Espacio de Apertura #2 - Hype, that Treacherous Friend

Hype (noun, contraction of hyperbole)
In marketing, a great need for consuming a product or work; most often, as a result of an aggressive advertising campaign in the media and press.
High expectations regarding the performance of a product, generally, a piece of art or entertainment.

For good or for bad we live in a world where publicity and marketing have become fundamental in achieving success and recognition within any consumer industry, more important than producing something truly original. Let’s remember that phrase from pop-culture: "everything that can be invented has been invented", to promote the product in a place that generates lucrative profits.

We live overexposed to advertising, plagued with Internet articles, teasers, top 10s of everything you can think of every month; daily, we are promised something, anything, the next big step for humanity. Our conversations, our relationships, they are also filled with these; our day-to-day activities are disrupted by the entertainment industry with increasingly creative and voracious marketing strategies. Buy this, buy that conditions life and expectancy in a massive way.

Yet, Has it been beneficial to our perception? In what way do we evaluate the works we are seeing? Is there such a thing as artistic value?

Over a month ago Venom was released and the expectations for a bloody film that would satiate our cravings for darkness were high, but it didn't went like that. Specialized critics, broadly speaking, battered the film because of a little worked and too repetitive plot where the actors were poorly profiteered.

Still, the film grossed $80 million on the opening weekend in the United States alone, and $125 million worldwide, making it the best film premiere of all time in the month of October, guaranteeing the production of a sequel.

If we go back a year from now, in 2017, we’ll remember that the movie that was on everybody’s lips was Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It had, according to the critics, the press, its actors, everything necessary to become a modern classic: a marvellous cast, a competent and respected director in the science fiction world, and very high expectations after the cliffhanger in which the previous one Star Wars: The Force Awakens, ended,. Not to mention Mark Hamill's return to the role that would launch him into fame almost four decades before: the Jedi Master Luke Skywalker.

The result was the most contradictory film in the history of the franchise, raising almost five times its budget, –__$1.333 million profit after a $317 million investment– yet, it divided the critics, fans and audience to a level so dangerous that Disney had to go back to the design table. The hype generated by the film disappointed the fans, but captivated the critics who recognized the plot twist that its director, Rian Johnson, was proposing, where, now, the force is in everyone and not only in a selected group of people. This seemed to disturb the fanbase, but delighted the critic. Controversy is also vital for the hype.

In this article you can read much more about the big polarization around the film and how, in spite of this, with such profits, it is quite difficult that the development and premiere of Episode IX becomes affected.

Finally, only a few days ago Red Dead Redemption 2 was released, maybe the most awaited videogame of 2018, but that didn’t make it immune to controversy either. Although the finished work is being praised and branded by the critic as monumental achievement in the gaming industry, with great ambition and attention to detail, it simply doesn’t narratively compares and compete with the studio’s predecessor, Grand Theft Auto V. The fact is that Rockstar Games has also been involved in a worrying media situation as a result of RDR2 release.

After an incredible dossier published by the video game press page, Kotaku, barely three days before the launch, public opinion became aware of the harsh reality behind the development of what many consider Rockstar's masterpiece to date. A suffocating and problematic work environment in which, according to no other than Dan Houser, the creative vice president of the company, several divisions of the company worked from 80 to 100 hours per week, approximately 14 hours per day, in order to deliver the game on time with the quality expected by the public and the studio.

To top it all, although in the first few weeks the reviews of RDR2 were unanimously acclaimed, recently some divergent opinions have already begun to appear which state that, even though the technical value of the videogame is undeniable, it is not exempt from everything that tends to plague the delivery of a work with such ambitions. Bugs, secondary missions that end up being more appealing and organics than the main history, and design aspects in which the game doesn't end up being as relevant or disruptive as the company would like to make us believe; however, they haven't done much to hinder the fact that RDR2 is, today, the most profitable entertainment product in history, with profits of $725 million on its first weekend...

All these works have something in common: seriously high expectations, behind which there were always huge media and advertising campaigns that manipulated and fuelled the bonfire of fan vanities. And, in view of its results, the strategy triumphed for each one, without the result necessarily being entirely to their liking Why did they do that?

The human being is, by definition, a gregarious animal that finds a reaffirmation of its identity, and relief to its anxieties, in the fact of belonging to an event, tribe or an specific event. Based on this, companies segment the market and carry out exhaustive campaigns that lead you to think that you truly need to consume what they tell you you must, regardless of its quality. At the end of the day, even art is a business and a risk for everyone involved, it's worth wondering: Just how critical are you about what you consume_?

• Xataka, Star Wars: Los Últimos Jedi – Reseña de un Fan y un Hater

• VidaExtra, Hype: un mal endémico de la industria del videojuego

• Forbes, ‘Venom’ Review: A Captivating Character Trapped in a Mediocre Film

• Kotaku, Inside Rockstar Games’ Culture of Crunch

• Warp, Red Dead Redemption 2 es el producto de entretenimiento más rentable de la historia

By: Hive account@bohemian.machine

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