Marketing of Video Games - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 45

Jetpack , Where's My Water and Castleville to look forward to for their
entertainment and enjoyment. 5
Marketing is, or should be, according to the traditional marketing per-
spective, part of the whole process of developing and distributing a game to
a gamer. So, let's start at the beginning of this process.
DEVELOPING GAMES
[The video game] is the most complex toy ever built and is vastly more
responsive than any other toy ever invented. Compare it, for example,
with its contemporary, the doll Chatty Cathy, which has about a dozen
dif erent sentences with which to respond when you pull the string.
Chatty Cathy does not take into account the variety of your responses;
the computer does. Chatty has a dozen responses; the computer has mil-
lions. (Sutton-Smith 1986, cited in Salen and Zimmerman 2004, 85)
The history of game marketing has been closely associated with game
development in a kind of “build it and they will come” philosophy. That
is, if a bright, exciting game is put out there, it will be purchased by a
hungry segment of gamers. We have studied the development of video
games in some detail (Zackariasson, Walfi sz and Wilson 2006). From our
experience, people developing video games are driven partly by a fascina-
tion by the medium itself and partly with personal ambitions to make the
best game ever! This last statement seems to be universal and has been
communicated to us throughout almost every interview with persons in
the game industry. Video games are, just as Sutton-Smith (1986) recog-
nizes, a highly remarkable technical achievement and the persons that
work with this are rightly viewing themselves as artists. Much of their
ef ort is therefore introverted toward the game itself. This fascination has
resulted in games being developed with the same logic as art for art's
sake—game developers create games for themselves. The process we saw
in practice that supported this logic was one in which a two-week cycle
was used progressively to develop the game, as an agile project. 6 At the
end of the two weeks, every one in the shop stopped work and focused
on evaluating progress to date (Walfi sz, Zackariasson and Wilson 2006).
Only after each individual reported on development to date and analysed
did the next cycle begin. The idea was that the possibilities for creativity
were built into the development process, resulting in an immersive and
fun game, which was built into the project. Only at a later stage in the
development were the consumers brought into the process, as play testing,
in defi ning whether the game was successful or not.
We have refl ected upon creativity in video game development (Zackarias-
son, Styhre and Wilson 2006). Refl ection on an I-methodology arose and a
friendly suggestion was made during the review that the process described