Hype-O-Chondria

In a slightly more preachy fashion, this week’s column discusses the use and nature of hype and the actual benefits of this shady character to the adult gamer.


I hate hype.


Actually, that’s not strictly true. As far as I’m concerned, there’s good hype and bad hype. You’ll all be aware of good hype, it’s the clever advertising that makes you think “I may actually buy this game”, the sort of thing that causes the committee untold grief when it has you marching down the street on launch day, paying slightly more than you actually need to for a game that you absolutely must have right now. This is the hype that fuels Christmas, and you can’t dislike Christmas!


When you’re little (before you either earn money or become so old your parents just relent when you ask for some as a way to shut you up) getting games is an event. Nowadays I will get, on average, a game a week, but when I was little I’d be lucky to get one a month. More often than not it would be birthdays and Christmas only. The excitement of opening a game for the first time, having only the odd glimpse of it from a magazine or (slightly later on in my youth) the internet, made the game better, and that is still true today.


If a game is hotly anticipated then, at the heart of the matter, your inner child is jumping up and down, screaming in excitement. I like that feeling. It’s the same feeling as watching the intros to the old kids’ cartoons on youtube, the little world you create around yourself that allows you to believe, for just a moment, that you never grew up. Good hype lets you do that games, to shut yourself off from the outside world for just a moment as you unwrap the package and pop the disc into the tray. Of course, the game may still be rubbish, but for that briefest of moments you get the innocence of youth back, when everything was made of chocolate and the taxman didn’t exist. Ambrosia.


There is a delicate balance here, of course. If the game utterly fails to match the hype, the special childish glow will be immediately countermanded by the atrocious nature of the product, which won’t help. This is where the bad hype crops up.


Bad hype comes from people like Peter Molyneux. Now I like Mr Molyneux, but dear God can he hurt a game. Obviously, there’s the incident with the first fable, and while Fable 2 was certainly closer to his promises, there was one aspect that was just terrible. Co-op. It was laggy, confined by a daft camera system even in online mode, and required you to select a strange henchman character. I had been led to believe that I could waltz into my friend’s game as myself, chiselled lumberjack Lemmy as I was, and together we would save/destroy the world. Thanks, Pete.


Obviously, a lot of developers do this, and perhaps it is mean to pick on Molyneux, mean and cliché. To be fair to developers, I can usually forgive their marketing spin, even when it is as ludicrous as Mr Molyneux, and it rarely destroys my good hype-induced feelings. What does manage to do that, however, are countdown clocks.


Announcements are bad enough, being as they are bland pieces of text designed to try and trick you into wanting a nebulous piece of non-software, but when you are trying to build up hype for an announcement by making a bloody clock, you’re doing it wrong. Watching the seconds tick down on a clock is only ever interesting when the end result is something marvellous and shiny, not a page of marketing speak.


What it boils down to is announcing an announcement, which is a dangerous road to go down. How long before we start announcing the announcement that is going to announcement the main announcement? There’s the danger of it becoming a horribly repeating circle of bad hype, something so memorable that no good hype can save the game. I’m forcibly causing myself to forget any games that have had a countdown clock precede their announcement, purely so that I may enjoy them when they come out.


A lot of people hate hype for the evil marketing tool that it undoubtedly is, but I find this to be a little disappointing. You can’t kill the hype-mills, they’ll always be spinning so long as there’s a product to flog, the trick comes from turning it to your own advantage. You will inevitably want one of the hyped games, it’s pretty much a fact, so just try to hang on to the good hype. Don’t fret that you’ve just given money to a faceless corporation, just recapture a bit of your youth from the experience. Games are supposed to be fun, not reminders of how sinister the real world is.


Cynicism will wait, be ten again for just a minute more.