Month: August 2012

#oneaday Day 936: Biggest != Best

No, I’m not talking about penises.

Let’s talk about Facebook.

Facebook is massive. Facebook has taken over most people’s daily existence on the Web to such a degree that there are plenty of people out there who genuinely believe that it is the Web. Like, all of it.

It’s not. But then you probably knew that already.

But the fact stands that it is a massive global phenomenon, and something that has happily grown and evolved over time from its humble beginnings up to the multi-bajillion dollar business it is today.

Thing is, though, as it’s grown, it’s sort of lost sight of what it’s for.

“Facebook is a social tool that connects you with people around you,” the login screen used to say. When adding a friend, you used to have to indicate how you knew them, and the recipient of that friend request had to verify your story. It was actually quite a good idea that got around the MySpace “friend collecting” issue, whereby people would just add and add and add each other and then not talk to any of their 40,000 friends. Facebook’s systems ensured that you 1) were actually friends with the people you marked as friends and 2) didn’t fall into the “popularity contest” trap.

Whizz forward to today, and the Facebook of 2012 is a very different place. Now we get people promising “2,000+ friend requests” if you Like one of their pictures. I don’t want two thousand friends. I want my online friends to reflect people I actually know, and occasionally give me the opportunity to meet someone new who is relevant to my interests and/or knows people that I know. Give me two thousand newcomers from all over the world, all of whom are vying for my attention simply to make some arbitrary number higher than everyone else, and you sort of lose that.

Part of the reason for this change is the different in what Facebook thinks we should use it for these days. I first joined the site quite a while after many of my friends had — at the time, I assumed it was going to be one of those passing fads like MySpace, and would quickly disappear into obscurity. But I found its value while on a trip to the States to visit my brother — while abroad, I could share the photographs I’d taken and easily stay in touch with my friends as a large group rather than emailing them individually. It was nice.

Over time, things started to shift. Facebook’s big change to something a bit closer to its current layout upset a lot of people, and the addition of “applications” marked the beginning of how the social network looks now. At the time, I was of the attitude that the people complaining about it were bleating on about nothing, but in retrospect they may have had a point. As everyone’s news feed started filling up with FarmVille brag posts, the signal to noise ratio started getting worse.

Then came the brands. Facebook undoubtedly thought they were doing everyone a favour when they opened up the previously “personal” social network to companies and businesses who wanted to grow their social presence. And in some cases, it worked well, with companies able to engage with their customers and post important information as and when needed.

Unfortunately, this too lost the plot somewhere. Now, pretty much every brand page uses the same obnoxious “engagement strategies” to keep people commenting, talking and Liking — the worst of which by far is the fucking awful “fill in the blank” status update that invites commenters to give their own meaningless opinion on something utterly asinine and irrelevant to the company’s product. (“My favorite color is ____________!” proclaimed the Facebook Page for The Sims 3 on one memorable occasion. Over four thousand people replied.)

You see, people seem to absolutely love posting things that have absolutely no value. People love thinking their opinion is important, that they are being listened to, that the things they say are somehow valuable to someone.

The things you say are valuable to someone. The people they are important to are called your family and friends. Not the PR representative for The Sims 3. They don’t care what your favourite colour is. They just want you to keep giving them page impressions and comments and Likes.

Likes. Fuck Likes. The Like button is Facebook’s most enduring legacy, and one of the biggest blows to actual communication in today’s connected world. Why comment any more when you can just click “Like”? It means nothing, particularly when it’s connected to a sentence for which the verb “like” is completely inappropriate. (“My grandad died. So sad right now.” “Insensitive Twat likes this.”) It’s a meaningless metric designed to measure how many people have seen something you have posted and want to interact with it, but are slightly too lazy to actually write anything.

The diminishing sense of Facebook’s usefulness for actual communication is perhaps best exemplified by the current way someone’s profile looks. Known as “Timeline”, the theory behind it is that it is an easy to navigate history charting everything interesting that has happened in someone’s life.

It’s a sound plan. Unfortunately its implementation is just terrible.

The problem is that there’s no consistency in how posts show up, and seemingly no understanding of how people read content. Leaving aside the fact that one’s profile cover image and fairly pointless basic information takes up over 500 lines — or nearly half of a 1920×1080 display — there’s seemingly no rhyme or reason as to what gets posted at the “top” of one’s profile.

The conventions established by blogs and earlier social networks dictate that the most recent things go at the top, so anyone checking in on someone’s page doesn’t have to scroll around or search to find something new. Yet with all the sources from which Facebook can pull information these days — games, external sites, apps, Spotify, Netflix —  there is no consistency in what goes where. For example, at the time of writing, this is what the top of my Timeline looks like:

What a mess, and very little of it is stuff that I 1) actively shared and 2) feel people really need to know. I deliberately shared the RunKeeper stuff because I like sharing my fitness achievements because it helps keep me honest, but I have no need to show people who eight of my friends are, nor do people need to know that I achieved Bronze Level 2 in Five-O Poker, a game I reviewed earlier in the week and specifically told not to share shit on my timeline. At the other end of the spectrum, pages that I have “Liked” elsewhere on the Internet — and thus wanted to share with others, perhaps because I wrote them or just found them interesting — have been unhelpfully collected into a single box that shows just four of them. This behaviour changes seemingly daily, with Liked pages sometimes showing up as individual posts on one’s Timeline (useful) and sometimes being collected into that box (not useful). At the time of writing, Facebook appears to have decided that “not useful” is the way to go on this one.

Let’s scroll down a few “page heights” and see what else we have:

The left column? Sort of all right. The right column, though?

SO MUCH IRRELEVANT CRAP.

Including posts from games that I 1) didn’t press a “Share” button in once and 2) have since removed from my Facebook account.

There. After five screen-heights worth of scrolling, I finally get to one thing that I actually want to share with people — my recent WordPress posts, aka a feed from this blog to my Facebook Timeline. Again, though, like the Likes, they have been collected together into a box that displays very little relevant information and, in this case, is put in a stupid, stupid place. Why stupid? Because the most recent post in that little WordPress.com box came considerably after the RunKeeper post at the top of my Timeline — and certainly considerably after all the spammy crap those games have plastered all over that infuriatingly useless right column.

“Facebook is a social tool that connects you with people around you” my arse. “Facebook is a digital scrapbook maintained by a five-year old with ADHD,” more like.

I’ll see you on Twitter.

 

 

 

 

 

#oneaday Day 935: Edinburgh, How I Miss Thee

A brief Twitter conversation with the always-awesome Mitu Khandaker got me all nostalgic this evening. Y’see, Mitu has just come back from the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, where she was speaking about exciting and clever things to do with love, sex, relationships and obsession in games — a topic which I find particularly fascinating, as my extensive series of posts on Katawa Shoujo will attest.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today, as I’m sure video and/or slides from Mitu’s presentation will be available online at some point soon, and they will probably say things rather more coherently than I can. (I LOVE YOU EMIIIIIII)

No, instead I just want to look back on why Edinburgh is awesome. Because it is awesome, and if you’ve never been I strongly suggest you take the opportunity to do so.

My memories of Edinburgh stem entirely from my several trips to the Fringe festival with the Southampton University theatre group, known on various different occasions as SUSU Theatre Group, “Blow Up” and “RATTLESNAKE!”, for reasons that I have, sadly, since forgotten.

My first trip there came during my first year at university. I’d joined the theatre group and had already had a small part in our overly-elaborate and rather pretentious production of Macbeth. The Matrix was still fashionable, you see, so it was seemingly obligatory for every student theatre company in the country to do a Matrix-inspired Shakespeare production, and we were no exception. (It actually ended up being quite good, though vastly over budget.)

Anyway, Wachowski-Shakespeare crossovers aside, my association with the theatre group eventually led to me auditioning for the Edinburgh production and successfully securing a part. The play we’d decided to take up was Ivan Turgenev’s A Month In The Country, which is a good play with interesting characters (I played Afanasy Bolshintsov, a character for whom I was legitimately able to leverage my legendary Harold Bishop impersonation), but quite heavy going. Our bright idea was to perform it outdoors in the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens, which sounded like a great idea on paper.

Actually, it was a pretty great idea that added some lovely atmosphere to the play, the only flaws in the plan being 1) the amount of rain that Scotland gets and 2) the fact that the Botanical Gardens were rather off the beaten track. As a direct result of 2), we had rather disappointing viewing figures, but soldiered on regardless, despite having no more than one or two people watching most days.

Performing the play was just a relatively small part of the whole experience, though.

In the mornings, we’d be flyering on the Royal Mile, one of the main streets in Edinburgh that attracts entertainers and promoters come Fringe time. Flyering was always fun, even if it was rather difficult to sell the idea of a tragic Russian love story performed outdoors in a venue no-one really knew the location of to passing tourists. We managed to get a few people coming along, though — and not just all our respective parents.

In the evenings, we’d take in some shows (all right, lots of shows) and then go drinking. Lots of drinking. You see, at the time, Scotland’s licensing laws were significantly different to England’s — in England, you could only drink until 11pm in a pub and 2am in a club; in Scotland you could drink until… actually, I can’t remember what time you could drink until in a Scottish pub (I want to say 2am) but I certainly remember that the clubs were open until 4am.

Our two regular haunts for drinking purposes were the “Frankenstein” pub, a rather tacky (but awesome) theme bar that sold overpriced (but awesome… and deadly) cocktails; and a club just around the corner called Espionage, which had five floors, each of which was themed after a far-flung locale that James Bond had visited in one of his movies. (Incidentally, I am very pleased to note that both of those venues are still there. That makes me feel warm and fuzzy.) Following drinking until some ungodly hour in the morning, we’d often decide that The Thing To Do at that point was to get a pizza from the conveniently-located all-night pizza place that was near Frankenstein — an all-night pizza place which provided you with said pizza at an astonishingly high speed.

It wasn’t all roses, though. On this first trip, I was enjoying the experience but found myself suffering considerably from the social anxiety that has wracked my personal life for as long as I can remember. I found it difficult to start up conversations with the people I was living with at times — despite the fact I was acting with them every day — and I found myself worrying that people would think the things I said would be stupid. I recall one evening getting very depressed, breaking down in tears and being very embarrassed about the whole situation despite the fact I was sitting by myself in the hallway when it happened.

Two of the guys I was staying with came to my rescue: Chris and Des (no relation to Des). I was very grateful to them, because they proved to me that the things rattling around in my head were completely wrong. They took me in to their room, talked to me, got to know me and let me stay the night in there with them. (To sleep. This was not a period of “experimentation” for me.) We had some laughs, particularly at Chris’ expense when he fell asleep in mid-sentence, and I got up the following morning feeling considerably more positive about myself, my situation and my ability to make friends.

That night was a real turning point for me. Remembering that night gave me the confidence to go back to Edinburgh on two other occasions with the theatre group — once without a show, once with a double-bill of The Importance of Being Earnest and Alan Ayckbourn’s Round and Round the Garden. Both visits were amazing, and neither were tainted by feelings of anxiety. In fact, the experiences I had on those two visits were remarkably akin to the way I felt when I visited PAX East a couple of years ago before my life went to shit — I felt like I was “home”, “among friends”, and completely comfortable. I would have given anything for it to have lasted forever.

But these things don’t last forever, sadly. What will stay with me forever, however, is the memories — Des getting told off for trying to dry-hump a guy dressed as a dinosaur on the Royal Mile; recording our drunken conversations on a Dictaphone in the kitchen of the hostel we were staying at; climbing Arthur’s Seat after a solid night of drinking, reaching the summit in time for sunrise, drinking sake in silence as we witnessed dawn breaking, then sliding down the muddy hillside on our arses.

Thinking about it, my positive memories largely revolve around what I did while I was there than the city itself. I’ve never been there when it wasn’t Fringe time, see — and at Fringe time it’s a magical place, infused with a wonderful atmosphere all day and all night for the entire duration of the festival. But from what I saw beneath the glitz and slightly grotty glamour of Fringe time, it’s a beautiful city, too, and one that you really should visit if you’ve never had the opportunity. One day I’ll make it back there, though whether or not it’ll be at Fringe time I don’t yet know!

#oneaday Day 934: Stop, Check and Check Again

The social Web is an incredibly frustrating place to be at times. I’m aware that I’ve commented on this subject a number of times before, but it’s important: the spread of misinformation is at best irritating and at worst incredibly dangerous.

The most recent example was a result of this image:

This image has been doing the rounds recently — first on Twitter, where the supposed exchange took place, and subsequently, as tends to happen, a day later when Facebook’s denizens caught up with the rest of the Internet.

It is, of course, bollocks. This exchange took place, oh yes, but it was not between Piers “Cuntface” Morgan and Bradley Wiggins. No, instead, this is what happened:

 

You have doubtless noticed that the person who replied to Piers Morgan was not, in fact, Bradley Wiggins, and was instead one Colm Quinn, who just happened to mention Wiggins in his tweet, which is where the misunderstanding came from — probably from someone who doesn’t quite understand how Twitter works. (Ending the message with “@bradwiggins” could look like a “signature” to someone not familiar with the way a typical Tweet is structured.)

As usual, however, the fact that “BRADLEY WIGGINS GAVE PIERCE MOREGAN AN AWESUM COMEBAK” makes a better story than “SOME DUDE YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF GAVE PIERS MORGAN AN AWESOME COMEBACK” struck, and it struck hard. The (inaccurate) story spread like wildfire, of course, with no-one bothering to actually check Wiggins’ timeline to see if he actually said the things that were attributed to him. And it spread. And spread. And spread.

Over time, some people got wise to the truth of the matter and pointed this fact out. But more and more people continued to post the inaccurate details — and then it spread to Facebook, and the whole thing started all over again, with both sides getting increasingly frustrated with one another.

I know it’s a seemingly silly little thing to get riled about, but like I say, consider the potential implications if the “fact” that started spreading was something that could actually put someone in danger, or ruin a person’s reputation. When the entire social Web starts acting like Daily Mail reporters by just blindly reposting things without even bothering to see if they’re true or not, we have the potential for a real mess. Just look at the reactions of Facebook-bound idiots who don’t know what The Onion is for a preview of what might be.

Fact-checking isn’t just for journalists. Of course, there are plenty of journalists out there who seem to think it doesn’t apply to them, either, but that’s another matter entirely. It takes a matter of seconds to check something like a Tweet is the genuine article. You should be immediately skeptical of anything posted as a screen grab of a bit of plain text that looks like it was written in WordPad, or anything described by someone as SO AWESOME/FUNNY/HILARIOUS/LMAOOOOOOO etc. And, most importantly, if something sounds like it was too awesome to be true, it probably was.

Respect to Mr Colm Quinn for his excellent admonishment of Piers Morgan’s twattish behaviour. Disrespect to all of you out there (you know who you are) who fall for this crap every time, whether it’s “OMG TODAY WAS THE DAY MARTY MCFLY WENT TO IN BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II!” (for the last time, it is October 21, 2015) or “OMG! PIERS MORGAN GOT BURRRRRRRRNED BY BRADLEY WIGGINS”.

Simple routine: before you retweet or share something, stop, check, then check again. It’s not that hard.

 

#oneaday Day 933: So What Happened Again…?

Yesterday they found a dead body in the supermarket car park approximately two minutes’ walk away from my house. It was spotted around 3AM, when a dog handler on patrol saw a fire and alerted the appropriate authorities. Upon dousing the flames, a badly burned corpse was found — so badly burned that it was impossible to immediately identify it as male or female.

I am curiously unfazed by this knowledge. It’s a horrible thing to happen and I can’t help feeling I should be more unnerved than I am by the fact that it happened not far from my doorstep. But I’m not. And that’s not what I’d particularly like to talk about in relation to this incident.

I’d instead like to talk about the reporting of the incident in the newspapers and online.

Most outlets did a decent job of reporting the known facts, which I outlined in the first paragraph. Nothing more was known, and nothing more would be known until 1) the police had completed their investigations at the scene and 2) the body had been examined.

The ever-resourceful Daily Mail, however, decided to just make some shit up to make it a better story. “CHIPPENHAM TRAMP SET ON FIRE AND KILLED BY 3 THUGS AS HE SLEPT IN SAINSBURY’S CAR PARK” proclaimed the headline. (For comparison, the Daily Telegraph went with “Chippenham fire: body discovered in Sainsbury’s car park”.) They then proceeded to explain that an attack was “caught on CCTV” (later changed to “thought to be caught on CCTV”) and that “sources” had seen “three men” filling up jerry cans at Sainsbury’s petrol station shortly before the blaze was found. (Sainsbury’s petrol station isn’t open at that time in the morning, which should give you a rough idea of how true the rest of it is.)

This went on for several paragraphs, explaining that the fire had been caused by this gang of three men dousing a homeless man in petrol and then setting fire to him. A horrible crime, I’m sure you’ll agree, but a fictional one.

How do I know this? Because the body was confirmed as female today, not male, and the original Mail article describing these “facts” has mysteriously disappeared, to be replaced with this rather similar, but much more vague account that more accurately reports the facts. Moreover, there has been no further mention of this supposed “attack” that was caught on CCTV, just an appeal from police for people who were seen in the area to come forward and assist them with their enquiries.

Now, for all I know, the story about the victim being a homeless person could end up being true, but the fact is, the Daily Mail were guilty of some incredibly irresponsible reporting on this incident. They presented their theory as fact without providing any evidence whatsoever — who were these “sources,” for example, and how did they see what  happened while apparently no-one else did? — and thought that this was somehow okay. It’s another example of the Daily Mail just not giving a shit about… well, anything really. It’s beyond parody. It’s just pathetic. And yet somehow it still continues to exist. How? And why? How has no-one stepped in to shut this crap down yet? Does the Mail’s questionable “comedy value” outstrip its obligations as a news outlet?

Apparently so. And I think it’s too late to do anything about it now.

#oneaday Day 932: Take Control

I’m generally a pretty disciplined sort of person. I’m good at prioritising, and if I have something that I have to do I’ll make sure that I complete it before I do things that I want to do.

It’s when it comes to prioritising the things that I want to do that things go a bit pear-shaped.

It’s easy to stumble through your days as normal and just let things happen. But if you do that it’s easy to fall into routines and patterns and then wonder where the minutes, hours, days go. Those things that you want to do sometimes get forgotten amid your default activities, your comfort zone, the things that you do without thinking.

In order to fit in all the things that you want to do, sometimes you have to take drastic steps. Steps like scheduling your time.

This approach doesn’t work for everyone. Some people are terrible at sticking to schedules, others simply don’t like the lack of flexibility. But I’ve discovered (and rediscovered) several times over the years that I actually seem to work better and be rather more efficient if I plan out my time carefully rather than simply taking things as they come. It’s a hangover from quite enjoying the sense of “structure” from school and university (even if — ssshhhh… I didn’t always show up to my university lectures and seminars) and it’s something that I should really start doing more of in my daily life if I want to fit everything in. Because even with scheduling, it’s sometimes tricky to squeeze all your desired activities in, and that’s when you have to decide how to make compromises and sacrifices. Thankfully, with the things that I want to do at the moment, I haven’t had to make too many of the latter.

The ironic thing about people not wanting to organise themselves these days is it’s so easy to do so now thanks to technology. You can make your phone remind you to do things, set email-based nags to pop up in your inbox, create task lists that synchronise between devices, take snapshots of things and store them “in the cloud” (urgh) for future reference. You can even get social and be public about the things that you want to do, making use of your friends as a means of browbeating… sorry, “encouraging” you to actually get on and do stuff.

I use a few simple tools to sort myself out. Firstly and most simply is Google Calendar. I use this in favour of iCal on my Mac because it’s easier to sync between devices, is stored online rather than tied to a single device and works with iCal and iOS anyway. Google Calendar is a decent tool with enough features for what I need to do — multiple colour-coded calendars, email reminders, the ability to invite people, time zone support — and it proves valuable when I have taken on lots of things and only have a limited time in which to do them. It was especially valuable this time last year when I was going to Gamescom in Germany and every developer and publisher in the world suddenly wanted a bit of my time. (Apart from EA. They ballsed up my appointment — their fault, not mine — and wouldn’t let me in to their stupid high-security compound. Fuck them. I went to go and see Larian Studios instead, which was much more fun.)

Alongside Google Calendar, I’ve tried several other tools over the years. Evernote is pretty neat, for example. Epic Win was a cool idea that gamified your own productivity, but development seemed to stop quite a while back and it’s still lacking a few features that many other task manager apps offer. Most recently, I’ve been playing with Springpad, which I like a lot, despite a few rough edges.

Springpad is quite a bit like Evernote, but with a few interesting twists. It’s based around the concept of “notebooks”, which are ways of grouping related content together. Within a notebook, you can create a wide variety of different notes, ranging from simple text notes to checklists (mini to-do lists, essentially) via tasks, recipes, books, product information (scannable via the RedLaser barcode-scanning interface on the mobile apps) and all manner of other stuff. A webclipper bookmark allows you to easily clip things into your notebooks, and the interface generally does a pretty good job of figuring out what kind of content you’re trying to store — I tried it with a recipe from BBC Good Food earlier and it successfully recognised it as a recipe, though failed to import the ingredients list correctly.

Springpad also features a “social” component which allows its users to make its notebooks public, too. While I’m not entirely sure that this has been particularly well thought out, it does provide an interesting alternative use for the service, effectively turning it into a kind of blogging platform. Notes can be used as entries, the more specific types of notes used to provide specific information, and the site’s in-built commenting facility allows users to build up a community. It’s a neat idea. I’m not entirely sure how useful it is, of course, but it’s a nice idea.

So anyway. Armed with these simple (and free) tools, I’m attempting to organise myself a bit better. After two days, I’ve already managed to do a bit more than I would have done otherwise, which is pleasing. I shall continue with this system for a little while and see if it’s something that I want to make stick. It will be an interesting experiment if nothing else, and it might actually spur me on to get some things done that I’ve been meaning to get done for a while.

Further updates on exactly what when I have something to share.

#oneaday Day 931: Pure Profit

The more doublespeak I hear from industry analysts and company executives on earnings calls, the more and more glad I am that companies such as Atlus, Carpe Fulgur, Xseed et al exist. (Though Atlus should really pull their finger out and open a European office. I’ll happily run it. Single-handedly. Gladly. Just bring fucking Trauma Team out over here and we’ll be cool, Atlus. Why you gotta be that way?)

Why? Because these are companies whose primary motivation is not profit, it’s pleasing their customers. They accept that they are catering to niche interests and accept that they are not going to create games that sell millions of copies.

Here’s an actual quote from Aram Jabbari of Index Digital Media, Atlus USA’s parent company:

“With the launch of the strategy RPG Growlanser: Wayfarer of Time, an iteration in the popular franchise never before released in North America, Atlus demonstrates the continuation of its proud heritage of supporting niche titles aimed at the core gamer. We are not intimidated by the challenges of servicing a smaller audience or pursuing more modest success with a given project. Our fans are excited for a new Growlanser title and we are excited to be able to bring one to them.”

What a great attitude to take. A bold, proud statement that Atlus specifically isn’t going after the quick buck, but is instead aiming to build long-term loyalty with its customers by giving them the things that they have been asking for.

Note: this is not the same as pandering to the whims of crybabies. It is a case of listening to your customers and providing them with things that they will appreciate, which in turn builds up a strong and significant base of loyalty which can be drawn upon in the future. I know plenty of people who will happily pick up anything that has the Atlus stamp on it purely because of the goodwill the company has built up over the years (goodwill which they’re at risk of losing with the whole Persona 4 Arena region-lock business, but that’s another matter entirely).

It’s the same with Carpe Fulgur, whose dedication to their craft shines through in every one of their three releases so far. While Recettear, Chantelise and Fortune Summoners may not be the most technologically-stunning or even best games in the world, they feature a top-quality localisation job the likes of which we haven’t seen since the days of Victor Ireland and Working Designs on the PS1. They work on niche titles that players might not have heard of, but built up a solid foundation of brand loyalty with Recettear and have continued to provide memorable experiences since.

Then there’s Xseed Games, whom I have to admit I’m not as familiar with, but who are noteworthy for bringing excellent PSP action-RPGs Ys Origin and Ys: The Oath in Felghana to PC, and are also handling the North American release of the fantastic The Last Story. (C’mon, guys, pick up Pandora’s Tower, too — your fans will thank you.)

And then there’s the even smaller niche developers and publishers like Mojang, Gaslamp Games, Zeboyd Games — too many to mention. Not one of these companies is responsible to shareholders and investors, which means they can take a much more “human” approach to business. Their team members can speak as individuals and freely give their opinions rather than stock, robotic “we do not comment on rumours and speculation” responses that frustrate journalists and public alike so. They can enthuse about their products in human terms rather than spouting bollocks like this actual quote from Ryotaro Shima, senior vice president the EML business department at GREE Inc and CEO of GREE UK Limited:

“The formation of a UK studio is strategically significant on many levels. Primarily it will allow us to focus on Western content, keyed to local social trends, as well as tailoring content for global propositions. It also reinforces GREE’s commitment to growth within European markets.”

Besides the fact that these smaller companies tend to have job titles that are less of a mouthful, there’s a clear disparity in the language used. Let’s take a look at another quote that is more roughly equivalent to the one from Jabbari I posted at the beginning of this piece — this one’s from Paul Nicholls, sales and marketing director at Koch Media, annoucing Andrew Lloyd Webber Musicals: Sing & Dance (yes, that is a game that is actually coming out, and you bet it’s a game being made primarily as something that will sell rather than a great creative work):

“This is a fabulous signing for us. Andrew Lloyd Webber and his creations are a British institution that have been enjoyed by generations across the world. The chance to bring this product to market for the Nintendo Wii is both an honour and hugely exciting.”

Note the difference in the language used. Jabbari refers to “our fans”; Nicholls talks of “bringing this product to market”. Jabbari speaks of “servicing a smaller audience”, “pursuing more modest success” and emphasises what Atlus is doing for its fans; Nicholls speaks of what a “fabulous signing for us” the Andrew Lloyd Webber license is — no mention of customers at all.

Obviously those two aren’t exact equivalents — one is a rather niche PSP release while the other is a Wii game based on the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber. But the point stands — personally speaking, I’m much more inclined to respect companies that have a “human” face; companies who make it clear that their first priority is not shifting as many copies as possible, but pleasing, surprising and delighting their fans.

Obviously it would be nice if the niche titles were multimillion-sellers, but that would somewhat diminish their “niche” status. What the continued existence of smaller outfits like Atlus, Xseed and the like proves, however, is that you don’t have to be focused on big business and the bottom line to be successful — it is possible to please your customers and have a company that performs well.

It’s also, I’d argue, a sign that going public is a terrible, terrible idea for a company supposedly based around creative ideas. As soon as “what would be cool?” becomes “what would sell?” or “what will make the investors happy?” I, for one, am no longer interested, because I’m being treated as a bag of money rather than a human being. For all I know, Atlus et al may be laughing all the way to the bank, but because they put such a human, consumer-friendly face on the way they do business, I’m more than happy for them to take all of my monies while I consistently give companies like EA, THQ and Activision the finger until they start speaking English.

#oneaday Day 930: Conditional Philanthropy

I will never understand people — particularly famous types — who are deliberately obnoxious, and who clearly get off on negative attention, conflict and repeatedly proving what an arse they are.

There are a number of people I can think of who fit into this particular category, but the one who springs most readily and frequently to mind is Piers Morgan, erstwhile editor of the News of the World and the Daily Mirror and presently dripping his own peculiar brand of slime over American television sets thanks to CNN.

Piers Morgan’s crimes against common decency are too many to enumerate, but his recent behaviour regarding the Olympics has drawn the ire of a number of people.

For those unaware of what he has been up to, it started here:

And continued:

And continued…

AND CONTINUED…

Morgan, it is fair to say, had something of a bee in his bonnet over the fact that some members of the British Olympic team didn’t sing God Save The Queen after winning a medal. He appeared to think that this was incredibly important, and that it was worth putting down their impressive, world-beating sporting achievements for.

Then came the bribery and guilt-tripping:

Generous, non? Well, it could be argued as such, yes — he has no obligation to donate anything to Great Ormond Street children’s hospital, after all — but dig a little deeper and this whole thing just becomes a bit sleazy, really. By not donating a proportion of his undoubtedly vast wealth to Great Ormond Street simply because of an athlete not singing the anthem — not taking into account the fact that winning an Olympic event is probably a pretty emotional moment for any sportsperson — Morgan is implying several things: firstly, that his apparent philanthropy is, in fact, conditional, and secondly, that athletes who do not sing the national anthem after winning a Gold medal are somehow child-haters.

The gloating didn’t help.

Neither did the inconsistency:

Or the abuse:

Basically, there was just something incredibly distasteful about the whole thing. Morgan was clearly just trolling for responses, and he got them by the bucketload — and yes, I’m aware I’m part of the problem here. We don’t even have any guarantee that Morgan is actually going to cough up the £15,000 he currently “owes” Great Ormond Street.

He probably will, of course, because he then gets to look like the hero who donated £15,000 to a children’s hospital — and also gets to rub how much money he has in the peanut gallery’s faces, of course — but I can’t help thinking that it is for entirely the wrong reasons. If he feels that strongly about supporting Great Ormond Street, he should just donate the money, not hold his contributions to ransom based on something completely unrelated — something that could potentially make the non-singing athletes look like child-hating dicks in the hands of an unscrupulous (read: Daily Mail) reporter.

Morgan’s not making a point here. He’s simply waving his willy around in an attempt to make us all feel bad in one way or another. Don’t sing the anthem? You’re unpatriotic. Don’t have as much money as him? HAHAHA YOU’RE POOR. Criticise Morgan’s true motivations for this little exercise? YOU HATE SICK KIDS AND ARE A PIG-IGNORANT VACUOUS LITTLE TROLL.

There are several things that remain a mystery out of this whole thing. 1) Why is Piers Morgan still relevant? 2) Why are there people standing up for him? 3) Why does he have to be so fucking infuriating and get off on all this “controversy” he’s stirring up? He’s like that school bully who would just shrug off any insults you threw at him then punch you in the face and still, somehow, end up being the most popular kid in the school despite being the very worst kind of odious cretin imaginable.

Fortunately, this being the age of social media, at least one good thing has come out of this whole debacle: this JustGiving page aiming to make up the difference in donations that Morgan has refused to give due to athletes not singing God Save The Queen. It’s a lofty goal, but if the world can harness its hate for Piers Morgan to raise £14,000 for sick kids… well, admittedly that’s not the best reason in the world to give money to charity, but it’s sure better than holding the donations from your own incredibly deep pockets to ransom.

#oneaday Day 929: PC Gaming: The ‘Master Race’ For A Reason

I finished Fortune Summoners tonight. (Go play it, it’s great.) I am not going to talk about Fortune Summoners, however; I am instead going to talk about something which came to mind while I was playing it.

PC gaming.

There’s still a bit of a funny attitude surrounding PC gaming. Some console players and commentators refer disparagingly to those who do the bulk of their game playing on personal computers using phrases such as “the Master Race”, and actively refuse to participate in it. The reasons for this are many, but the most commonly-cited ones include the supposed “expense” of getting started and the misconception that some things are just “better” on console.

Let’s address both of these points before moving on to the real reason I started writing about this.

Firstly, the cost issue. Yes, depending on what sort of games you want to be playing, there will probably be a higher up-front cost to get a gaming PC. But, realistically, this startup cost is not significantly more than a new console costs upon its first launch. And for that price you’re getting something that significantly outstrips current-generation games consoles in terms of performance — and will continue to do so for quite some time.

My current PC cost in the region of £650 to put together and is what I’d describe as “mid-range”. It plays most games at 720p (the resolution most Xbox 360 and PS3 games tend to run at — sometimes less) at 60 frames per second or more without breaking a sweat. At 1080p, it can handle most stuff you can throw at it without issue — it’s only really demanding stuff like The Witcher 2 and Crysis that will make it struggle a little. In short, stuff looks good on it — significantly and noticeably better than on Xbox 360 and PS3 — and given that the next generation of games consoles are yet to be announced, this system is going to maintain a comfortable lead for a year or two at least. We have no idea how much these new systems are going to cost at this juncture.

Insofar as the console experience is “better”, I agree to a certain extent, in that sitting on a couch with a controller in your hand is, for most types of game, much more appealing than hiding in your computer room with the screen a few inches from your face. However, there is a very straightforward way to solve this issue: connect your PC to that big-ass HDTV you have in your living room, and you immediately have the world’s best games console that also does all that “multimedia” shit far better than Microsoft’s gradually-worsening Xbox interface ever will — just compare the experience of using Netflix on the Web to Netflix on Xbox and you’ll see what I mean. Add an Xbox 360 controller and you can play sitting slumped back on the couch just like a console, but you have the added option of playing with mouse and keyboard for when accuracy and/or lots of buttons are required.

Take this approach and you’ll be set — you practically won’t need a console, except for exclusive games. Multiformat games are generally best on PC — even the worst console port is usually able to take decent advantage of your computer’s hardware, allowing you to run it at crazy resolutions and deliciously butter-smooth frame rates. Online communities are generally lively and active. And the vast mod community allows games to maintain their “life” long after console players have moved on to the next big thing.

The thing I really wanted to talk about, though, is diversity. There is no other platform on which you can have such diverse experiences as the PC. iOS certainly has a good go, but as days go on it’s abundantly clear that the mobile market is shifting very much in favour of “freemium” social games rather than truly inventive experiences. On the PC, meanwhile, the fact that it is such a free market out there — and easy to develop for (relatively speaking) — means that if you can imagine an experience you want to have, you can probably do so on PC.

Fortune Summoners is a prime example. Fortune Summoners is a Japanese platform RPG that combines elements of Castlevania, Zelda II, Demon’s Souls and ’90s arcade games to produce something that is endearing, charming and bastard hard. That certainly wouldn’t get a retail release on consoles (not that it did on PC, either) but even if it were to be released on a service such as Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Network, it wouldn’t be an easy title to come across accidentally thanks to the closed nature of both Microsoft and Sony’s networks and their rigidly-defined criteria for advertising products. And would it even be released at all? A translation of a 5 year old Japanese game that was the start of a series that never continued? Would that be profitable? Would that be worth promoting? These are the questions that get asked when it comes to console games, whereas the PC marketplace has a lot more small-scale “enthusiast” developers and publishers more than happy to cater to “niche” markets — if not through Steam (which is generally pretty good anyway) then directly to their customers.

And there are plenty of niches catered to. “Grand Strategy” buffs can enjoy titles like Crusader Kings II and Civilization V. “Bullet hell” shooter fans can take on Gundemonium Recollection and those three games that Capcom released on Steam recently that I’ve forgotten the name of. Adventure game fans can enjoy pretty much the entire history of the genre, from King’s Quest I right up to more recent titles like Resonance or Telltale’s episodic work. Japanese visual novel enthusiasts can delve into JAST USA’s vast library of translated titles, and within that collection there are plenty of dirty and non-dirty titles. Simulation fans can drive anything from a First Great Western train to a garbage truck.

This isn’t even getting into the rich back catalogue of gaming that the emulation scene offers. While downloading ROM files for old consoles puts you on shaky ground legally, let’s face it — pretty much everyone occasionally has a hankering to play, say, Super Mario World or Blast Corps and thus finds themselves digging around in one of the dark corners of the Internet. While there’s a certain magic to playing it on old hardware, that’s not always practical. Old hardware breaks down; old cartridges lose their batteries; old CDs get scratched or broken. Through the magic of emulation, your PC is not only a bleeding-edge games console, but it’s also an archive of all the console games you owned in your youth, too. And an arcade machine. And a means of playing Web-based games.

So if PC gaming is considered to be “superior” by some, it’s certainly not without reason. Nowhere can you get the same diversity of experience that a PC offers. Nowhere else can you finish a game of Civ V and then have a quick rag on Dr. Mario to cool down. Nowhere else is there such an incredibly useful, multi-functional device that is ready and willing to hook up to your TV and serve pretty much all of your entertainment needs — both interactive and non-interactive.

So if you’re one of those people who dismisses the PC platform out of hand without even an iota of interest in engaging with it, I’d urge you to reconsider. You’ll be surprised how little it is about editing AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS or slotting cards into slots these days, and how much it is about enjoying some of the finest digital entertainment experiences on the planet.

Join us. Join us.

#oneaday Day 928: Begun, The Clone Wars Have

EA has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Zynga. The reason? The uncanny resemblance between Zynga’s latest “invest-and-express” game (their term, not mine) The Ville and The Sims Social. I won’t cover the case in detail because my friend and colleague Mr Mike Thompson has already done a fine job of doing so over at Inside Social Games.

Despite the clash between EA and Zynga looking to many like Darth Vader fighting Sephiroth (I know that would actually be awesome, but it’s more the “evil” thing I’m going for) I’m actually sort of glad that this is going ahead, even if EA is actually on shaky ground due to, as Zynga’s general counsel Reggie Davis noted, the uncanny resemblance between EA’s own SimCity Social and Zynga’s CityVille.

But then Zynga doesn’t exactly have the best track record. FarmVille, one of the company’s biggest hits, was accused of being a clone of Slashkey’s Farm Town on its original release. Its iOS title Dream Heights was rather publicly called out by Tiny Tower developer Nimblebit for being a ripoff. CityVille’s roots can be traced back to a number of similar titles. And… you get the picture. Zynga is good at one thing: marketing. They are not good at thinking up original ideas, as we’ve seen a number of times previously.

Zynga is by no means the only one to blame in this situation, however. It is a widespread problem that is simply brushed under the carpet by developers, publishers, press and public alike. Clones are taking over the market and oversaturating it. At some point, we are going to reach critical mass, and there’s the potential for a real mess when that happens.

I review mobile and social games every week. In any one week I can guarantee that I will come across at least one of each of the following:

  • An isometric-perspective citybuilding game where you have to complete quests and construct buildings to increase your population cap. More effective buildings either cost real money or require you to bug your friends for “materials” before you can construct them. Usually involves farming.
  • An isometric-perspective ranching game where you have to complete quests and construct buildings to allow you to expand your territory in several directions by clearing mist/chopping down forest/”exploring”. Usually involves farming.
  • An isometric-perspective farming game where you have to complete quests and construct buildings to allow you the ability to plant and harvest better crops. Almost definitely involves farming.
  • An isometric-perspective pet/monster care game where you have to complete quests and construct buildings in order to attract various different pets/monsters, which you can then care for and/or sell by clicking repeatedly on them. Usually involves farming.
  • A slot machine simulator where you can pay real money in order to win virtual money which cannot be used for anything except playing that particular slot machine simulator. Does not usually involve farming.
  • A “match-3” puzzle game in which you create horizontal or vertical lines of three or more like-coloured gems (always gems) in order to make them disappear and score as many points as possible in 60 seconds. Rarely involves farming.
  • A “match-3” puzzle game in which you create horizontal or vertical lines of three or more like-coloured gems (always gems) in order to make them disappear and complete a linear series of levels. Almost never involves farming.
  • A “match-3” puzzle game in which you create horizontal or vertical lines of three or more like-coloured gems (always gems) in order to make them disappear and either score as many points as possible in 60 seconds or complete a linear series of levels. (Yes, some games feature both modes!) Does not generally involve farming.
  • A “match-3” puzzle game in which you click on groups of three or more contiguous like-coloured gems to make them disappear and score as many points as possible in 60 seconds. Usually free of farming.
  • A “match-3” puzzle game in which you click on groups of three or more contiguous like-coloured gems to make them disappear and complete a linear series of levels. Generally lacks a farming component.
  • A “match-3” puzzle game in which you click on groups of three or more contiguous like-coloured gems to make them disappear and either score as many points as possible in 60 seconds or complete a linear series of levels. (Yes, some games of this type also feature both modes.) Usually lacking in the farming department.
  • A “bubble shooter” puzzle game in which you fire coloured bubbles from the base of the screen in an attempt to attach groups of three or more like-coloured bubbles together and make them disappear in order to score as many points as possible in 60 seconds. Generally farming-free.
  • A “bubble shooter” puzzle game in which you fire coloured bubbles from the base of the screen in an attempt to attach groups of three or more like-coloured bubbles together and make them disappear in order to complete a linear series of levels. No farming here, no sir.
  • A “bubble shooter” puzzle game in which you fire coloured bubbles from the base of the screen in an attempt to attach groups of three or more like-coloured bubbles together and make them disappear in order to either score as many points as possible in 60 seconds or complete a linear series of levels. (You’re getting the picture now, huh?) Farming? Nope.
  • A hidden object game where your uncle has gone missing in time and/or space and the only way to save him is to build a mansion and then repeatedly search the same rooms over and over for a selection of arbitrarily-discarded bric-a-brac which, for some reason, you need to find as quickly as possible.
  • A hidden object game where your uncle has gone missing in time and/or space and the only way to save him is to repeatedly search the same rooms over and over for a selection of arbitrarily-discarded bric-a-brac which, for some reason, you need to find as quickly as possible — but hey, you don’t need to build a mansion.
  • A hidden object game in which your uncle has not gone missing in time and/or space, but in which your mansion has become invaded by ghosts and the only way to get rid of them is to build a mansion (again, presumably) and then repeatedly search the same rooms over and over for a selection of arbitrarily-discarded bric-a-brac which, for some reason, you need to find as quickly as possible.

Of course, you can probably boil most of gaming down to a selection of basic formulae like this, but for some reason the issue of cloning is always particularly apparent in the social and mobile gaming space. Perhaps because the developers of these titles generally make no attempt to hide the fact that they’re simply cribbing from the unwritten template. (Currency, energy and experience meters go at the top. The Shop button goes at the bottom right. You must start your game with a non-skippable tutorial that treats the player like a complete idiot. You must present map screens from an isometric perspective. GOD HELP YOU if you go top-down or — heaven forbid — 3D.)

In mainstream gaming, the closest we get to a “cloning” problem is the number of similar first-person shooters we have on the market, but in this case, these titles do enough to distinguish themselves from one another with their aesthetic, narrative, gameplay modes and general “feel” to make them unique from one another. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 may both be brown-coloured manshoots, for example, but play them both and it’s clear that there are marked differences between the two of them, because they’re different games that just happen to be in the same genre, not clones.

Play something like CityVille then SimCity Social, however — or indeed The Ville then The Sims Social — and you’ll be hard pushed to tell them apart.

This is not a positive direction for one of the most exciting, creative industries in the world to be moving. There’s a huge amount of potential in both the social and mobile gaming markets, and only a few developers tap into this. Most, sadly, choose to take the path of least resistance and make one of the games on the list above.

Come on, folks, we’re better than this. Stop trying to tell me that your isometric-perspective FarmVille clone is somehow “innovative” and make something that actually is innovative.

#oneaday Day 927: On Stickmen

I draw stickman primarily for one reason: I’m not very good at drawing anything more complicated. I’ve never practiced drawing particularly hard — I’ve always enjoyed doodling and drawing stupid things, but I’ve never tried particularly hard to actually practice good technique or anything. I spent a few weeks reading up on how to draw manga-style characters a few years back, but never really got the hang of drawing things that look particularly “convincing”. My manga-style drawings always end up looking like the sort of thing a 12-year old kid scrawls in their art book in an attempt to look cool, rather than anything particularly convincing. So no, you won’t be seeing any of those here for the moment.

And then I inevitably run into various other issues if I do decide to draw more detailed characters, which I shall now demonstrate for you forthwith. Note: I am not doing this to solicit feedback, nor am I fishing for compliments (not that these pics deserve any) — simply to demonstrate a point.

Let us begin.

The first question I inevitably end up asking myself regards body image. I put “myself” in my cartoons frequently, and drawing a body makes me ponder whether or not I should draw an “idealised” version of myself (right, obviously) or a more… ummm… “accurate” depiction.

This also raises difficult questions when a friend of mine asks for a guest appearance, as I then have to make the same decision regarding how I represent them — I don’t want to cause offence, but at the same time I want them to be recognisable, and their “shape” is often a part of that factor. It’s just easier to do a stick body because everyone is equal, then, and the main distinguishing factor between characters is not something people (including me) can be particularly sensitive about, but instead the part that really matters to their “character” — their face.

Also, I’m not very good at drawing fat people. Or boobs.

Another thing I am not very good at is posing characters, as the slightly uncomfortable-looking Alex above will attest. I am fond of “arms folded” and “hands on hips” as strong poses, but these are tricky to draw. In the case of “arms folded”, I have no idea where the fuck to put people’s hands, and I’m not even entirely convinced I know where people’s arms go. I then run into mild perspective issues as I try to figure out what would be behind those arms, and it all just gets to be a bit of a mess. (I should probably do it the other way around — body first, then overlay arms on top.)

Questions of clothing then rear their head. What should characters wear? Should they wear the same thing all the time as part of their “look”, or should they switch things up occasionally? Will I ever learn how to draw bare legs beneath a skirt?

Finally, I have to figure out what on Earth to do with more bizarre characters such as Phillipe here. Phillipe works as a stickman because stickmen can get away with exaggerated expressions such as his perpetual gurning. But does that really work when placed atop a more “normal” (i.e. not stick-figure) body?

Looking at the pics I’ve drawn above, it actually sort of does. (Also, I can take further advantage of Phillipe’s perverted nature with offensive T-shirt slogans.) But I still find myself looking at drawings like that and thinking to myself that they’re crap, whereas I’m much happier with the way these characters come out as stick figures. Stick figures can be easily posed, manipulated, mangled and otherwise abused. As soon as you add a “proper” body to the mix, you have to think about things a little more. They’re not as bendy. Well, that’s not true, you can do whatever you want with them. But contortions are easier to draw on a stick figure than on a character with a body. Also you don’t have to worry about lighting with stick figures, whereas cartoons with “proper” bodies inevitably look better if there’s a sense of light and shadow in there.

Why am I thinking about this now? Well, every so often I get a hankering to write a visual novel, but the one thing that usually stops me before I even start is thinking “I’ll never find anyone to draw some good-looking graphics, and I certainly can’t do it myself.” I’ve contemplated making a visual novel using just stick-figure characters and I think it might sort of work — it’d certainly be a distinctive aesthetic — but then I lose confidence and think it would be the rubbishest idea ever.

What I should actually do, of course, is actually script the thing for myself and then see if I can actually recruit someone who can Do Drawing afterwards. But then I go and get into a loop where I want to “see” the character as I’m writing their dialogue, and I go around and around and around and don’t do anything at all.

Screw graphics, basically. They just get in the way.