Great Expectations, Part Eleven: Tone

By Sanya Weathers

Without releasing a single screenshot, feature list, or press release, you can let your future customers know what kind of product to expect, just by the way you interact on your website, social media hubs, and forums.

A freewheeling style that allows for plenty of trash talk with no one taking it personally works well for a PVP game. A positive, sunny outlook signals cheery and casual content. Strict and stiff moderation (with a streak of black humor) can create a civilian’s idea of a military atmosphere. Precise semantics lends itself well to a game that is all about lore and storytelling. These are obviously broad brushstrokes, black and white descriptions where your tone needs to be more gray, but you have the idea.

The key to all this is that it can’t come across as calculated, and you can’t think of it as manipulation even inside your own head. Players are exquisitely sensitive to subtext, and if you think of your different tones and voices as manipulation, they will know – and they will resent it. Consider this: You probably behave differently for different people in your life. Around friends, you might swear like a sailor, but in front of elderly relatives, “dang” is as far as you go. Your coworkers know you’re a funny guy, but they don’t know about the tattoos. Okay, at a gaming company, they know about your tattoos, but substitute whatever you like. Are you manipulating one group? Lying to one set of people? No. You’re modifying your behavior in order to have the best possible relationships with everyone.

Your customers are just one more group of people in your life, and you adjust your style in order to have the best possible relationship with the people most likely to be around for years.