8.28.08
Yo,
A quick introduction before my long legacy of jilted g1 posts begins...
Name's Raistlinhawke, broadcasting textually from California's asshole, collectively known as the parts of Southern California that aren't LA, Palm Springs, Beverly Hills, or Anaheim. I am a Junior in college, with a major in Film and Media Studies and a possible minor in Creative Writing. Aside from a gamer I am also a cineaste, moderate liberal, prone to passionate acts of procrastination, and the farmer of the greatest white man 'fro this side of ever.
Before discovering the wonders of Screw Attack, I had to be drafted into the satisfying yet time consuming realm of the bloggist, something I had previously dismissed as the field of gossiping school girls and annoyingly alive emos. Once I had gotten over myself and vented for casual publishing, I developed a severe addiction to the sport and now have a library of brain-dribblings all over the world wide web-iverse. You may have seen me on Gametrailers.com or ThatGuywiththeGlasses.com, but seeing as my viewers between them amounted to what I can count on a single hand that the likelihood of that is mathematically undesirable.
Let's get my verbose yet meandering ramblings out of the way and get to the point, this is where I will be stapling up anything that feels strongly enough to waste time typing up. Usually this revolves around games, but recently I have been known to do a slice-of-my-life kinda thing, so have fun with that as well. To start out this tumultous relationship, I'll bring the two other g1s that are going to read this up to speed by porting over other pieces I've written for other sites, starting with the introductory article below, which I wrote for a now comatose website named reelgamers.com. Took me about two hours and a line of A&W refills at a local KFC/A&W collaborative restaurant, but after I organized my mind droppings into something cohesive I wound up with this. Its a bit dated now, so any criticism to that point will be ignored and tsked. So, without further ado, here's my article entitled: Internet Hype: A Dangerous Form of Advertising.
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I’d like to start out by expressing my deep affection for Grand Theft Auto IV. Despite a knee jerk reaction to open world gaming (a side effect of being raised on strictly linear RPGs and Adventure titles), the game’s storyline and production values seemed the highest of the franchise; and the idea that the majority of gaming seemed destined to pitch over into an open world standard of development lead me to pick up the title. I am very glad to have taken the time to embrace Liberty City, it is a deep and rewarding escapist experience, the epitome of gaming’s sole purpose, if my unpublished volumes of gamer-philosophy are to be believed. I could take my place in line and spend my column time exacerbating Rockstar’s sales figures by worshipping the game’s many shining points and well-crafted mechanics, but my instinct against conformity is one of the harder knee jerk reactions to give up. Once again I would like to point out the obese pink elephant in the room and mention that Grand Theft Auto IV is a wonderful game and a strong contender for Game of the Year. But if I must endure another self-professed expert masturbating the game, hailing it as the proverbial Second-Coming of immersive gameplay, I will choke myself on the tapeworm from my roommate’s cat’s stomach. The entirety of the world, with advertising-compatible media, is aware of the game’s superiority, and it is this type of bombardment advertising, be it negative or glaucoma-inducing positive, that I have a stringent problem with. The immediacy of the Internet has birthed a newer, stronger version of the commercial “hype” mechanic, and with games like GTA IV, it has become an irritant that could negatively change how consumers go about buying games.
I offer you an experiment: you need an internet connection and a stopwatch. Go to a popular gaming website’s chat room or forum. Make sure you are amongst a sizeable amount of people also trolling this space to insure instant replies. Take out your stopwatch, and prepare to punch the start button as soon as you comment. In the appropriate box, enter the phrase, “Isn’t GTA IV a little over-hyped?” (Make sure to enter it precisely as written, simple English allows for understanding by even forum-intelligence.) Immediately hit the start button on your stopwatch, and time how long it takes for a reply to be posted either a) derailing your intelligence and/or b) calling for your banishment from the site. I performed this experiment on four different popular websites, and averaged 3.4 seconds between them. What does this experiment prove, beyond that I have too much free time as to devise this idea? The venomous defense of any nay-saying on this game has extended beyond fanboy-ism (usually reserved for the latest Nintendo release) and entered into the realm of a deluded mob mentality. The sheer number of supposed enthusiasts for our GTA IV example seems to extend beyond the franchise’s normal fan base (and its suggested age range), so, to my logic, something other than previous experience would have to bring these people together under the goal of idolizing a DVD/Blu-Ray disc. I have no problem of a popular video game inspiring a recognizable following, it helps the video game culture gain more traction in the global marketplace, and I am all for that. My problem begins to develop when an extremely large number of people abandon all sense of reason in dialogues of a game. The idea of perfection is a subjective impossibility, there will never exist a perfect ANYTHING, so the idea of a software program, whose job it is to provide a unique experience to all its players, gaining universal “perfection” is completely asinine. This does not stop the masses of people spewing insults and curses like carbon dioxide exhalations, however, and it’s this passionate subjectivity that leads to me to believe that Internet-lead hype is much stronger than any of its brethren, for a reason I hope to find out.
This is not limited to video games, but any major release of information. The much-anticipated Grand Theft Auto IV is just a prime example, having months of tantalizing foreplay in the form of unrevealing trailers and hushed text blurbs from Rockstar. The problem exists on both sides of the press: those reviewing and those purchasing. Remember, this is a ridiculous attempt at a philosophical musing, and as such it adheres to the assumption of most philosophy to view the “subject” (in this case, our perspective GTV IV consumer) to know nothing, and be effected by absolutely everything. This is a degrading assumption, but allows for the philosophy of the argument to be seen and incorporated to the reader’s understanding (“well, I wouldn’t fall for that, but I see where he’s going…”). Let’s begin by examining the reviewing method. Most use a ranking system: either Arabic numerals or stars, ranging from a total of 5-10, the higher the score, the better the game. However, the official method of scoring a game and what the viewer takes in by simply looking at the final score do not always correlate. Most sources explain that a complete score does not mean a perfect game, but that the game is an exceptional release and deserves the attention of those that the genre (and rating) suits. This is rarely recognized by the viewer, especially when utilizing the internet as her/his means of research. Websites tend to compile many different reviewer’s opinions to a single browser page, and the effect of so many “perfect” scores has the effect of being the first (or possibly second, if word of mouth can be included) injection of hype, and becomes the groundwork to which extended use of Internet sources adds. The viewer feels that, to get such universally “perfect” scores, the game must be so. For example, my instant reaction when seeing the 8 or so “10/10” scores for GTA IV directly next to the “9.5/10” and “9.2/10” was that the dissenting reviewers had a bad experience with the game, and their non-conformity to the now established “perfect” game was petty subjectivity, rather than the game being below perfection.
Many viewers, me included on many occasions, now make the incredibly stupid move of opening a topic of discussion on the game with those trolling public forums which we experimented before. It is here they come into contact with the rest of the hyped-up people and their various reasons for rabidly defending the game as an objective perfection. If not ignored, reading through the mass of replies to a thread has a sort of boring effect on the mind. Not the uninteresting, sleep-inducing type of boring, but the drilling into the skull and later passing as one’s own opinion kind, like that seen with most religions. The posting and replies to our viewer’s discussion thread is usually the death knell for the rational aspect of any game analysis (ask me about Indigo Prophecy, I dare you.) We can also assume that our viewer of the aforementioned reviews did not throw his prospective purchase to the proverbial coliseum (forum) floor. He would still be bombarded with taglines and snippets of deific visions of GTA IV in the scrolling browser side advertisements of any well trafficked site he would happen to traverse between the review and his purchase. Such an aggressive campaign by Take Two and Rockstar practically guaranteed any blogger’s geocities page (one that receives a certain amount of hits per day, mind you) would gladly be paid for in exchange for complete browser-whoring on the part of the site holder. Being a country of capitalism (at least via GTA IV’s distributing company’s association,) this is quite legal and the industry standard, to which I cannot hold complaints to without being branded a socialist, that which I am 70% sure that I am not. Nor do I want to complain, it is a matter of free enterprise, and the decision of the business to pursue its goal as it wishes (a solid ideal I firmly believe.) I also believe that the effects of this virtual commercial blitzkrieg should be taken into account by all web surfers so not to suffer the drilling of it into our minds after seeing the same 30-second spot in the upper-left of our browser for a month straight. Like forcing a child to write “I will not draw in my English book during class” 500 times on the chalkboard, repetition forces perspective, and in internet terms, the near constant repetition of glorified games like Grand Theft Auto IV could lead to a numbing of the consumer mind.
I am an advertising director for two independent film companies, have successfully campaigned all of my advertised candidates into my University’s Senate, and I am the person my team sends out to speak with perspective clients for location ownership, distribution, film festival admissions, and various production logistics. I know how to advertise, and I know the image of the consumer one must take on to successfully mount an effective commercial campaign; one must envision the viewer as a brainless lump of modeling clay meant to be molested into the most cost-effective consumer possible. This is how I recognize and appreciate the depth of the efforts of game companies and viral advertising. This is also why I find it grinding to any internet inhabitant spending over a certain amount of time soaking up these efforts. The concept of excessive advertising has not changed, get the message out at peak times/places as many times as possible. But the Internet, acting as the pinnacle of the immediate information scene, stands as a deterrent to the analytical pretext required for the immerging and current gamer community to foster their own opinions.
Let it be known that I do not intend to come off as a stuck up idealist wanting to be the savior of video games, more a skeptical gamer that holds his ability to subjectively analyze among his highest traits, and hates to see it come across any resistance. Internet advertising will not turn us all into brainless zombies obediently purchasing on exact release dates, but it will make it harder for people to find their own things to love/hate about games. We live in age of the news crawl; topic sentences subjectively picked from the meat of the actual news in order to fit a sound bite; news reduced to polls and quotes. The internet, as it does with most things, accelerates this process by featuring the same virtual news crawl on browser side ads, pop ups, spots before streamed media, etc over and over again in great multitude. With the actual depth of any review being curtailed for the misunderstood score system, images of games like Grand Theft Auto IV are created without provocation. No help are rabid fan communities, so incestuously clinging to the peer pressure of previous fan bases mixed with console loyalty. Games are reduced to a bombarded, repeated tagline that serves as no use to the consumer. I’d like to end with the ideal that consumers are able to tune out all useless advertisements and buy to their liking. But when a loather of horrible animated shows such as myself has a sudden urge to buy the last three Naruto games, I digress. The days of “Let the Buyer Beware” are slowly coming to end, to welcome the age of “Let the Buyers Think for Themselves….
…..Please.”
