Sunday Thoughts: Teasers

I absolutely adore Doctor Who. I know I might catch a little flack for that, and to be honest I’m not enjoying this series as much as others, but anyway I really do love Doctor Who. What I really love, more than the show itself, is the way that as the series progresses gentle teasers are continuously dropped by the writers and actors. It really keeps you guessing about what’s coming next, and reveals just enough to let you speculate wildly about where the time-travellers might be going next. For me chatting with friends about just what might happen is as big a part of the show as actually watching it.

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that way about games this way, even in the build up to E3. Of course I’ll speculate about what might be at the show and what’s going to get revealed in the press conferences, but I feel we rarely get teased like TV shows regularly do. If we know anything before the show it’s little tidbits of information like the news of Sony’s domain registrations.

These little morsels of information very rarely come from the companies themselves, normally either someone digs up some domain or trademark registrations, or something just leaks. Of course, you can argue that leaks may be a form of PR teasing without leaving themselves too open to follow up requests for information, although often they are genuine leaks. Teasers for other media often come this way as well but it seems PR is more willing to drop little hints officially than they are with games.

[drop]I suppose partly this is to do with the completely different schedule that games operate under. If you look at the games that will be announced at this year’s E3 (no, I don’t know what they are) it’s very unlikely we’ll see more than a tiny handful this year. Games are announced so far in advance that it would seems a little odd to tease before the announcement. Generally we get teasers once a game’s actually out, it’s far rarer to get something before the game’s actually out and that approach does make sense.

With E3, and a few other expos, being the main places for gaming announcements it does make sense that companies want things to go off with as big of a bang as possible. Whilst teasers can help to build the anticipation and increase the impact of an announcement, they can also completely ruin it. If you let too much information go too early then someone’s going to piece together the entire thing and your press conference at the big show will land with a damp splat rather than the world-shattering thud you’d hoped for.

Take last year’s announcement of the Xbox 360 S or the PSP Go in 2009. Microsoft managed to keep the 360 S mostly under wraps until a day or so before their press conference, and still it lost its bombshell feeling. It was more a sense of just waiting for them to actually unveil it. Of course, these weren’t teases from Microsoft or Sony but they do show just how dull things can be when you know what’s coming.

However, if you can get the balance right, if you can appropriately misdirect before the announcement, then it can land to an even bigger response than if the announcement had been made by itself. This is exactly how magic works, there’s no impact if you just hand someone’s watch back to them. You’ve got to make it look like its smashed before you make the big reveal that the watch was on you assistant’s wrist the whole time. That’s what getting you buzz right can do for an announcement, point your fans in one direction and unveil something that genuinely surprises.

Although a lot of us moan at the use of countdown timers, look at just how much anticipation Konami’s countdown for Metal Gear Solid: Rising built. It revealed just enough to speculate but also misdirected fans enough that we didn’t get quite what we were expecting.

I guess what I really want is to be excited again, have someone make me feel genuinely excited for E3 rather than dreading the work load. Then again that’s not exactly a common situation.