To open this post, the “teaching rhetoric of advertising” part of me just wants to make sure anyone reading my blog who hasn’t seen this amazing WWE 2K18 commercial has the chance:
From a branding standpoint, it might be the best presentation of a massive group of unique characters I’ve seen in quite some time.
As I write this, the game itself is downloading to my Xbox One.
I’ve been playing wrestling games since I can remember there being wrestling games. But the thing that really sets them apart for me is the ability to create your own characters. For a couple of years, I was part of an “internet famous” group of in-game wresting creators who built competitors who weren’t in the game (I mostly made graphics for the others– I wasn’t as good at sculpting).
But every year, I make an idealized version of myself. He’s actually the role-playing wrestler (one of them, anyway) I used to utilize when I was part of that whole scene. If I can get all the capture stuff figured out, I’m going to toss a video of him up later, once I get the work done.
What I think is worth commenting on right now, though, is the idea of prosumers. I’ve been trying to explain this in ways that fully resonate with my students, because most of them ARE prosumers, but they don’t remember the pre-prosumer era. A perfect example of what it means to be a prosumer is someone who buys this game then spends more time in the “create a wrestler” suite making wrestlers who aren’t in the game (then uploading them to the community for others to use) than actually “playing” the wrestling part of the game.
That’s a huge scene, though. People buy the game mostly to do that. In fact I know one guy who makes wrestlers (complete with movesets– not just the visual elements) and then watches the AI play against another AI to see how well he’s managed to capture a real person. Then he tweaks, and he tweaks, until he thinks it’s perfect.
People wait in online forums and on Twitter begging for him to finish his next creation.
This is a rather standard form of gamer creation, one that isn’t hacking, isn’t unintended. It’s a perfect way of looking where design could be going. Imagine if major fighting game franchises could allow players to design DLC characters for their games? Imagine the added value. There are already 100s of wrestlers in 2K18 (vs. the 30-or-so fighters in most standard fighting games), but there will be thousands of good Create-a-Wrestlers (and hundreds of thousands of not-as-good ones) shared online.
Imagine what it could do for the life of a game like Mortal Kombat X if every fighting game fan could add their contributions to the potential player pool.