Cecropia

March 20, 2008

An Unexpected Discovery; Personality Games Make Good Advertisements

While experimenting with the new genre of personality video games, Cecropia made an unexpected discovery – personality games just might be ideally suited for interactive advertising.

An ideal advergame lets a customer actually interact with a company's brand in a meaningful way. With most existing advergames, customers either don't interact with the company's brand at all (see orbitzgames.com) or they interact an abstract way (see dyson.com) or they interact in a meaningless way (see gettheglass.com).

In mainstream, content-rich video games, there are few potential meaningful product interactions – unless maybe you’re selling weapons or sports equipment! And casual games like Tetris do not allow for meaningful product interactions because casual games are so abstract.

Personality games, by contrast, allow many more types of interaction than classic content-rich games. With personality games, there are many more things you can do with a product than throw it, jump over it, or drive it.

Another reason personality games make good advergames is because they are all about characters and humor. In this way, personality games can be very similar to television commercials. They can move the feelings of the audience, leaving the audience feeling something positive that the audience then associates with the advertiser’s product. Content rich video games are pretty short on humor and memorable characters. And casual games like Tetris simply cannot emotionally move an audience the way that personality games can.

So maybe we’ve hit on something here; using personality games in interactive advertising. Some of the hard-core fans of The Act have expressed dismay that we would even consider contributing to such commercialization. What do you think? Should we let this art form die with the one completed game, The Act, that’s available to only a handful of people? Or should we move into interactive advertising so millions of people can enjoy them? Tell us what you think!

March 12, 2008

Why The Act is not available in Coin-Op

Our first personality video game, The Act, was a creative success. It proved that the building blocks of sketch comedy – characters, personality, and story – could be used not just as the setting of a video game, but also as the actual game play. With The Act we were able to prove that a powerful, emotional connection could be created between game players and interactive characters – particularly with people who previously were not game players!

We developed The Act for the coin-op environment. It was a perfect ‘laboratory’ in which to obtain feedback from thousands of players. Unfortunately, though The Act was a creative success, it was not a commercial success in coin-op. We tried very hard to make it work – making substantial changes to the game and experimenting with all sorts of locations. But the coin-op world is clear cut. Operators will only buy machines that earn enough coins to be a sensible investment. We were never able to cross the threshold to make the earnings high enough to justify the purchase of the game by arcade operators.

We sought advice from coin-op industry experts Eugene Jarvis and Andrew Eloff of Raw Thrills and Andrew Pines of CosmoDog. Their unanimous assessment: though they personally loved playing The Act, the game violates a cardinal rule of coin-op game design: coin-op games should be easy to understand and hard to play. The Act is the opposite: difficult to understand but easy to play.

We concluded that if we attempted to make the gameplay obvious there would be no fun left in The Act, because much of the fun in playing The Act is in figuring out the gameplay. So, after watching over 3,000 groups of people enjoy playing The Act, we stopped testing. It was painful to stop – we were so emotionally invested in The Act – but we simply could not justify continuing the effort.

We offered the prototype units on eBay and we were thrilled to see the positive reaction of game enthusiasts! One buyer will bring his unit to the California Extreme arcade show this summer. We’re told there is a unit at Hal’s Landing in Laredo, Texas. The Act has been a huge hit with the game club at a high school in Lincolnshire, IL, out drawing Halo 3, Super Smash Brothers Melee, Guitar Hero II, and DDR. Other units are cropping up around the country. If you find one, drop us a line and we’ll post the locations so other people can enjoy The Act.