Ken Levine wants developers in the media spotlight

Bioshock creator Ken Levine’s been doing the media rounds promoting G4TV’s airing of the E3 Bioshock Infinite demo, and appeared on the Gamers With Jobs podcast to discuss the video, E3 and the difficulty in promoting a game in mainstream media.

Levine cited an appearance at a state school where an entire classroom had never heard of Bioshock, let alone played it as exemplary of the lack of exposure games have in the mainstream, but thanks to advertising ubiquity and a huge marketing budget, everyone knows more than they’d want to know about the latest Transformers. Video games don’t have the same kind of outlets in which they can be promoted.

“When you have a big game coming, I think there’s this weird sense that there’s certain places you can promote the game and certain ways you can show it, so you do it at E3 and you have people write articles about it.

“We need to be on mainstream shows. We need to be on NPR. We need to be on Fresh Air. We need to be in those places talking about what we do … we’re still kind of ghettoized as game developers, and we need to think about, how do we reach out and talk to people, so you don’t have a room full of college kids saying ‘I’ve never heard of that game.'”

Games certainly have mainstream advertising presence, as Levine acknowledges – most major news outlets do reviews, and there are TV spots and bus ads. But why is it so hard to give a game the same cultural ubiquity afforded to TV, books and film?

I think it comes down to face value and authorship. For one, the acting in games is either voice or motion-caption, and it’s a lot easier to sell Ray Liotta as Henry Hill in Goodfellas than as the voice of Tommy Vercetti in GTA: Vice City. With the exception of athletes or a 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand situation, an actor’s role in a game, no matter how many lines of dialogue, isn’t large enough to merit a concentrated marketing effort, meaning we’re left with the lead developers to sell an audience on a game’s merit.

In film criticism there’s a concept called auteur theory, which a posits that a director is the primary artist of a film, allowing a distinct style to emerge – Quentin Tarantino’s stylized violence and non-linear narratives; David Lynch’s surrealism and fascination with Laura Dern; Hitchcock’s everything. That makes it easy to put a creative face to a movie, and it helps that they can be compelling, if somewhat eccentric, personalities.

With games, it’s a little harder. Though the end product is often driven by a single vision – Brendan McNamara’s reign over LA Noire studio Team Bondi can attest to that – will long development cycles, postponed release dates and well over 100 people performing vastly different jobs, it’s a little harder to present a game as one person’s vision. Game development still has its fair share of interesting personalities – Cliffy B, Tim Schafer, John Romero – but in a lot of cases, if we carry over auteur theory from film, it’s more likely to apply to a studio than any one person. Take a look at the Wikipedia article for GTA IV – you’ve got an art director, two technical directors, three producers and two writers. Of course people involved in film and games need to specialize, but it becomes hard to pinpoint that creative vision to one individual.

That doesn’t mean it can’t happen though, and like a lot of things in this industry, media presence will improve with time. Jimmy Fallon recently had a week-long feature on games, and there’s no doubt that a Ken Levine or a Gabe Newell or a Cliff Bleszinski could make for interesting guests on The Daily Show, NPR or Conan.