May 2007

The New York Times has a strong story on the marketing strategy behind the impending release of Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth installment in the long-running Die Hard series, starring Bruce Willis:

Tom Rothman, a co-chairman of Fox, said the studio consciously took advantage of the summertime action-movie gap in its decision to release its fourth Die Hard on June 27, five days after Universal’s Evan Almighty and a week before Transformers, from Paramount and DreamWorks. A surfeit of fantasy and computer-generated visual effects has left a hunger in the audience for real things, Mr. Rothman added. Over the next few weeks Fox will tease that perceived appetite with a marketing campaign that promotes John McClane with the words: No mask. No cape. No problem.

Of course, the studios invariably “jockey for position” with respect to release date and genre, but this campaign marks a rarer case of more directly positioning a film against its competition. Nicely done.

Disclaimer: I often do work for 20th Century Fox, but I wasn’t involved in this particular promotion.

I’m a lifelong Lakers fan, coming of age in the Showtime era of Earvin “Magic” Johnson, James “Big Game James ” Worthy, and Kareem “Cap” Abdul-Jabbar. More recently I savored the Threepeat of Shaq and Kobe, but my favorite Laker player of all time is Robert “Big Shot Bob” Horry (a nickname he apparently dislikes).  I dig his style, the way he picks his spots during the course of a long season, and, of course, his uncanny ability to knock down a three-pointer when nothing else will do.

Now that the Lakers have fallen on hard times (short-lived, I hope), I’ve temporarily transferred my play-off loyalties to Horry’s new team, the San Antonio Spurs.  Imagine my outrage when Horry was universally branded the bad guy in Game 4 of the current Phoenix-San Antonio series!

In the interest of fairness, I feel about the Suns — who have now knocked the Lakers out of the play-offs two years in a row — like I felt about the 1980s Celtics.  They’re whiny cheaters … and an incredibly talented team who have redefined basketball.  In short, they’re the perfect arch-rivals.  Why couldn’t the Lakers have drafted Leandro Barbosa when we had the chance?

That being said, I think Nash is more to blame than Horry for the suspension of his teammates Stoudamire and Diaw and therefore for the Suns’ loss to San Antonio in last night’s Game 5.  Here’s my man Rob’s woefully under-reported account of the controversial foul, buried beneath the Phoenix reaction:

Meanwhile, Horry said he was an old school guy and that in his early years, his foul would have been no big deal. He said he bumped Nash when he realized he wouldn’t be able to get in front of him to draw an offensive foul. 

‘If it would have been anybody but Steve Nash, it probably wouldn’t have been two games,’ he said after the Spurs shootaround. ‘But you know Steve is a great player, MVP. He’s a focal point of the NBA now and they just have to protect their players.’

Horry said Nash over-dramatized the bump when he went flying into the scorer’s table.

‘I thought I’d just bump him a little bit,’ Horry said. ‘As you know, the great acting skills Steve has, when he hit the floor, then flopped and did ‘Oh, I’m dying here’ it happens. I really wasn’t trying to hurt him. I had no malicious intent to hurt Steve. I like Steve. He’s a good person.’

Horry already was a target for Phoenix fans. When he was with the Suns in 1997, he tossed a towel in the face of then-coach Danny Ainge.

Now Phoenix fans have changed Horry’s nickname from ‘Big Shot Rob’ to ‘Cheap Shot Rob.’

‘It doesn’t bother me,’ he said. ‘I was already hated here in Phoenix anyway, but the messed up thing is the boos were kind of disappearing. Damn, now I’ve got to start all over.’

Now if you watch the replay carefully, that’s exactly what happened — Nash was bumped into the scorer’s table, then he threw himself on his back to dramatize the foul.  But that doesn’t fit the “narrative”, does it?  The Suns are supposed to be the brave, scrappy underdogs, and the Spurs are known as the wily, boring old guard. The Nash side makes a better story, whether it’s “true” or not.

No, I don’t think Stoudamire and Diaw should have been suspended for violating the letter (rather than the spirit) of the “don’t leave the bench” law. But I also don’t think Robert Horry, of all people, should be branded a dirty player because of a Steve Nash flop.  If you ask me, the league should be looking for flops as well as dangerous play — Raja Bell got away with another acting job last night.

The bottom line is that the Suns are the story this year, and just about everyone would rather watch a Suns-Cavs final than a Spurs-Pistons match-up. Me, I can’t wait for Game 6 tomorrow!

A snippet from Will Wright’s keynote at South by Southwest Interactive:

Stories are really based on lot of properties. Language, imagination, but most important for me is empathy, the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of someone else on screen. Actors are emotional avatars. We can inhabit that person and feel what they’re feeling. Film deals with this rich emotional palate because they have actors. Games tend to appeal more to the reptilian brain, the basic instincts of fear and aggression.

But games have a different emotional palate, not that they don’t have an emotional palate. Pride and accomplishment, guilt, these things are felt in games, but are not felt in watching a movie. I once beat the hell out of my creatures in Black & White, I felt terribly guilty. I’ve never felt guilty watching a film.

The circuit in our brain that makes stories appealing to us is empathy. Whereas in games it’s more agency, the fact that I’m causing what’s going on on the screen. Movie: What’s going to happen next. Games: Can I accomplish this?

I’d definitely recommend you read the whole thing if you’re interested in the future of gaming.