Op-Ed: Rage Against the Hype Machine

For the past two days, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA, Sony and more have been trying to tell me how much I’m going to love high-fiving my bro and trading my online AXE Body Spray techniques with other people on Facebook, all from within my game. A man walks onto a stage, there is dramatic lighting, pumping music, and with swagger he says into the mic, “And now, the moment you have all been waiting for”. And I turn off the stream, because this isn’t even remotely the moment that I have been waiting for.

Pitch men from E3, WWDC, Blizzcon, and other shows drop that line and I think “This isn’t the moment I’ve been waiting for.  This is the moment YOU’VE been waiting for.  Easy to get confused, Broseph.”.  I think I WAS pretty excited at that moment, once upon a time, but not anymore.

Full disclosure, this isn’t my first game rodeo. In years past, I used to wait for E3 for months, excited for the news of the upcoming year in games.  I’d love to see the new games previewed, see some new technology in action, and generally be psyched for everything that was coming down the pipe.  But in the last few years, it’s gotten to the point where I don’t think any game can live up to the expectations that the marketing groups build in my mind.  All this hype is spoiling my enjoyment of games.  There are only so many times I can fall for your tricks, Mr. Molyneux.  Playing Fable 3 was . . . I’m trying to come up with a metaphor, but all I can think of is that it was like playing Daikatana or or that BMX game where the women took their tops off.  These games are so bad I can’t even make a joke about them.  I am now The Who, and I am fucking onto you.

This year, I’d just had enough, and tuned out and turned it off. The hype is no longer contained, and I didn’t even have to wait for E3 2013. Sony and Microsoft released their console info weeks ago – and the internet shitstorm was impossible to avoid.

There seemed to be no real point to tuning in to see the magic, because I’d already seen behind the curtain.  But because half the people I know are as nerdy as me,  I was able to benefit from the second hand E3 story; I got the basic info without needing to swallow the gaming hype suppository of actually watching the presentations.  Sadly, even that info wasn’t enough to get me fired up about 2013/2014 in games.

So as I understand it, Sony didn’t piss people off as much as Microsoft, and by default they win.  But here’s my thing: At this point, I don’t care anymore who “wins”. It doesn’t matter. A lot of jokes were made about the PS4 and the XBone looking the same. That’s because they are the same.  Sony “stole” the show this year just by watching what was unpopular with the XBone and deciding to keep with the status quo. Their entire marketing pitch was apparently yelling “Look at that shit!” while pointing at the Microsoft people.  That is not a marketing pitch that makes me excited to buy their product (though it is funny as hell).

What the pitch men seem to be missing, is that the moment I wait for is when I PLAY THE FUCKING GAME.  I do not wait breathlessly for some guy to tell me about the game, or show me the box cover.  When the hell did the advertising for something become a product in and of itself that people get excited about?  At the moment, I don’t care about your commercial or new gameplay video. They are, like consoles, invisible to me. They are just windows that I look at something ELSE through.  And I don’t get excited about a window, I get excited about what’s on the other side.

And what’s on the other side is nothing that i’m going to get excited about this year from what the tubes on the internet are telling me. Some new Madden’s, Dude: The Bro’ing, Tom Clancy’s “Scary Plot from 1998 Spy Game”….. No women?  No people of colour?  Just roid driving and dance games.  And the same Assassin’s Creed I’ve been playing for the last 10 years, before I finally just got bored and wandered off halfway through AC3. Clearly there is an eager audience for these games – i’m just not in that crowd anymore.

This EA employee volunteered to be shrunk to the actual size of a Madden model.

I did stream the previews of Watch Dogs and Destiny; Watch Dogs admittedly looked amazing, like real video at points. Sadly, Bungie’s disappointed me.  I was very excited to see what they were going to do now that they’re away from Microsoft and don’t need to do another Halo game.  I thought maybe they’d go back to their roots a bit, maybe bust out some good old Myth: The Fallen Lords. Instead, we get Halo meets Anarchy Online. Again, games that there is a big crowd of people waiting to throw their money at their console for, but I just don’t see it.

So here it is… the middle of E3 week, and I as a gamer (because while this article may sound otherwise, I enjoy playing the hell out of games), I just can’t bring myself to give a single fuck. I tried to turn on the streaming presentations several times, and didn’t even have enough interest to click play.

I have become overwhelmed by the hype in the games industry to the point where I am just numb: I don’t care about my console’s “features”.  I don’t care about peripherals.  I buy a console to play video games, and I want the console itself to be as invisible in that experience as possible.

Each year, the expo presentations of the game market get bigger, louder, and so pervasive in media that it’s hard for that hype not to impregnate everyone’s feed. The Wall Street Journal is covering E3.  Fucking Forbes covers E3. Each year I’ve watched the feeds, I’ve seen the previews, and now I am done waiting for the yearly apology from Mr. Molyneux for missed opportunities.  My new operating instructions are this:  ignore hype – play games.