Guernican is back with part two of his feature on the advertising and marketing of games…

Remember Shadow of the Colossus? Team Ico’s almost-a-blockbuster was a genuinely beautiful thing. No hordes of no-marks to button-mash your way through. None of those ‘get the item, pull the switch, open the door’ moments. Just 16 big, big bad guys and a viral marketing campaign that ticked lots of boxes but avoided the one marked ‘sell-out’.

Giantology was a blog purportedly written by a giant-hunting obsessive. Cue plenty of posts on myth and folklore, religious tropes and the occasional aside about his girlfriend. It was reasonably well-written and eventually padded out with some low-budget but effective viral videos showing remnants of the title’s Colossi buried or hidden in far-flung location. Told with a completely straight face, it was the perfect accompaniment to a game that was big on visuals and pontificating, and short on chuckles. Mythology is the perfect subject for this sort of thing. For a start, it often takes itself terribly seriously. It’s effectively a self-perpetuating beast, with rumour, conjecture, opinion and theory all rolled into one big ball of content that fans can pick over and contribute to at their leisure. In short, it’s a gigantic Wikipedia, to which clever ad agencies and their clients can add to suit their own purposes.

Did it work? Well, Team Ico’s previous effort, Ico, was critically acclaimed but rather short on sales. Shadow of the Colossus , by contrast, sold rather well and garnered accolade after accolade.

Where Giantology worked was that it asked you, quietly and reasonably politely, to engage with it. Compare this with the moral minefield that is Saints’ Row 2. Publisher Volition hired notorious nice guy Gary Busey to present Street Lessons with Uncle Gary, a series of short gameplay montages where Gary’s inimitable leer introduces some of the more reprehensible things you can get up to in Stillwater. Cure your headaches with explosive satchel charges! Throw people under trains! Gary revels in all of it, possibly under the influence of some extremely strong designer pharmaceuticals. It’s the only way to explain that shirt.

But although Volition have spent a few quid bringing Gary on board, it’s still just shouting at you. It’s still a gameplay clip. There’s nothing there that immerses you… that asks you to participate beyond parting with your hard-earned. Same goes for Resident Evil’s virals, which are mini-trailers with lip-gloss and hair-gel. Giantology, released over several months and using fuzzy routes to reach its clear objective, probably cost a fraction of the budget and was, for me, far more interesting. Alright, so the nature of the game is very different. Shadow is thoughtful, slow-paced, and personal. SR2 is gleefully childish. Having said that, the ultra-violence of SR2 earns it an 18-certificate, whereas Shadow – a game much more ‘adult’ in its pacing – is more or less suitable for all.

People consume advertising very differently these days. It’s no longer enough to shout at your customer 5 times a day on Channel 4, and sweep them up with a big poster on their way home. We’re so adept at tuning out marketing messages that we only look up when something genuinely tickles our fancy. Part of the problem with gaming’s advertising world is that, in spite of the medium’s cries to be taken seriously as a genre, it rarely rises above the childish. That’s a no-brainer for a game like Saints Row, which is only adult in the sense that it’s brutal and graphic. But when you think of the more cerebral and narrative-driven games to stand out in recent years – Bioshock, Fahrenheit / Indigo Prophecy, and the like – they demand marketing and advertising that has a little intellectual rigour to match their grand aspirations.

I’m probably not alone is salivating over the arrival of David Cage’s Heavy Rain later this year. As a game that aims to redefine how narrative can be used within the controllable context of a video game, it deserves a campaign that illustrates the potential of the medium. Perhaps they’ll be able to do that without resorting to the tried and hackneyed route of simply showing us large chunks of it. You never know… it might help to redefine the audience as well as the genre.