A few years ago, while on a gig covering the Electronic Entertainment Expo for IGN, one of our intrepid reporters snapped a shot of the exhibition floor the night before it opened. He only wanted a "before" picture of all the 30-foot installations, still covered in huge white sheets to keep the big reveals hidden, but he got a little more.

Just as celebutaunts get nip-slipped by the paparazzi's high-intensity flash brackets, his camera caught the logo of a previously unannounced game: New Super Mario Bros. Wii. The photo and the exclusive went up immediately. An hour later, both vanished from the site. Seems we got an angry call telling us either those images would disappear or all our scheduled interviews with top Nintendo personalities were canceled.

IGNORE THIS!

Fast forward to last week. Activision announced a second Call of Duty installment due in 2011 but refused to say it's Modern Warfare 3, or who's actually making it.

Why all the secrecy? And maybe you've noticed how cagey every single industry figure gets when talking about upcoming projects. Video games might position themselves like big-budget Hollywood movies, but their information lockdowns are right out of the tech industry playbook. For good reason.

Spoilers are big business. "Spies" are everywhere, eager to prove they know something you don't by telling you all about it. Marry that to a rabid Internet hungry for every scrap of information and rapid-firing opinions based solely on those scraps, and it doesn't take long for things to run completely off the rails.

In Nintendo's case, they just wanted to control the story. New Mario games are their equivalent of a new iPhone model...a major product with a narrative designed to sell to a loyal consumer base. They had a story -- a side-scrolling, four-player, reimagined classic -- that our early reveal didn't tell. Instead of details for fans to latch onto, we created speculation.

We analyzed this one frame for three days straight.

I remember the rampant, sometimes abusive speculation around whether Bungie planed to include the Assault Rifle or the Battle Rifle in Halo 3's loadout. That's just crazy, but it also put Bungie in something of a bind. If they hadn't included both, a serious fan backlash would've inevitably followed. High Voltage Software found that out the hard way when early reports claimed their Wii-specific shooter, The Conduit, supported WiiMotion Plus. When that fell through, fan outrage impacted them, their game, and their sales.

If nobody had ever mentioned WiiMotion Plus, those fans might've been disappointed but not viscerally angry.

It's an interesting dance. Publishers have to build momentum going into a major release, but they can't afford to say too much about an unfinished product. Feature sets in particular can be moving targets. I've seen great ideas cut from good games at the last minute for whatever reason...time, money, poor implementation, poor fit, you name it. Talking about them before they're set in stone just begs for derision and scorn. Not surprisingly, High Voltage is demonstrating far more messaging discipline for Conduit 2.

That said, the right speculation works wonders. Bungie likes to tease fans to fire up anticipation and get them talking with a few out-of-context trailers. Activision's offhand non-announcement came at the end of a comparatively weak (only $51 million in profits) quarterly earnings report conference call with investors. It led to a brief spike in their stock price.

Operation: Firebomb Ain't It Cool News.

Maybe you've noticed the operative word here is "tease," not "spoil." Movies and television must give away a few critical plot points to get an audiences interested, but games can achieve the same goal by showing off a minute of gameplay. The real trick is in managing expectations. Oh yes, announcements are often timed for purely financial reasons, but on the consumer end of the scale, it's vital to not over or under-promise on what you plan to deliver. If you say nothing at all, that's easily accomplished.

Secrecy controls the information. It allows for teases that ignite the imagination and locks down spoilers, which can ruin an experience before it starts. Sure, it can be frustrating at times -- particularly from a journalist's perspective, when we're trying to get a story to tell you -- but sometimes it's better to sacrifice curiosity rather than satisfy it. Odds are we'll enjoy a game more for playing it clean, without too much prior knowledge.

And isn't that the real point?