It's not what they need to know. It's what they need to
care.
Lemme tell you a story about my mom.
My family grew up watching college basketball, which everyone in Kentucky knows is the only sport the good Lord intended his creation to play. But opposite the madness of March, some people dabble in watching football.
Not my mom. Football was "too complicated" for her. All the downs and positions, sometimes they carry the ball and sometimes they kick it, different players for offense and defense? The core rules to american football might be 10x more simple than any esport, but it's still 10x more complex than other traditional sports. All this sportsball nonsense got a polite no-thanks from my mother.
American football, as observed by my mother.
The notion that my mom was incapable of understanding football could not be further from the truth. This was a woman with a master's, a successful career in banking, and encyclopedic knowledge of everything about tennis you could ever ask. But the look on her face when football was on the screen was the same look when I'd try to get her to play Catan: A polite laugh followed by a joke that she'd never understand it.
To be fair, the Catan rulebook is a whopping 7th grade reading level.
It's the same look I see on a kid's face when I'm trying to teach him some basic math concept, or my face when my fiancée tries to show me a new recipe, or the face of
literally anyone seeing any advertisement.
Advertisers don't worry about people not
understanding their ad. They want your attention, your memory, your focus. People in marketing will sacrifice kittens to Cthulhu if means getting your brain to follow along for just five seconds. And they really do operate on
seconds--they know in most mediums they have only about 3-5 seconds to make an impression, and past that the audience is a lost cause. (An increasing number of video ad platforms are starting to cap ads at 6 seconds, because the data clearly shows that time past that is useless for almost all ads.)
You think 6 seconds is a short time? That's enough for THREE of these.
But then one day, something happened that made my mother, whose interests are primarily taxes, cats, and fresh produce, to
start watching football.
Did the commentary or coverage change? Nope. Did the rules stop being "so complicated"? Good one.
But my sister
had started college at Ole Miss.
Their mascot had to be changed in 2010 to make sure no one would somehow mistake Mississippi as racist.
It is my understanding that the only departments at Ole Miss are Football, Greek Life, and Confederate Flag Weaving--and all students are required to triple major. And while my supportive mother didn't adopt freshman hazing or casual racism, she sure did take to the gridiron.
Suddenly she could not only tell me the rules of football, but also the stats and academic probation status of every starting player. She'd fill me in on what Player A said about Player B on Twitter, and I don't think she knows what Twitter
is. And, most importantly, she could point out which boy on the field was in my sister's math class and kept asking her out.
The moment my mom had a reason to
care, she went from a football luddite to a regular caller on The Paul Finebaum Show.
Maybe it was Paul's relentless 4-hour coverage of the SEC that hooked my mom, but I doubt it.
We are not conspiring about how to make people who want to watch Smash do it. (That's trivial!) We are conspiring about how to make people who don't want to watch Smash do it. Which is hard, but surely no harder than getting my mother excited about chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
Random Joe isn't going to click a Smash stream and try to figure out who Nairo is. Only
Decidedly-Non-Random Joe does that. Random Joe is going to see a Smash stream and decide in 3-5 seconds if they are going to keep watching or go back to Fortnite.
At least the deck
is stacked in our favor. We've got eye-catching Nintendo characters. We've got ever-improving casters. And the game is just inherently
great to spectate, heads and shoulders above
literally every other video game. (Single screen action, clear success states, minimal visual noise, implicit "I like Yoshi" character-based tribal affiliation, the list goes on)
I have played this game for 9 years and have no idea what is going on here. We take for granted how clear Smash is.
The bottom line is, it doesn't matter how easy it is to figure out that Nario is playing the skinny blue chick. (Because you're right, it's super easy.) The trick is getting an uninterested viewer to figure it out
subconsciously before his 3-5 seconds are up, and that requires a broadcasting culture focused professionally around that objective--rather than memes.
The audience for any growth-oriented media is
always people just tuning in, not Twitch chat.
confirmed for Hyrule saga.
