Marketing Study: People pay attention to the stuff they want to learn.

A new study emerging from the Netherlands showed that the motive that drives a person to read an ad directly controls how they look at the ad. Well, this is once again kind of a "no duh" type of finding, but it leads in nice to interface design in games. What do people look at when they are looking at your game? Depending on where the gameplay and the current goals of the player, they might be looking at things you put little or no effort in to.

For example, when I am in combat while playing World of Warcraft, I don't look at my avatar, I look at my ability buttons. I could care less how cool my guy looks as he's beating down that Murlock, I'm looking at the refresh timer so I can launch my next special attack. If I'm playing alone, I may look at my health bar, but, mostly, it's all about the refresh bar. How much time did they put in to that refresh bar as opposed to the dozens of animations that are going on in a typical combat "dance"?

The same thing might happen if I enter a town. What am I looking for in a town? I'm looking for places to shop and sell. How do I know where stuff is? The signs on the buildings. As I walk through a town, I'm not looking at the cool architecture, I'm looking for information to tell me where I need to go.

When making games, be mindful not only of how pretty stuff is (which is important in this day and age), but what the player is actually looking for when he enters a scene. Maybe you're putting too much effort into the wrong thing.

Best comic I bought this week (BCIBTW)

I think I need a better name for this feature. I want it to say "out of the few comics I bought this week, I liked this one best. There may be better out there, but I didn't buy it."

Well, I'll figure it out.

This week, we have a tie! Once again, the comics this week were sorta lackluster. The two titles that managed to pull ahead were: The new Black Adam book, and Stormwatch: PHD.

Black Adam turned into, basically, a version of Vandal Savage in this issue where he tries to bring his dead wife, Isis, back to life. Using minions as meat shields and just meat (eww), he powered his way through this comic on sheer willpower and fierce determination. The comic follows the tradition of 52 in making the reader respect the ferocious passion of Teth Adam while still maintaining the fact that he is hugely unlikable as a person. This kind of juggling act makes the comic like a car wreck you can't help but watch: curious, but repulsed at the same time.

Stormwatch: PHD is always pretty excellent. The best part of the book is the relationship between the cast members. In this issue, our heroes try to solve a mystery, and get their butts handed to them when they finger the wrong supervillain. The dialog and the mystery keep the story flowing, giving us more looks into the souls of each of these characters, while ramping up the tension as they close in on their (innocent) subject.

Other comics I bought were this week's Annihilation selection: Nova and The Wraith. Both of these books felt filler-ish, with Nova getting assimilated by the borg-like Phalanx and the Wraith being tortured by the already-assimilated Ronan the Accuser. Wraith isn't really doing it for me. He's like a superhero I would have designed when I was 15. Hopefully, 15 year olds are reading this book and really liking this character. Me? I say "meh".

This issue was particularly bad, as it featured the Wraith's origin story. Basically, its a version of Conan's, from the movie: child witnesses his family and friends murdered, gets away only to get stuck in a place that is essentially hell, where self-infliction of pain is the norm as the residents of the place gain immortality, but also a kind of numbness that makes them want to hurt themselves in order to feel something. Anyway, everyone there goes insane except our hero, whose thirst for vengeance allows him to maintain his grip and search out his parent's killers. Ok, maybe the self-inflicted pain part kinda diverges from the "slave boy who grows big muscles" part of the Conan flick, but essentially, its the same, as the years of torture make the kid stronger than his foes.

The latest issue of Green Lantern also came out. I was right in my previous post: Johns is making each member of the Uber Sinestro team into a boss monster. Nothing was revealed, nothing got done in this issue except killing Jack Chance, who was basically the Green Lantern version of the Wraith. Oh, the irony. Oh, and we found out that Parallax kills...through psychoanalysis! Which is also funny because that's what the JLA had to use to defeat Kid Amazo in the end of this lame arc set in JLA classified.

Lots of irony this week. Maybe I should come out with the Iron Award!

Branding makes the food taste better

This is an interesting study: a taste test given to a bunch of 3-5 year old kids found that they find the food from McDonald's tastes better when they know its from McDonalds than when they think its from somewhere else. The children were given two identical foods: chicken mcnuggets, fries, etc. One set was in a McDonald's branded container, and one in a plain wrapper. Overwhelmingly, the kids thought the food in the branded container tasted better. There are also other interesting factoids, such as the kids with more TVs and/or who ate at McDonald's regularly were more likely to think the branded food tasted better.

I think this proves, basically, that preschoolers really don't know what they like.

I'm sure some politician out there is going "Why can't 3-5 year olds be allowed to vote!"

Heh.

Anyway, the reason I blog this is to show the strength of licenses. Even after we grow up and develop a certain jadedness to marketing, we can never quite get away from having more trust in brands we are familiar with, even if there's no real reason to trust them over something that is unfamiliar. Trust is an important part of the buying process: the buyer has to trust that he'll be entertained by a game before he'll purchase it. A license or a brand that the buyer trusts to be entertaining has more likelyhood of being bought than an unknown.