#oneaday Day 692: Trailer Park

It was the Spike TV VGAs last night, supposedly one of the biggest nights of the year in gaming. As usual, the awards themselves took a back seat to misogyny, a lack of respect for what gaming has become and all manner of other nonsense, but that’s not what I’m going to write about today — plenty of other people have already been commenting on the matter having actually endured the whole thing, so are in a better position to comment on the event itself than I am.

Instead, I thought I’d comment on the concept of trailers, and why the fact that some people will happily fill their pants over a trailer is such a mystery to me.

This fact was really hammered home to me as the Star Wars: The Old Republic hype train got into motion earlier this year. We saw some CG trailers with absolutely zero gameplay, and yet people were getting excited about the game. It was patently obvious that the game would not be anything like those trailers suggested, making them almost entirely useless as a “preview” of what is to come, and yet they still mustered up excitement. When gameplay footage for The Old Republic did eventually emerge, it turned out that it looked suspiciously like a World of Warcraft-style MMORPG with Mass Effect‘s conversation system. This is less exciting.

The same also occurred with Dead Island. Dead Island introduced itself to the world with a genuinely harrowing trailer that was beautifully shot and scored with the perfect soundtrack. But again, there was no gameplay in evidence, and it was depressingly obvious that the game would be nothing like the intimate, “personal” experience that the trailer appeared to promise. And when the game did eventually appear in the form of a first-person action RPG, it was a bit of a disappointment. Sure, it’s not a bad game, but I’ve got all the “battering zombies around the head” excitement I need with Left 4 Dead and Borderlands’ Zombie Island of Dr. Ned expansion pack.

A big part of the reason people watch the VGAs is for the trailers, judging by Twitter and a lot of the discussion which has followed. But should we be demanding more from our trailers? As it is, the games industry is following the template set out by movies — but they’re two fundamentally different media. Games are interactive, movies are passive. So why are we advertising games in the same way as movies?

Well, apparently, because it works. Activision pay for high-profile slots during giant sporting events to promote Call of Duty. People jizz their keks over CG The Old Republic trailers that have nothing to do with the game. People hail Dead Island as “one to watch” based on an (admittedly excellent) trailer that, again, has nothing to do with the game itself.

Is this a bad thing, though? Will the fact that The Old Republic actually revolves around fairly traditional MMO play rather than the high-octane excitement implied by the trailers cause some people to cry foul? Did Dead Island warrant the amount of attention lavished on it by the press following the striking nature of its trailer? Should we be so quick to judge upcoming games as looking “great” or “crap” based purely on short snippets we see at awards ceremonies which otherwise insult our intelligence?

I don’t have an easy answer for that, but I can tell you what I think personally: I don’t give a crap about trailers. Give me a demo, an early version or even just some simple commentated footage of someone playing the game and I’ll be much more excited. Don’t insult my intelligence by showing me something which I know very well won’t represent what the game is really about. Take a leaf out of indie developers’ books and provide an interesting, well-cut trailer that shows what the game is and why I should be excited about it. Good quality work should speak for itself.

What do you think? Trailer buff or cynic?