Are you human being who sometimes must describe things to other people to convince them to give you money to feed your children and/or dangerous addiction to high-end Lego castles?
Are these things which you are describing computer games on a digital storefront such as, to grab a random example, Valve Corporation's STEAM?
Well then, I have a beautiful, simple formula to make your description-writing life much easier. You should care, because I actually spent a couple of years as a subcontractor working on Valve Corporation's Steam storefront, and this was a formula that my team and I came up with to help smaller game developers create better, more discoverable store pages for their games.
You see, in the before times, in the long long ago –
Actually, before we get into that, here's the formula:
Who am I?
What's my goal?
How do I do it?
Or, as I like to think of it, RGG: Role, Goal, Gameplay.
You can describe these things in basically any order, but you should describe all of them, and you should describe them quickly and interestingly. You are now empowered to write store copy that is better than 95% of your competition.
Want to know more? Well, in that case –
AHEM.
Amongst the many bizarre detours of my career,* I spent a couple of years working as a subcontractor on the Steam storefront. We did a whole bunch of stuff (mostly revolving around the Steam Labs Experiments), but one of the big ones was running the big developer survey: a project designed to communicate (anonymously) game developers' thoughts and concerns to the monolithic storefront which held their tiny, delicate lives in its hands.
*(Other highlights include disposing of cannibalized rats, selling Game Maker games burned onto CDs like a carnival barker, and sometimes eating out of garbage cans.)
As it turned out, developers' thoughts mostly boiled down to NO ONE CAN FIND MY GAME.
You see, at that particular moment in time, the big pressing issue on developers' minds was discoverability: the Steam sluice gates had only recently opened, the once spacious and curated streets were now flooded with tens of thousands of titles, and all of the small-scale developers who had previously occupied comfortably middle-class positions felt completely lost.
And so, we set about creating a series of experiments and tools to make games more discoverable on Steam.
We did a lot of things (including the Categories browsing menu that is still on the Steam front page to this day) and discovered all kinds of crazy stuff, but one of the simplest things was this:
A stunning number of developers just weren't describing their games.
You know, in the store description.
They were describing all sorts of other things, but very rarely what their game actually was from a gameplay perspective. (Pro tip: gameplay is what the player does.)
It was genuinely shocking to see how many developers spent all of the time to lovingly craft an entire game and then threw it onto the store with a description like:
Kyro isn't your ordinary highschooler. When the sun goes down, Lord Chaos reigns! Only the legendary PhaseMaster can stand against him! With a band of colorful friends at her side, she fights to save Chocotown!
Or occasionally:
Roses fall in the Midsummer of youth, and a girl must make her choice. Who will you be in the fragments of the future?
Now, these may be (debatably) interesting chunks of emotional prose. (Heck, hand me a bongo drum and a soul patch, and I'll perform them as a bit of beat poetry.)
The problem is that players don't care.
People have to know what your game is in order to decide if they want to play it or not. It's in your interest to tell them.
The number one thing that players want to learn when looking at a store page is WHAT GAME GENRE IS THIS? Until you tell them what it is, they really don't want to see anything else.
The emotion being evoked, the storyline, the characters – all of that comes second to game genre.
It's not that these things can't be selling points. They are, in fact, what sets you apart from other games in the same genre. BUT, players only care once game genre is established.
Any description that doesn't tell players what kind of game they're going to play is a description that players skip over. (Or, you know, click past to find a more communicative game.) If we were selling automobiles, this would be like describing the cordovan leather seats and 2000 W cigarette lighter without telling people that the vehicle is, in fact, a unicycle. No amount of leather and cigarette-lighter-wattage is going to convince a soccer dad who needs to transport his 8 children between their various blood sports to purchase a unicycle. In fact, he will be upset that you wasted his time.
If you want to see this in action, just watch somebody browsing Steam during one of the gigantic sales – they are absolutely ruthless. There's a bajillion things competing for their hard-earned money dollars, and their attention is going to go to the thing that doesn't waste their time.
So, as part of the tools that we were creating to help developers make their games more discoverable, we came up with a simple fill-in-the-blank formula to help developers come up with short, punchy descriptions that informed players while also conveying the other selling points that made their games unique:
Who am I? (What role the player will play, what wish fulfillment or power fantasy they get to live out, etc.)
What's my goal? (Whatever the player is ultimately working towards. This is the "why should I care?" part of the equation.)
How do I do it? (What genre the game is, what gameplay actions the player will take, what special mechanics there will be, etc.)
Role, Goal, and Gameplay. It's really simple, and it works for 95% of the games that are being put on Steam.
It's really flexible: you can do this all in one sentence, break it up into punchy bullet points, mix around the order to be more exciting, make the role explicit or implied, etc. Just check those boxes: role, goal, and gameplay.
To go back to our strawman examples from before:
Date your high school classmates, then weild them as guns and blast your way across a procedurally-generated side-scrolling 90s world in this Rogulike Dating Sim mash up! Only you can kill the Lord of Chaos, pass Algebra II, and become homecoming queen!
(That's right, they were describing the same game! Mind blown.)
And there you have it. You are now empowered to write informative Steam store descriptions that players might actually glance at for .27 seconds.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go trade my car in for something with better leather grain and improved cigarette-lighter-wattage. The ability to start on the first try would also be nice, but that's really a secondary concern.
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