the game is also something to behold: a
narrative dedicated to investigating various facets of humanity, a narrative
that draws its cast of characters from the oft marginalized group of "not
white men" that video games are so terrible at admitting to the existence
of. Broken
Age, despite its brevity, is rich, straight up, and I plan to play through
it again and try to write a more involved consideration of its loopy themes and
construction of (and engagement with) gender binaries and familial structures
in the next few weeks. But that's in the
future. Right now I'm nursing a serious
hangover, and I'd like to talk about something a little lighter. I'd like to talk about how Broken Age made me into a viral
marketing mouthpiece without trying very hard.
Some background: I bought Broken Age early last week. Broken Age is, if memory serves, the
sixth Double Fine game I own on Steam now.
I bought Broken Age for full
price, without any second thoughts: I think Tim Schafer is a genius, and I want
to support him whenever I can. I played
through Broken Age slowly, pensively,
like I was eating a particularly rich or rare food that I wouldn't be able to
have again for a while. Then, when I was
finished, I looked in my Steam inventory and found that I'd been given, in
addition to the requisite cards you get for playing a game, four "25%
off" coupons for Broken Age.
At first I was kind of upset: this was the sort of thing
that would've been really valuable to me before I bought and played BA, but now it was useless. The coupons didn't even really work as gifts,
since I'd basically be giving someone a product that they'd then need to spend
money on. The whole thing was, in many
ways, crazy. Who gives people coupons
for things they already have?
People who want to get those coupons to the people who might
use them, as it turns out.
Broken Age was
barely cold before I began its meta-game of coupon distribution, seeking out
old friends who grew up on King's Quest
games, their friends and family, and other friends with friends. At first, I thought it was just a matter of
throwing things around at random and acting as a sort of e-coupon fixer, but as
time went on, things became more complicated.
As I started to talk to people more and more distantly related to my
normal group of video game friends, I fell into a pattern of explaining why Broken Age was worth playing, why it was
fun, why it was important.
I'd just meant to hand out coupons, but instead I'd become a
sort of mouthpiece for a company, a company I love, certainly, but a company
that I certainly don't work for, especially not in that capacity.
I didn't get angry, or really even get close to feeling
angry - Broken Age is good, and I
think telling people to check out good things is generally good. I like Double Fine, and I'd like for them to
remain fiscally solvent as long as possible.
The more people who buy their weird, artsy games, the better. But it got me thinking: is this the best way
to virally market a game?
It seemed to work, at least a little, but it's one of many
prongs of Double Fine's guerilla media machine. They've been getting lots of
attention in the press at large while sitting on Steam's front page, and they
managed to initiate a brief, if crucial, dialogue about Kickstarter rewards and
how they relate to product releases to the larger market. But what Double Fine has really made me think
about is just how marketing impacts me, and how non-advertising based marketing
campaigns actually work.
Double Fine's success seems to be the exception, rather than
the rule, as I look through the array of Steam freebies that I've been failing
to hand out over the last few months.
While giving away my Steam coupons, I've also been distributing other
pieces of Steam marketing memorabilia, like free games and other, more obscure
coupons, that I received months or years ago.
Hardly a demonstrate of effective marketing. But something about Double Fine's framing of
their act (it was a gift, a thank you for my loyalty as a customer) and the
social interaction it prompted (putting me in a position where I was compelled
to discuss something I was passionate about) really worked. Similar strategies are unfolding in Mechwarrior Online, even as I write
this, where players who log in and win a certain number of games (5, a low bar
in MWO, where games last ten minutes
tops, and win-loss ratios usually turn around 1-1) will be given a free mech
and mech bay. There's an implication,
there, not just that you should play something, but that you should get your
friends to play it, to acquire free things so that they too can enjoy this
interesting experience.
I'm not sure this will ever be a substitute for conventional
marketing strategies: if I wasn't playing MWO
already, I wouldn't care one whit about their marketing strategy, and if Broken Age wasn't secure on Steam's
front page, I wouldn't have even known it was coming out. But as augments, it seems like these socially
minded giveaways, handouts that encourage dialogue and interaction between
players and potential players, are actually a sound idea. Will they continue to emerge? I sort of hope not - handing out coupons is a
bit of a chore.
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