Monday, October 3, 2011

Spilling the beans: How do you REALLY tell the difference between pure story info and spoilers?

It has come to my abundant recent knowledge that due to the more increasing nature of sites like IGN, Gametrailers, and Gamespot...that some of the info they give out about entertainment seems to lie in a vast gray area of story or plot details. Though we think that while a mere synopsis or detailed report of details seems unharmful, how do we objectively decipher that someone may or may not wanted to know that bit of info, and in their opinion it was really a spoiler in disguise?

This also transcends specific genres as there is a divide in the fanbase. A lot more RPG enthusiasts find story details to be more spoiler-written than say an FPS game. Take for instance a wiki article on games like Final Fantasy, compared to the almost total plot-telling of RAGE that id gave out. Then again, how these games are presented, the biggest part of an RPG is figuring out the story yourself, while with an FPS knowing more of the story ahead could change if you're motivated to buy or complete game.

Going along, there are some games that show spoilers but you don't know they are 'til you play the game, one of the biggest examples of this is Ace Combat where some of the more definitive scenes are shown in big-budget trailers to grab your interest, later to find out that some of those sequences aren't til the final missions or cutscenes.

There are also issues about some RPGs and Adventure games that show "a little too much", not in the sense of spoiling major parts of the game, but showing scenes out of context in the accidental nature of confusing more of the audience than they may have intended. This is also of course another form of marketing, as to trying to say to their market "buy it to figure out the scene and not be confused anymore". Of course the consequences are much higher about this form of details since people like me don't want to be confused about details if they want to make a solid purchase, if not that a later trailer dissolves some of the confusion from the earlier footage.

With all this said, this all entails to the final notion that most marketers or info sites overlook, just how smart some of their audiences are. People like me who have played certain genres for almost decades aren't that hard to be fooled into thinking how more or less of the game they have actually showed. I could say for a fact that while some of the FF-XIII-2 footage has left me confused, that I also know that there is plenty of room in the game to those scenes to become completely understandable(as far as FF plot-telling is able to achieve). Thus why do FPS games seem to give out more info than RPGs because after id told most of the story of RAGE, I know that they have pretty much told me the whole basic plot of the full game.

Subplots aside, I think while these kind of motives have more good than bad intentions...Companies should re-evaluate their nature of what they deem story info and all-out spoilers.

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