Mass Effect 3, Marketing, and a Magic Bullet: Emily Wong Reporting

On October 30, 1938, Mercury Theatre of the Air performed H.G.Wells’ War of the Worlds, which was broadcasted over the Columbia Broadcast System radio network.  Orson Welles directed and narrated this now-infamous production.  Because many listeners missed the first few minutes, which included the disclaimer that the performance was only fiction, many believed that an actual invasion was taking place.  This event is often cited as an example of the Magic Bullet (or Hypodermic Needle) theory that states that media have swift and powerful effects on consumers because they believe the entire message.  You don’t hear too much about Magic Bullet nowadays but then a strange thing happened on the way to the release of Mass Effect 3. The 21st century version of War of the Worlds appeared via Twitter.

Emily Wong from Mass Effect.

It all started out with a simple retweet from an Alliance News Network message.  I didn’t pay much attention, but it said something about a mysterious object in the sky.  Another retweet revealed that reporter Emily Wong, from Mass Effect 1, was reporting that Earth communications were down just as this object descended from the clouds.  My interest piqued, I began to follow the Alliance News Network (ANN) so I could get all the tweets as they posted.  What followed was a brilliant re-enactment of War of the Worlds with the Reapers now taking the place of Martians.  Of course I did not realize this at first, but as I read tweet after tweet, I remembered listening to recordings of War of the Worlds and reading about the ensuing panic.

Soon I started following the hashtag connected to the tweets and found that many others were commenting on the messages.  Some even took to role-playing as they pretended to “panic” and in doing so began to “re-enact” the real panic of 1938. I began to see some slight similarities between the mayhem used to support an antiquated theory and the reach of social media.  Of course the reach of ANN is nowhere near the panic of 1938.  Some estimates run as high as 1.7 million people who thought the production was real.  I don’t believe anyone thinks the Reapers are really coming of course and only 8,000 people were on the receiving end of those Tweets, but my guess is that the “magic bullet” BioWare is looking for is an uptick in sales.  Is it a stretch to think that those consumers who are still undecided about buying Mass Effect 3 would do so because of this modern-day War of the Worlds? Or do these message simply reinforce the idea that this is a must-have game for those who have already decided to purchase Mass Effect 3?

As I sit here and read the messages from Emily Wong, I wonder if I will see her in the actual game. Or does her story end before the game begins?  Her frantic messages serve to heighten anticipation of the invasion of course, but they also reveal how quickly messages spread through social media thanks to retweeting and hashtags.  One of the aspects of the classic magic bullet theory is that mass media quickly effect those who consume them. A marketing magic bullet, in this case, might be powered by social media.

The Fractured State of Social Media in Gaming

It seems that social media is all the rage these days.  Facebook. Twitter.  Blogging. Linkedin. Four square. And so on. The mass communication field is no different.  As researchers and teachers we are searching for ways to examine and incorporate social media into more traditional mass media.  For video games this presents an especially tough challenge, which is ironic since video games were social media years before Facebook arrived. And yet while console games have carried an online component for the past ten years, in many ways the explosion of other social media has left gaming behind.  There is certainly no need (and this is not the space) to recount how popular Facebook and Twitter are, but before these two social behemoths became popular Xbox Live had friends lists that allowed gamers to interact with their peers from around the world. Yet today the bulk of “social” in online gaming is adversarial multiplayer matches or cooperative games.  Two recent releases that showcase these features, and more, are Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit and Call of Duty Black Ops.

EA's Need For Speed Hot Pursuit

Criterion’s Need For Speed Hot Pursuit (NFSHP) contains a feature called autolog that immediately presents your friends records and accomplishments for a race or challenge you just completed.  In addition, it allows you to jump right into a race so you can attempt to beat your friend’s time. This shameless adaptation of Facebook game score announcements has been hailed as a shot in the arm for the racing genre and arguably so since it encourages racers to compete for the best times even if they cannot race head-to-head.

Black Ops takes a different approach.  When the player enters the multiplayer suite, he/she is treated to a crawler at the bottom of the screen which displays challenges his/her friends have completed or new ranks earned.  I admit those messages are mildly interesting, but they don’t really mean much to me.  Black Ops also contains a file share system much like the one Bungie has been using for Halo games since 2007.  Recent multiplayer matches can be viewed and saved for friends or the entire Black Ops community to see.

These two models work better than say, a web application like dynasty anywhere in NCAA Football 11 because they exist in-game.  And while web extensions like Bungie.com have been quite successful, the ability of gamers to interact with other players or information about those players is certainly more organic when it is contained to game world, first, and then to other, extra-game media.

The problem with console games application of social media is that they are limited and inconsistent across the gaming medium.  Right now, gamers using Xbox Live can watch movies together via Netflix or watch a sporting event together using the ESPN app.  There is also the new video chat via Kinect. And of course gamers can play together in real time across many games in different genres. However, while the concept of playing together is as social as social can get (at least online), the options that exist outside of real-time interaction are extremely sparse.  What the medium needs is a way to generate social interaction outside of the standard multiplayer, co-op, or movie-watching sessions without asking users to create either text-based or out-of-game media. That is the problem with dynasty anywhere: it requires users to sit down and write about their games ala a sports journalists. That brings a limited response because it is so far outside the realm of virtual football as to be foreign to most of the participants.  Game related social media should a) occur inside the game and b) be restricted to the simple creation of media such as film clips, challenges to best friends, and announcements of scores and so on.

Activision's Call of Duty Black Ops

For example, suppose I finish a multiplayer session in Black Ops where I record 25 kills on a certain map.  I could choose to have that match uploaded into my file for my friends to see.  If they log onto Black Ops within, say, 24 hours, they will have an opportunity to play the same match type on the same map to see if they can beat my score.  If they do that, oh, 20 times, they could get a reward (think achievement or trophy).  The objectives could change daily or weekly.  Today it might be kills, but next week you may have call in more helicopter strikes on a certain map than I did.

A second approach could be to create the feel of having friends playing even when they are far from their consoles. Your friends’ play styles could be incorporated into gaming sessions. Black Ops has a game mode called combat training.  In this mode, the player (and friends if desired) fight against computer controlled bots.  This is nothing new of course though Black Ops developer Treyarch did add the nice touch of allowing the bots to display names from the gamer’s friends list. Shooting bots “disguised” as your friends is a nice middle ground between plain vanilla bots and actually having your friends in the match.  It makes things more personal.

However if the game took information from those friends such as favorite weapon, kill-to-death ratio, and accuracy (that information is already recorded and displayed elsewhere in the game) and incorporated those stats into bot play, it adds another dimension to the game play.  Now, not only is my success important to me, but it also factors into how well my friends do when they play that particular mode. If the idea of helping your neighbor (in this case fellow gamer) is not the epitome of community and social, I don’t know what is.  This next step in social gaming seems, at least to me, like a natural evolution of the shared gaming experience.  After all, video games are a unique medium and that should be reflected in how gamers interact with each other.

Since When Did Playing Games Become Work?

Dragon Age Origins: I bought it not so much for the fun as for studying the morality system.

I ordered Dragon Age Origins from Amazon last week.  Now I am not a real big role-playing fan but I do play them from time to time.  In fact I usually buy one role-playing game (RPG) per year.  I played Oblivion in 2006 and Mass Effect in 07.  I never finished Fallout 3, so I stayed away from the genre until Mass Effect 2 came out earlier this year.  I guess Dragon Age could be my RPG for 09. Whatever.

Somewhere in the midst of checking the US Postal Service website for the status of my package, I began to wonder why I was so intent on playing this game.  I then realized that while the game only mildly appeals to me (I prefer sci-fi RPGs), I am fascinated by the morality system and the choices presented in the game.  I know if I can get my hands on it I can probably use the content as the basis for a study, a paper, or at the very least some good blogging. That’s when it dawned on me: I play games for research and not for fun.

So then I started debating with myself, thinking “surely I play other games just for fun.” What about NCAA Football 11? I play that game every day, but it is also research.  I’ve already blogged about dynasty wire and social media.  I sent some tweets about the power of the press in that game. In fact I started tweeting about the social aspect of the game before I even picked it up from Gamestop. And while eating breakfast this morning I tossed about an idea about getting users to create more stories to increase the hype and tension before big games and therefore make online dynasties more realistic. That would make for a fascinating study.

Well then perhaps I play Mass Effect 2 just for fun. That’s no better.  After all that adventure provided inspiration about death in games, cultural hegemony and racism.  I even thought about blogging on how the game treats the disabled in the “Overlord” DLC.  So much for that.

Worse still, I bought Red Dead Redemption to see how Rockstar went about developing the narrative.  Fable II was only an exercise in studying the morality system and how NPCs would react to my in-game decisions.  I got great information, but never finished either game.

I think something is wrong with me.

I see more than Tomb Raider's Lara Croft. I see body image and media effects.

It finally dawned on me that my gaming only serves as a platform for my research.  Even when I think I am just having fun or relaxing, I suspect that somewhere in the back of my mind I am taking mental notes for my next project.  I would not be surprised if the gaming I’ve been doing these past few years (Mass Effect 1& 2, NCAA Football, Dragon Age, Tomb Raider Underworld, Gears of War, GTA, Modern Warfare 2) will provide a wealth of potential projects to work on after my dissertation.   And so here I sit with research ideas about male body image and the use of drama in video games floating around in my head.  Even now I have a blog draft about the perseverance of hyper-masculine heroes in games such as Gears of War. In an age where Lara Croft looks more like a women and less like an adolescent fantasy we still have Marcus Fenix who exemplifies the typical ultra-macho, super-aggressive male role model.

And so my brief self-reflection has led me to the conclusion that my days of gaming just for fun are gone and they aren’t coming back.  That pastime has been replaced with the need to explore game content for hegemonic messages, changing player identity in the face of moral choices, and genre-blending trends in the industry.  I used to joke that studying games gave me an excuse to play them.  Now I think studying games is my sole reason for playing. How my (gaming) world has changed.