Email: Is hype really bad? Confused.

Hello Mr. Malstrom, I know you get a lot of emails but I just have a question for you. If you could answer it, I would be pleased. I hope this does not make me seem like a hardcore gamer, because I’m not one at all. You seem to be the type of person who does not understand why people hype games. Well I agree to a point, but as Super Mario Bros. 5 neared closer to releasing, I found myself getting more and more excited about it. And even though I hadn’t played it at the time, I thought it looked fun when watching the game-play videos on Youtube. Is it wrong to hype a game the way I did? Or are you just getting on the people that hype games they know little about? Thanks for taking the time read.

-PS- I’m kinda referring to your recent article on Metroid: Other M when you mentioned people hyping the game.
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We haven’t seen any gameplay of Metroid: Other M. We don’t know anything about it aside from Sakamoto’s statements. And with Zelda Wii, we haven’t seen anything about it. We don’t know anything about it.
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A game will be either be good or bad. Why waste life getting hyped for something you cannot control? I’m not saying do not get excited about upcoming games. I’m saying do not get excited about upcoming games of which we know little to nothing about. What’s the point?
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Let us talk about imagination for a moment. The use of imagination is, probably, the most important skill in Human life. Imagination, alone, makes a man or destroys one. What is fear but imagination? And in order to become successful, one must imagine one’s way optimistically. So imagination cuts both ways.
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The difference between a ‘great person’ and a mediocre person is not the power of their imagination. The mediocre person could have an imagination just as powerful as the ‘great person’. No, the difference is in how the two people control it. The ‘great person’ is not only able to harness his or her imagination upward for themselves, they are able to motivate and uplift people around them. Mediocre people are depressed as their imagination runs against them. And they tend to depress people around them.

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The greatest games are those you continue playing inside your imagination. Remember when you were a kid, and throughout school you were daydreaming of playing a game instead of listening to boring teacher? Years and years pass, and the game still lives on in the imagination. A game like Zelda still lives on in the imagination and appears in the unlikeliest places… like Google’s title gifs.

In the same way, the greatest books, the greatest plays, the greatest music, and the greatest movies all resonate with people’s imagination. Humans are dream animals.

Hype is the customer imagining the product before he/she purchases or plays it! The reason why almost all games fail to meet the hype is because the customer’s imagination is more powerful than the actual product.

The reason why games are no longer magical is because the Industry is abusing the practice of imagination for shallow gains. We are seeing games hyped years and years in advance. The customer’s imagination is activated only to pay for the product. Once the customer pays for the product, zappo, the use of the imagination has little effort. Modern games have little to no resale value. If these games are so good, they should be able to hold their value more. But the only way they can sell at $60 is if there is powerful hype behind them. Once that hype is gone, the game falls flat. The entire “Game Industry” would be crushed if every gamer waited three weeks before purchasing a new game. The hype evaporates by then.

I have a big problem with ‘narrative’ games because not only are they using the medium of gaming incorrectly (games are not movies), narrative games are not activating the customer’s imagination. They are merely ramming the ‘developer’s imagination down the customer’s throat. The customer’s imagination is as equal to that of the developer. The developer’s job is to activate the customer’s imagination, not transplant the developer’s imagination into the customer’s head. That is not how it works. The customer will get bored because his imagination isn’t being activated.

But the Industry has greatly abused imagination by using hype to pre-sell mediocre games. I believe this is a big factor why such games sell only within the first couple of weeks. And we gamers are enablers for it as we keep getting suckered by it.

A game will be good or bad when it comes out. You can’t control that. And unless some solid gameplay is shown, it is a waste of time getting excited about a game.

But imagination is a powerful subject. Montaigne uses many examples but some of the more printable ones are “a man who imagines homes in his head” and “brings them forth in the morning”. Love is dependent on imagination. A woman depends on the man’s imagination to ‘make him fall in love’. Businessmen need imagination. Imagination is what starts the entrepreneur in the first place.

We want games to activate our imagination. What we are getting instead is our imagination activated to buy games. Ever since this began, older gamers began declaring that gaming was in decline though they couldn’t articulate why. “It’s like the soul is gone.”