1201: WE AR GOINGON HOLLYDAY TUMOROW

Well, we are. I’m looking forward to it a lot, even though my innate Britishness prevents me from showing any outward signs of it.

It’s the first proper holiday either Andie or I have had for quite a while, and it’s the first one I’ve had for ages where I haven’t had to do at least some work in it. (As it happens, depending on when my new gig starts, I may find myself having to do some work while I’m out there, but at present I’m as free as a bird, which is a very pleasant feeling indeed.)

Holidays are ludicrously expensive, aren’t they? Well, depending on where you go, obviously. But for the most part, if you want to go somewhere nice and/or abroad, you’ll generally find yourself having to pay through the nose just to get there, and then a whole bunch on top of that once you are there, assuming you actually want to, you know, do stuff. Fortunately, we’re lucky enough to have some friends where we’re going (all right, the primary reason we’re going on holiday is to visit them) and as such the expenses while we’re actually there will be significantly less than had we had to find a hotel for the time we’re out there. So thank you enormously to our gracious hosts for putting up with us!

This will be the second time I’ve visited Toronto. I really enjoyed my last trip there, as it’s an interesting city. Those who live there probably take it all for granted by now, but I was struck by its incredibly multicultural nature. I’m not talking like British multicultural, either, where you have districts that are predominantly Asian, Polish, whatever — no, I’m talking about this strange and wonderful thing Toronto has going on where you’ll be walking down one street and it’s Chinatown, then you’ll walk down another and the architecture is completely and utterly different and the people are likewise completely and utterly different. It’s quite chaotic, in a sense, but in a thoroughly pleasant sort of way.

The other reason I’m looking forward to visiting Toronto, of course, is the people we’re going to visit. Mark and Lynette are some very dear friends whom I haven’t seen face-to-face since 2010 and my trip to PAX East, at which I got to meet a whole bunch of people from the Squadron of Shame for the first time. I’ve often said that that trip was one of the most genuinely happy times of my life, and I stand by that; the fond memories are made all the more potent by the fact that everything else in my life pretty much fell to pieces shortly after that trip, but fortunately, as long-time followers will know, things are in a much better place for me now.

I’m looking forward to seeing Mark and Lynette (and their friends, too, some of whom I’m already acquainted with) because they are My Kind of People — people with whom I can nerd out about Persona, anime, JRPGs, board games and all manner of other geeky stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I very much enjoy spending time with my friends who live near me here in Southampton, but very few of them are “into” the same things to quite such a degree as I am. Sure, a lot of them are gamers to varying degrees, but an unfortunate side-effect of the games industry’s diversity these days is that not everyone is into the same things. One of my regular board gaming buddies is massively into Minecraft and Skyrim, for example, whereas I think I’m pretty much “over” both of those games, largely because I have such an astonishingly huge Pile of Shame to play through and thus don’t really want to devote any time to two potentially endless experiences. I don’t really know many people in this country — certainly not anyone I can just pop over for a coffee with — who would get quite so excited about, say, Ar Tonelico or Trauma Team as me.

Still, I guess in one sense this is a sort of good thing — I’m grasping here, I know — because it makes those rare opportunities to get together with Your Kind of People special occasions to be enjoyed and treasured. I’m hoping the coming two weeks will be memorable and fun not only for me and Andie, but for Mark, Lynette and anyone else who gets involved, too. There will doubtless be plenty of board and video games along the way, plus eating good food with good friends.

Can’t wait. So I should probably get to bed so I don’t miss our flight in the morning, huh? Catch you on the other side of the Atlantic, then.

1200: It Was Just a Joke

Playing Robot Unicorn Attack 2 on the toilet earlier, a question came to me. It’s been lingering in my mind for a few days, actually, but as I was there attempting to better my score and ensure supremacy for Team Rainbow in the twilight hours of the second of May, 2013 — Team Inferno probably have it in the bag, sadly — it struck me that perhaps Robot Unicorn Attack 2 is taking itself a bit too seriously.

And then this, naturally, led my mind on to ponder “how far is too far?” for things that are, essentially, jokes, memes, gags, whatever you want to call them. Because that’s what the original Robot Unicorn Attack was — a joke. An immensely popular joke, yes — one million plays within a week of its release, apparently, and plenty more since then — but still a joke. This much is probably self-evident from its title. It is a game called Robot Unicorn Attack. No-one has called a video game something quite so literal and ridiculous and meant it since the 1980s.

And yet here we are in 2013 with Robot Unicorn Attack 2, a surprisingly well fleshed-out expansion of the original’s “endless runner” gameplay that features online asynchronous cooperative “community” goals, an upgradeable unicorn, a levelling system, downloadable content, a bonus level unlockable if you either progress far enough in the game or stump up enough in-game currency, and all manner of other things. It’s not the deepest game in the world, but it is a mobile phone game — and, more to the point, it is a mobile phone game that understands the sort of experience that is sensible and practical to put on a mobile phone. (It’s also one of the less offensive examples of the “freemium” model I’ve seen recently, though the pop-up adverts are a bit gross.)

It’s hard to explain, but it just feels a bit “wrong”. It feels like it’s not a joke any more. I hesitate to use the words “sold out” but… well, yes, it’s sold out. It’s Robot Unicorn Attack, but monetised out the wazoo to be profitable, whereas the original was a freeware Flash game that anyone could play without having to pay a penny.

I think that “monetisation” part is the key defining characteristic that determines “how far is too far” when it comes to jokes — particularly ones which started on the Internet. By the time money gets involved — i.e. it gets incorporated into something which is sold, or used to advertise something else for profit — it is probably already well past its sell-by date.

I can think of a number of examples where this has happened in advertising in particular. Take the advertisements for the price comparison website Go Compare, for example. For quite a while, these featured an irritating moustachio’d arsehole singing the service’s jingle over and over again in various different styles. Everyone got immensely irritated with it. So, naturally, what the “clever” marketers did was leverage the fact that everyone was irritated with the “Go Compare Man” and put out some ads in which he was subjected to various indignities. But by that point, everyone had already pretty much just moved on to wanting to fire everyone involved with Go Compare into the sun and never hearing of their stupid company ever again. (Any time I need insurance, I will not go to their stupid site on principle any more.)

See also: the number of pointless mobile apps that have attempted to incorporate any combination of Nyan Cat, Gangnam Style, the Harlem Shake or any other “viral” sensation out there. Viral sensations are a marketer’s dream — they provide a ready-made audience, so long as you can inextricably link one annoying thing with a specific brand. The audience doesn’t even have to like the annoying thing — they just have to start thinking of these things not as “Gangnam Style” but as “that music off the [Brand X] advert”.

I often wonder how a lot of marketers sleep at night knowing that their career is, essentially, to irritate people as much as possible. It surely can’t be satisfying to flick on the TV, see a Go Compare advert and think “I did that.”

Still, I guess they’d probably say the same about a games journalist’s output. Oh well. Each to their own, I guess.

1199: Back… to the Mansion

I never played the first Luigi’s Mansion, to my shame, but I understand it was a good time, if perhaps not quite up to the standard of some of Nintendo’s other, more high-profile titles.

I have, however, been playing the second Luigi’s Mansion game thanks to a copy generously provided to me by my brother for my birthday. Yes, it’s the second 3DS-related post in as many days, but I actually want to talk a little more generally about Nintendo and how they do things rather than go into the specifics of the console and the game itself.

Luigi’s Mansion 2 doesn’t come with a manual. It comes with a pathetic little single sheet of paper that outlines the basic controls, plus all the other usual health and safety crap that Nintendo always bundle all their products with.

What struck me in the couple of levels of Luigi’s Mansion 2 that I’ve played so far was this, though: it doesn’t need a manual, because it is so immaculately and intuitively designed that even someone completely unfamiliar with the original game will be up and ghost hunting within seconds, and all without any real “tutorial”. Okay, there are a few messages the first time you get items, but an awful lot of stuff isn’t explicitly explained at all — it just makes perfect sense.

This is in direct opposition to the way that a lot of mobile and social games work — pretty much every mobile and social game out there begins with a long, tedious, badly-worded and unskippable tutorial that literally doesn’t allow you to do anything but the thing it’s telling you to do. No sense of exploration, no means of discovering things for yourself, no means of skipping the bullshit if you’re already familiar with how to “Build Your Own Town!” and then spend the rest of your life tapping on things every time your phone lights up.

I found this interesting, because ostensibly a lot of Nintendo’s games target a similar demographic to those who play mobile and social games. This isn’t to say that they’re dumbed down or “casual”, I hasten to add — but their recognisable, consistent, family-friendly aesthetic and “pick up and play” nature makes them ideal for pretty much anyone to try for themselves and probably have a pretty good time with.

I think it’s a difference in approach. Nintendo comes at it from a rather welcoming angle that is friendly to both experienced gamers who have been helping Mario out since the ’80s, and newcomers who are coming to a Nintendo game for the first time on the 3DS. “Come on in,” their games say. “We’re going to have some fun. If you know what you’re doing, go right ahead and enjoy yourself. If you’re not sure what to do, though, don’t worry — we’ll help you out.”

Compare and contrast with the way that, say, Zynga treats you when you start one of its games. “YOU!” the game seems to say. “You are STUPID. You are a WORTHLESS IDIOT who has NO IDEA how to play a fucking video game. Why else would you be playing one of OUR games? Let me walk you through everything EXTREMELY SLOWLY. No, I don’t believe that you know how to play this game already. SHUT UP. You can start playing when I say so. Don’t click there, click here. I said CLICK HERE. I’m going to wait here until you click here. No, I don’t care if you want to make it full screen. I say click here, so you DAMN WELL BETTER CLICK HERE. Twat.”

I’d never really noticed this strong distinction until recently, but by golly it is noticeable. And it makes the difference between me playing a Zynga game and feeling like I’m having my intelligence insulted at every turn, and playing a Nintendo game and wanting to show everyone how awesome it is.