A lot of sites are going overboard with screenshots, and something needs to be done to reign in this excessive practice.

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A Picture Says a Thousand Words…Doesn't It?

When watching TV and ads start running for a new movie, there are often a ton of different versions of the commercial, each showing fairly different scenes from the film. With some of the big blockbusters out there this can be particularly bad. It’s getting to the point where someone could practically splice together all of these scenes in the commercials and have seen the whole movie. The same can be said for screenshots and movie clips for games that haven’t been released yet.

Obviously, seeing lots of images of a game before its release isn’t so bad as a movie, since games are interactive, so that what you see is only one part of the experience. The problem is that if gamers are bombarded with a few hundred screenshots and dozens of movie clips, it sucks the mystery out of the game.

Another problem that comes with this deluge of screenshots being made available is that it brings a certain level of superficiality to games. Over and over again gamers are subjected to images of a title and are developing thoughts largely to do with how pretty the game is. Meanwhile, there is often times very little information pertaining to the mechanics of the game, concerns being drawn over potentially troublesome rule sets in an upcoming title, or any other detailed examination of what is planned for the game. What readers are more likely to be struck with is a paraphrased version of the fact sheet handed out by the publisher for the game that has had the PR spin doctoring filtered out, with a very noticeable link somewhere on the page saying, “Click Here for More Screens!”

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Granted, most sites simply don’t have the time to give a detailed analysis of every title that passes their desk, but it seems that most outlets’ level of binge and purge tactics towards preview writing is hitting new heights as previews and hands-ons consistently get pushed to second fiddle, while 200+ screen galleries are placed in the limelight.

Now, many editors could come right back and say they’re giving people what they want, but it

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seems to me that the demand for images among the net crawling gaming populous has been engineered in the first place. Back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the vast majority of worthwhile game magazines focused very much so on content for upcoming titles, going into quite a bit of detail as to what to expect from an upcoming game. The best part of all was that even though a preview may have only been one paragraph, due to the space limitations of the print medium, A LOT of information was squeezed into that space. Nonetheless, game publications put a lot of emphasis on what people would be doing in the game, with just enough screenshots for gamers to get the gist of the game’s look without giving too much away. Once the Internet came along, game sites didn’t have to worry about squeezing X number of articles into a limited number of pages, they could put in as much screenshots as they liked.

With these countless screenshots being made available to gamers, after a few years of constant brow-beating of course game sites are giving these people “what they want,” their readers have been conditioned to expect it. Multiply that by the fact that competing web sites each adopt this screenshot-saturated approach to content to keep up with one another, and suddenly we have a gaming public who have been programmed to expect mountains of images at every turn, with only a small proportion that seem interested in really digging into what their adventures in upcoming game XYZ might entail.

The question remains: can this be reversed? Really, I see no reason why not. We’ve seen it a thousand times before in marketing campaigns as companies shift public opinion as to what to expect from a given product, so that what the public wants can fit a certain mould. There’s no reason this can’t be applied yet again to gamers and whether or not they are fixated on screenshots. The real question is whether or not game sites want gamers to care less about screens. As it stands, online game publications center a lot of their business on having gigantic media sections. It’s even a highlight of subscription models that allow hastened downloads and a cornucopia of screenshots and game clips for gamers to see. Perhaps we’re condemned to live in a world where the ‘80s mantra “Image is Everything” reigns king.

- Mr. Nash

(August 16, 2004)


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