I’m just going to go ahead and say that we gamers are big, fat targets. (Apologies if you’re actually fat, don’t take it personally.)

Marketers love us. They’re as young, eager and wide-eyed as most of us gamers. Chances are, they’re gamers themselves. And they know what we want.

The problem is that gamers want it all. We want everything - the highest definition, the clearest sound, the most engrossing storyline, and the most powerful hardware.

So what do marketers do? They throw everything at us.

For instance, take a look at game retailers.

Look at the colours and the pretty lights. Look at the flash deck that’s churning out offer after offer. I see at least 7 different genres of games on the home page, and that’s before the fold.

Everything is trying to get my attention. My eyes don’t have a chance to focus on something in particular, because another little animation of Forza 3 is looping away at the top of the screen.

Gaming news sites are much the same. The content itself on IGN is drowned out by the deafening roar of the iPod Touch flash ad. An ad for the movie The Final Destination gets more space than the handful of headlines that Gamespot has to offer.

There’s no thought given to the content that’s presented to us. There’s no Information Architecture going on here. It’s just a mind dump, a stomach upheaval of content that is loosely grouped together. It’s a page full of animations, filled with links that have no obvious destination and that take you to single landing pages with little to no flow.

So what should game site designers do?

Nothing, most likely. We’ve all been programmed to work in that way. We’re gamers - we want it all, and marketers know that, so they throw the proverbial kitchen sink at us. Even if we don’t, we scan for what interests us, and anything that doesn’t catch our fancy gets cast aside. No biggie - someone else will pick up on it. There are a lot of gamers out there, after all.

And once we get our information, whether it be the score on a review, or the price for the latest and greatest title to hit the shelves, we move on. We close the tab and search for other reviews, or we click “Buy Now”, submit our CC details and get on with our lives.

Some may consider it evil; I see it as a necessary evil.

I’ve been thinking about this and on the state of our current web site at sogc.com.au. Comparatively speaking, there’s not a lot going on there. We used to have some nice big title graphics, sponsor logos, the lot. Now it’s a lot more…austere.

As much as I hate it, I think we need to start acting more like everyone else. Minimalist design belongs in the design studio. Let’s add some flash up in this motherfucker.