Launch Madness
I’m beginning to wonder whether our entire culture is morphing into the guy on the plane who won’t stop showing you pictures from his daughter’s fifth birthday (Disney princess themed, of course), no matter how much boredom and annoyance you put into your, “mm-hmmm, really?” People of America, please listen to me: Not everything that happens to you is worthy of being an “event.” Most of us are ordinary—we do ordinary things, think ordinary thoughts, and live ordinary lives. This is largely a good thing. Interesting lives tend to be very hard on the furniture and are just as likely to end in a cheap hotel with a junkie hooker bearing a suspiciously androgynous name as they are to end with a Nobel prize. (More likely in fact. And as a note for high schoolers, Goths, and emo kids—cheap hotel rooms and depression are not a lifestyle choice.)
Maybe it’s a byproduct of the internet age, this belief that everyone who reads your Facebook page wants to know that you just sneezed. We’re all so desperate to show how special we are that every facet of human existence gets inflated in importance beyond all reason. To me, nothing illustrates this better than the complete overload of the product launch.
Let’s face it. When you can pre-order Eragon on DVD prior to its “highly anticipated” release date, ensuring that you get it at the earliest possible opportunity, it’s obvious that: 1.) You are a gigantic dork and, and we beg you to change your mind about naming your first child “Arwen Sapphira”; and 2.)This whole launch phenomenon is completely out of control.
When I was a kid, the only reason any sane person would wait outside a store at midnight was for concert tickets. Now, through the wonder of technology, we’ve advanced to the point where we can curse at Ticketmaster and scalpers from the warmth and comfort of our own homes. And yet, inexplicably, we line up at midnight to buy video games, DVDs, game consoles, and phones. Phones, for God’s sake. Are we so overcome by materialism and advertising that we can’t wait until morning to buy a damned phone? All those nifty features on your new phone will be on every other phone made within two years, and yet people line up like Khrushchev-era Soviet citizens waiting for their weekly bread ration in order to buy a phone. And not only that, they’re actually arrogant about it. At least in the few midnight video game lines I’ve seen, the people there had the grace to understand how ludicrous it was to be sitting outside of a store in the middle of the night in order to buy a game. But the phone line people have the nerve to get smug and superior when you ask what they’re doing: “Oh, this is the line for the new iOrgasm—it’s like the iPhone, only it can make an appointment with a Thai massage girl while downloading music tracks that haven’t even been recorded yet. But don’t even think of trying to get one. They’re totally sold out everywhere.”
Of course, while most of my annoyance is aimed at us consumers for falling for this garbage, I’m still irritated with the companies that keep it going. Your crappy movie that sank like a stone at the box office and was compared unfavorably with a full rectal exam? It doesn’t need a big build-up to its “release date.” And I know that the Gamestop employees enjoy taunting people with the knowledge that the game they want to buy is, “in back,” but they’re not allowed to sell it until midnight of the launch day. But here’s a radical concept—why not just sell things when they arrive in the store? Why make your customers jump through hoops so that you can inflate the importance of your product? And in the name of all that is holy, at least try to make enough units to meet demand. Some of these game systems you’d swear were launched with one factory manned by a ninety-year old couple named Erma and Bob, who can only make 2-3 consoles per day before Oprah comes on and it’s time for the early bird special at Denny’s. All of which, of course, only drives up the insufferableness quotient of the store employees and geeks (but I repeat myself) who are dying to tell you that they’re special enough to get one, since they pre-ordered it immediately after exiting the womb, but you’re totally out of luck.
Which, of course, goes back to my earlier point about special-ness. Maybe if we weren’t so desperate to differentiate ourselves by what we own, this consumerist madness might die down, and we’d no longer have to endure the constant barrage of launches, premiers, and collector’s editions. But we need to move quickly, before we find ourselves waiting in midnight lines for the launch of the pre-order opportunity to buy the Special Edition of the newest first person shooter. (Hey, it comes with a poster-sized map of the game world and a cheap velvet bag, so it’s totally worth it.)