The Problem with Today’s Hype and Spoiler Culture

I’m an old school gamer, the type that grew up making maps for myself. The habit stays with me today. I prefer to go into anime, movies, and video games blind. But it’s terribly hard to do that now. The Internet has made hype and spoilers almost unavoidable. As many of you know, I’m a big Legend of Zelda fan, and I was excited for Breath of the Wild. I decided to do a complete media blackout on the game to avoid the issue of hype I’ll discuss shortly and to avoid spoilers. It was hard, but I managed to play the game with minimum knowledge. I knew almost nothing when I finally sat down to play it, and I enjoyed the sense of discovery. I haven’t experienced that rush of discovery since the original Legend of Zelda and before the Internet was around to spoil everything.

This post is something of a “get-off-my-lawn” old-fogie article, but many people today miss out on excitement and discovery because of oversharing. I know people who won’t play a video game without first watching a Let’s Play on YouTube. They feel uncomfortable not knowing what the game will bring. It’s one thing to read a review when you are uncertain if the game is any good. After all, games can be expensive. But it’s another issue when uncertainty in a game causes anxiety. Watching a video that covers the entire game defeats the point of playing the game in the first place. In a similar way, other gamers won’t play a game without a walkthrough. Now, I’ve done this for old NES era games that were designed to play with a Nintendo Power play guide. Legend of Zelda II stands as a good example, but I rarely do this. Likewise, online MMORPGS all-but force a player to watch a video on how to complete harder content. Teams will kick or ridicule people like me who prefer a virgin experience. I am aware this can waste time for other players, so in MMORPGs, I concede and spoil the content.

Hype ties into this spoiler culture. Studios often show the best parts of movies, anime, and games in an effort to drive up excitement. The problem with hype is how few shows and games can live up to it. I’m sure you’ve been stoked for an anime, movie, or video game only to be disappointed by it. The gap between what can be delivered and what can be expected is often large. I was hyped for Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I am a big fan of the original series, and Brotherhood was supposed to follow the manga better. Great! Or so I thought. The series disappointed me compared to the original series. I was excited to see how Ed and Al would use their intelligence like they did in the original series. Well, all I saw was the usual shonen meathead story. I enjoyed the show as an action story, but I was excited for another cerebral story of alchemy. Brotherhood failed to live up to my hype.

The trouble with expectations lies in their lack of reality. You can expect anything at all because hype is an idea wrapped with attachment and excitement and anticipation. When you love a series, you have a certain idea as to how the story and characters should be. Writers struggle with this fact because every fan as their own expectations, and writers can’t possibly reach all of them. Many segments of a fandom contradict each other. Each segment also sees themselves as true fans, which will inevitably end with a segment raging at a direction the story takes. Hype within fan-segments creates this disappointment. For example, I’ve seen fan segments on Tumblr get upset over the direction BBC’s Sherlock series went. Long running anime struggle with this problem too.

Anticipation helps us enjoy stories. In fact, I like to make artificial anticipation by scheduling a day to watch a specific anime instead of watching it whenever. However, too much anticipation can ruin a story. I find it best to keep my excitement in check and limit my consumption of marketing materials and YouTube hype. But this is difficult. Hype is everywhere. Breath of the Wild hype was hard to avoid. I had to be draconian and block YouTube channel alerts and avoid all video game websites. But the effort was well worth it. I decided to try this for any piece of media that catches my interest. I may watch a trailer or two, but that’s it. I will avoid everything else. Although, trailers nowadays often spoil the best scenes in movies and games.

This spoiler and hype culture we have on the Internet comes from fear of uncertainty and from identity. People don’t like uncertainty and the unknown. Many people also attach their sense of self to what they like. Sports fans have long done this, but you can see this inside the anime community. Waifuism, for example, rolls a character into many/most aspects of a person’s life. Do story shape us? Yes. My experiences with the Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy 6 have shaped my thinking across many topics, but they are just a small part of my identity. Of course, much of the issue comes from the Internet’s echo chamber effect. The media we consume feeds back to shape our view, which drives us to seek out more of the same.  And woe to those who change a beloved story inside this chamber.

I speak in generalities from my own limited observations. I, too, reside in the echo chamber. However, the hype and spoiler culture we see online hurts our ability to enjoy stories. It encourages us to indulge anxiety and fear surrounding the unknown even within entertainment. If we can’t tolerate not knowing what’s going to happen in a video game or anime, how can we tolerate life? It seems silly and grandiose, but everyday thought patterns with the small aspects of life carry over to the large and important. We need to be careful of how we think in all aspects of our lives.