Picture a movie trailer that shows only the first scene of the film. The camera pans across a large number of clocks, a teenager enters and causes a giant speaker to explode with a pluck of his guitar. End trailer. Are you convinced yet? Excited to see Back to the Future?
Of course not. You still don't know anything about the film. You have no idea why you should care about it. You've seen nothing of its characters or plot, or of time-travelling DeLoreans.
So why are most game demos so similar to this hyperbolic example? You get the first level, maybe the one after, and maybe a tutorial. At most. That's the best they can muster to represent a game they've spent years making, and that they're now trying to convince you to spend money on.
Is it any wonder some gamers say they have to pirate a game just to find out if it's good or not?
Like music videos, movie trailers have become an artform unto themselves. They're carefully edited to provide an overview of a film without ruining its surprises, and to touch upon everything cool and interesting that happens in it in the most exciting way possible.
Go watch the trailer for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and marvel at its accelerating pace, its escalating sense of threat, and its rousing, tailored John Williams score. It's better than the film it's advertising.
In contrast, game demos will never tell you that a great game is great. They will, at most, assure you that a great game is at least average. Often they will convince you that a great game is a slog through monotonous, lifeless levels of crushing tedium.
Sometimes demos don't even include proper levels, instead containing only the tutorial. "Welcome to an RTS. You select the troops by lassoing them with the left mouse button. Congratulations! You are the best I've ever seen at left-mouse-button lassoing. Please pay £35 to continue playing."
Demos ought to be vignettes of awesome. They ought to be mixtapes of incredible. They ought to be singles we give to friends to convince them to get the album. They ought to be pamphlets we give to non-gamers to convince them to try games.
They ought to be designed to work within the limitations of the format, to shout as loudly as possible: this is why I'm special.
Some people already realise this. Valve got it right with Half-Life: Uplink, Half-Life's demo which appropriated content from its progenitor into the equivalent of a highlight reel. A highlight level, if you will, featuring scripted sequences, zombie fights, and with hints of a giant Garg showdown to come. Monolith did the same thing for FEAR.
These demos gave you a genuine taste of their respective games - and without spoiling any particular level in the process.
Every other medium is criticised for 'one sheet' thinking. We're told producers greenlight movies based on the poster, not the script. But games have completely the opposite problem: a stubborn unwillingness to condense themselves into communicable chunks. So we need to hold developers to higher standards. As you're playing the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 demo on the PC Gamer coverdisc (you do use the disc for demos, right?), take note of its 1.77Gb filesize. Is that demo worth the space? Is it special?
