Why Tesla’s Cybertruck captures the hearts of millennials
Retro has evolved.
Elon Musk announced Tesla’s newest electric-powered vehicle in late November this year in a reveal that received a significant amount of attention as Musk was seen center-stage smashing the truck’s windows. But beyond our initial amused reaction to the “bulletproof” windows shattering, it was something about the Cybertruck’s slick, sharp edges that cut deep into our hearts, whether we ended up putting in an order for the truck or not.
Although Wall Street was skeptical about the unconventional look and overall functionality of the truck, the 250,000 orders placed tells a different story about the Cybertruck’s overall reception. RBC Capital Markets analyst Joseph Spak even likened it to a Hummer for millennials. Like the Hummer, the Cybertruck is a powerful symbol of the times we grew up in — but it’s not through its militaristic appearance that it provokes a sense of anatopism upon seeing one drive by. Rather, it is a visual, tangible symbol of the early days of video games, and as a result it throws us off balance to see a digital artifact come to life. Like the Hummer was inspired by military vehicles during times of war, the Cybertruck makes use of millennials’ intimacy with the virtual polygon worlds that animated our tube TVs.
Unlike our tangible molecular world, 3D virtual worlds are made up of many polygons, which were less numerous and thus more apparent back in the day when game engines had much lower processing power. “Low-poly” is a term used to describe the environments in which we can see the polygons that make up the 3D illustrations.
The thing about millennials is that we have been driving polygon-built cars before we got our actual drivers’ licenses. As we selected between Yoshi or Mario, we instantly put ourselves in the front seat, learning to drive using Mario Kart 64 tracks as our training grounds, and later racing them (while simultaneously yelling at our siblings) on Crash Tag Team Racing.
We thought we could just be Mario or Crash Bandicoot for a couple moments, but after countless hours of gameplay and hundreds of races won, we gained a sense of attachment to our first poly-cars. And now it dazes us as we watch those vehicles trespassing through the screens of our Nintendo DS’s, and onto our streets. How could that be? Weren’t these objects made for our entertainment, restricted to 4 corners?
As children, we thought that games were just pastimes, as an escape from reality for a period of time. But as we consumed them, we consumed the identities that they gave us and the representations that they evoked.
By arousing such intense emotions in us through play, low-poly video games had a pervasive effect on us that lasted beyond the period of being entertained. The imprints that they left on our identities show how they are intimately tied to our emotional landscape, which is what Aubrey Anable tries to demonstrate in her book, Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect- — affect being “the aspects of emotions, feelings, and bodily engagement that circulate through people and things but are often registered only at the interface — at the moment of transmission or contact” (Anable xviii).
“Affect stills us, gives us shape, identifies, signifies …” (xix)
Anable analyses affect as a source of power that causes games to transcend the definition of being just a platform of entertainment into “a whole way of life” (x). By being an affective system, games are not limited to the private spaces within which they are consumed, but become a part of culture that interacts with us in various and complex ways (xiv).
Not only are games as affective systems influencing our cultural and personal identities, but their impressions also last beyond the initial play through nostalgia. Taking both the cultural and nostalgic quality of games means that, if they can successfully be bottled into consumable material form, then they have the potentiality of being highly marketable.
In Jeremy J. Sierra and Shaun McQuitty’s empirical study on the “Attitudes and Emotions as Determinants of Nostalgia Purchases”, they identified nostalgic products as an attractive purchase for consumers, as people purchase items in an attempt to preserve their past and solidify a sense of self (Sierra, McQuitty 99). Especially when it comes to experiences shared with other people, nostalgia helps cultivate and preserve our individual and group identification (105). It is only strengthened through the fact that the digital age makes it especially easy to be fed more and more notes of nostalgia, encouraging a yearning for the past.
For the millennial population trying to understand our personal identities in a rapidly changing modern landscape, it’s these moments of nostalgia that help us make more sense of who we are. Layering both affect theory with our connection to our past experiences (particularly social ones), it makes sense that retro games touch us so dearly, as they are a part of our identities.
And marketers capitalize on our desire to relive the past. Volkswagen tapped into their consumers’ social identities when they came out with the New Beetle: a new, shinier and more technologically advanced rendition of the Vintage Beetle, which reminded customers of the times they used to travel with their friends in their youth, allowing them an opportunity to identify with their past through a consumer purchase (109).
The Cybertruck’s magic is that it takes what we know and love — those simple low-poly structures we spent hours interacting with — and makes it tangible and drivable.
Then why don’t we just skip a step and start driving a replica of Mario’s kart (and while we’re at it, throwing bananas at speeding cars)?
Rather than directly recycling the past, nostalgia takes on a romanticized view of the past. So we don’t really see people going out of their way to buy one of those fat TV sets and a Playstation 2 to relive the good old days of low-poly gaming. Instead, nostalgic products reinvent the past so that it is consumable in the present. They do so by romanticizing it: you get low-poly gaming without having to hit your TV every once in a while when the noise starts showing up on the screen, or waiting for your favourite game to load only to see the infamous “Red Screen of Death”:
It’s fun to look back on, but you wouldn’t buy it.
Successful nostalgic products are past artifacts without all the heavy baggage that comes with the past’s technological constraints. In fact, while the Cybertruck evokes “low-poly” architecture, “low-poly” actually could not exist until high-poly became an option. A scene like Yoshi Valley in Mario Kart 64 was made up of around 700 polygons. Today our game consoles are capable of displaying scenes with hundreds of thousands of polygons, making polygon budgets not really an issue anymore when it comes to what our game engines can handle.
The use of low-poly today is an aesthetic. It’s a reminder of the simple past — but a romanticized version of it. Just a look at low-poly art shows us the immense difference between “low” poly of the 2000s and the low-poly work that exists today. Nostalgia reinvents low-poly so that it looks more like high fidelity models of a low-poly world rather than a couple hundred polygons assembling together in an attempt to look 3D.
In a market saturated with photorealistic graphics, many indie games are trying to stand out by making a return to retro graphics as a way of celebrating the digitalness of their games (Thibault 19). In his article in a gamenvironments issue, Mattia Thibault draws on the appeal of imperfect graphics in the face of high quality, photo-real images, writing that, “the digital being all but done, future cultural products will more and more be hybrids, able to exploit both computing and materiality” (20). Taking this into the commercial space, an automobile sounds like the next big thing — and Musk did exactly that.
The Cybertruck is a kind of emotional sense-memory rather than an accurate remembrance of the low-poly days. It’s a shiny version of the past: one that you’d want to drive today. Only the most favorable strains of low-poly overtones are used — this car will not lag on you!
At the same time, it is a reminder of our digitally-influenced past right here on our streets. It may be a gawking sight at first because we never expected those things we drove at the age of eight to ever be able to gain the power of breaking past our screens and onto our streets. Our Gameboys, Nintendo’s, PS2s, and XBox 360s may be dead, but that doesn’t mean the technologies the virtual worlds that they gave life to are long gone. In fact, they are well and thriving — through us, through affect. And we just thought we were playing a little game.
Sources:
Anable, Aubrey. Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Sierra, Jeremy J., and Shaun McQuitty. “Attitudes and Emotions as Determinants of Nostalgia Purchases: An Application of Social Identity Theory.” Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, vol. 15, no. 2, 2007, pp. 99–112. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40470284.
Thibault, Mattia. “Post-Digital Games: The Influence of Nostalgia in Indie Games’ Graphic Regimes.” gamenvironments, no. 04, 2016.
