Game Flow is a collection of audio essays about the culture of video games and experiences with gaming. If you have an audio essay that you’d like to submit to the podcast, send an email to [email protected]. Music for this podcast comes courtesy of Sylendanna. 

I was 13 years old when I attended my first midnight launch.

It was 2008 and Super Smash Brothers Brawl was about to release. It was possibly the most exciting moment of my life to that point. In the months leading up to Brawl’s release I checked the Smash Bros Dojo website every day for the latest updates.

My daily routine involved waking up as early as possible and quietly rushing to the family computer. Every day gave me a new surge of adrenaline. What was going to be in the game? What new, exciting characters might be unveiled? My teenage mind ran wild imagining the possibilities.

And to this day, hype finds a way to consume me. I’m constantly searching for that next reveal. I want to feel excited again.

Many attentive gamers have shared this type of experience, but unbridled hype is not a phenomenon entirely unique to gaming. Sports fans get hyped over big games or the start of a season. Fans of big blockbuster movie franchises dress up on release day and buy all the toys.

But hype culture doesn’t burn as brightly in these spaces as it does in the world of video games. Gaming is the only medium where hype permeates every facet of the industry. You don’t have millions of book readers tuning in to Penguin Random House’s quarterly results, but you do with games.

Gaming companies paved the way for contemporary hype culture when they turned E3, an expo meant for industry reveals, into a marketing event that dominates gamers’ lives for the weeks before, during and after.

Companies know they have their claws sunk deep when people are already demanding the sequel before the original game is released, or when flashing a mere logo sends fans into jubilant screams.

And for most of us, our first experience with hype comes in childhood. You play a game, any game, and you naturally seek out the community for that game. Maybe you finish and you wish there was more. So you get to talking. You spend your time dreaming about what this magical new game could be. There are videos and podcasts and message boards without end, but it can never satisfy your hype. Only the new game can.

You’ve already been sold a product that may never exist - and you may be just a child.

Games are in a unique position among media forms where they are, at a fundamental level, toys, and children are a large segment of the consumer base. And if there’s one thing about kids, it’s that they will find even the simplest objects extremely enthralling. So when you present them with a video game, a toy that may be infinitely interesting, and then you give them an even more interesting community to explore, you generate a lifelong connection with that child - and a lifelong revenue stream.

And so, the excitement builds from a young age.

The natural extension of this excitement, this primal need to play a new game, is that you become increasingly concerned with the well-being of the companies that produce what you want. So sales become important to you, and if you want to play games on a specific platform, it’s even more important that sales of your preferred platform are higher than anything else. NPD results, quarterly reports, sales milestones, it all matters so much.

Because if your favorite company doesn’t sell enough, then they won’t have enough money to make the games that you need. It’s the only way to make sure you never run out of the things you love. And when the things that you love are products that you must convince others to buy so that you keep getting more, you have effectively been branded.

You may try to shake the grip of branding, but you’ll never truly escape it. Because almost everyone, even the most cynical among us, has one thing that could get them to break. If the right company pushed the right buttons you would fall back into the hype cycle, fully subsumed under corporate control. You’ve already spent your money - you just haven’t given it to them yet.

Now, I’m not saying getting excited is a bad thing. I’m not even saying that closely following the games you love and the companies that produce them is inherently a terrible idea. But I do think it would be wise for us to be self critical. Are we letting our excitement distract us from the reality of the situation? Have we effectively become unpaid salespeople, evangelizing for products that we receive no economic benefit from? Are we drones following the whims of corporations that couldn’t care less about us as human beings?

Have we been consumed by the hype?

It happened to me over the last year.

After five years of generally setting gaming aside, the Switch sucked me back into hype’s hypnotic gaze. And now I’m staying up late at night arguing on message boards. I’m constantly abreast of the latest releases. I’m watching the same trailers over… and over… and over…

I’ve even been to a few midnight launches. I was 13 years old at my first.

That’s it for this edition of Game Flow. Thank you to Sylendanna on Soundcloud for letting me use the track “Last May” on this show.  If you have an audio essay that you’d like to submit to the podcast, send an email to [email protected]. Feel free to head to the website gameflowpod.com to leave a comment, or reach out on twitter through @TravisArbon. And make sure to subscribe and leave a review via your podcatcher of choice.

Next Week- The Importance of Ports