Bioshock: Infinite’s trailers are staggering works of genius. Soundtracking,
V/O, scene selection, all of that shit is coming together in a tight little
package that actually made me want to buy a game I know I won’t have time to
play until it’s well into its second month as a $30-40 purchase on Steam.
The way it showcases gameplay, theme, character... It’s a
master-stroke of advertising. It hints at everything, exposes nothing.
It has explosions, hints of a character’s psychological damage and a nice
sprinkling of dry, nonplussed wit that that lets you know just what kind of a
game you’ll be playing.
A good trailer, a well
made trailer like Bioshock: Infinite’s,
can make a release.
Alien: Colonial Marines has, by now, firmly established a beachhead in the running for
“worst AAA title of 2013.” Its trailer aligns with this perfectly:
there’s no real commentary on the game, no hint of what play is like.
There’s a set of vague promises associated with gameplay: you know there
will be pulse rifles. There’s gonna be aliens, that’s a sure bet.
There will be a marine, at least one marine. Spaceships, acid for
blood. But the game itself, what is it? What’s it supposed to be?
It’s fleshed out only in
the vaguest terms of shooterdom: guns go off, teammates go “ra ra ra.”
Aliens mill about silently. A motion sensor ticks. How will
these aspects manifest in gameplay? How will gameplay look? How
does the game shoot? How do your teammates move and fight? How does
the motion tracker track motion? Bioshock:
Infinite, for all its trailer’s heavy use of in-game cutscenes, is still
presenting you with both an idea of what its engine is capable of, and a
showcase of some actual gameplay (which looks fairly spectacular). Alien:
Colonial Marine never even entered its engine during its release trailer.
The end result is a
trailer that doesn’t show a game so much as a concept, a trailer that, by
nature, should be reviled, excoriated and abandoned as an artifact of
marketing. If it were a trailer for a film, it would advertise
Prometheus: a mess of a work, over budget and underthought. A
pfaughworthy play on a celebrated property that, upon initial inception, defied
its limitations in its creation of significant and consumable art, stripped of
all the traits that made it interesting.
All this rests upon a
core conceit: that a good looking trailer doesn’t constitute a good trailer.
Steam constantly
bombards me with ads, ads for games. Many of these ads look quite
interesting. Kerbal: Space Program
was one of these interesting looking ads. It had interesting art, and the
term Space Program? Sounds kind of interesting. So I clicked on it,
let it spool out and draw me in. What followed was an incoherent thirty
second clip of inhuman sprites assembling an engine that, in turn, generated a
version of Steam’s logo. Then, some
space shit. No hint of what the game actually constitutes. Any good
will generated by an interesting art style or a place on Steam’s ad rotation
was wasted by a shit trailer.
Compare this to
Introversion’s staggeringly well made trailer for the alpha of their aptly
titled Prison Architect. I’m
familiar with Introversion, with their conceptually masterful games that I
inevitably don’t enjoy playing. And here’s a trailer for an alpha of a
sim game. Two things I never even consider playing. And yet the way
they candidly discuss their process, their work and their game... It
makes me want to pay money for it, even though I know, inevitably, I’d get
tired of it the same way I nearly immediately grew tired (and somewhat baffled,
in the case of Defcon) of their previous titles. Their enthusiasm for
their creation was infectious, and their candid call to arms, as well as their
celebration of the process of development (and the hilarity that can emerge
from early development bugs) made me want to be a part of it, even though I
knew I wouldn’t actually enjoy their game. Introversion’s trailer was
that good.
And it was that good
because it showcased genuine enthusiasm for a project, not just a concept.
Conceptual excitement is cheap. That’s how books are optioned to
become films that never premier. That’s how shit video games based on
popular IPs get licensed and then, after an overlong development, eke out a
brief, miserable existence. That was a callback to Alien: Colonial Marines, in case you missed it, though in a few
weeks you might be able to read it and think of The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, which has emerged to
lackluster reviews already and is currently awaiting a score aggregation from
Metacritic. People can trade easily on concepts. Concept as
overriding concern can easily kill a game. What’s worse, when the idea is
more important than what the idea produces, the poor execution can damage the
concept as well as the game.
I’m not entirely sure
where this came from, or where this line of thought is going. If I had to
try and justify it, I guess I’d say trailers are a lens by which we can examine
this phenomena of concept overriding or synergizing with game. A solid
concept, one well realized and fully fleshed out, will probably have a trailer
that showcases game and exposes that a concept has been realized. It’ll
focus on what has been achieved, not what they’re attempting to achieve.
A bad trailer will showcase a potential concept for a game: a teaser will
sub for a release announcement. Some watchwords.
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