Hype

When I was a kid, I never really noticed the holiday (or everyday) toy hype. I don't remember ever wanting something that the TV said I had to have. The main reason for this is that I was big on video games at the time (and probably always will be), and since video games weren't the must-have at the time, you didn't see too many commercials for them. If I wanted something, it was usually because one of my relatives took me to a store and said "pick something out," and I would find what interested me on my own.

Today, it's a different story. Many things are blown way out of proportion by their commercials, and the things that I think are the two most frequent repeat offenders are movies and video games. When I was a kid and the Super Nintendo was still new, I don't think preorders even existed. Now you have preorders, midnight releases, and events where people will line up outside a store hours before it opens just for the privilege of POTENTIALLY buying a game or console (if you line up too late, you might not get one). This also applies for movie commercials. Apparently the thing for movies now is to show you a bunch of half-second clips of the movie with epic music such as "O Fortuna" in the background and some narrator saying one word at a time. LIKE. RIGHT. NOW. Then following the release of the movie, they have commercials saying said movie is the #1 movie in America/in the world/of all time, regardless of how true that is. You can even find movies about this hype today, one being Jingle All The Way, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, andmovies that are part of the hype, such as The Wizard (which Nintendo used to advertise/build interest in Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES).

The Wizard actually got me thinking... There are two sociological concepts I want to bring up, those being Idealization and Mystification. Idealization is when someone or something presents the ideal form of itself, such as when a person attends a job interview or when a toy appears in a commercial and appears to be more fun than it probably is. Mystification is when, having gained interest through Idealization or some other form, said thing generates more interest by not giving away anything at all about itself after that. The example used for this is celebrities: People are always interested in them because we see them in movies and then we don't usually hear anything else about them unless they really slip up. As such, their mystique keeps us intrigued, and we find them appealing and attractive.

I will end this post with a quote from Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, who does a weekly video game review called Zero Punctuation.

"There's a reason why I never play demos... demos create expectations and expectations color your opinion of the final product. For most people, the demo for Mirror's Edge colored their expectations a shimmering gold, only to realize once they bought the full game that they had been seeing the light reflecting off a stream of piss."