Crowdgaming: The Role of Crowdsourcing in the Video Games Industry by Francesco Ursino

Author:Francesco Ursino
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Published: 2016-02-29T22:00:00+00:00

When the aim of a campaign is to promote a game, or film about a video game, or even a book focused on this topic, the most important question for a backer seems to be: “How is it?” In these cases, the type of product is clear, and there is not so much to say. A video game is a video game, and so in this type of artistic creations, the focus goes on “how” the game/movie/book delivers its message (through its genre, gameplay, style, and thousands of other variables). However, when a potential backer goes on Indiegogo or Kickstarter and finds out that Oculus Rift is “the first truly immersive virtual reality headset for video games,” the first question to ask seems to be: “What the heck is this thing?” In our case, Oculus Rift is a headset that allows living virtual reality experiences, in which the movements of heads and hands are translated into a digital environment. The device went through a Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $ 2 million, and it ended with the acquisition of Oculus VR, the developer of the device, by Facebook. We are not interested in other aspects of the development of this product, here: what is important for our analysis is the type of video that Oculus VR choose to propose to its future backers.

The video was a bit more than 4 minutes long, like the one we saw on the Indie Game: The Movie project. Nevertheless, its nature was different. It is shot in a professional way too, but the communication was based on two goals: let the people know what Oculus Rift was, and who was making it. The first person participating in the video was Palmer Luckey - founder of Oculus VR: in the first seconds of the video, it was possible to catch Luckey’s background and his passion for games and technology, which started at his parents’ house in Long Beach, California. This first sequence had the aim to create a bond between Luckey, and the mass of enthusiasts that have been dreaming of these types of devices since they were children; perhaps, some of them tried one of these products, like the Virtual Boy of Nintendo, commercialized in 1995. The narrative is clear: a boy wants to go over the traditional experience given by video games and start to craft and experiment in his parent’s garage. The rest of the trailer continued with an alternation between images of the device, and interviews of other testimonials. Among these, the figure of John Carmack, the creator of massive successes like Doom and Quake, represented a sort of endorsement, a clear signal to the players who could have trust Luckey, because even Carmack himself seemed to believe in the project.

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