What Video Games Can Teach Advertisers

As virtual worlds seep into the real world via our personal electronic devices, the art of great storytelling will have a central role in your company’s ability to grab customer attention and create emotional connections. Here are three takeaways from an IBM for Games article on storytelling in gaming.

Get your audience invested in your story. “Interactive storytelling is important because we’re not just affected by the art from a passive standpoint, sometimes we’re more invested in the outcomes because we have a digital representation of ourselves on screen.” Says Leena van Deventer Game developer, writer, and educator in Melbourne, Australia.
Ask: What is it that makes our customers love/hate about us and how do we incorporate that into our message to elicit not just a response, but an emotion?
Start simple and build rich worlds. World of Warcraft didn’t start out with a cohesive storyline. “If you look back at early World of Warcraft, there was no cohesive storyline,” says Jeff Kaplan, a longtime game director for World of Warcraft who now oversees Blizzard’s latest title, Overwatch. “It was more, ‘Here is some context for your questing actions — go have a good time.'” Over the 13 years of WoW’s existence though, Warcraft’s mythology has grown to stretch over millennia and parallel dimensions that create an immersive world experience for players.
Ask: What would your company’s story be if it was mythological? Who are our heroes and villains?
Always try something new. “A lot more things are being tried now in different games than were being tried 20 years ago,” says Schafer, who now runs his own independent games studio, Double Fine. “People are afraid to put something into games they haven’t seen before, but indie games have done a lot to change that.”
Ask: What story experiments can we run to build a richer mythology that excites our customers?