Comunicating Entertainment: Movies & Video Games
Probably the main difference between games and movies is the fact that games are interactive, while movies are absorptive. Although both games and movies are experienced based entertainment, these experiences are different in nature. Movies come to you and go into you but you don’t react back to them in order to change them in any way. In terms of communication channels, movies are one dimensional or mono-directional. Games, on the other hand, are interactive and require you to act and react in order to experience them, thus creating a true bi-directional communication channel, that is, a conversation between the customer and the product.
Because of this difference between movies and games, one difference between communicating a movie and communicating a game relates to the intended response of the customer at a communication stimulus. In a mono-directional environment, communicating a movie that has a compelling plot and characters is done, for example, by interrupting the customer through an advertising message. In a bi-directional environment, you can actually engage the customer in a meaningful experience because a game has compelling things he or she can dynamically interact with. If you can only interrupt your customer from watching his TV news and show him a movie trailer, you can actually engage a potential customer to experience your game through a demo of your product.
Another difference between games and movies is the duration of their entertainment experience. Movies have actually short stories and life spans (their time span being the duration of the movie and their life span being usually a season) and can only be communicated as a time-limited experience. Games, on the other hand, have a much longer life span and can be communicated as a continuous and developing interaction between consumer and product that doesn’t really have an exact ending point in time. For example, positioning the Beowulf movie would most likely communicate “an epic legend… this fall,” while positioning the Beowulf game would most likely communicate “play the legend… starting this fall.”
In: Marketing Communication · Tagged with: entertainment, marketing communication, movies, video games
on October 9, 2008 at 4:34 pm
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I’d be interested in your take on adapting games to the silver screen. It’s been happening with increasing frequency since Tomb Raider (a games-inspired feature, Max Payne, will be released on the 17th of October, after a year in which Hitman, another game-inspired feature film, was one of the bigger hits). Clearly, while the interactivity of the games gives them more lasting power, there is something about movies that makes gamers (and license holders) want to explore that medium for their characters. I would venture that there are issues of reach at play, as well as a score of other factors.
on October 9, 2008 at 4:53 pm
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The trend that you are describing has been going on in both directions and even more. I believe that the answer lies in the brand (or IP – Intellectual Property, as they say in the entertainment industry) and the ability to successfully communicate it and sell it through various media channels.
Successful video game titles usually get sequels to be done. These are most probably the titles or the brands that will make their entrance into cinema as well. The reverse is also true, famous movies have been converted into video games for years now.
It’s interesting to actually see what is the true origin of such a distributed IP. If we take Lord of the Rings, for example, we know that the origins were in Tolkien’s book. A movie series has been done based on it, as well as a video game series. If we think about Spiderman, for example, probably the original Marvel comic book was the source of the movie and the video game.
If we take a video game new IP, like Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed, for example, it will be interesting to see if based on the video game success there will be movie and novel sequels done as well.
In the end, if the purpose is to make money, why not take a successful brand from a specific niche and plant it in another niche that can profit based on it? If properly done, making a movie based on a video game does not dillute the video brand value or its customer experience and its reach, but rather enhances it. The same is valid the other way around as well.