narrowing audiences by catering to them.

I was recently attempting to explain why I don't play many videogames to Angus McQuarrie, a friend of mine who is an avid gamer, and on the cusp of starting out in that industry. His assumption was half right, that I don't play more 'complex' (read, non-nintendo) games because I don't get any gratification from them in the short term.

The reason behind this, though, is that the majority of blockbuster videogames are absolutely incomprehensible to me, in terms of control scheme, and game dynamics. I have pretty good reflexes, and I have an excellent academic understanding of different game dynamics, but I am useless at playing a game aimed at the 'hardcore gamer' well enough to enjoy it. Whenever I attempt to play Halo, or GTA, I get killed a dozen times in the first ten minutes, and then think to myself 'There are things I can do that I will actually enjoy' and go off in search of one of those things.

The game is designed with a curve that appeals to the people the game is marketed to. This is the fairly large segment of people, they are the ones who give the aforementioned game franchises opening weekend tallies that embarrass the biggest blockbuster films. But I, and many others, don't fit into it.

I don't speak videogame. Which is fine, except that the games which become pop culture touchstones are entirely inaccessible to me - I can't draw on past experiences, skills developed in previous iterations, and understanding of how to solve a specific problem with the controls that an avid gamer would know intuitively at this point. This is because gaming has, in part, evolved to meet the need of that specific subset of hardcore gamer - to keep them engaged, the references and experiences they have developed needed to be built upon.

When I try to play a game aimed at the hardcore gamer, it's as though I decided Finnegan's Wake would be an excellent follow up to the initial reading experience of Goodnight Moon.

Comics (the mainstream superhero market) has the same problem. The people who buy comics now are the same ones who were buying them 5 years ago. And, to cater to those consumers, continuity is an appalling mess for anyone not intimately familiar with the characters and history, impossible to delve in to. Even ignoring the tendency for Marvel and DC to directly reference events from the mid 80s, certain that the readership will understand, most flagship titles are now written based on the assumption that the reader at least superficially follows another 5 or more titles, within that company alone.

Both of these markets, the hardcore gamer, and the hardcore comic reader, have inherent limits to their size. Consumers will age, lose interest, decide to move on, and the product is not accessible to a larger group of potential new consumers.

The solution to this problem is to challenge and engage people by creating new experiences, not just further refining old ones, increasing the complexity to flatter those who have developed insider status. Nintendo does this, after falling behind in an attempt to compete by refining it's old experiences, by stepping outside of the conventional control scheme. Many comics publishers are doing the same, creating new worlds and content that doesn't re-hash the same tropes and characters as the mainstream successes.

The problem is, that this process of refining and focusing on a mainstream, hardcore consumers in both mediums has gone on for a long time. Long enough that the scope of the medium is conflated with the mainstream successes. It's very difficult to avoid - when I say comics, you think superheroes, and when I say videogames, you think sci-fi, fantasy, or crime - based characters completing tasks in search of reward or advancement. And of course, when the mainstream products all inhabit that genre-space, all media attention further supports that bias.

In short, developing a relationship with your core audience is great, but the potential fallout is altering your product to the point where it will not appeal to anyone else. If you can't continue a relationship with your current followers, without driving other potential customers away, you're doing something wrong on a very basic level.

compartmentalization as failure.

Until recently, I was a strong advocate of compartmentalization in most communication. Having a separate team work on each of many fronts does, in principle, result in a finished product that has been reviewed by several teams, each one with specific expertise in the area they are responsible for.

I think the new media landscape, especially for corporate communications / PR / advertising / marketing, makes compartmentalization a dangerous, and arguably foolish option.

I’m hereby advocating a completely integrated communication system, one team, involving experience in internal communications, marketing, advertising, and public relations. I think, in the very near future, the amount of crossover necessary to do any of these things well, will make each role complementary, at the least.

Compartmentalization only makes sense if there are multiple, separate aspects to an operation. Communication no longer works that way, thanks in a large part to the massive internet community that is watching for anything suspicious or sinister. Even with the best oversight, multiple companies means multiple messages. Even assuming you manage to create a brief so comprehensive that the actual content is consistent, you will still get McLuhaned.

McLuhaned – When consistent ideas and messaging come across as not-at-all consistent, do to a difference in medium. (A corollary of ‘The Medium is the Message’)

The previous assumption is based on my observation that PR, Marketing, and Advertising each have a different vernacular, with different conventions. They are each functionally a medium, independent of which media they are disseminated through.

Beyond this, internal and external communication need to be in sync. The new reality is that regardless of how many NDA’s you force on your workers, things WILL get leaked, emails WILL get addressed to the wrong people, and the internal and the external WILL get compared. If they don’t line up, you lose trust on every front. Obviously, that’s unacceptable.

I’m hereby claiming this as Crowley’s first rule of modern communication – All that when compared, portrays an entity in a negative light, will eventually be compared. The way the internet works is to guarantee that someone is always watching. Be ready to work with that.

I guess the core point is that transparency is mandatory. And even a transparent company will eventually look as though it’s hiding something if communication is compartmentalized, as (mentioned before) compartmentalization breeds inconsistencies.

Speaking of transparency, I suppose I should finish what I started with ‘Crowley’s first rule’.

I’m Jon Crowley. Nice to meet you.