Here's an idea.
Amiibos have been turning consumers into collectors.
[THEME MUSIC]
After visiting my pals at Toy Pizza a couple weeks ago,
I started thinking lots about toys, collectibles,
and what I think they're for.
Yeah, this is not fun.
Which now that I think about it, probably explains
last week's episode about LEGO, and also
has turned out to be accidentally great timing,
given all of the hullabaloo surrounding Nintendo's amiibos.
Amiibos are collectible video game characters
that communicate with the Wii U and new 3DS
to unlock and store game extras and player stats.
And like Samus's skills on [INAUDIBLE],
they are in demand.
Absurdly low stock, which some people claim is purposeful,
scalpers, bizarre edition, retail, and distribution
strategies, and a dock workers strike-- not kidding--
have created a dearth of Marths, Max, and Meta Knights.
The grey market of bulk purchased and resold rare
and defective amiibos, one selling for 25 grand,
has formed online, as have, of course,
communities of collectors, many of whom are very upset about
the situation.
A normal boy or girl like me can't even
get the toys he wants.
Now people collect amiibos, and the reasons
that people collect anything, to develop or advertise
the skill, effort, or wealth related to collections,
to associate themselves with what they perceive
the thing being collected to mean,
to preserve or display that meaning for others,
all summed up by a Baudrillard quote
that we used in our morning routines video.
What you really collect is always yourself.
But my question is how do things generally, and amiibos
specifically, end up having that meaning that
makes them worth collecting?
Archaeologist Ian Hodder wrote that an object
can gain a cultural meaning, as opposed to scientific meaning,
in three ways-- first, the many effects it can have
on the world, it's utility or functionality, second,
the fact of its symbolic existence being quote,
part of a code set or structure.
In other words, objects generally
are meaningful because they are symbols.
Specific objects are meaningful because
of where and how they fit into the larger
structure of symbols.
And third, to what their symbolism refers,
the values or ideas that a singular object may represent.
Hodder calls this the historical content of the object itself.
It's why your grandfather's watch is so meaningful.
Amiibos are unique because generally,
their utility and the way that they
fit into that larger structure of things
sort of straddles some lines.
They sit in the sometimes controversial doll,
action figure, collectible disputed zone.
But also because the are a Nintendo computer product,
they embody the toy video game dichotomy, which
is to say if a Blink amiibo isn't displayed proudly and set
loose in a game of Super Smash Brothers,
he's not living up to his full potential.
I don't know if everyone my age had exactly this experience.
But I got my first NES in 1989 for Christmas.
And back then, there was no hesitation in calling it a toy.
I don't think that's true anymore.
I think home video game console is no longer
perfectly synonymous with toy.
And I think that that is a symptom of video games having
not entirely grown up.
As I've matured, so too have video games, and cartoons
as well, but not, at least not similarly, toys, and certainly
not the collection of them.
Where it's understandable, if not expected,
that people like me and my pals will play video games
and watch animated television shows, for the general,
totally uncool populist adults collecting and displaying
figurines remains a marginally aberrant behavior.
Unless we're talking about your grandmother's
Hummel collection.
That is totally normal somehow.
But I think amiibos address this by virtue
of the fact an amiibo is a computer
product with a utility.
Two things happen.
If they don't mature collectibles per se,
then they at least advance them technologically by giving them
a networked purpose, by giving them another set of objects
to be a part of.
In so far as entertainment and design have gone from physical
to digital, we're sort of in this spot of physical meets
digital with stuff like vinyl records
that have download codes, the internet of things,
and stuff like Disney Infinity, Skylanders, and amiibos.
For me, these empowered collectibles inch
closer to action figures because they do something.
They can take action.
They're not simply an inert object.
They can be used or consumed.
And this is significant because as David Banash wrote,
use is one way to distinguish a consumer from a collector.
It's in making a collectible consumable
that the act of collecting it makes
it less wacky in the eyes of many people.
Amiibos are collectibles which are usable, collectibles
apologizing for their collectibility in some way,
but also weirdly legitimizing it through their relationship
with video games, a widely understood and accepted
hobby, which might partially explain
why the low stock is so vexing.
Amiibos encourage and enable collecting
in I think new and interesting ways,
but also make it frustrating and impossible.
We could only get four of the most common ones via Amazon.
And this situation is exactly the one
that creates collectors.
Banash again writes that it's only
when the object is unavailable that consumers
recognize themselves in the figure of the collector.
It makes me wonder how much frustration, and discussion,
and community building has occurred around amiibos.
Because people want simply to be consumers
but have been turned into collectors by Nintendo.
Gotta catch them all.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
All of this is to say, though normatively
speaking, adults shouldn't play with toys,
amiibos' scarcity and relationship
to much beloved video games and characters
make them very attractive and complex objects, which actually
also caused me to wonder one final thing about toys
and collections generally.
When I was old enough to want things like Ninja Turtles, GI
Joes, and Transformers-- not a young kid, where
my parents were just buying indestructible toys
and putting them in front of me, but an older
kid without discretionary income yet but still capable
of convincing my parents to spend their hard
earned cash on mass produced, molded
plastic figures of major market media entities--
I never played with those toys, at least not in the way
the commercials showed kids playing with them.
I would arrange them.
I took a lot of them apart.
I don't remember exactly why I wanted them.
Maybe because my friends had them,
or because I thought Michelangelo was cool,
or because I liked collecting them.
Either way, it wasn't to do this kind of stuff.
Get 'em, Rock and Roll.
Here comes Grand Slam.
--[SINGING] He fights for freedom wherever there's trouble.
GI Joe is there.
But here's the thing.
I still had tons of fun.
I loved those toys.
They were able to take on all of that meaning.
They became important, which makes
me realize that while the distinction between a consumer
and collector might be a clear one,
the distinction between collector and player
might be less so.
And maybe amiibos speak to that uncertain Link.
What do you guys think?
Have amiibos turned consumers into collectors?
Do they illustrate some blurry line
between what it means to collect versus play?
Let us know in the comments.
And you know exactly what I'm going to say.
Idea Channel collects records.
What?
Was that not what you thought I was going to say?
We have so many records.
Because of reasons, all of which are very good,
we have to do comment responses from my apartment this week.
Let's see what you guys had to say about "The LEGO
Movie" and copyright.
First things first, I want to make
it clear that I am in agreement with Carter [INAUDIBLE] here
that, you know, there are a lot of things
that are wrong with copyright, a lot of things
that need to be fixed.
But I don't mean to suggest in any way
that I'm saying that copyright needs to be abolished.
I think that that would be over correcting just
in the completely opposite direction.
And that, you know, I think of myself
as being pretty far left in the copy fight.
But I'm not saying that there should be no system
to protect creative works.
President Business-- it's almost like LEGO pays a lot of money
to show their ads before YouTube videos that
have their name in the title.
I hope you at least saw something cool.
I think I saw the same LEGO Star Wars commercial
about 1,000 times, which is something
I'm not interested at all in even a little bit.
Definitely don't need those, any of the LEGO,
LEGO sets for Star Wars.
Not interested in the Millennium Falcon even a little.
Iona had some qualms with the premise of last week's video,
saying that we're not really asking whether people think
"The LEGO Movie" is about copyright,
but rather just asking if people think
in general that less restrictive copyright is a good idea.
Because you can kind of read whatever message
you want into the "LEGO Movie," that the narrative
is open enough that if you are looking for a cause,
you will find it.
And I think this is really interesting.
Because in the comments from last week,
there was no shortage of alternate readings
for "The LEGO Movie," like here, here are a couple.
Blair Einfeldt saw it as being about education.
Not Gaius Baltar saw it as a message against capitalism.
Nicholas Breilmaier saw it as being
not about less restrictive copyright,
but about just the importance of being creative,
of thinking outside of the box in general.
And yeah, I mean this, I think this
is a pretty valid criticism, that if you
can read any cause into what they're working towards,
or a lot of causes into what they're working towards,
at what point do you say that the movie is definitely
about this thing?
Maybe you can't.
Definitely not going to ask the author about it.
That's for sure.
[INAUDIBLE] brings up the problems
that occur when Lord Business tries
to Kragle extended universes and talk about Star Wars
specifically.
And this actually brings to mind something
that I was thinking about, another sort
of big topic for "The LEGO Movie," which
is intertextuality, which is, you know,
sort of when characters, or ideas, or settings cross
their own borders and interact with characters,
and ideas, and settings from other universes,
which, right, I mean "The LEGO Movie" has by the dozens.
And um, I actually had never thought
about the intertextual nature of one universe,
that there actually is intertextuality between what
we see on screen from Star Wars and what
there is in books, and comic books, and other media.
And yeah, this was-- sort of opened my eyes a little bit.
Thank you for writing this comment.
It was a great comment.
Links this one and all the others in the doobily doo.
And on that intertexuality note, Joshua Haverman
talks about how, in order to really get
at what's happening in "The LEGO Movie," maybe it
would be helpful to take a look at a film the directors worked
on before, "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,"
which I love, and you know, talks
about how both of those movies, both of these movies
are about kind of innovating in the face of a force that
wants to make sure that that's not happening.
And so, yeah, I mean maybe that does
give credence to some of the readings of "The LEGO Movie"
that we were talking about a couple minutes ago, about how,
you know, maybe it's about just the importance
of thinking outside the box.
Liquifiedbutter, I have been thinking
about this for the last week.
And Girl Talk was the person that I sort of settled on
as being the closest as well.
I, I also thought about Kirby Ferguson and Eclectic Method.
It's sort of like, like mash up, video mash up
DJ stuff that's really great, if you don't know it.
Um, but I was thinking about, you
know, what are the requirements of the real life [INAUDIBLE].
They're going to show the culture industry
that the creative reuse of pre-existing culture
is not only um like fun, which I guess would probably
mean profitable, but also has an important relationship
to creativity moving forward.
And I don't know.
Like call me a cynic, like I don't
think that there's any one positioned
to do that right now.
Like Girl Talk is the closest, but still not quite there.
Yeah, those were um oil trees.
They don't uh grow back.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these collectible mini things.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit links
in the doobily doo and tweet of the week
comes from Darling Lily tooth who
asks what IKEA says about the humanoid rock condition.
I love this.
I didn't even know.
I love that there are stools that are put together wrong.
Because I have done that.
The Crystal Gems, they're just like us,
except for the fact that they're alien space rocks.
[THEME MUSIC]