What a Game Trailer Audience Thinks and Needs
What is going through someone's head when they're watching a game trailer and how can you make the trailer suit their wants, needs, and expectations? I previously discussed catering trailers to an audience at a very broad level in this post about the marketing funnel, but today I'm thinking of the moment to moment experience of people watching a game trailer.
Three questions which I think will come up most frequently are:
How do I fit into this game?
What is this building to?
What is the connection?
How do I fit into this game?
Player interaction is a fundamental difference between games and movies; the game cannot advance without the player. This is why it isn't a sufficient way to teach people about a game by using the trailer to show content like: characters, dialogue, environments and objects from the game. As potential players we need to know how our inputs affect game, whether we're moving a character around with a gamepad, swiping across objects with our fingertip, pointing and clicking on things, etc.
Content is not very exciting if we don't know how we interact with it. A shot of a living room in a game might look very pretty, but our interest in it as players will vary wildly depending on how we can interact with it in the game.
Do we:
Pick up objects, flip them around, and read their contents?
Pick up objects and throw them at enemies?
Look at the objects from afar with no possible interaction?
Tear down the shelves and replace them with new ones?
Re-organize the objects on the shelves?
Use the furniture as cover during a tense shootout?
Hide under furniture to avoid a terrifying monster?
It's relatively easy to understand how a player interacts with a game where you move a character about, but we still need to understand how the game's world is affected by those inputs. I talked about this more in my article about player verbs.
This question of "How do I fit into this game?" runs in a constant loop while watching a trailer; this is why some people get frustrated by cinematic game trailers which don't highlight "real" gameplay interaction. If one goal of your trailer is to help people understand how the game works, make sure the shots in the trailer help people see how the player fits into the game and what their actions ultimately amount to.
This living room looks very different depending on what you know you can do in it.
What is this building to?
When watching a trailer we usually expect shots to get progressively more and more interesting whether in the intensity of the action, story, ideas, visuals, or something else. I see a lot of game trailers where the content and ideas at the end feel very similar to ones I've already seen at the beginning. These repetitive shots can really kill the excitement and interest because it feels like the game backpedaled right when it was supposed to speed up. The shots and ideas in a trailer need to build or twist ideas established early in the trailer, not repeat them.
Make sure shots get progressively more complex or elaborate as the trailer goes on. Try to imagine someone describing a delicious meal they're making you for dinner. If they're doing it right they're going to start with the basics like:
"First, we add finely minced garlic to a tablespoon of oil in the pan with a dash of table salt."
Then maybe the middle of the description includes other ingredients like chopped vegetables and pepper. And then they finish the story off with descriptions of the elaborate touches like a special sauce made from slow cooked pork shoulder or something.
If instead they ended with "And then we add: table salt..." that would be pretty anti-climactic wouldn't it? The story might work if it ended with artisanal salt from one particular beach in an isolated part of the world, but if it's just regular salt then that would kill the story. That's essentially how I feel when a game trailer has very basic shots in its second half which don't twist or build on the previous ones. So take a good hard look at the shots of the trailer, and see if there's a linear upward progression of interest.
This shot would work ok for the beginning of the trailer, but not for the end.
What is the connection?
Editing is all about creating connections. If we see a shot of a ball being thrown, we expect something to build upon or connect to it. It could be a shot of something like:
The ball being caught
The ball falling into a pond
A dog chasing the ball
Or if it's in a trailer, it could be a match cut shot of:
An explosion
A person getting hit in the face
A glass being smashed against a wall
Every moment a person is watching a game trailer they're looking for connections; they're trying to create a full picture of the experience. The easier you make the connections to understand, the easier it will be for them to formulate that picture. Showing and facilitating the audience's understanding of how the different elements of the game connect is what will create interest. This doesn't mean explaining every connection, it means showing the pieces which fit together, and letting the audience make the connection.
A lot of individual inputs in games don't mean much, but you can spark the imagination by just showing or implying what those inputs will cause.
For example, let me tell you three things about a particular game. In this game you can:
Shoot guns
Time (and bullets) only move when you move
It's VR, so your head and hands are what control movement
These are for the game SUPERHOT VR; their trailers do a good job of establishing these ideas and then showing several scenarios which help us explore why the connection of these elements are interesting. As far as games go, this one is pretty easy to understand and imagine as soon as we know the premise. So how do other games with less visual mechanics help the audience form connections?
When you put a shot into the trailer depicting player interaction, ask: "What happens next?" or "Why does that matter?" I see a lot of game trailers which skip from one player interaction to another without helping me understand how they connect to any meaningful result or consequence. It would be like if I showed you a machine with levers, buttons, switches and knobs, then cut together a video showing levers being pulled, buttons pressed, switches toggled and knobs turned. You'd probably be left wondering: "But what does the machine do!?" in an exasperated way rather than a curious way. But if the montage ended with a door suddenly being unlocked, you might be a little curious because now there is a connection between the interaction and a result.
How you interpret this shot will vary based on what know about how the game works.
The other way a lot of trailers drop the ball is with poorly chosen and edited story elements like dialogue and narration. For example, if a game has a non-linear story revealed through snippets of voiceover, cutting a random selection of clips into a trailer won't help us form a picture. We will desperately want to try to connect the voiceover lines together thematically or narratively, but if they're selected in a way where connections can't be formed then we'll get frustrated.
This is why an effective trailer cannot be just a random jumble of video clips, audio files, and sound effects. Because random chaos frustrates our desire to form connections to comprehend what we're seeing. The audience seeks information for how they connect to the game, and I think a good trailer will help them do that with as light a touch as possible. The lighter the touch, the more connections they can form themselves and let their imagination run wild. The more you say, the more you constrain their imagination.
