Why we love the post-apocalypse...in media

Apocalypse is generally something to be feared. If faced with it, most of us would be terrified beyond measure. But there is something appealing about it as a setting in entertainment media, particularly in film in video games, the essence of which is that it represents freedom from drudgery and hopelessness in contemporary life.

That may seem a bit counter-intuitive, as apocalypse - or more accurately: post-apocalypse - implies living in a wretched world devastated by some kind of man-made or even natural disaster that renders the Earth as hyper-dangerous and perhaps even toxic. But that is not the whole story.

With apocalypse, there is a presumed background of anarchy that goes with the destruction of government and societal institutions. There is no pressure of work or career. You don't have to go to the dull cubicle hell every day. Your wealthier friends with better houses and fancier cars are suddenly on a level playing field. If you see your boss after the apocalypse, you can tell him to f-off with essentially no repercussions. Another angle on the appeal of apocalyptic settings for the jaded, disgruntled aspect all of us have somewhere within us is this sense that apocalypse is the universe's revenge on those in power in society whom we feel have screwed us over.

Picture it: every day you go to work and your boss treats you like a dog. He yells at you for being late. He reviews your powerpoint presentation and tweaks it, making it worse. Then when he presents it to the management team and they hate it, he says it was all your fault. Or if they like it, he takes all credit. When you complain to his boss, she looks back you like you're crazy and lectures you about your bad attitude and how you are not a team player. But when the bombs fall and society is devastated and somehow the three of you survive, you encounter them in the rubble and it is immediately known that their precious powerpoints and management meetings are worthless. Their unfair assessments of how you lack real talent and have zero growth potential are meaningless. In that moment you could exact any kind of revenge on them with no consequence. It is as if the universe crept up and said to your bosses, "Oh yeah? Well screw you."

Now this may be an extreme picture, but everyone experiences moments in contemporary life where they want to scream and lash out at the world. When someone dangerously cuts you off in traffic you curse them and give them the finger. When you are taking a walk around the neighborhood after dinner with your family on a nice summer evening and someone in her BMW with a her shitzu on her lap while simultaneously talking on the cell phone and smoking a cigarette rolls through a stop sign and doesn't notice you in the crosswalk, you wish there was a cop there to pull her over.

These ordinary moments of malaise against society build up in our inner beings, and the apocalypse provides a path for you to release the pain and frustration they bring. The apocalypse, while a horrible reality if we were ever faced with it, allows for freedoms we would otherwise never experience. Sure, it comes with death and destruction, disease and hellish scarcity of food and resources, but in those moments when you boss trashes your work, when you step in your neighbors dogshit on your lawn, when telemarketers call you for the fifth time during dinner, you start to think of fantastical moments of the worst possible revenge on these people that you would and could never do.

These are not pleasant concepts to ponder as revenge is ultimately self defeating, even if made possible by the apocalypse. The new age teachings of the 21st centry, such as in Eckhart Tolle's masterpiece A New Earth, teaches us all the trappings that such egocentric revenge condemns us to. But even if we are transformed beings who seek understanding, wisdom and communication between all, we still get those impulses that tell us we have been wronged when we get cut off in traffic, step in our neigbor's dog shit or have our powerpoint unfairly slammed because your boss has the emotional development of a preteen. Everyone has their limits of patience and escapist apocalyptic media transports us to a world where revenge is ours and we are free from the mundane tyranny of our lives.

In essence, this is why violent media and video games are so popular. It's not because people have a desire to cause death and destruction in real life, but rather because they know they can't. The apocalyptic setting empowers people to be survivalists and live off their wits. It is the great leveler of playing fields in life where the investment bankers and corporate executives and transactional lawyers no longer hold an upper edge that money gives them.

If you think about every shooter game you have played, all them have some context that allows for the player character to run around killing everything in sight. War is a good one, or alien invasion, or some other disaster where you are being pursued to the death. While such games have rules even within their apocalyptic settings, it is still that general sense of freedom from typical societal rules that is so empowering. This is the inherent appeal of most violent video games.

April 2010 NPD Recap. And the problem with the Wii...

Last Thursday NPD released the April 2010 results data and below was the data they publicly announced:


For some reason NPD decided only to reveal unit sales of the top 5 titles of the month instead of 10. Maybe they were embarrassed at how low the lower half of the top 10 performed, but hey, they just report the data. How well or poorly sales do is not NPD's fault. The other standard tidbits they published for April 2010 (compared to April 2009):

• Total industry sales fell 26% to $766.2 million
• Software fell 22% to $398.5 million
• Accessories fell 9% to $118.4 million
• April YTD sales were down 11%

Specifically on hardware:

• Nintendo DS sold 440.8k units (vs. over 1 million units in March)
• Nintendo Wii sold 277.2k units (vs. 557.5 units in March)
• Sony PS3 sold 180.8k units (vs. 313.9k units in March)
  
• Microsoft Xbox 360 sold 185.4k units (vs. 338.4k units in March)

The gist of most headlines was essentially "train wreck" or "sales derailed" or "it's the end of the frakking world" and such. So what happened? Some analysts were baffled or even dismayed at these results. Several explanations were floated around, the first of which being that Easter came earlier this year so its annual bump was felt in the March sales data this year vs. April last year. That's at least partially valid. Another theory on the Nintendo angle was hardware shortages. I find that unbelievable because every Best Buy, Target, Fry's and Gamestop store I've been to all year always had hardware stock in. Always. If this far into the Wii lifecycle Nintendo can't manage supply, people should be fired. I guess some of it could be true, but again, I have never been unable to find a Wii at a Best Buy or Target or Gamestop in the last year.

I think the real issue was just there was nothing new and exciting to buy from Nintendo on its platforms. There hasn't been anything good released on the Wii since New Super Mario Bros. in November, and notice it was #3 on the April chart at 200k units. In other words, it's crushing new all new releases after November. March's Pokemon blockbuster releases on DS came in at #2 and #4 in April, which also explain the 1 million+ DS hardware units sold that month. Wii Just Dance is the only 3rd party game on a Nintendo platform to crack the top 10 and that was released back in November, too. The Wii 3rd party market used to be dominated by Guitar Hero and Rock Band. This just reiterates for the 1000th time that only Nintendo releases matter on its platforms, especially late in the cycle. Everything else that isn't Nintendo is either associated with Nintendo - as in Sega's Mario vs. Sonic Olympics game...it has a picture of Mario on the pack front and has Mario in the name - or is a fad.

Said another way...

...the only 3rd party games that will sell big on the Wii are fads genres: guitar, fitness, dancing and such.

To be fair, that's sort of the nature of Nintendo. You buy their platforms for the 1st party games like Mario, Pokemon, the occasional Zelda game, maybe even Metroid. You dip into the fad genres and the forget about them. After guitar games peaked in 2008, fitness games peaked in 2009, even though the vast majority of the fitness category was driven by Nintendo's Wii Fit and its balance board peripheral. EA did okay with Sports Active and there are some new entrants in 2010, but already year to date fitness is way behind mainly because the Wii Fit is down. It's old news.

What's going to be the fad genre on Nintendo in 2010 that's going to turn it around? Can anything turn it around? Price drops always help, but the thing has to sell software, both 1st and 3rd party, for it to continue (wait, resume?) to make big profits, even if the hardware itself is a profitable business.

So where does this leave us regarding the Wii? Rather describe the Wii platform as being dominated by casual gamers, I think a better term is fadfickle gamers. Yes, I'm making up a word. It's called "fadfickle."

fadfickle - a type of gamer who typically buys hardware and software as part of a fad. Once they get bored they stop playing and don't buy anything new unless it's part of a hot new fad.

The Wii is dominated by these gamers. They followed the guitar fad. A smaller portion followed the fitness fad. The bought the Wii in the first place because it was a fad and was cheaper than the 360 or PS3 and its software was, too. When it came out in 2006 "subprime" was not a well known word. Once the economy soured the probability of fadfickle gamers dropping two to four hundred dollars for various types of Wii bundles declined.

Compared to the 360 and PS3, the Wii is still the bestselling console month over month, however compared to YTD 2009, 2010 Wii sales are lower while both 360 and PS3 sales are higher, especially the PS3 thanks to the price drop.

What does this mean? The "core" gamer is still buying, but more on that later...

Long live Kevin Butler

With the launch of the Slim hardware update last September, Sony brilliantly updated its branding for the PlayStation 3 and perhaps for Sony Computer Entertainment as a whole. Fans and industry analysts have written at length about the Kevin Butler campaign spanning first party games and the new hardware itself, generally lauding it over the pompous launch campaign back in 2006 that featured, among other things, a crying baby and a levitating PS3 that were supposed to convince the masses to save up their pennies to buy it for its pure awesomeness. But the introduction of Kevin Butler changed all that. See below for its awesomeness:

Well played, Kevin. Well played.

What made this work was that Sony was able to make fun of itself while finally delivering the console at a price a broader range of gamers would accept. The brilliance was that Sony carried this highly accepted tone over to all its first party ads. The first major game to be promoted after the Slim launch ad above was the highly anticipated sequel: Uncharted 2.



For those who had played the first Uncharted game, the above ad resonated well because while the footage itself did not convey the game's excellent whit, the humorous story in the ad about the girlfriend thinking the game was a movie did. Perhaps that is a bit of a coincidence, but as new ads rolled out the offbeat humor Kevin Butler brought to them stayed consistent and gave the PS3 a new, pleasantly snarky vibe that made gamers rewind their TiVos. Even if the game being advertised, unlike Uncharted 2, did not have a wisecracking tone the ads still did. Sony successfully managed to tie all its first party games together, from God of War III to the new MLB game featuring Joe Mauer, inside the Kevin Butler mystique and make them work. It gave their ads stopping power, at least to the target market, and in this economy that's exactly what you want to do.

At GDC this year I had a chance to sit down with Sony marketing VP Scott Steinberg and ask him about Kevin Bulter. He assured me Kevin will be a central part of the PS3 marketing campaign throughout 2010 and presumably beyond. Personally, I can't wait to see what Kevin does next.