I’ve been thinking again about player stories in video games. No, not the soaring epics crafted by the masters at Bioware and Valve, but the funky little stories that players tell about their own, specific experiences while playing games. As I’ve said before, these stories have value; these stories help sell games — but only if enough people learn the stories. And the key to that is (as much as I hate to use the word) virality.
Minecraft got a huge surge of popularity right out of the gate from YouTube videos. Ditto for Just Cause 2. StarCraft 2 has filled vast swathes of YouTube (and Korean TV stations) with game replays.
Anything on YouTube can easily go viral. How easy is it for players of your game to get their stories online there?
Free Realms was the first MMO I know of that made it a matter of one or two clicks to record your play session and post it on YouTube. Why don’t all the MMOs do this? If I have a good story, I want to easily share it with my friends. And if they can easily share it with their friends… well, the odds of someone new coming to check out your game go up quite a bit.
I’ve seen some attempts at using social media like this, but they are crude, pitiful things. When I see a Facebook post saying “Joe Samplename just got the Eat All the Kittens Achievement in KittenNomNom 3!” I’m less curious about Joe’s game than I am amused thinking that Joe called in sick and just got busted by PSN. The same goes for cheesy tweets proclaiming your levels or achievements to the world.
These aren’t player stories. This is just spam.
What I’d like to see is something like in The Sims. In that game, the system automatically takes screenshots during dramatic moments (births, deaths, weddings, more deaths, the other deaths, okay this isn’t funny anymore where’s the pool ladder? deaths) and lets you label them like pics in a photo album. (“Photo Albums,” children, are how the Old Ones used to store images. It’s like Flickr, but in a hard-bound book.)
Again, not all video games are about player stories, and that’s fine. But for those that are, I’d encourage the developers to consider how the players will record and pass along those stories. Stories sell games. The best stories go viral, and can sell lots of games. Let’s make it easier for that to happen.
