Lightning Talk
Michael Suen
Learning Games Network
Biography
Michael Suen’s work centers on producing integrated web campaigns, designing game content, and managing LGN’s social media presence. His research and practice focus on the development of creative transmedia ecologies.
Abstract
This paper will explore the cultural discourses and practices emerging from the transmedia promotion of video games. In a seeming betrayal of its own medium, the video game industry has since thrown its weight behind the production of markedly cinematic trailers. Forgoing the interactivity of gameplay and overleaping technical limits of game engines, these promotional texts—at once original, short, spreadable, and enriching story introductions—suggest there is a broader ecology of media at work.
Are these advertisements or short films, previews of the primary text or extensions of it? Such promos may remediate and repurpose the film language to accentuate the game’s environment and mechanics, inviting the viewer to imagine their own spectacular interactions within this virtual system. They may also present a self-enclosed narrative with links to the primary game world, providing clues for what will transpire. By analyzing video game trailers that have been released in the past five years, we will begin to detail these emerging transmedia aesthetics and logics in the promotion of AAA video game titles.
While we tout the transmediated possibilities of expansive storytelling and effective promotion, we also must recognize the failed migrations of video game properties across media. As we identify these audience reception practices, we hope to imagine a framework that will maximize the emerging promotional culture of intertextual and transmedial value in video games.