Things We Hate About Gaming: The Hype Train Rolling Into Town

Hype, whether through word of mouth or mass marketing campaign, has been endemic to gaming since its inception. However it wasn’t until the last generation of consoles that the mass adoption of broadband allowed constant updates on a game’s development. We now live in a world of endless screenshots, videos and early impressions. A game no longer receives just a preview and a review as was once the case in print media. Instead, we are privy to the tiniest bowel movements of the lowliest member of the most obscure games from day one. It is this endless hype that I’ll be discussing today.

First off, let’s not unequivocally condemn hyping any game. If it wasn’t for word-of-mouth hype on certain podcasts I routinely listen to I’d never have played Castle Crashers or Left 4 Dead. The difference between the hype around these games and AAA blockbusters usually centers around concept vs gameplay. What do Castle Crashers and L4D have in common? The answer is that whilst lacking particularly inspiring concepts they offer refined and exciting gameplay. A 2-D brawler and a co-op FPS aren’t the freshest ideas out there, but where both titles excelled was in their execution. In this situation hype is a welcome necessity to boost sales and awareness. Few games these days deliver genuinely exciting gameplay devoid of a grandiose conept and when one comes along it needs all the help it can get.

Conversely, many triple-A titles are promoted entirely based on their grandiose concept. An excellent example would be GTA4. Despite being a personal favourite, the game requires that the player buy into a concept before they can enjoy it. That concept being that a player can experience a more realistic and engaging open world environment than previous GTA iterations.  The pre-release hype existed to drill the validity of the concept into the player’s mind before playing it. When a gamer finally comes to the game they come prepared – hyped up. Despite spending the majority of one’s time shooting and driving these central mechanics were rarely discussed. Instead we heard about the TV in your apartment, the drunk-driving minigame or the relationship building meta-game. It is at this point where the player’s perceptions become distorted. Interesting yet relatively small aspects of the game are used to mask the difficulty in accessing them. The over-arching concept becomes more important than it’s execution.

Further exacerbating the issue is the length of time a game is hyped for. As gamers we gain access to screenshots, videos, teaser trailers and previews months before a game’s release. These sources of information are so easy for the developer or publisher to manipulate that they are basically worthless. From the first rumours leaked to blogs and review websites to the game’s demo itself the hype train can roll on for months, even years. To give a personal example, a couple of months ago Eurogamer spoke to the creators of the Homeworld RTS franchise. The developer gave no details on the game, barely confirming that it would be developed at all. Being a Homeworld fanboy the likes of which the human mind cannot comprehend I got a little bit excited by this news. It was only after I’d calmed down and changed underwear that I realised how utterly worthless such information is. Now I’ll be slavishly refreshing my RSS feed right up to the date of release for the tiniest morsel of news. If I had simply remained unaware until a few weeks and months before release the game would be a pleasant surprise. With potentially years of news to lap up about Homeworld 3, who knows what will happen to my perceptions of the game?

The perverse relationship between pre-orders and overall sales can also be heightened by hype. To give another personal example, I was forced to spend 15 minutes scouring a local shop to find the only remaining pre-owned copy of L4D before I could buy it. Due to L4D’s reliance on word-of-mouth and reviews rather than a non-stop skull crushing degree of hype, few pre-orders were placed. As a result few copies were stocked and the ability of the retailer to predict the game’s popularity was reduced. This wasn’t isolated to a single store. In a relatively large town with numerous games retailers, only being able to find one pre-owned copy of a game is a bad sign of things to come. Anecdotal evidence I realise but still quite disturbing. When retailers make decisions about which games to stock based on pre-orders, hype inevitably influences the situation. It may sound selfish but when I can’t go out and pick up a game because expectations weren’t unrealistically raised, shit is fucked up.

I don’t honestly know if we can ever escape the negative effects of hype on retailers and consumers. So much of the modern economy is based on selling the sizzle rather than the steak that I can’t see the games industry bucking the trend. Still, I’ll make a new year resolution right here right now. As a writer for this website and an avid gamer I will not pay attention to meaningless hype. You won’t hear me report on a rumour of possibility of an idea of a game. I’ll pre-order the games I’m genuinely excited for, not the ones I’ve been told to get excited for. Anyone out there gonna join me?

More things we hate about gaming.