The Quickening: Hype · 2:20pm Mar 30th, 2018
Hype is defined as when the marketing or criticism of experts about a product (video game, movie, etc.) generates an expectation in the player about the content and quality of the game.
It's amazing how important expectations can be for something, and it seems normal to think that assumptions about a future product or experience are in some way relevant. Taking a tour of different phenomena of today and fiction, I will show to what extent expectations can influence us and our environment.
In recent years we live in the hype trains era. The creation of expectations for movies and videogames lives an unprecedented time as it happens, for example, with the trailers of the upcoming releases. Before they were only a small advance to know the plot; now they have become events in themselves that spread like wildfire throughout the network, to such an extent that even teasers, which are nothing more than "trailer trailers", have attained great importance. They have so much relevance that, sometimes, the teasers announce the date of the departure, not of the film itself, but of the trailer. These teasers are subject to reviews and video-reactions and some, like the teaser for Rogue One: A Star Wars story, still have today more visits on YouTube than the trailer itself.
After all these years and all the different incarnations of Spider-man, this teaser still amazes me like the first day.
The same thing happens with everything that surrounded the film based on one of the most important videogame sagas in history, World of Warcraft, which aroused a lot of traffic before and during its production; However, today, shortly after being released, no one seems to remember it. The anticipation with which these teasers are launched also becomes absurd, as evidenced by the remake of the classic Final Fantasy VII. It was aired at E3 in 2015 and received a tremendous ovation. But the game is still in production, with no release date and, with almost no hope of coming out, it's speculated that it might not even be available for this generation of consoles.
Don't be a failure, please!
Although all this hype can be very useful for companies, we must be careful, because such high expectations can have adverse effects when faced with reality if the product is not up to par. This is the case of No Man's Sky, a video game created by Hello Games and supported by Sony. It was a product launched in 2016 that millions of players had been waiting for years for the supposed revolution that was going to mean in the middle and its incredible promises. After its release, not meeting the expectations created in his promotion, No Man's Sky will be recognized as one of the greatest disappointments in history, with a barrage of negative criticism after its launch, a decrease of almost 90% of players after the first two weeks of departure and even investigations for misleading advertising. Despite this, it's true that it was one of the twelve best-selling games of 2016 on Steam, as well as the launch with the largest number of simultaneous players in the history of the platform.
Something similar happened with Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. The product and expectations could not be more ambitious: unite the two best-known and best-selling superheroes in history to make a film in the golden age of masked heroes tapes. Such an event made the film become the fourth most sold movie in history in its first week. However, perhaps because it didn't live up to such expectations, it broke another record of questionable reputation: being the superhero movie whose collection fell the most in the second week of the show, with a chilling 80% crash. It also stood out in terms of his bad reviews (27% in Rotten Tomatoes).
This movie failed because, for all the things it promised, it couldn't live up to the high. Its only hope to be remembered is the ultimate edition, which improves the final product and converts it into a more decent experience... but it's still bad.
Is the hype therefore something that companies should look for in their products? Should they control the expectations they create in relation to the actual product they have in hand? What seems certain is that the reaction to these and other products wouldn't have been the same if we hadn't heard from them before their release. Expectations, therefore, affect, and perhaps do more than you would have ever imagined.
And, since expectations can change the behavior or actions of people and the set of these modify the reality, it wouldn't be strange to think that this can be affected.
We have learned that expectations can play a role in how we perceive a product, causing us to believe that it has the effect we were expecting or pissed off at not being up to par. Also that these can make us behave in a certain way, even though we believe that this is not the case. All this can also have an effect on reality, leading to avoidable disasters or simply modeling reality constantly. For this, when you see people going crazy for trailers, preaching the effects of a treatment that does not have them, giving much importance to pre-election surveys, speculating about the future price of shares to invest, lamenting how bad they will do in an exam or anything else that is going to come, you know that maybe they are already talking, in a certain way, about the final result.
But what do you think about hype? Let me know in the comments.
I can agree to this. Having been disappointed so many times with mostly game purchases. NMS, MA:Andromeda, I have become more cautious and cynical towards what I buy and I'm extremely critical of the hype towards anything that interest me.