The Myth of Representative Video Game Trailers

In the new special issue of the journal Kinephanos about the promotional context of video games, you can also find my own contribution about video game trailers. The article entitled Exploring the Myth of the Representative Trailer analyzes the widely spread notion of representativity of video game trailers, which often leads to dissapointment upon the release of a game.

Beyond dicsussing the origins of the video game trailer and its specificities, I present an empirical analysis of the reception of twelve trailers for eight mainstream games grounded in online dicussions on YouTube and three gaming news sites (Eurogamer.net, Kotaku, and Polygon). The fidings show different approches to trailer watching from information-driven perspective, which highlight the paratextual role of a trailer, to more cinematic ones, which appreciate the self-contained entertainment value of a video game trailer. Nonetheless, trailers are in many cases judged based on their perceived representativity. This means that trailers that are more detached from a given game, for example by not employing gameplay footage, are often criticized by their lack of direct (indexical) representational relationship. Even the knowledge about recent cases of misleading trailers does not stop viewers from basing their expectaions of a video game and its features purely on paratextual information. Notably, some video game fans believe that they are able to see through marketing ploys and accurately predict how the game is going to play like once it is released.

One of the analyzed trailers is the CGI commercial for BioShock Infinite, which shows a rather non-canonical narrative sequence from the fictional world of the game. For its departure from the source material, it has been criticized by many viewers. The main reasons was the (perceived) lack of representativity, which is also explicitly communicated by the trailer through its footage disclaimer.

Paratextuality in Video Game Culture - Dissertation

My recently defended PhD thesis provides a thorough update of video game paratextuality based on Genette's original framework. In the opening chapters, I review the current research on paratexts in game studies, media studies, literary theory, and film and television studies, including the highly influential redefinitions by Mia Consalvo and Jonathan Gray. I argue that the current state of paratextual research is often misleading. In many notable cases, scholars shift away from the original meaning of the concept without fully acknowledging the consequences of such a departure on the applicability of Genette's framework. This applies both to the reduced scope proposed by Werner Wolf and to the expanded version, which can be found in works of Consalvo and Gray.

My redefinition of paratextuality is based on the underlying concept of transtextuality. In the context of other transtextual relationships such as metatextuality or hypertextuality (in Genettian sense of adaptation and transformation of an existing text), paratextuality is established as link between a text and the surrounding socio-historical reality. The updated definitions are accompanied by a methodological framework for analysis of paratextuality in video games. I provide conceptualizations of four main paratextual dimensions: (1) function, (2) authorship, (3) substantiality, and (4) spatiotemporality.

Dimension	Operationalization	Main Categories
Function	Categories	1. Referential	1a. Promotional
			1b. Legal
		2. Instructional
		3. Interfacial
		4. Corrective
		5. Revelatory
Authorship	Discrete categories	1. Authorial
		2. Worker’s
		3. Publisher’s
		4. Distributor’s
		5. Retailer’s
		6. Allographic
Substantiality	Categories	1. Semiotic
		2. Sensorial
		3. Technical/Material
		4. Factual/Cultural
Spatiotemporality	Two-dimensional continuum	x-axis – before and after launch y-axis – outside and inside the surface

Table 1: Overview of paratextual dimensions and their operationalization

The empirical part of the thesis focuses on video game trailers as an example of video game paratextuality. I analyze both the formal aspects of twelve selected trailers as well as their audience reception. The findings of the formal analysis show that video game trailers are to a certain extent paratextual as they address the socio-historical circumstances of video game production by informing about developers, publishers or release dates. At the same time, many trailers feature original content and possess an aesthetic quality which makes them autonomous in the sense of an artistic text in its own right. This ambiguous nature of video game trailers is also reflected in their reception. In the analyzed online discussions, viewers sometimes emphasize the paratextual capacity of trailers by focusing on their informational value. Others highlight their cinematic quality and praise (or criticize) them based on their own merits. Overall, the combined findings suggest that trailers are a complex phenomenon of video game culture and they cannot be easily classified as either paratext, or text. Instead, I propose to focus on individual traits and characteristics trailer by rejecting the reductive label of paratext, which is currently used to classify any video game epiphenomena.

You can read the full dissertation here: link

Trailer Literacy: Discussing Representativity in Video Game Trailers

Check out the Watching the Trailer blog for my thoughts on representativity in video game trailers: Trailer Literacy: Discussing Representativity in Video Game Trailers.

Apart from the recent controversy about No Man's Sky promotion (inluding the Advertising Standards Agency's investigation), it briefly covers another notable case of Killzone 2 and tackles the issues of video game trailer literacy, footage disclaimers and the socially constructed nature of representativity in video game promotion.


Watching the Trailer is an online hub for academic and industry-based research and opinion on the 'coming attraction' film trailer. It is run by Frederick Green, Keith M. Johnston and Ed Vollans. Its empirical work is focused on audience reception of trailers.

“Footage Not Representative”: Redefining Paratextuality for the Analysis of Official Communication in the Video Game Industry

The edited volume Contemporary Research on Intertextuality in Video Games was just published by IGI Global. Among the chapters which cover various transtextual and intertextual relationships, there is also my proposed update of the Genettian paratextual framework in the context of video game industry - “Footage Not Representative”: Redefining Paratextuality for the Analysis of Official Communication in the Video Game Industry.

In the chapter, I provide a critique of the current typology of texts based on relationships of so-called textual transcendence. I argue that the term paratext is reductive because it simplifies the complex relationships and connections between texts and socio-historical realities - paratexts often feature different types of textual relatioships and they should be seen as texts in their own right, not just as subordinate promotional materials. Thus, I propose a more nuanced inquiry into paratextuality that examines the consitituents of paratextual relationships (redefined as links or connections between a text and the socio-historical reality) without labeling whole parts of textual systems as paratexts. Apart from the redefinition, the chapter includes four case studies of video game paratextuality: trailers for Mass Effect Andromeda, infographics of Evolve, website presentation of the Borderlands series and patch notes for Destiny.  

Towards a Typology of Video Game Trailers in G|A|M|E

The Evolve 4v1 trailer is an example of the interface trailer.

My interest in video game trailers has turned into an article in G|A|M|E, the Italian Journal of Game Studies. The article is open-access and can be found here. I already attempted few trailer analyses at this blog back in 2011 (modern and retro), however they were written largely from an enthusiast's perspective. The article "Towards a typology of video game trailers: Between the ludic and the cinematic" is taking more academic approach. It first briefly reviews current research into video game trailers and surrounding industry and popular practice of trailer typologies and marketing and then proceeds to present my own theory-driven take on the typology of video game trailers introducing three different categories of trailers: performance, transmedia and interface trailers. Check the article and the whole new issue of the G|A|M|E journal about re-framing of video games in the light of cinema here.