A Game Concept - Trailers, Expectations, and Inspiration
I think there's something fundamentally weird about how game trailers will utterly misrepresent the product in order to sell a vibe, and we just accept it as part of the bargain. As long as the trailer at some point puts a little "not gameplay" caption in 10pt text somewhere, they're basically in the clear, especially if they finish the trailer with like 10s of actual gameplay. In that case it was basically a cutscene, which is technically part of the game you'd be buying.
A really annoying version of this is this kind of bait-and-switch trailer, where they'll show what appears to be an interesting setting or character or game concept, then at the end they pull out an assault rifle and start jumping around building wooden shacks because oh you didn't know? It's Fortnite again.
One of these that really stuck with me was a trailer I saw a few years ago, that had a necromancer character finding a body, doing some ritual, and taking skull as some kind of ritual object. While this is happening, a voiceover is grimly talking about the dark path and sacrifices of this magic, that to know these secrets you accept being shunned and feared - and they show this with a family cowering into their home as the character walks past.
My mind starts buzzing with this idea - this is a cool premise surely, a game where we can perhaps do some dark rituals that give us deep knowledge about the nature of the cosmos, but in doing so distance ourselves from society. Perhaps in taking this skull we can unlock new powers by tying up the victim's loose ends in a kind of Quantum Leap but for corpses, jumping from story to story and learning the dark secrets of a society while righting its wrongs despite looking incredibly wrong ourselves. Maybe there's even some kind of moral trade-off involved - letting the spirits move on or harvesting them at their fullest - that'd be exciting and distinct! To even start down the path of righting these wrongs we have to desecrate a corpse so it sets up some really interesting and unusual stakes.
Anyway if you keep up with the whole video game trailer release hype cycles, you probably already recognised that trailer as what it was - not the reveal of a new dark narrative spirit whisperer game, but basically a hype trailer for the Necromancer character in the (at that time unreleased) Diablo 4.
It was 100% flavour. None of what appeared in that part of the trailer is in the game in any meaningful way - you won't be dealing with social ostracisation, you don't unveil any particular dark truth about the univers, you even come to the adventure pre-skulled.
I'm not saying that Diablo 4 needed to have a social consequence system or a corpse-flaying minigame, but I do feel that it's a bit weak to have a whole theme of the character trailer be about being shunned, then in game you get to the major city all corpsed up and nobody particularly gives a shit - you are so visibly doing some dark bullshit and vendors are just like "yeah I can sharpen a scythe no problem." It's all so procedural and presumed that all of the character design is reduced to pure flavour.
My partner and I spend a lot of our time talking about videogames, and especially about Themes and Throughlines - where the writer's intent and intentionality become design and mechanics.
She's been doing a lot of writing in the last couple of years and is very good at it, and I have a very overinflated opinion of my ability to finish a project, so we've often discussed the idea of what kind of game we might make together. While my preference for my own writing would be something relatively breezy and low-narrative (because I balk at sincerely expressing myself), she'd be the writer and is very much into Themes and Throughlines and Arcs and Resolutions in a way that makes me think maybe my misreading of the Necromancer trailer would be a good project for us.
I think there's something fundamentally exciting in how the viewer can take in the aesthetic and thematic elements of a piece and synthesise something entirely new and distinct from it. This is pretty much the origin of fan-fiction, right? The most prolific fic communities always seem to be based on the least complete or satisfying source narratives - nothing motivates creativity like loving something but knowing it could be better.