Game Pitch Reflection

A couple of weeks ago me and my team had to deliver a game pitch to our class that painted in detail an exciting game that would sell itself.  Despite the good feeling I had after our pitch was over, watching a replay of it made me see the reality of our presentation which was quite frankly not that great.  I’m not saying it was bad, because it wasn’t, but it was a lot worse than I had thought.  There is a lot of room for improvement without a doubt and comparing our pitch to that of Tony’s(our lecturer) it’s clear for me to see how to.

I think one of the pitfalls for me and my fellow students other than lack of experience, is that we’re too busy trying to spice up our lines.  In an effort to make ourselves and our game sound good all we seem to achieve is a disconnect with our audience as our information is either too complicated or convoluted to understand.  Not only that but it takes much more effort to memorize all of our lines as well.

Watching Tony deliver his pitch made me think of one thing; simple.  By simplifying his pitch Tony ended up being more direct, humorous, easy to understand and most importantly kept my attention.  He didn’t garnish his sentences with hype words like a cheap salesman, he got in there with 2-3 sentences for each slide that was able to clearly identify what he was talking about and gave more detail then my groups entire presentation.

I had to ponder how Tony did this.  Because my group still delivered a lot of information, even more information than Tony, but how we did it was far inferior to Tony’s method.  The difference I’ve come to realize is that Tony told a story with his pitch.  Instead of just dumping a pile of information and hoping I would understand and compute it all, Tony instead was narrating his game in a way that allowed my imagination to build this game world of his, populating it with his ideas.  Instead of thinking of words and text and black and white I was instead thinking of an old grumpy tooth fairy sneaking around this colorful environment trying to find the right change to give to the sleeping child while still trying to make a buck and keep his tooth fairy pension.

So note to self, for all future presentations tell a story instead of a hyped vocabulary lesson.