why do video games describe themselves like this?
why do people make posts like this lol
this has to be ragebait
i may have been a little heated. but taste aside, i feel like we can do better than "traumacore opera" for our ad copy. （ ´,_ゝ`）
the thing is that - it works! you are supposed to spell out the essence of your game on your page in great detail so that you know its for you. that is just the playbook for games. a lot of people do it because its the thing to do if you want to optimize with the hope of eventually making a living.
and here is where im going to be a contrarian. i feel like in describing itself so much i don't actually need to play it to find out what its about. it's already told me. so to me it has the opposite of the intended effect.
i wish we treated this space as the back cover of a book, and not a huge neon sign.
>>3mukpe5mcyc2g
lmao. maybe its not clicking for you but to me traumacore opera is a perfect hook to get someone interested in the game just like you say you want to read on the back of a book or whatever. i feel like the whole store description is sparse and actually contributing to the mystery of what the game is gonna be like when you actually get in. youre pointing your finger in the wrong direction here
>>3mukprfyyzc2g
it does not click for me! i actually don't know what 'traumacore' even refers to here. -of trauma. sure. it's a vague term that could mean whatever the reader projects onto it ┐(ﾟ～ﾟ)┌
i think you are meant to feel something when you read this introduction but i don't. that is not a fault of the quality of the game (which i have no desire to comment on), but in how it presents itself. ad copy is a piece of writing, and it can be good or bad. i consider it is a part of the work, and reflective of the attitudes contained in it. i think it matters.
this isn't as much about this game in particular as it is a general trend of games having to over-explain themselves to market. or at least they think they do. i don't know if anyone even reads past the title, trailer and screenshots but every time i do it's like this.
>>3mukogu6rhd2c
referring both to OP and the copywriting of this game that i know nothing about. i do find it kind of. bad. but i don't want to be mean to anyone related to the project. it will repel some and i'm sure attract others.
(is it a good thing for your game to have hundreds of tracks???? how large could the scope of this game that can only describe itself in terms borrowed from the Aesthetics Wiki possibly be???)
>>3muknrr5gwc2g
I see it in the same way that I see some books now being marketed with fanfic tags like enemies-to-lovers.
Many young people conceptualized a lot of pre-existing games as parts of certain aesthetic movements e.g. traumacore, frutiger aero/metro, Y2K, and even vaporwave to an extent going a little further back.
Now that those young people are reaching the age that they are creating their own stuff as well as being within the prime demographic for games, they are marketing their own creations in this way, and others are seeing this and following suit as a way to be marketable towards young people.
Its essentially just a "vibe-genre" where the feeling something evokes and its atmosphere are what's being marketed rather than its objective qualities in comparison to other genre tropes.
>>3mukrmjwyrc2g
>ad copy is a piece of writing, and it can be good or bad. i consider it is a part of the work, and reflective of the attitudes contained in it. i think it matters.
I think if you consider it a part of the art it can't be objectivity good or bad right? (unless you're one of those people who somehow genuinely believes objective quality exists in art.) like obviously it can have literal grammatical mistakes or whatever, but everyone has the right to market their art in the way that most speaks to what they're trying to communicate with it. I don't think there is a right or wrong way to market something you've made, maybe there are ways that present the objective qualities of your game more clearly than the aesthetic and story ones, but I don't think one of those is the "right" way.
Of course its completely valid to personally dislike this approach and feel it doesn't make you want to play it, but I think it's really reductive to say
>you are supposed to spell out the essence of your game on your page in great detail so that you know its for you
In a business setting, yes, if you're trying to sell more this is what will do that, but games are art, and not everyone who makes them is trying to make a living with them. Sometimes people will straight up lie or leave things out of the marketing pitch to subvert expectations, and this is an artistic choice, not a "mistake".
I'm sorry if I've been too confrontational or misinterpreted anything. In general I have a very hard time understanding your feelings on this as you said both
>you are supposed to spell out the essence of your game on your page in great detail
>i feel like in describing itself so much i don't actually need to play it to find out what its about. it's already told me.
I do not understand how these opinions can co-exist. If anything I feel like these aesthetic labels are more vague than traditional games marketing, and explain far less about the actual experience of playing the game.
>In a business setting, yes, if you're trying to sell more this is what will do that, but games are art, and not everyone who makes them is trying to make a living with them
i feel like describing your game in terms of what it's derivative of in 1001 vibe-genres is quite unevocative though--commodifying, even. at the end of the day it is advertising, but to me it comes off very inelegant and unartful, and a surprising choice for what is in large part a writing project.
i also agree with OP's oxymoronic take that it is both totally vague while also leaving nothing to the imagination. i think that's the nature of something defined by its tropes rather than its substance
>>3mukyncfkbx2y
thanks for fucking with my oxymoronic duality deculture-san (˘･з･˘)
>>3mukyncfkbx2y
I'm not saying its good, just that they're allowed to be "inelegant and unartful" if they want to, and its not the "wrong" way to market things. Perhaps I'm misreading this take into the previous posts, my bad.
I also don't really understand this separation of "tropes" and "substance" are tropes not just groups of generalized traits of the "substance" of many pieces of art?
I agree that marketing off of genre is generally pretty ineffective and lacks depth, but it does communicate the works rough vibes quickly. Which feels relevant somewhere like Steam, and I believe its a valid creative choice, if not one lacking in potential depth and conveyance.
i never said it was against the rules. "allowed to" and "is this bad for society" are different conversations. it was my bad for not properly distinguishing it.
why does everything have to be filed under a shelf and keyword-optimized? is this the level VN literacy is like? i think you can not do this and still be successful? and not turn bitter people like me away?
plenty of VNs get big on a strong hook line, a distinctive voice in the actual store page prose, or just a screenshot/trailer that does the vibe-communication without doing it in tropes. this game does a good job with the trailer part. imo
kinda just feels like the author is copying a known pattern gamedev pattern mindlessly, which as deculture-san points out is a little baffling for a LITERARY work
or idk, am i just being hopelessly optimistic here? （⌒∇⌒ゞ）
>>3mul2ocifq22g
walking around in the bushes. panicking. talking to myself. i've thought too much about this game and now i've gotta play the demo. the ragebait marketing worked. ts pmo fr but now i've gotta see just how many songs are in this
>>3mul3bf52j22g
>>3mul3sg5mh72o
I appreciate the thought out responses, I was definitely reading things that weren't in the posts into them because of my own past experiences, we agree much more than I initially thought, sorry about the confrontational attitude.
Shoutout to nuance fr, I think I just felt a knee-jerk reaction to defend the cringe-kids cuz I was similar myself when I was younger, and I try to push back on my own feelings of rejection of the younger generation because of that. It definitely does make sense for marketing in a post-TikTok world to have these bite sized rough ideas to communicate ideas as quickly as possible, but I agree that we're worse off for it.
Sign in to reply.