Show the Dream, Not the Job
A lot of game trailers highlight the tasks you perform in the game, and not the goal or fantasy you'll fulfill. This is something I've noticed for a while, but how the difference in presentation affects the message revealed itself into perfect clarity when I watched trailers for the games Tools Up! and Moving Out during my recent game trailer critique stream.
Both of these games feel very much inspired by the incredibly successful Overcooked games which are about people making and sending out orders from a kitchen. In Tools Up! you're renovating houses, and in Moving Out you're moving people's stuff out of their house or apartment. Take a look at the reveal trailer for Tools Up! by Radikal Studio.
I think this is an excellent trailer. The music is energetic and fun, the graphics do a good job of focusing the eye on the important actions, the capture is well composed for clarity and timing, and the title cards tell you just enough information to understand the idea.
Take a look at the title cards:
Meet Tools Up co.
Do the Renovation
or Make a Mess Trying
Work Together With Up to 4 Players
Race Against Time
These title cards introduce you to the characters, the job of renovating, imply there will be accidents, say you can play with up to 4 people, and indicate there's some sort of time limit. The trailer mostly lets you watch the gameplay, and identify the individual tasks for yourself.
The trailer for Moving Out is superficially similar, but has key differences.
This trailer has a very different feel firstly because of its repetitive music which feels to me more like it's maintaining a steady beat rather than ebbing, flowing and building towards a big ending. This hurts the pacing, but I think the content of the voiceover and title cards' is what feels the most different.
Here is what they say (title graphics are in bold):
What is moving all about?
Lift with your legs or spine
Carry with care, because of the obstacles
Deliver the goods, and break delivery records
Play by yourself or with friends
Customizable characters
Explore the city
50+ Levels
What feels different to you? (if anything)
This trailer feels like it focuses on the minutiae of the game, not the goals. The minutiae of moving don't sound like fun tasks, they sound like work. These two games are in fact both centered around real jobs, so let's imagine the head of these two companies pitching the company to us at a job interview.
Based on the trailer for Tools Up! I imagine the head of the company would say something like:
"We're Tools Up co. We renovate houses! Sometimes the job can get messy, but we work together in four person teams. The deadlines can be tight, but we get the job done!"
Multiple characters doing the same task makes multiplayer games less chaotic!
Here's what I imagine the head of the Moving Out company would say based on their trailer:
"Welcome to our moving company! At this job you're going to lift stuff, carry stuff and put it in the truck. If you can do it faster, great! We work in four person teams, and if you work hard enough you get some special outfits. We work all over the city, where there are a lot of places of all shapes to move things from."
The second pitch is longer, but the part which trips me up the most is the job description of lifting, carrying and delivering. When someone describes the individual tasks of a job it can sound very dull, because that is often the case with jobs. Whereas I think a more high level description of the job like: "We help people move their lives or business to new places" sounds more alluring to me.
Why is this?
I think it's because even within the confines of a moving company, the high level description lets my imagination run wild. I can imagine all the unique things I might be moving, the spaces to navigate, and how it could get chaotic. But when someone describes to me the individual tasks, they're limiting my imagination because if they're describing a job to such a granular degree, I'm going to assume nothing exists outside of that description. Even if they said "Lift, carry, deliver and more!" it would still have the same effect on me.
Carrying is a very dry thing to focus on. WHY you're carrying is more compelling.
It's as if a ninja school's pitch was: "In this school you'll learn how to:
Wait patiently
Walk quietly
Hang from ledges
Run fast
Poison food
Throw shrunken
Throw smoke bombs.
Rather than saying: "In this school you'll learn how to:
Evade detection
Infiltrate fortresses
Assassinate targets
Even if the first school listed every single skill they'll teach you, it will start to sound like work even if it's something you want to do!
As with everything, it can be a tricky balance of making a game feel specific and not generic, but I think it's especially important for title cards and narration to call out the fantasy as much as possible, and let the game capture and choreography show how the game achieves that fantasy. For example, Mark of the Ninja and Ninja Gaiden are both games about being a ninja, but one is hyper focused on staying undetected, and the other is about barging in and cutting heads off.
Interestingly enough, there's another trailer for Tools Up! which I found to be less effective than the first one.
This trailer has similar pitfalls where it starts describing the individual problems and tasks you perform in the game like cleaning up messes, getting plans and moving furniture. I react almost the exact same way to this trailer as I do to the Moving Outtrailer. This is probably also a lesson in releasing only as many trailers as you can with consistently interesting content, but that's for another post.
I think it's okay to take stock of the tasks you perform in the game, but then take a step back to consider what the purpose of that task is. Once you reach something which sounds cool and aspirational, then you're in good territory.
As an example, here's an excerpt from Seth Godin's book This is Marketing.
Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt famously said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit. They want a quarter-inch hole.”
The lesson is that the drill bit is merely a feature, a means to an end, but what people truly want is the hole it makes.
But that doesn’t go nearly far enough. No one wants a hole.
What people want is the shelf that will go on the wall once they drill the hole.
Actually, what they want is how they’ll feel once they see how uncluttered everything is, when they put their stuff on the shelf that went on the wall now that there’s a quarter-inch hole.
But wait…
They also want the satisfaction of knowing they did it themselves.
Or perhaps the increase in status they’ll get when their spouse admires the the work.
Or the peace of mind that comes from knowing that the bedroom isn’t a mess, and that it feels safe and clean.
“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit. They want to feel safe and respected.”
This scenario goes quite far down the rabbit hole, but I think it's a really great example of finding what people really want and aspire to. I think a lot of game trailers are stuck on the drill bit part of the pitch for their game, and audiences are left thinking: "So?"
Sell the dream, not the job!
