Dev Take Tuesday - The Wheel and the Carousel

It’s been a while since my last Dev Take, and I’ve been watching several TV shows—some new, some old. None have led to any new insights as a game designer and developer (which likely says more about my frame of mind then the shows myself). Then I watched the season one finale of Mad Men. I’m way behind the crowd on this one, but I would always hear references to the show and decided to finally check it out.

In the final episode of the season, 60s ad man Don Draper and his team need to pitch an advertising angle for an innovation on the slide projector—a wheel on top that makes it easy to put together a slide show. The slide projector company (Kodak) wants to highlight the newness of the tech, even though they admit that a wheel actually reminds people of ancient technology. But Don takes an entirely different approach in what makes for a memorable scene.

Some of the poignancy of that scene involves what viewers know about Don’s personal life, but I won’t get into that here to avoid spoilers. Instead, I want to focus on Don Draper’s explanation of novelty and nostalgia in advertising and how that relates to game development and game marketing. Here’s a YouTube link to the scene in question, but I’ll also include a transcript below.

Well, technology is a glittering lure. But there's the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job, I was in-house at a fur company, with this old pro copywriter. Greek, named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is "new". Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of... calamine lotion. But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It's delicate... but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, "nostalgia" literally means, "the pain from an old wound". It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the Wheel. It's called a Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around, and back home again... to a place where we know we are loved. (Transcript courtesy of IMDB).

When we as developers create a new game, I think our first instinct is to focus on novelty—what are we doing different? What’s flashy about our game? And that flash can certainly be a powerful draw. We (at least most of us) don’t want to trot out a carbon copy of another game and call it our own. But I still think that game developers can—and should—try and capture that feeling of nostalgia, when appropriate. It’s tough. Some people might use pixel art or chip tune music and say that’s enough. Others might copy every last aspect of a beloved game of the past without modernizing the design for what current customers have grown accustomed to.

Photo by Lessa Clayton 

Nostalgia doesn’t mean perfect replication: our minds tend to smooth out the imperfections of even our most favorite memories and thus a perfect copy ends up betraying our personal memory of the past. Instead, I think nostalgia is about finding that ache that Don Draper describes. Like a carousel, the games we develop can take people on a journey that eventually brings them back to the familiar, brings them back home. A wheel, once connected to an axle, takes people forward or backward. But a carousel keeps people entertained. Attached. With Alkanaur we’re aiming for that carousel experience. We’re not using bold new technologies or designs. Nor are we simply pushing people backward to the exact experience they received in other tactics games. We want anyone who has played other games in the genre to face something new and intriguing before the carousel turns and brings them back to a familiar place they know and love. We believe that approach will be both a potent draw for potential customers as well as a powerful and fulfilling experience for our players.