There's something I want every company who advertises online to try, and I'm concerned especially, as is my wont, with computer game designers. From now on, I want you to carry out all of your intra- and inter-organizational communication via Tumblr-style tiles, or animated banner ads, or youtube videos with hammy narration and bombastic Hollywood movie preview soundtracks. All of it. No more helpful flowcharts, no more concise and clearly explicative memoranda, no more easy-on-the-eyes bulleted lists with neatly nested annotations, no more calendars delineating who works when and on what task. I want you to try getting all your information via flashy, endless Tumblr jumbles. Since you seem to think it an appropriate means of conveying information about your product, since you think it's good enough for your customers, then it must also be good enough for your workspace.
But if it's not good enough for you to be treated like an idiot, inundated with flash instead of substance, glitz instead of information, then describe your product!
List your system requirements.
List the genres your product might fit.
List gameplay options.
List your factions.
List your classes.
List your weapons.
List your map sizes and terrain types.
List your monster types.
List your skill trees.
List everything! In plain text! You are not transcendent artistes birthing wonders beyond mortal speech. You're a bunch of semiliterate code-monkeys, technicians with maybe one or two decent ideas in your heads worth paying for. Express those ideas clearly and succinctly, without the industrial light and magic. In order to get information about your product, I should not have to glean every single scrap of useful info out of half an hour's video of some degenerate nasal-voiced dweeb slobbering all over the microphone and fumbling at building hype. Provide clear information. Document your product's features just like you're supposed to document your code.*
Note, I'm not (just) complaining about the existence of advertising. I'm pissed off that for over a decade now it's been impossible to find any official information, about any product but especially games, outside of advertisements. Where are the fact sheets? In the days when games still came in cardboard boxes, companies grudgingly compiled lists of features if for no other reason than to have something that could fit on a game box. Unlimited broadband has transmuted quick-reference cards into tedious animated, narrated, triple-pixelated fudge ripples for only $9.99 for a limited time in the cash shop 'til you drop loot don't scoot before you get the boot and what was I talking about again? Oh yeah: obfuscation.
Just tell me what you're selling, and do away with that profligate poseur and cheat, the youtube narcissist. He never will be missed. They'll none of them be missed.
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*Though, from some of the complaints I've been hearing about recent games, documenting code has gone out of style as well.
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