Hype is surely the most effective marketing tool in any company’s utility belt. When the public are so excited about an upcoming product that they are willing to trawl the Internet for a slightly higher definition version of the teaser trailer and flood Amazon with their pre-order cash before a release date has been announced, you know you’re onto a winner.
This year there has surely been no single work of entertainment that has induced such ravenous hype as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The game has now been available in stores for almost a month, sales figures are astronomical and the servers are filled with happy gamers. But, is the game really worth the extraordinary amount of hype that precluded its release?
The hype machine for Modern Warfare 2 first kicked into gear on March 25 of this year when the teaser trailer containing the now infamous line “Remember, no Russian” (more on that later) was first shown at San Francisco’s Game Developer Choice Awards. I could not name a category from the Awards show, never mind a winner. The big news from the show was that Modern Warfare 2, sequel to the amazing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, was on the way. More trailers, interviews and gameplay clips were released at a steady clip as the months rolled by, all of them doing downloads in the hundreds of thousands. The game was secure at the top of every gamer’s to-buy list.
Several weeks before release news hit headlines of the infamous “No Russian” mission. In this mission players take on the role of an undercover CIA agent infiltrating a group of Russian terrorists as they massacre civilians in an airport. The player can choose to join in on the civilian shooting gallery or just watch it unfold. Multiple times before reaching this stage the game warns you of its disturbing content and gives you the option to skip, but this didn’t stop the media circus. The controversy even sparked discussion in the House of Commons. True to form, The Daily Mail had a lot to say about it at the time and Sam Leith’s review of the game on their website is 435 words long, 269 of which are dedicated to describing the scene in detail and piously condemning it. Still, if the Grand Theft Auto series has taught us anything it is that moral outrage does little to hurt a game’s sales and can indeed be an important cog in the hype machine.
On 10 November the game was released. To date it has had the biggest launch in entertainment history, grossing more on its first day than Grand Theft Auto 4, The Dark Knight and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I, like many gamers, was lined up behind the counter of my local Blockbuster waiting to get my hands on it. Unfortunately due to a broken right hand induced by an angered punch to a couch sparked by an accidental bite of the lip whilst eating a lovely slice of bread pudding (true story), I was not able to play the game very much during that first week but since I have made up for lost time.
What I can safely say after my time with it is that the game is superb. The graphics are gorgeous, the controls are unmatched and the game runs at a surprisingly solid framerate. So, does it live up to all this immense hype? The issue here is not with the game itself but with the whole phenomenon of hype. How can anything justify such borderline hysteria without being some kind of cultural revolution? Surely hype should come after release when people have been exposed to the final product, reviews are up and word of mouth has spread.
At the age of eleven I was personally stung by this phenomenon for the first time. It was 1997 and toys, fast food promotions and television specials were abundant for the ill-fated Joel Schumacher opus, Batman and Robin. Finally the film hit theatres and even at eleven years old it struck me as a camp load of nonsense. The next year TriStar Pictures began marketing Godzilla and the whole process began again. Modern Warfare 2 is certainly not a Batman and Robin situation. The game is excellent, but I am still left somewhat cold and empty, like a child on Christmas morning whose toy fire engine is great, but doesn’t fulfil his every dream as he had hoped. I have once again been battered with the hard lesson that hype is not intense public excitement for a product that has proven its worth, but the workers’ tool of the skilled marketing executive.
Those of you who have yet to learn the brutal lesson of succumbing to hype only to have your dreams shattered may not need wait too long. James Cameron’s Avatar is just around the corner…
Jim Dixon
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It’s remarkable how some people in power either ignore, or refuse to see things which are staring them straight in the face.
This was the prevailing theme today when myself and an audience met with Ivan Lewis, Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth affairs. The topic on the agenda was primarily the war in Afghanistan, the logistics, ethics and practicalities involved in such a war. Lewis spoke for around a quarter of an hour before opening it up to the floor for questions.
It’s here when I’m going to check myself slightly. I am constantly defending politicians against others’ insults. For every expenses abusing, sleaze ridden corrupt cabinet minister, there are constituency MPs who work hard for their electorate, and want (to use a cliché) “to make a difference”. But given the responses supplied by Lewis today, can you blame young people for feeling disenfranchised and apathetic about politics? Typical politicians answers were given, instead of answering the question directly, policy was trotted out with all the panache of a Michael Howard Newsnight interview. The audience looked on incredulously as good, constructive questions were left unanswered.
Lewis is currently on a roadshow (his own words) visiting every region in the UK to stir up support for the war in Afghanistan, to “assure forces that the British people support them”. I have no doubt that the British people support them, but their ringleaders…I’m not so sure. Lions led by Lambs indeed.
Furthermore, Lewis constantly emphasised that we were in Afghanistan to rid the world of the greatest threat to our way of life. It would be churlish to point out the not-insignificant problem of climate change as our greatest threat, but you can’t have everything. For a man so clearly preoccupied with the modern threat of terrorism (Lewis voted for the Iraq war, for ID cards and against an investigation into the Iraq war) he seemed stupendously blind to it’s root causes. Much of the argument seemed to take the view that we stamp out any insurgents in Iraq and by proxy safeguard our own country. What he fails to take into account is that much of the terrorist bombings in the UK (including July 7th in London) were propagated by British residents. How exterminating members of Al-Qaeda 3000 miles around the world is going to help us, I don’t know.
Moreover, he incessantly referred to the British people being in a state of fear as “the security of the people of this country lay in the hands of extremists”. Have I ruptured the space-time continuum into a Daily Mail alternate reality? I’ve yet to meet a single person who is genuinely worried about the threat of terrorism to this country. It’s happened before, but the chances of you being in the wrong place at the wrong time are so minute that it’s hardly worth thinking about. Did people stop using the Tube when London was under threat? No, because they had to get on with their lives and it was business as usual.
Towards the end of the talk we were bombarded with statistics showing “improving” living conditions in Afghanistan. Much has been made of the effort to rebuild and reinvigorate Afghanistan. While this may be true, it still doesn’t explain the fundamental point of the whole debate:
Why are we there in the first place?
Joseph Stashko-Adamaszek
]]>The UK is “ready” to send more troops to Afghanistan, said foreign secretary David Miliband on Monday night.
He added that Afghanistan is “not a war without end” but that military and civilian resources had to be used in a “clear political strategy”
You can read the full story, with video, here
]]>It comes after growing concern from both the public and other political parties that forces in Afghanistan have been grossly neglected by the Labour government. The Sun last week reported on another gaffe on the part of the Prime Minister as he misspelt the name of a deceased soldier.
You can read about the proposed measures here
]]>After Abdullah Abdullah, his main rival in the election race pulled out, Hamid Karzai has been declared president of Afghanistan.
A second round of voting was due to be held after the first round was marred by violence and claims of fraud.
You can read the full story here
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