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Editorial: Mindless ConsumerismWould you buy a product you knew nothing about? Many people will.By Connor Graham - 08-05-05 |
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Let’s talk about our country, America. America is a capitalist nation. The American College Dictionary defines capitalism as: “the concentration of capital (wealth) in the hands of a few.” In other words, people have their own money and may do with it what they please. In this situation, anytime two people want to make a trade, they both have to believe that they’re getting the better end of the deal, or one of them will back out of said deal. Now, you may or may not agree with me, but I’ve always thought of capitalism as simply, “everybody wins.” In other words, if two people make a deal, for example, “I’ll trade you an apple for an orange,” then presumably, Person A has more apples, but needs oranges, and Person B has more oranges, and needs apples. Both people believe that they get the better end of the deal. But who trades apples for oranges? Not many people any more. Think about Person A needing an mp3 player, and Person B needing money. Now, think that Person A is just an average Joe, like you and me. Person B, however, is a huge corporation that produces, among other things, mp3 players. Let’s call this corporation “Abble” and this particular mp3 player brand “iBod.” If Person A needs an iBod, and Abble needs money, then everybody wins, right? It sure seems that way. Now let’s introduce another company, called “Tell.” You may have heard of Tell. They make computers, computer accessories and peripherals, and mp3 players. Let’s call the mp3 player the “Tell Digital Jukebox,” or Tell DJ. There is a specific model called the Tell Pocket DJ, which is similar to an iBod Mini. The Tell Pocket DJ costs $200 and holds five gigabytes of songs. The iBod Mini costs $250 and holds four gigabytes of songs. Now, with this information in front of us, if Person A buys an iBod Mini because he has never heard of the Tell DJ, is everyone winning? Not really. A similar situation to what I described above happened to me and a friend just recently. My friend bought an iPod Mini from Apple, which, at the time, cost $250 and holds 4 gigabytes of songs. When I told him I had a Dell Pocket DJ from Dell, which cost only $200 and holds 5 gigabytes of songs, well, let’s just say he wasn’t too happy. Author’s Note: Since the time of writing this, Apple has changed the price of the iPod mini. Now you can get the 4GB mini for $200, and a 6GB mini for $250. So they’re still ripping you off, just not quite as much. And this is exactly what I’m talking about. You may not believe it, but a huge number of people will buy a product without knowing much of anything about it, or its competitors. Getting back to my mp3 player example, I was listening to my Dell Pocket DJ, when a friend of mine (well, actually it was someone who I see fairly often who bugs the crap out of me all the time, but that’s a different issue) saw me listening to it. This is about how the dialogue went: Him: “Is that an iPod?” Me: “No, it’s a Dell DJ.” Him: “Is that like an iPod?” Me: “It’s an mp3 player, yes.” Him: “A what?” The expression on my face, or at least the one I could picture myself having, would have looked something like -_-;; . If you can’t recognize the expression, it’s one of someone who’s embarrassed for the person he’s talking to. This person had no trouble understanding the concept of an iPod, but had no idea what an mp3 player was. It’s people like this who are the epitome of mindless consumerism, people who will spend large amounts of money on something that they don’t even understand, possibly just because this product is ‘cool,’ or possibly because the person is just a moron. In this case, I think it was a little of both. Or maybe a lot of both. But I digress. Fortunately though, this problem is not universal. It seems to me like this whole trend has thoroughly attached itself to one industry. Unfortunately, this industry is one that I’m sure a lot of people reading this have to deal with, and that’s the electronics industry. For some reason, computers are in a huge percentage of American homes these days, and as the number of people that own one goes up, the number of people who actually understand how to use one goes down. It’s almost oxymoronic how huge an influence science and electronics have on people’s lives today, yet how few people truly comprehend them. If you haven’t already made the connection, video games are part of this influence. How many people do you know that play video games? More importantly, how many of those people could name the company that first introduced A and B buttons, shoulder buttons, and the directional control pad? How many of them could tell you the differences between cartridges and discs? How many of them could even name a single game for the SNES? If you were to interview a good portion of the United States gaming population, you would probably be quite astounded by the results. This trend of mindless consumerism is just about to bring a new angle to video games: the ‘cool’ factor. Sooner or later, video games are going to really become ‘cool,’ and any company that wants to succeed will have to appeal to the masses. But then what becomes of those of us who don’t want to be sheep, those of us with unique enough tastes to love original games like Feel the Magic: XY/XX, and that realize the only difference between games like Madden NFL 2004 and Madden NFL 2005 is a single digit at the end? What’s the point of playing the same game year after year? But, like it or not, it’s exactly these kinds of games that appeal to the masses, and any company that can’t turn out mindless crap like that over and over will decline in popularity and eventually die, leaving us with nothing more than the hope that Halo 3 will actually have some new gameplay mechanics, as unlikely as it is. The “coolification” of video games has begun, and someone has to stop it. Stay tuned to Nintendo Now until next week, when I will further discuss the influence of “cool” on the content of video games. |
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