Applied to Marketing! The Appeal of Content Deciphered from Games, Part 1

I think it's the best indoor entertainment. The visuals, story, music, and the interactivity of being able to play. Games, packed with all kinds of art and technology, provide a higher level of satisfaction and experience compared to any other entertainment in this world. Moreover, they are easily accessible.

And in the broader sense of content, games offer numerous hints. Titles that sell millions of copies, or series that cumulatively sell tens of millions. Analyzing them reveals a wealth of appeal, useful techniques, and lessons.

If you think about it carefully, you'll notice that successful games and content share many 'common elements'. This time, we will decipher the common elements that make content appealing and interesting, from the perspective of games.

Games, the strongest form of indoor entertainment, truly hold hints for leveling up all kinds of content. And those who create and disseminate their own content, in particular, will have much to learn.

Storytelling that evokes joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure

To get straight to the point, popular titles that sell millions of copies evoke joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure through their stories. Of course, it depends on the game genre. For content centered around gameplay, like puzzles or board games, a different approach is taken. However, many games with passionate fans feature overwhelmingly emotionally resonant story developments.

Let's apply this to content marketing using articles. When writing an article, try to appeal to human emotions: joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure. Articles that make people happy. Articles that provoke anger. Articles that appeal to sadness. Articles that evoke enjoyment. Content that appeals to emotions, in whatever form, has a strong impact.

Even with content that is merely information transfer, there are countless ways to stimulate joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure depending on how it's written. However, it's a double-edged sword; when appealing to negative emotions, please be careful as it might lead to a 'flame war' situation with a massive surge of bad rumors and anti-fans.

Human appeal of characters

Games with many fans have appealing characters, don't they? Whether they are enemies or allies, they are captivating. Even enemies might have cool lines or their way of thinking might garner empathy. For example, protagonists might be characters with such human qualities that you want to be like them, or want them as a girlfriend or boyfriend – characters that simply draw your heart in.

This also applies to other content; for example, blogs by authors whose personality or way of life is cool or respectable tend to attract passionate fans. Conversely, even if someone is a bit difficult personally, people are drawn to types who can sharply discern the essence of things, whose ideas resonate, or who meticulously analyze reality.

In any case, if there is something overwhelming, such as a way of thinking or human appeal, people will become fans and pick up the content that person disseminates.

There are annoying and scary enemies.

There are enemies. Something that must be defeated, no matter what. There are enemies that overwhelmingly provoke discomfort or make you feel, 'This guy is so annoying.' Or, there are targets to be defeated that, despite being cool and appealing, evoke an inexplicable sense of fear.

When such enemies are translated into reality, they are sometimes called 'necessary evils,' but including something to be overcome in content also tends to evoke empathy.

However, in the real world, there are almost no cases where someone is absolutely 'evil' or 'a bad guy.' For example, even if you designate a certain entity as evil, that entity might have its own side of the story or a different perspective, so you won't necessarily find a 'bad person' even if you try to.

So, what is evil in the real world? This can be replaced with 'problems that need to be improved'. Taking a problem that needs to be improved as a theme and figuring out how to solve it ultimately becomes the 'enemy' in a game or a certain story. There may be other elements that can be antagonists, but for now, let's call it a 'problem'.

Operability, the comfort of the playing experience.

There's a feeling of being comfortable playing, of being able to move freely. A smoothness like limbs, or rather, so smooth you forget you're even controlling it. This is important. For example, no matter how good a game is, if the operability is poor, it can be frustrating. You're pulled back to reality. Surprisingly, this is crucial.

If we replace this operability with websites and content, it becomes usability and readability. The placement of punctuation and line breaks. How to create text and designs that are easy to read to reduce the basic stress of reading. Surprisingly, this is important.

When you study how to write, you're told to 'revise 100 times'. And it's important to thoroughly pursue how users can enjoy content, use tools, and navigate websites without feeling stressed.

When creating long, vertical reading content like landing pages, there are often rules like 'keep each line within a certain number of characters'. In other words, the fundamental readability of text is important for smoothly conveying the quality of the content.

Summary

So, this time, I extracted four elements from games and considered their application to marketing and content. To summarize, they are as follows:

• Story that evokes emotions = Flow that stimulates emotions
• Appealing characters = Author's appeal
• Annoying and scary enemies = Problems
• Operability = Readability of text

I actually think this is quite accurate. In reality, content that goes viral often contains anger or sadness. Of course, joy and pleasure too. In fact, if you compare content that's currently viral with the points discussed here, you'll likely find many surprising matches.

And games hide many more charms. No game consists solely of story, enemies, characters, and operability. Games have various attractions like graphics and music. Elements that can be applied to various situations are hidden within games. Next time, I'd like to delve deeper into the appeal of games that can be repurposed for marketing.

Next article:
'Applicable to various content! Unraveling the appeal of content from games'