#oneaday Day 657: Drain Blaster

After over 4,500 posts on this blog (and another 2,300 or so on MoeGamer), it will probably not surprise you to learn that I sometimes have difficulty thinking of something new to write about. Indeed, there are a number of topics I have written about multiple times, often without realising it — and often with inadvertently using some of the exact same arguments and phrases each time I do so. At least nobody can say I'm inconsistent in the way I do things.

With that in mind, and given that this is a personal blog, it stands to reason that I should probably start talking about weird, hyper-niche things that, statistically speaking, very few people probably give a shit about. But if Chris "Papapishu" Person's work over on Aftermath is anything to go by, there will always be an odd little audience who are very much into weird, hyper-niche things.

I guess part of the reason I tend to hold off on writing about weird, hyper-niche things is worrying about whether or not I will actually be able to fill a convincing blog post on the subject, but, well, I've taken care of about half of what I consider the "bare minimum" for each day with this preamble, and thus I now feel suitably equipped to actually tell you what I want to talk about.

Today I would like to tell you about our toilet plunger.

A plunger is one of those things that you don't really think about needing until it's too late. At least, I've always been that way; I am fortunate in the fact that my wife likes to be prepared for all sorts of eventualities, and thus she is the sort of person to purchase a toilet plunger in the anticipation that we might need one at some point.

But my wife didn't buy just any old plunger. Oh, no. She bought a Drain Blaster.

You might think that looks quite like a normal plunger, and you would be partially right; like a regular old plunger it has the big rubber thing that you put over the hole in the bog, along with a smaller head for dealing with, presumably, plugholes. (I have only ever used it for the toilet.)

Where a Drain Blaster differs from a regular plunger may well already be apparent from the picture above, but just in case it isn't: it's all in that thick cylinder of a body, and the handle above it. Because you can pull that handle out to fill the cylinder with air, and then blast the air back out by plunging the handle back in.

And you know what? It does an amazing job of unblocking a toilet. I don't really know how one uses a regular plunger for the same job other than just sort of… plunging it in there and hoping for the best, but with the Drain Blaster it really is as simple as putting the rubber bit over the hole in the toilet, pulling up the handle and pumping it a few times until you hear everything proceed on its merry way down your soil pipe. I am yet to encounter a blocked toilet that has been able to stand up to even the briefest assault from a Drain Blaster, and, as someone who blocks the toilet more frequently than he would perhaps like to admit, I am exceedingly grateful that, at some point in the past, my wife decided to go hard on our choice of plunger.

I am reminded of a legendary group text (it may have been an MSN Messenger conversation, given the era) from among my friendship group at university, when one of our number (not me, surprisingly) admitted that he had produced a poo so formidable that he absolutely could not get rid of it. It eventually took several kettlefuls of boiling water to break up the beast enough for it to finally vacate the premises, and he chronicled the entire process, which was unfolding late at night when, being university students, many of us could be relied upon to be a little bit tipsy and thus very receptive to such a saga. Thankfully this was an age before smartphones, so there were no pictures involved, but the entire process was chronicled in exhaustive detail. I will never forget it.

I mention this because I wonder how different his experiences would have been if he had a Drain Blaster. I don't even know if Drain Blasters existed back then, though given that the device is essentially a bike pump with a plunger head, I would be surprised if they didn't. Could the sheer volume of this legendary turd stand up to the relentless assault of a Drain Blaster, or would the boiling water still be necessary? I guess we will never know.

Anyway, that's what I wanted to talk about today. If you read all of that… uh… well done, I guess?

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 656: User error

One reason I absolutely cannot wait to ditch my professional social media responsibilities (which will be at some point in the next few months, in all likelihood) is the phenomenon of users making an error themselves, then yelling at us for their own mistake. There have been two separate examples of this just today, and I'm glad I was too busy to reply to them (the chap who's been helping us out with social media handled them) because I'm not sure I would have been able to resist being sarcastic. (Naturally, I won't name and shame or give the exact examples here, but anyone who has worked in any sort of tech with a vaguely public-facing aspect will likely know the sort of thing I'm talking about.)

Whenever I see something like this, it just comes across as a completely alien way to react. If I'm using a device, and it behaves in a way that I don't expect it to, the first thing I look for is if I'm doing anything wrong — which I inevitably am. I use it as an opportunity to learn exactly what it is that I'm doing wrong, then to never make that same mistake ever again, because I learned what the problem was and how to fix it. The absolute last thing I would consider doing is going on social media and yelling at the company who makes the product in question — particularly when there is absolutely no way of them solving my issue without making me look, at the very least, a little bit stupid.

I get that people are frustrated when things don't work the way they expect and they don't know why. But receiving a message filled with swearing and abuse because you didn't think to press a single button that would immediately resolve the problem you are having — yes, this really was one of the incidents today — does not make the person who has to answer that message feel particularly inclined to want to help you. I mean, most of the time they will go out of their way to help you, even for particularly stupid questions — contrary to popular belief, there are, in fact, stupid questions — but you can rest assured that they're having a good giggle at you behind your back.

Note that I absolutely do not have a problem with someone who does have a question with a simple and straightforward answer, and who asks that question without becoming abusive. I am more than happy to help anyone like that out. But someone who bursts into an inbox with no prior contact and fills their message with "wtf" and "ffs" and all that sort of shit… well, they're not getting their relationship with us off on a particularly good foot now, are they?

The only time I've ever yelled at a company on social media was when CEX missold me an expensive arcade stick with the promise it would work on the consoles I asked if it would work on, and it did not do that. After the staff in the shop refused to help, I had little option but to Karen it up a bit and eventually got the situation resolved. I'm not particularly proud of that little episode, but I did manage to get it resolved without any swearing or abuse at the staff in question — just a lot (a lot) of repeating myself.

Anyway, don't be rude to staff of a company if the fault is actually completely of your own creation. It's not hard.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 655: I would rather play Atari 2600 games than mobile games

I probably don't need to say anything more than the headline, but I will expand on it for the sake of having actually written something today. I mean what I say, though! I would genuinely rather play literally anything on the Atari 2600 than a modern mobile game. And with the 2600 being so easy to emulate these days — not to mention the fact I have worked on both devices and game cartridges featuring Atari 2600 games — you can even take the experience on the go with you.

I remember when mobile gaming first became a thing with the Java phones. Well, actually, technically it first became a thing with Snake and the other games no-one remembers on the Nokia 3210 and company. But expandable mobile gaming — by that I mean the ability to download new games onto your phone — really took off in the Java era.

At first, it was mildly exciting… at least until you downloaded a Java game and realised that a lot of them were Not Very Good. Often not for lack of trying, and there were some genuinely decent ones — I recall a good version of Lumines, for example — but for the most part, they were a pale imitation of even the dedicated handheld games consoles that were around at the time. The Game Boy and its successors ruled the roost in that regard for a good long while — and deservedly so.

The advent of iOS was a huge shift, though. Anyone who was around for the launch of the App Store will doubtless remember things like ngmoco's output (before they became free-to-play garbage peddlers), Epic's "Castle" tech demo that eventually became Infinity Blade, and doubtless many others that are lost to time. Quite literally in many cases, because these were digital-only games that were often exclusive to iOS — and while I'm sure some have been preserved, I bet there are plenty more that we'll never see again.

Things seemed… interesting for a while. The ambition of this new breed of mobile game was hard to fault, but many folks (including me) found that touchscreens were less than ideal for console-style experiences. The best games were ones that were built around the inherent limitations and inaccuracy of a finger-based touch interface — or which used other methods of control, such as tilt.

Then, one day, Apple announced that it would be introducing the concept of "in-app purchases". I knew immediately that this would be an awful idea, as the general gaming community had a collective bee in its bonnet about DLC at the time, and adding DLC to mobile games sounded like a really bad idea in that climate.

Unbelievably, though, I underestimated quite how awful things would end up becoming in the mobile space. While there are still a few "premium" games available for a one-off purchase these days, most of them are available on other platforms with actual controllers, leaving the vast majority of mobile-exclusive titles these days as free-to-play gacha crap.

I've done my time in the gacha mines. I've made the mistake of thinking I'd sling a game twenty quid to "support" it because I'd been playing it quite a bit and I liked the look of the current character banners. But in more recent years I've become hyper-aware of quite how much those games exploit horny young men in particular, with massively sexualised artwork designed not to add depth to the characters they depict, but purely to get said horny young men convinced to open their wallets in the hope of acquiring a JPG — or an animated GIF if you're lucky — of their favourite waifu in a skimpy outfit. And I say this as someone who likes sexy games!

No more. I swore off all mobile games quite some time ago now, and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. Now, at the times when I would typically want a mobile game — when I have a few minutes to spare, when I'm bored, when I just want something to do with my hands that I don't have to think about too much — I will quite happily reach for an Atari 2600 game, because those fit the bill perfectly.

Your average Atari 2600 game can be played for sessions of maybe 1-5 minutes at a time, and that feels like a satisfyingly self-contained play session. You can keep playing to beat your high scores, or to get a little further, or compete against a friend if you're playing together — or you can move on to something else, and have another 1-5 minutes of fun. And at no point in the entire process will these games attempt to monetise your erection.

On that note, may I remind you that Activision Collection 2 is coming to Evercade next month…?

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 654: Jensen Huang is an enemy of the arts

The headline is probably not news to most of you reading this, but I feel like it's worth commenting on, because the NVidia CEO just can't seem to keep his mouth shut.

To recap: a little while back, NVidia introduced its new "DLSS5" technology via transparently obvious Digital Foundry advertorial video. I still don't really know what DLSS is, or what it used to be I guess, but this latest incarnation of it did… not go down well, to say the least.

The reason? It's fucking generative AI, because of course it is. In this case, it's generative AI that takes two multi-thousand dollar graphics cards to render a slop filter over the top of the perfectly functional graphics the game already had. Early defenders tried to convince everyone else that it was just "improving the lighting", but then Huang came out and said the following:

First of all, [the critics are] completely wrong. The reason for that is because, as I have explained very carefully, DLSS5 fuses controllability of the geometry and textures and everything about the game with generative AI. It's not post-processing at the frame level, it's generative control at the geometry level.

(Tom's Hardware)

Okay. So it is generative AI. Which sucks. And everyone hates. And in this instance, it is adding what is colloquially referred to as a "yassification" filter atop character graphics in particular, making them look markedly different from their actual, canonical designs. You know, the ones that artists worked on.

Today, Kotaku posted what I would argue is a bit of a fluff piece on the subject, quoting Huang extensively. Huang is presumably in some sort of "damage control" mode — although not that much, because the part of NVidia that makes decent graphics cards for gaming PCs and consoles is of very little importance to a company that has very much thrown its entire lot in with generative AI.

From the Kotaku piece, quoting Huang, who was speaking on a recent episode of Lex Fridman's podcast:

DLSS 5 is 3D conditioned, 3D guided. It's ground truth structure data guided. And so the artist determined the geometry we are completely truthful to. The geometry maintains in every single frame.

Okay, first of all, what the fuck does "ground truth structure data guided" mean? Secondly, I'm sure the geometry is still there, it's just underneath a hallucinated AI-generated image.

He goes on (emphasis mine):

Every single frame, it enhances but it doesn't change anything. The system is open, you could train your own models to determine, and you could even in the future prompt it. You know, 'I want it to be a toon shader, I want it to look like this kinda,' so you can give it even an example. And it would generate in the style of that, all consistent with the artistry, you know, the style, the intent of the artist. And so all of that is done for the artist, so that they can create something that is more beautiful, but still in the style that they want.

So let me get this straight. It "doesn't change anything", but it does "generate in the style of" how it is prompted, am I getting this right? So it does, in fact, change something?

And who is doing this "prompting", exactly? Who is saying "I want it to be a toon shader"? The end user? Because that sure as fuck doesn't sound like being "consistent with the artistry and intent of the artist". Or is it the artist? Because if an artist wants their visuals in a toon style, they'll design them in a fucking toon style in the first place and they don't need the slop machine to do it for them. Or they don't if they're an artist with any fucking skills, anyway.

All this just confirms exactly what we've known for a while now: Jensen Huang is an enemy of the arts. He doesn't give a shit what the "style and intent of the artist" are, because his magic slop machine can just overwrite it and make it look "more beautiful". Fuck the artists who worked hard on each scene, each character, each object. Fuck having a coherent, distinctive artistic vision and visual style — bring on the uncanny valley AI slop! Fuck everyone who makes it their life's work to bring interactive worlds and the characters who inhabit them to life!

Jensen Huang, you are a rancid little fuckboi who, years after this bubble pops, will be looked back on as one of the most insidious, dangerous influences on the arts that there has been for a very long time. I'm not sure what sort of legacy you think you're leaving behind, but I can tell you with great confidence that it will not be a flattering one.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 653: Web best (forgotten) practice

When I was first interested in Making A Website, back in the early days of being able to Go On The Internet, itself part of Going On The Computer, I learned a number of supposed Best Practices that I still habitually follow to this day as much as possible. And yet reading a recent article about how a single article on PC Gamer is a 37MB initial download, followed by nearly 500MB of ads downloaded in the background over the course of five minutes or so, I can't help feeling like a lot of them have been forgotten about.

Here's a few that I can remember off the top of my head:

Keep your pages lightweight. Don't be afraid of all-text pages. Compress your images. Don't upload them at an unnecessarily huge size or using a file format that doesn't compress them unless there is some reason for needing to see them at high resolution and lossless quality. Arguably this one is even more important today as a lot of people are looking at websites on phones, but 37MB for an initial download is bananas, even bearing in mind today's average Internet connections, even over the airwaves on your phone, are much faster than they were 20+ years ago.
Hyperlinks should be inline rather than an instruction. That means if you're linking to something, you put the hyperlink where you mention the thing rather than spending a whole other sentence saying "Click here to see the thing!" This one is quite often argued against these days in favour of "calls to action", but if your website is not a marketing website, you don't need to give a shit about "calls to action". Save yourself some words, make your writing better and just link to the thing. The "click here" is implied by the text being a different colour. That's how hypertext works!
Hyperlinks to other pages on your site stay in the same tab/window. Hyperlinks to other websites go in a new tab/window. target="_blank" is so easy to include, and most CMS packages have the ability to choose whether or not a link opens in a new tab without you having to do any sort of HTML shenanigans yourself. The reasoning behind this is that you actually want to keep people on your website, so if you're linking to something relevant that is not on your site, when the reader closes the tab for that external resource, your site will be right there waiting for them where they left it.
Metadata doesn't belong in content. We all know that social media made a real mess of this, but outside of platforms designed around metadata being part of content, you don't need to put things like #hashtags in your articles, because most CMS platforms have some sort of tag facility built-in, and even if you're hand-coding a site, you can still include metadata tags in a way that is invisible to the end user. You are (hopefully) writing a page to be useful to a person, not a machine. In fact, in these days we live in, making a page more friendly to a person than to a robot will make you stand out considerably.
Don't interrupt the reader. If someone has clicked on a page, they're there to read the thing they clicked on, not to subscribe to your newsletter, not to watch a video and not to click away to a related article. If you must include those things, put them at a relevant point in the text (e.g. a video showing the thing you're talking about in the article, a link to a source you're quoting) or, if they don't fit into the flow, at the end of the piece so the reader has somewhere to go next. If you're giving the reader "FURTHER READING:" options after just one or two paragraphs, all you're doing is implying to the audience that the rest of the article isn't worth reading.

Most of these are broken on the daily by commercial websites, usually in the name of "SEO best practice" or whatever. The last one in particular drives me bonkers. I just want to read the article! I do not need linking to something tangentially related after I've only read the introduction, and I certainly do not want to subscribe to your fucking newsletter until I have read your entire piece!

Many of these rules were originally put in place because a lot of people were still using dial-up Internet at the time, and if you gave someone with even the very fastest dial-up modems a 37MB single page? Well, they just wouldn't be reading that page. In the process, however, these rules made for a Web that was clean, straightforward to navigate and consistent in its design language. And we've lost a lot of that in the attention-deficit, ad-riddled, bloated mess that the modern Web is.

"I want the old Web back" is a lot more than just starting your own blog in favour of corporate-controlled social media websites. The rules above are a good start. Generally respecting your audience — including their time and network bandwidth — is a good next step.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 652: New Tricks - done

I've finished watching the full run of New Tricks, the BBC sort-of police procedural about the "Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad", or UCOS, a unit in London's Metropolitan Police made up of one actual police officer and several other retired coppers. I enjoyed it a lot, even if the cast changes in its latter seasons arguably made it into a bit of a different show, and it meandered a bit in search of its own identity as a result.

New Tricks opens with UCOS being fronted by Sandra Pullman (Amanda Redman), a semi-disgraced police officer who gained notoriety after shooting a dog on a bungled raid that left the person she was supposed to be rescuing paralysed after falling out of a window. She assembles a colourful team of former police officers, including the diamond geezer Gerry Standing (Dennis Waterman), the extremely neurodivergent Brian "Memory" Lane and the relatively-normal-but-talks-to-his-dead-wife Jack Halford.

Between them, they form an initially uneasy alliance that subsequently blossoms into both genuine friendship and a wonderful sense of camaraderie as they solve a series of cold cases, many of which have been dormant for 20-30 years or more. As a result, Pullman more than redeems herself in the eyes of her superiors — though she still occasionally gets stick about the whole dog-shooting thing — and her band of merry old men find some meaning in their lives, as well as some closure in some longstanding issues.

This core cast remains constant for a significant proportion of the show, and we get to know them all very well. Halford is the first to leave; after finding closure on the murder of his wife, he departs to live out the end of his life peacefully after discovering he has a terminal illness. Lane is next to go, once again after reaching some closure on his "case that got away" — closure that involves him sacrificing his new career in the name of justice and the truth when he accuses a powerful member of the police for wrongdoing.

Standing lasts the longest, sticking around until the second episode of the show's final season. The two-part story that sees him departing after having faked his own death gives him a good story to go out on; he didn't have quite the same "issues" hanging over his head as Halford and Lane, so he needed something like this to make his departure an event of note in the same way, and it worked well, revealing some hitherto unknown details about his past career that felt very much in keeping with what we had learned about him over the course of the prior eleven seasons.

The replacement cast members include the Glaswegian Steve McAndrew (Denis Lawson), who is rebuilding his life following estrangement from his wife and son; Dan Griffin (Nicholas Lyndhurst), who is a frighteningly competent, knowledgeable individual who acts a bit as the group's "Superman" at times, despite occasionally demonstrating himself to be a bit unaware in terms of social interactions; and the latest to join the group, following Standing's departure, is Ted Case (Larry Lamb), a superstitious but intelligent former detective with a gift for interviewing witnesses and interrogating suspects. Outside of the "old men" of the group, Pullman is eventually replaced by Sasha Miller (Tamzin Outhwaite) towards the end of the series, and while this is probably the biggest upheaval the series saw, she settles into the new role quickly and does a good job.

New Tricks, across its entire run, strikes a good balance between the inherent comedy in such an unusual, eccentric ensemble cast, and the inherent darkness of a series about investigating longstanding cold cases, typically murders. The show thankfully sidesteps some of the clichés of police procedurals after its initial episodes; the pilot episode and the first couple of regular episodes give Pullman a superior who is the very definition of the stereotypical "shouting police chief", but before long he is replaced by Robert Strickland (Anthony Calf), an altogether calmer individual who, while coming from a background of privilege, often sides with "the little guy" (relatively speaking) rather than The Establishment as a whole. In the context of the series, this means that while he is often outwardly a by-the-book sort of individual, on the down-low he is immensely supportive of UCOS' eccentricities and lets them get away with a lot — because they get results.

(Yes, I know UCOS can be argued to be part of "The Establishment" also, given that they are a police department in their own right. But New Tricks makes a point of showing that the police as a whole are certainly not infallible, and there are several cases that involve the unit uncovering corruption within the organisation, eventually bringing justice to someone who had been wronged, many years ago in some cases.)

New Tricks' biggest strength is in its characters. We get to know the initial ensemble cast particularly intimately over the course of their time with the show; the later additions are also plenty likeable and get their own stories to shine, though by the simple fact that they have less time on screen in total, we never feel we quite get to know them as well as Pullman, Standing, Lane and Halford. Ted Case is the character who suffers the most in this regard; joining the cast full-time partway into its final season, some of his development feels a little rushed — although this, in itself, works quite well in the context of his character. The reveal that he is gay is handled in a particularly entertaining way that, from the relatively little we know of him at that point, feels very much in keeping with how he does things.

Given that the show ran for a long time — 2003-2015, to be exact — means that things change quite significantly in society over the course of its complete run. The show starts in a pre-smartphone age, for one, though the team are all comfortably using tablets (as in, iPads, not little boxes of pills) by its conclusion, and, as you might expect from the composition of its cast, issues such as sexism and ageism are explored. Several episodes, particularly later in the show's overall run, also deal with crimes that have a racial component or that involve domestic abuse and sexual assault, and while the show isn't particularly gory or shock-horror, it also doesn't shy away from real issues.

I'm sure there's plenty one could criticise about the show as a whole, particularly as today, in 2026, a lot of people have a somewhat skeptical view of the police and their role in society — and the way in which police-centric TV shows can somewhat "whitewash" this fact. But taking it as pure escapism — as a fun detective show with some colourful characters — it was highly entertaining, and I'm glad I took the time to watch it from start to finish.

Now I need something to replace it…

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 651: New project idea

I've had an idea for A Creative Project. I get these every so often. Sometimes I follow through on them, sometimes I start them and don't finish them, sometimes I don't even start them. This one is actually one I've been mulling over in my brain for quite a long time, and I think I'm just going to go ahead and do it.

Rather frustratingly for you, I'm not going to give you any details on it just yet because it's something I want to keep secret until I'm ready to launch it. It's the kind of thing that's going to take quite a while to put together, you see, and I want to launch it when it's in a "complete" state rather than doing things piecemeal. It is, however, something that I hope folks will find worthwhile and valuable, and it will allow me to realise something that I have wanted to achieve for quite some time, but have never really quite figured out the best way to go about.

I'll be honest: the reason why my brain is always mulling over Creative Projects is because as I get older, I feel increasingly… I don't know, "concerned" about What I Will Leave Behind. I'm not planning on dying any time soon, I hasten to add, but when I look back over my time on this Earth, I want to feel like I achieved something that mattered. My wife and I have not had kids and are not going to have kids (through mutually agreed choice) and as such any "legacy" I leave behind will have to depend on what I was able to achieve in the time allotted to me.

Now, I'm sure one could say that I have already "left something behind" — several things, in fact. There's this blog, there's MoeGamer, there's the stuff I wrote for various websites (although most of those are now defunct and thus only accessible via the Internet Archive and/or websites that have ingested all the material from a now-dead other site), there's the contributions I've made to magazines over the years, there's my YouTube channel, there's all the Evercade manuals I've had a hand in writing, there's the blogs and videos I've made for Evercade.

And yet, I dunno, I sort of feel dissatisfied. I feel like relatively few people know who I am. When people look back on sites like USgamer and GamePro, I'm never mentioned. Whenever I've launched new Creative Projects, they don't get any buzz from peers I may have worked with or adjacent to. Don't get me wrong, I have absolutely no desire to be "famous" (or "infamous", for that matter) — but sometimes it does just feel like it would be nice to have a little bit of recognition (or, hell, just acknowledgement) for the hard work I've done over the years.

As always, if you're reading this, the above is not directed at you. If you're reading this, you probably Give A Shit about me, and that is nice, so thank you. I'm just talking more broadly. I'm not getting any younger, and it seems that getting vaguely maudlin over whether or not you have "achieved" anything in your lifespan is a natural thing to do when one is not getting any younger.

There's a line from the Final Fantasy IX manual that always sticks with me at times like this. For the longest time I was convinced it was attributed to Zidane, but it's actually attached to Freya's character profile in the original manual. The line is "To be forgotten is worse than death."

I probably don't need to explain myself there, do I…?

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 650: Games for Children

I read an article earlier that annoyed me a bit. I'm not going to link to it partly because I don't want to send any particular ire in the author's direction, and partly because it wasn't this specific article that annoyed me, but rather a common talking point that it used as its central thesis.

The relevant quote is this (and I'm aware this is probably as good as linking to it, but whatever; statistically speaking, most people probably can't be arsed to search for it, and the rest think asking an AI will get them a meaningful answer. That latter group are wrong and cunts, by the way.):

I think we need to start acknowledging that too many adults are evaluating games like they're up for the Booker Prize when instead they're well-constructed children's books. We don't need to pretend. We'd be better off being real.

This argument primarily came about because some folks have been looking at the recent Pokémon game, Pokopia, as a reflection on life in a world without humans, and life in a world living with the results of climate change.

The thing with art is that it's a subjective thing. There's authorial intent, to be sure, but there is also the very specific, very personal reaction that someone has to something. And that comes from somewhere. And if multiple people are saying the same things, independently of one another, there's clearly something in the work that speaks to people who are on a particular wavelength.

With that in mind, I feel like it's the height of arrogance to describe something as being childish, which is the main core argument that annoys me not just about this piece, but about other thinkpieces along these lines. Sure, Pokopia is a game designed to be sweet and colourful and friendly to kids or inexperienced gamers, but that doesn't mean it's completely incapable of saying something.

I add to this: being aimed at children does not mean something has lesser value, either. There's a vast canon of "children's literature" out there that is well worth reading by adults today, because it stands up not as "books for kids", but simply as well-crafted stories. Another objection I have to the argument above is that by using a phrase like "well-constructed children's books" as a diminutive, reductive way of talking about things, you are, by extension, implying that nothing designed for kids can have any broader cultural value.

It's an ongoing thing that certain portions of Terminally Online people in particular like to bring up: that Games Have Bad Stories. And it's bollocks! Just as in any medium, there are games that do have bad stories, yes, but there are also many, many examples of those that have good stories. Great stories, even. The implication behind the sentence "too many adults are evaluating games like they're up for the Booker Prize when instead they're well-constructed children's books" is that "games, as a medium, will never have the same value as another medium that I consider inherently more valuable".

I haven't played Pokopia so I can't comment on the specifics of that case. But I can comment on a vast number of other games that very much are worthy of exploring with detailed critique and analysis. I write about many of them over on my other site, MoeGamer! The most recent thing I have written about over there at the time of writing is the incredible Esoteric Ebb, a game that is about as far from being a "well-constructed children's book" as it's possible to be. (And yes, I know I said I wouldn't pick on that article specifically; it just so happens that this particular quote is especially symptomatic of the issue I'm talking about.)

The core thesis of the piece in question is that "we all need to be more honest" when we're talking about games. And I don't necessarily disagree with that. There's a lot of criticism out there where people look at a game and complain about something that it isn't — and which, in many cases, it has never purported to be — rather than evaluating whether or not it was successful at what it was actually trying to do, whether that was implicit or explicit. (I wrote about this back in 2013 on USgamer, now archived on MoeGamer. If you want to know more, look up John Updike's rules for literary criticism.)

But "being honest" doesn't mean that you just go "ah, games are all just children's books, not like real literature and art" and be done with it. Critical, artistic and literary analysis has a place in writing about the medium, whether the subject under discussion is something as seemingly breezy and lightweight as Pokopia, or something as dense and philosophical as Esoteric Ebb.

Video games have been around for a very long time now — and, moreover, using the medium as a means of storytelling is now very well-established in its own right. At some point, the thing we need to "be honest" about is the fact that the medium as a whole is mature, and that there's absolutely no problem with treating it as such.

If you want to treat video games as nothing more than a throwaway bit of fluff that makes you feel better of an evening, I'm not stopping you. There is great value in having something you enjoy that you don't need to engage with on a level beyond "I like doing this because it makes me feel good". But don't throw around "we all need to" like it's some great unacknowledged, universal truth. If someone finds greater artistic, creative value in something and you just don't see it — perhaps just be honest, say you don't get it yourself, and move on. No need to tell everyone else that they're doing it wrong.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 649: Collapse

I'm exhausted. Busy day at work, big lunch, long and tiring drive home. A mostly good day, though, aside from the twat driving at 45mph in the middle lane of the M3.

Lunch was good. The boss treated us to a meal at a local (to the office) Turkish place. I had calamari as a starter followed by lamb moussaka. It was really good, but it made me just want to nap for the afternoon!

On the way back, I listened to some stuff from Sbassbear, a musical collective on YouTube that are probably best known for their Game Grumps remixes, which are consistently hilarious and incredible in their quality.

Tonight I listened to two of their more "conceptual" albums. The first was GrumpWave, which was a series of 30+ minute lo-fi tracks with some of Arin and Dan's more thoughtful conversations overlaid. It was a rather contemplative listen, and I really enjoyed it.

The other thing I listened to was Fever Dream Radio, an ADHD nightmare of an album designed around the concept of a restless, anxious soul constantly channel flipping on the radio. It's a lot to take in but was frequently hilarious. Musical comedy is tricky to do well, because to really succeed you have to absolutely commit to The Bit, but Sbassbear has always taken even their most ridiculous compositions and arrangements very seriously. If you think you can handle it, I recommend giving it a listen in its entirety.

Oh, also we have no Internet at home so I'm writing this from bed on my phone. And on that note, time for some very well earned sleep!

#oneaday Day 648: Kim Bab Keyboard

I've been doing this wrong all this time. I'm on my umpteenth monthly visit to the office, blogging from a hotel room, and somehow it has only just occurred to me that you can, in fact, plug a keyboard into a phone and type on that rather than using the touchscreen. Altogether a much more pleasant experience, and much more conducive to actually writing something of substance.

Of course, I cannot actually promise that anything following will actually be of substance, but at least I won't be complaining about how much I don't like typing on my phone, because right now I'm typing on my nice keyboard.

I don't really know why this has never occurred to me before. I think at least part of it is down to the fact that plugging a keyboard into a device that is considerably smaller than the input device always felt… "extravagant" somehow, to an unnecessary degree. But I guess it's not that strange. On a trip up to the Edinburgh Fringe with the university Theatre Group (many years ago at this point), I purchased a portable wireless keyboard to use with my Palm handheld, and that was perfectly acceptable to me. So, since I have my keyboard in my bag anyway because I'm bringing my computer to work, I figured I might as well use it for this.

So what have I got to report today, other than the usual long drive down some of the worst roads in the country? (The M25 sucks, as has been well-established on these very pages on numerous occasions, but the A1 is full of potholes now, too.) Well, I decided for my food this evening I'd do something a bit different; rather than loading up on a big bag of portable junk from the nearby Morrisons, I thought I'd try a local Korean place that I've walked past many times and been intrigued by, but never actually given a go.

So I decided to give it a go — and this was, it seems, a very good idea, because the food was delicious. I don't know Korean cuisine particularly well, but the lady behind the counter was extremely helpful, even going so far to ask me if I'd ever eaten the food they had on offer before, and offering me some suggestions and recommendations accordingly. I eventually plumped for Korean chicken kim bab (I think that's spelled right), which is essentially Korean sushi rolls.

This is what they look like:

They were delicious! As well as the Korean fried chicken with a delicious sweet but spicy sauce, there also appeared to be some combination of cucumber, cabbage, carrot and (I think) white daikon radish. And, thankfully, no onion or onion-adjacent stuff. I've found that Korean food doesn't seem to have a lot of onion in it, unlike cuisine from some other areas of east Asia, so I'm absolutely fine with that.

So yeah. That was a good decision, and I will be going there again — perhaps to try something a bit more adventurous next time. It was definitely a substantial, satisfying meal, and at £9 for a generous portion it wasn't excessively expensive either. Sure, it's more than a supermarket sandwich, but it was also several orders of magnitude more tasty. And probably not terrible for you, either.

So that was a nice discovery, and has put me in a relatively pleasant mood for the remainder of the evening. Now I'm just killing time in my room until it's time to sleep, then we have a Big Exciting Meeting (that I've been reassured doesn't mean anything Bad) tomorrow, and the boss is taking us all out to lunch, which will be nice. I know I complain a lot about having to do this monthly visit, but honestly, it's nice to actually see everyone semi-regularly, and if we get treated to something tasty, so much the better.

On that note, then, I think I'm going to spend an hour or two playing some Activision games on Evercade, then hopefully get a good night's sleep for what should be a busy but rewarding day tomorrow. Have a pleasant evening!