Joost Schuur

Microsoft bills their Game with Fame program as an opportunity to ‘play your favorite games online against your favorite actors, bands, and sports stars’. However, it’s little more than a marketing means, tacked on to an online system that is not equipped to scale to the interest levels it generates, and will ultimately disappoint many more than those few that do get a legitimate opportunity to take part and play their idols.

The biggest problem is that for a short window of two hours, only a very limited numbr of fans will actually get a chance to play these celebrities. Consider the potential audience of 25 million people who are on Xbox Live as a starting point, and any celebrity or group featured can easily generate tens of thousands of people who could potentially make themselves available during that time. There’s no proper mechanism either to sign up, other than the existing friend list abilities of Xbox Live, along with its current 100 friend limit. Just before the event, fans are asked to send a  friend request to one or more specifically created gamer tags for the event, in what is nothing more than a digital land rush, awarding whomever happened to send a request at the right time to get noticed.

In the end, thousands of other people who set time aside to take part are not only left out in the cold, but have no further way of actually following the event as it takes place, since there’s no broadcast ability of matches on Xbox Live. On top of that, Microsoft call for those lucky few who did get a chance to play, to email in their stories, since again, there’s no formal way to record what happened for each participant built into Xbox Live in most games.

I’m sure the logistics of holding these kind of events are equally frustrating for marketers at Microsoft. I expect they consider it to be an imperfect, early foray into using Xbox Live to connect gamers with celebrity video game players, allowing them to measure level of interest and see what works and what doesn’t. In fact, when you look at their 1 vs 100 quiz game, the foundation is already there for a much better system that could allow you to play alongside or even against celebrities on a much larger scale. At the very least, Game with Fame is a promotional opportunity to attract attention to the latest works of a band or actor, perhaps as part of a collection of paid advertising bought elsewhere on Xbox Live or Microsoft’s other properties. It’s a numbers game: Hundreds of thousands see the event announcement, ten thousand try to take part, 25 succeed. Thus you’ve caught many more eyeballs than you’ve ended up disappointing.

So at the core of Game with Fame’s problems is the fact that most game’s aren’t designed with this kind of marketing strategy in mind. Most developers don’t even have the luxury of creating a fully featured buddy, stats and matchmaking system into their game, much less appease their publisher’s marketing department with features to specifically play celebrities. By the time marketing even starts to propose a promotional event with a celebrity, most games have long gone gold and shipped. Still, let’s put on our thinking caps and consider what opportunities might be possible, with some foresight and support by the great Keeper of the Project Development Schedule:

• Broadcast their game play live: Make an event out of it that people can plan for and promote virally. ’6 PM, tune in and watch Tom Cruise get his butt kicked by a 13-year-old in Halo 3!’. Even if the game doesn’t support streaming matches via its own protocol (like Valve’s SourceTV), you could capture the video out from the celebrity’s system and use any number of existing video streaming services. Time delay it by a little bit, so you’re not giving people in the game an unfair advantage.
• Replay the event later: For those that couldn’t tune in live, let people watch a replay at a later date. Create 5-15 minute highlight reels for people who don’t have that much time and add some expert commentary from someone who knows the game and can explain strategies used (or missed). Video on demand has the added benefit of serving as a permanent add for the game, especially if you mix up video footage of people behind their controllers with what’s happening on the screen: ‘Look at how much fun Metallica had playing Brutal Legend! I should get this game!’.
• Feature the whole thing on TV: Once you’ve got nicely edited footage, find a TV show and network with the right demographic and show it on TV. This’ll work for a little while. TV viewing is declining, while younger viewers, who are the target audiences for video games are flocking to the Internet. How about an online show then? Something produced for Revision3 e.g.? The point is though, once you’ve broadend yourself from serving a few dozen people who happened to be able to catch a spot on a buddy list, to a wider audience of viewers, the video you produce can be used in a lot of different places.
• Allow fans to play against the replays: This one’s going to be game specific. Racing games in particular often let you race a player’s ‘ghost’ to see how well you did against them. The trick is going to be highlighting that replay data among everyone else’s. This will often require the game to explicitly allow you to search a specific player’s shared replay data, instead of playing against players of a similar skill level or on your buddy list.
• Beat a celebrity’s score: Probably one of the easiest ideas. Many games have leader-boards that give you your rank, even though many of them don’t let you look up a specific player’s score if you know them by their gamer handle. If you really wanted to mix things up though, you could create an event specific leader board and award everyone who played during a specific time period and beat the celebrity a small (virtual) prize to boast with later on. Imagine an avatar t-shirt that says ‘I beat Slash at Guitar Hero!’. Such an event specific leader board would take some foresight to implement into the game however.
• Celebrity created content: Depending on what kind of modification ability the game offers, allow the celebrity to actually shape and influence the content that goes into the game. Maybe you allow players to drive a custom tuned car based on the specs put together by a NASCAR driver, or you let them skate on a skate park designed by Tony Hawk. If you want to go really big, pair them up with a seasoned game designer and create a whole new death-match level, or just create a model for a really wicked looking weapon thought up by Mikey from American Chopper.
• Celebrity endorsed content: If it’s not feasible to create new content, you could at least have celebrities pick their favorite bits of the game and discuss it. Highlight their favorite track out of dozens or explain what their favorite map in an FPS is along with what strategies they use on them. Show screen shots of their avatar as they appear in-game and have them discuss their load outs or character inventories in an RPG.

Just for fun, substitute the word ‘celebrity’ with ‘developer’ and think about how all of these features can be used by the people who made the game to communicate with their players about what they’re most passionate about in it. It doesn’t all have to be blatant marketing initiated from the publisher to take advantage of a game’s demographic. Opportunities like this could just as well be used to educate gamers about how to have more fun playing a game and then enjoy it for longer.