The Hype Player’s Confession
Yesterday afternoon I walked into a Munich electronics store and bought Diablo 3 without having played either predecessor, without touching the beta, without watching a single review, trailer, or screenshot. I stood in line with 163 other people doing exactly the same thing. That makes me a hype player—and I’ve made my peace with it.
StarCraft II: hype. Skyrim: hype. Mass Effect—which I genuinely loved—hype. Every single one of them delivered something real: hours of entertainment, cultural fluency, the particular pleasure of having a shared vocabulary. But would I have bought any of them without the millions-strong chorus of anticipation telling me to? No.
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when I sought out games that felt like secrets—titles with genres or storylines or characters so uncommercial that only the developers and a handful of obsessive weirdos would ever touch them. But that was when I had time. And when there were fewer options.
Back then maybe twenty good games came out in a year, and you were expected to have played all of them. They were part of the cultural vocabulary, the shared language of the schoolyard. If you hadn’t played something, you might as well have been standing next to the weird kid collecting insects in a jar. And if you didn’t have a Super Nintendo or a PlayStation—ideally both—you were already behind.
Now everything gets thrown at you simultaneously. Steam bundles entire development studios at discount prices. Thirteen identical military shooters drop in the same weekend. Indie developers want your money on Kickstarter before they’ve written a line of code. There’s a Wii, a 3DS, a PS3, an Xbox 360, a PS Vita, an iPad, an iPhone, and forty overpriced retro consoles all competing for the same shelf space and the same hours. I lost the overview years ago.
So I default to the brightest, loudest, most hyped things—because they’ll either deliver the entertainment I’m paying for, or at minimum give me a shared vocabulary for complaining. When StarCraft 2 felt too easy, when Skyrim was too sprawling, when Mass Effect 3’s ending was too unsatisfying—at least I could be disappointed alongside everyone else.
I put fifty euros into Diablo 3 knowing I’ll play it as little as possible. Single player through to the end, a taste of multiplayer, expansions ignored. That’s all my time allows. In a few months the next thing will arrive with the same weight of anticipation behind it, and I’ll buy that too. A week later it’ll disappear into a shelf—physical or digital—and that’s fine. That’s the deal I’ve made. I am a hype player.