#oneaday Day 51: The Art of the Thumbnail

I'm in a Discord with some other (relatively) low-subscriber retro gaming and tech YouTubers, and we've had some interesting discussions over there. One subject that comes up frequently that I think I've derived the most value from is that of video thumbnails.

To put this in context, prior to joining this Discord, and for quite some time, my YouTube channel looked something like this:

I don't dislike this look. I was rather fond of how each "series" I was doing had its own distinct appearance, and I feel each thumbnail got nicely to the point: telling viewers that it was a video about a particular game on a particular platform.

But that's not really how YouTube works. However nice it looks to have a lineup of games with lovely consistent thumbnails Criterion Collection-style, it doesn't necessarily bring the views in. And so, with the advice and encouragement of the folks in the aforementioned Discord, I do things a little bit differently now.

This is how my channel looks today:

I'm pleased with this. Because I feel like these thumbnails do a much better job of intriguing and attracting the viewer's attention without assuming knowledge — i.e. "what is 'Atari A to Z'?" — while still allowing me a certain degree of consistency and coherence that makes my work immediately identifiable if you know what to look for.

Best of all, I haven't resorted to any of the more flagrantly transparent "clickbait" techniques, and "YouTube Face" is nowhere to be seen. The videos I make on YouTube are not for the same audience as Mr. Beast, so I make zero effort to court the sort of people who respond to those sorts of thumbnails.

And it works. At least I think so. Some of my videos perform about as well as what I considered a "solid performance" two or three years ago — that is to say, breaking three figures in the view count — but quite a lot more of them exceed that by two, three or even four times. And I've had a few breakout successes: my Super Woden GP 2 video sits at 86K views to date, my look at Ultima love letter Moonring has 21K views to date (and a very long tail), my video covering the announcement of The400 Mini attracted 14K views, and most recently a video on Project Gotham Racing 3 brought in a relatively modest but still impressive-for-my-channel 2.5K pairs of eyes.

I don't do this for the views, as I quite frequently state; I do it because I enjoy it. But I won't pretend it's not nice when a video does well — at least partly because it results in a bit of pocket money for me. That Super Woden GP 2 video made me over a hundred quid within a few days of it being posted. And now I get a small payout from YouTube earnings (i.e. the minimum payment threshold) every couple of months, whereas once it was a far-off goal I thought I'd never achieve. That's nice.

The secret behind those thumbnails? It's not really anything complicated. The most effective advice from the Discord I've followed is to keep text to just a few bold words, and present those words using at least two of the following: a bold outline around the letters; a bold drop shadow; and slightly rotating various parts of the complete text so that the eye is drawn to lines that aren't quite "straight". That's about it. I don't overuse colour; I don't overdo the "big red arrow" or "circling the obvious thing" tricks (although I put in a big red arrow occasionally as an in-joke to the group, which refers to itself as the "Big Red Arrow Club"); and, as noted, I don't do the "YouTube Face".

It works for me. The result is a channel full of videos I'm proud to call my own, and which a gradually (very gradually) growing number of people are coming to appreciate. That's pleasing to me.

YouTube and YouTube culture has myriad problems, but it's still the best place to create and share stuff like this. It's a valuable means of self-expression and sharing one's interests, and it's something I'm glad I decided to get stuck into exploring properly.

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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.

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#oneaday Day 50: Another Project Complete

As of today, I now have videos recorded for all 25 of the games included on The400 Mini, the miniature games console based around the Atari 8-bit. Not all of them have been published yet — the final one, which covers both Centipede and Millipede, will be out later in the week — but it's nice to feel like another creative project is "done". If you're interested, I set up a playlist on YouTube here:

As you'll note from the thumbnail, this playlist includes both videos that I've previously recorded that happen to cover the games on The400 Mini and new vids that I've recorded specifically to look at everything included on the system. The Atari 5200 games included in the playlist, covered during my "Atari A to Z Flashback" project, where I made videos for all 150 games on Atari Flashback Classics for Switch, are fundamentally identical to their Atari 8-bit counterparts, and a few others I'd previously covered on the 8-bit-centric "Atari A to Z" series.

I'm pleased with this, at least partly because it means I can now get on with exploring the broader Atari 8-bit library once again. The games included on The400 Mini are a fun cross-section of what was out there on Atari 8-bit, but they are just a fraction of the whole picture — a picture that today includes some incredible efforts from modern developers who are still putting out amazing stuff for the platform.

One of the things that I hope comes to light for people who watch my videos is that a lot of games that ended up being very famous across multiple platforms actually got their start on Atari 8-bit. Off the top of my head that I've covered already, there's Boulder Dash, Alley Cat, Spelunker, Lode Runner, M.U.L.E. and plenty of others besides.

All of these are arguably more famous in other incarnations (except perhaps M.U.L.E.) but I feel it's important to acknowledge where they came from in the first place; a lot of self-styled gaming historians don't give the Atari 8-bit the credit it is due, assuming it to be a niche system on the level of stuff like the Oric Atmos, Dragon 32 and suchlike. But no; while the Atari 8-bit never had the same widespread acceptance of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, it was still a lively, active and well-supported system (supported by everyone except Atari for significant portions of its lifespan, anyway) with some excellent capabilities that the platform's more talented programmers really got to grips with.

I realise this all might sound a bit fanboyish, but that's just because, well, I'm an Atari fan. Always have been. And I feel it's a bit silly for big chunks of computing and gaming history to be ignored just because they didn't happen on the most famous platforms.

And so I will continue to bang that drum on my YouTube channel. I have a platform there, and have amassed a following of quite a reasonable size. If the stuff I do convinces just one or two people to explore things a little beyond the usual scope of "retro" — or just to acknowledge that Atari home computers exist — then I'll feel like I've done a decent job.

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#oneaday Day 49: No Hate

I have little to no time for cynical negativity, and I've felt this way for quite some time. I've been trying to pin down exactly why I feel like I can't participate in a conversation where one or more of the participants has switched to "cynical negativity" mode, and I think I've just answered my own question: it's because it feels like those who are being negative are trying to close the conversation.

I don't always mean literally, as in "let's not talk about this any more", but I tend to find that a negative opinion about something almost certainly stops people from wanting to pipe up and say "actually, I liked it", because these days that often seems to lead to an unnecessarily heated argument. Both sides become entrenched in their respective positions, and both inevitably come out of the encounter feeling worse about the other person.

I know. I have been there on a frustrating number of occasions. There are Discord servers that I have come to feel less than welcome in because I liked something that someone with a louder voice than me didn't. And I feel it's genuinely quite hard to find a place where you can just go and be enthusiastic about something any more, without some killjoy jumping in and rattling off a laundry list of its "flaws". And the negative one always seems to come off better than someone who feels positively about something — even when the positive one clearly knows a lot more about the thing in question.

Once someone has opened that initial negativity valve, one of two things tends to happen: 1) the conversation ends, with the positive person left feeling like they can no longer talk about something they like, or 2) other people, some of whom have no experience with the thing under discussion, feel emboldened to jump on board with the person being negative, leaving the positive person feeling like they're being ganged up on.

There are responses to this, and I've heard them all.

"If you really love something, you criticise it." That may be true, but "criticising it" is not the same as shitting all over it and, in some cases, casting aspersions on those who do like it.

"Stop being so defensive." I am defensive because you are attacking something that is important to me.

"People are allowed to have different opinions." If that is the case, why do I now feel like I cannot open my mouth and express my support for the thing that "the room" has now decided is "bad"?

"Stop playing the victim." I'm sorry, but after probably over a decade of this at this point — of feeling like I have no place to really "belong" — I feel somewhat hard done by.

More than anything, though, it's just boring. I know we can all have a good laugh at the creative ways in which people talk about things they dislike — it's a lot harder to be "amusing" when you're being positive, it seems — but when no-one seems to like anything any more, it becomes extremely tiresome.

I'm not saying no-one is allowed to dislike things. I'm not saying no-one is allowed to hate things with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns. I'm saying I wish people would just be a little more considerate of those who like things, and want nothing more than to be able to talk about the things they like with other people.

Someone liking or loving something is an opportunity to learn and grow. Even if you end up not feeling the same way about the thing in question, you can learn something about the person you were talking to, and why the thing might be important to them. Meanwhile, if you close them down by saying you hate the thing before they've even had a chance to express themselves fully, that's a potential relationship that is never going to go anywhere.

I feel bad that I even have to justify this. But with every passing day, I feel more and more alienated from people who should, in theory, be my friends, based on our shared interests. But when I'm confronted with negativity, I don't feel welcome. I don't feel like anyone wants to understand me. And I don't feel like anyone wants to be my friend.

That's a really shitty way to be feeling, let me tell you. And I hope it never happens to you.

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#oneaday Day 41: Dawntrail Ponderings

I'm probably going to do a "big" writeup on Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail when I've actually beaten the main story, but I thought I'd post some musings this evening.

For the unfamiliar, Dawntrail is the fifth expansion to Final Fantasy XIV after Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers and Endwalker. It was in an interesting position before it started, because Endwalker, as the name suggests, brought the story of Final Fantasy XIV, as it had existed right from the abandoned version 1.0, to a very definitive conclusion.

Without getting too much into specifics for the sake of spoilers, I'll say that they handled it in probably the best way they could have done: treat the new storyline as basically a complete fresh start. You cross the ocean to be far away from the landmass and surrounding islands the base game and previous five expansions (mostly) took place on, and come to learn about a territory we, as players, have previously not really heard much about.

One of the interesting things about Dawntrail is the timing of its release. I don't know how much of it was deliberate, but given that the first half of the game is very much about overcoming prejudice and standing together for the good of everyone, it feels… timely, given the various things that are happening around the world right now. It feels like it's going "this is how things could be if people would just stop being dicks to each other", and it's honestly nice.

Again, without spoiling things, this is just half of Dawntrail, however. I would forgive anyone for thinking that the first half of Dawntrail is a bit "slow" in comparison to previous Final Fantasy XIV expansions, but that's entirely deliberate. Since the overall story is basically something of a "reboot" — or perhaps it's more accurate to call it a "sequel" — it makes sense that there needs to be plenty of work done to establish the new setting and its important characters. Sure, plenty of old favourites crop up, because it wouldn't be Final Fantasy XIV without them, but you spend a lot of your time with the new cast.

Stick with that relatively "peaceful" first half, though, and things get Very Real beyond that halfway point. If you were concerned that Dawntrail wouldn't conclude with some sort of earth-shattering cataclysm for the Warrior of Light to avert in cooperation with her trusty companions, then rest assured that cataclysmic happenings are very much in evidence, and they hit all the harder for how long you spent getting to know everyone in the first half.

Again, this feels timely. After the game goes "this is how things could be", it then goes "and this is also how things could be", working on the assumption that something goes horribly wrong somewhere. The message of mutual cooperation and overcoming prejudice is still very much in evidence, but it takes on something of a new meaning in the context of the game's second half.

That's all I'll say for the moment, because I'm a relatively short way into that second half, and I feel I stopped this evening just before what is going to be a fairly critical moment. (It is late and the cat is bugging me to go to bed.) It's definitely living up to the standards of its illustrious predecessors, though, and I'm glad about that. I've spent so much time in Final Fantasy XIV now, it's like a long-running TV show; I want to keep following these characters, learning about the world they inhabit and see them overcome all sorts of challenges. And there are clearly plenty more challenges ahead.

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#oneaday Day 38: The Mystery of Mario500

Earlier today, I was reading an article on retro gaming site Time Extension. The article was quite interesting — it was about the struggles academics were encountering in getting today's students (18 year olds) to engage with anything other than Minecraft or Fortnite. It's a good read, and I encourage you to take a few minutes and give it a look.

That's not what I want to talk about today, though. I want to talk about this comment I found underneath it.

A screenshot of a comment from the website "Time Extension". The comment is by a user named "Mario500", and is dated "Yesterday, 2:01pm". The comment reads "(note: the creator of this message was unable to finish reading this article immediately upon finding vulgar (or profane) language among its text)".

The "vulgar (or profane) language", by the way, was the word "damn", used in the context of the phrase "didn't give a damn".

Intrigued, I decided to delve into "Mario500"'s comment history. And what I found didn't make things any clearer. Because this is what I found:

A screenshot of Mario500's comment history. There are too many comments in the image to include in this alt text, but you can read them all at https://www.timeextension.com/users/Mario500/comments

I was immediately fascinated. Who is this person, and why do they seem to think they're the editor of Time Extension? Why do they ask questions about things a regular reader of Time Extension — and particularly a Nintendo fan — would almost inevitably be very familiar with? Why do they constantly refer to themselves in the third person (except in their earliest comments)? Why do they put everything in brackets?

I'm particularly fascinated by their apparent inability to understand sarcasm or exaggeration for comic effect, but for the life of me I cannot work out if they're taking the piss, if it's someone who really does think and talk like this — entirely possible that they're someone on the autistic spectrum, for example — or if they're a bot.

The bizarrely Puritan attitude throughout is odd, too. Besides the initial "vulgar (or profane) language", there's another comment that uses the exact same phrasing, along with one that offers "(suggestion: no hoping for swearing)" when an interview with a fan translator expresses that they hope the official release of a game keeps the naughty language intact, and possibly my favourite, "(suggestion: never insult thy self (or any other (separate) self))" in response to an article writer self-deprecatingly calling themselves a "moron" for selling their Gamecube setup.

I'm intrigued by Mario500's first comment, too. It lacks the later "gimmicky" elements of their subsequent replies, instead simply stating "This article could have been much more objective if I were involved in its creation."

They offer no further explanation of exactly how they would make the article — a lengthy feature about the history of media mogul Robert Maxwell's involvement in the games industry — any more "objective" than it already is, but chances are they, for some reason, took umbrage at the description of Maxwell's "shady business practices" in the article. But, I mean, those are pretty established facts at this point; no amount of "objectivity" (which, under these sorts of circumstances, generally means "stop saying mean things about bad people I like") can really spin it another way. Maxwell was a shit; he didn't deserve to die (probably), but he was still a shit.

(note: the creator of this message was unable to finish reading this article immediately upon finding vulgar (or profane) language among its text)

Anyway, I'm baffled. The rest of their profile on Time Extension is completely barren, they rarely get responses to their bizarre comments and I'm still not entirely unconvinced that they're a bot.

Still, it was a mild diversion earlier today. I thought you might be interested to see the stranger side of the Internet.

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#oneaday Day 37: Late Again

I've gone and left writing this until some ungodly hour in the morning again. It tends to happen when my mood is low; I stay up later than I should, which inevitably means I'll have trouble getting up in the morning. Likely no gym or swimming tomorrow, then — I value a good night's sleep more than a fitness regime. I'll get an early night tomorrow night though and go on Tuesday morning.

I decided after a lot of umming and ahhing to treat myself to Gas Station Simulator. I have a lot of time for these games that take something mundane and turn them into a relatively entertaining, but not super-demanding experience — Square Enix and FuturLab's Power Wash Simulator is probably the most well known, but there are a fair few out there now. Gas Station Simulator appears to be one of the more polished ones, and while it's still prone to Perpetual Indie Game Roadmap Syndrome, it is, at least, in its current state, a "finished" game.

I like what I've seen so far. There's a nice combination of relatively mindless "clean up the shit" gameplay combined with a bit of time management, a bit of finance management and a bit of self-expression through customising your environment. The titular gas station you find yourself taking ownership of is a complete shithole when you first acquire it, so you have a lot of work to do, though it doesn't take that much to get it looking vaguely presentable — enough to keep customers stopping for fuel in the middle of the desert happy, at least.

I'm interested in what it will look like in the late game, though. I anticipate that once you get the money rolling in fairly reliably, you'll be able to do a lot more with the overall decor of both the station itself and its various supporting buildings. At present I can just paint stuff and buy a few decorations, but I'm hoping for some more options once I unlock some more of the game features.

Because yes, in true 2024 game tradition, this isn't a game that gives you the keys to a sandbox and lets you loose; rather, you work your way through a series of objectives that introduce you to the various mechanics one at a time, gradually building on top of each other to make the game a little more complex with each passing hour. I mock it for doing this, but it's a sound approach, particularly when you're dealing with a game that, as this does, appears to have plenty of moving parts to contend with.

Thus far I have the fuel pumps, the station itself (which acts as a shop) and I've just unlocked a car repairing garage. At present, I have to do everything, but I understand at some point in the game you can hire employees to automate some or all of it. That's going to be interesting; will the game remain entertaining if you're no longer having to frantically dash between different areas to do stuff?

Anyway, that remains to be seen. I played for far too long and now it's late. So I will report further on my findings once I have had some sleep. Here's hoping I'm through the "trough" my mental health has been going through and it's onwards and upwards from here.

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#oneaday Day 36: In My Thoughts

I dreamed about our dearly departed cat Meg last night and into this morning, which caused me to wake up feeling rather maudlin. My general mental wellbeing didn't really improve for most of the day, but I did manage to distract myself with some gaming, so that's something.

I've just come off a Dawntrail session, and I'm making good progress with that, but I've also been flitting around between a couple of other things today.

First of these is Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?, which is a lightweight management sim sort of game in which you run a spy agency, train up spies and send them out on missions. It's quite fun and silly, though I haven't felt any real "challenge" from it as yet. I don't know how long it is but I suspect I'm quite early on in it so far; I wonder how it will up the challenge factor, and if it will do so by something more interesting than "require bigger numbers".

I started playing this because I've been having a bit of a hankering for that kind of game of late, and it's one of those genres that it doesn't feel like we have that many good modern examples of. Management sims were all the rage in the late '90s and early '00s, but it feels like they were one of those genres that got a bit left behind in the move to 3D. Modern 3D examples do exist — the Two Point games, which are successors to Bullfrog's Theme titles, are a good example — but it's kind of telling that stuff like Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story? is still presented in isometric quasi-3D artwork rather than polygons.

I don't know if I'll stick with it so far, as there are a number of other "sim"-type games I'm interested in having a fiddle with — after watching Game Grumps play Gas Station Simulator I actually quite fancy a go at that, for one — but what I've played so far does seem fun, and despite the relative lack of challenge in what I've played, manages to remain free of being patronising in a mobile game style.

The other thing I gave a shot for a bit earlier is Spiderweb Software's Avadon: The Black Fortress. I've been meaning to try a Spiderweb game for some time, but never got around to it and never quite new which one was best to start with. So I just picked one and gave it a go for a bit.

For the unfamiliar, Spiderweb Software make traditional CRPGs in the western style; that means they unfold rather like old Infinity Engine D&D games, or perhaps later Ultima titles. Avadon actually sounds like it might be a bit of a departure in that it's less "freeform" in its structure — thus far it's been quite heavily "mission-based", and you have relatively limited options to build your characters — but it sounds as if it's well-regarded, and many folks seem to think that the streamlined (not necessarily simplified) mechanics allow its story to shine a bit more. And it's certainly got some nicely written text in it.

Again, don't know if I'll stick with it, but I'm glad I've broken the seal and started giving it a go. I like what I see so far — although it seems the game is light on music, which is a shame, as I do like a stirring orchestral accompaniment for my western-style CRPGs.

And Dawntrail. I won't say too much about this for the sake of spoilers in case anyone reading this is planning to play it, but the thing that struck me while playing this evening is that this is a story the world really needs right now. There's lots of tolerance and understanding and learning about different cultures, and it just feels like such a marked, likely deliberate contrast to the intolerance and general shittiness around in the world at the moment. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes next, as I've reached a particularly significant moment in the narrative.

Anyway, it's nearly 2am and my cat Patti is bugging me to go to bed, so I should probably do that. Here's hoping for a restful night's sleep.

I miss you, Meg.

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#oneaday Day 34: It took blatant enshittification before people saw Game Pass for the scourge it is

Recently, Microsoft announced a slew of changes to its Game Pass service, the subscription-based service where you get access to a bunch of games for as long as you pay for it. They have not been received all that well, to say the least, with many quite rightly pointing out that its combination of price hikes and making existing offerings significantly worse is a textbook example of enshittification.

However, prior to all this nonsense, Game Pass had some of the most rabid defenders on the entire Internet. "It's consumer-friendly!" they'd chant like a mantra. "$12 a month for a whole library of games!"

I don't know about you, but I consider perpetually paying for something and then not actually having anything to show for it if I decide to stop paying is anything but consumer-friendly. It's a glorified rental service — and, more to the point, it's absolute garbage for game makers.

You see, while Microsoft does, on occasion, offer larger developers and publishers flat fees for listing their titles on Game Pass, a lot of developers, particularly smaller ones, have to rely on a "streaming"-style income stream, where they get paid according to how much people play their games. And if you've been paying any attention whatsoever to how streaming has been going over the course of the last few years, you'll know that that is an absolutely terrible deal for the artists involved.

The trouble with the Game Pass model is that it incentivises the very worst practices in the industry. With games making money according to how much they are played, we get games that are ridiculous, unnecessary timesinks. We get "live service" games. We get games that are never actually "finished", perpetually following a "roadmap" meaning there's never a good time to start playing because the Next Big Update is always just around the corner.

To put it another way, Game Pass encourages content, not art. It encourages the blandest, most transparent engagement bait, designed to Skinner Box people into believing they're having a good time while they grind through their mindless Daily Objectives for the umpteenth time. And it's an attempt to normalise people not owning things. It's an attempt to ensure that everyone quite happily hands over the keys to their entire media collection for the sake of supposed "convenience" — and don't ask about the games we remove from the service every month, thank you very much, we try and keep that bit quiet.

"But Game Pass makes me try games I never would have tried otherwise!" the defenders say. Bullshit. If you were interested enough to download a game on Game Pass, you're interested enough to read up on it, download a demo where it exists or, hell, even purchase it on a digital storefront and refund it if you found it wasn't actually something you enjoyed. (That's a practice I kind of abhor, also, but that's probably a subject for another day.) Taking risks on art is fun! Sometimes you find things you don't like, sure, but in a lot of cases you'll be very pleasantly surprised when you try something outside of your usual wheelhouse.

Game Pass is a festering boil on the arse of the industry, and the sooner we lance it, the better. It's bad for players and it's bad for the people who make the games. I'm glad there's some pushback against these latest shitty moves from Microsoft — who seem to have been making a lot of such shitty moves of late, in a variety of areas — but I fear it's too little, too late. There are already people for whom not buying games and instead "getting it on Game Pass" is the norm, and that's a problem we're going to have to address conclusively at some point. Because what we have right now is not by any means sustainable.

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#oneaday Day 33: The Latest Horrifying News from the World of AI

Yesterday, the tech blog 404 Media reported on a horrifying development in the story of the World Wide Web's gradual decline into AI-encrusted unusability: the apparent resurrection of the once-beloved TUAW (aka The Unofficial Apple Weblog), a site that hasn't been active for 10+ years, into an AI-powered slop machine.

To make matters worse, the new owners of the twitching corpse of TUAW have apparently seen fit to "borrow" the identities of the site's former regular contributors, replacing their original headshots with AI-generated portraits or stock images of completely unrelated people and replacing their original archived work with AI-powered "summaries".

Naturally, the former TUAW writers are not all that happy about this. One of the affected individuals, Christina Warren, pointed out that the reason this has been done in the first place is likely "an SEO scam that won't even work in 2024 because Google changed its [algorithm]". She then concluded that those responsible were "Assholes!", which I thoroughly concur with.

This is just the latest in a long line of absolute bullshit brought about by the infestation of "AI" into everything online. There is absolutely no excuse, no justification for what has gone here. Not only is it defacing the legacy of a publication that was once loved — and trusted — by a significant number of readers, it's also destroying the portfolios of the writers in question, who are now saddled with AI-generated slop that has their name attached to it.

"I don't want people to come across the contents coming out of that site and think that I actually wrote like that [very poorly]," Warren told 404. And I can't help but agree — because we have a very real problem online in that sites shuttering often means vast swathes of work by talented writers just goes in the dustbin without warning. And while sites such as the incredible, wonderful archive.org do their best to keep a record of everything that once was, the sad reality is that a lot of stuff is just plain lost.

I know, because I've been on the receiving end of it multiple times.

My stuff might be in here… somewhere… maybe?

One of the first sites I ever wrote for professionally, Kombo.com, no longer exists, and its URL now redirects to a site called "GameZone". Surprisingly, GameZone does seem to have some of Kombo's old articles archived, though none of them are under their original byline, instead all attributed to "kombo" (lower-case). There are 28,435 articles attributed to "kombo", all with the wrong dates on them — they claim to date back to 2012, but there are some with the headline "E3 2010", suggesting that they were simply republished on the "newer" site in 2012 — and no means of identifying who wrote what. As such, it's useless for me to use as part of a portfolio.

The two "big" sites I wrote for, GamePro and USgamer, also went belly-up at various points. In both cases, again, some of my work ended up archived on other sites. In the case of GamePro, some of my stuff found its way to the American tech site PC World, but a search for my name now throws up a list of useless garbage that quotes my name but doesn't actually link to anything I wrote without manually scrolling through several pages of junk. And, of course, there's no link to my byline for me to easily find everything by me, despite my byline being right there on the articles in question when I can find them!

This is the one and only GamePro article by me I could find after a few minutes of searching. It appears on page 2,689 of a defunct archives page. None of the images or links in the article remained intact.

USgamer, which folded a little more recently, fares a little better in that I actually have an author page on VG247, where the articles ended up — although said author page has no picture, no bio and a link to a Twitter account that no longer exists. There's 8 pages of material from me, which I suspect isn't all of my work from USgamer, but it's a decent amount, at least. I just wish it wasn't on VG247, which is a site I am… not a fan of.

Better than nothing — or being "AI summarised", at least. Just wish it was under a different masthead.

In this respect, I guess I'm actually kind of lucky that my identity hasn't been co-opted by a content farm and all my past work fed into ChatGPT to regurgitate at considerably lower quality than I originally wrote. But I have to confess that reading stories such as this one about TUAW fills me with genuine dread. I'm not overly concerned about AI "taking my job" because it's rapidly becoming very clear that AI writing is both easy to spot and demonstrably inferior to a human being doing the same thing.

But I am concerned about the potential for AI slop with my name attached to it dragging my reputation through the mud. As a writer, I find it grossly insulting to my profession. And simply as a human being, I find what has been done here to be absolutely, totally unconscionable.

There has to be a breaking point somewhere. Soon. Please. I am rapidly running out of what little faith in humanity I have left. And there wasn't a lot left in the first place.

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#oneaday Day 31: Hypnospace

Decided I wanted a break from Dawntrail this evening, so I decided to give Hypnospace Outlaw a go, since I'd always been curious and it was cheap in the GOG summer sale.

For the unfamiliar, Hypnospace Outlaw is an adventure game of sorts, but rather than controlling a character you're manipulating a computer from a fictional 1999 as it navigates around the "Web" of sorts. Technically "Hypnospace" is a Web-equivalent that people browse in their sleep through a special headband, but so far that doesn't seem to have mattered all that much.

The fact it's set in 1999 does matter, however, because most of your interaction involves using a delightful parody of the early(ish) Web — a land of personal Geocities pages, primarily. Hypnospace is a managed service rather than a completely open free-for-all, and divides user pages into specific "Zones" according to their subject matter. As you progress through the game, you're given access to more Zones and thus more pages to browse.

Honestly, just browsing through the wealth of information that has been composed for these fake Web pages is a lot of fun in itself. The world of Hypnospace Outlaw has clearly been thought about in great detail, and even though it is, by necessity, considerably smaller than the "real" Internet — even as it existed in 1999 — there's a sense that you really are exploring a community, but through your computer screen, rather than on foot.

The actual "gameplay" part of Hypnospace Outlaw places you in the role of a volunteer "Enforcer" for Hypnospace's manufacturer MerchantSoft. This affords you special privileges — among them the ability to wield a literal banhammer — but also effectively stops you from "existing" online for the duration of your contract. Your job as an Enforcer is to seek out violations of MerchantSoft's "laws", which include copyright infringement, harassment, illegal (disturbing or offensive) content, distribution of malicious software and commercial activities carried out via non-approved channels.

This starts pretty simple with you wielding your banhammer on some obviously copyright-infringing pages, though the game makes sure you're aware of the consequences of your actions through the way the page's owners update their sites as the game progresses. In subsequent cases you'll have to track down cases of cyberbullying via "hidden" pages, only accessible via certain means, and infiltrate rebellious groups by effectively using social engineering techniques to glean sensitive security information.

So far — I estimate I'm about halfway through the game — no real "judgement" has been placed on the player character for the things they do, though only the most hard-hearted won't respond to the anguished frustration expressed by those who feel they had the rules applied to them unfairly. It's satisfying to find your way into what the creators of a page clearly thought was a safe, hidden inner sanctum and then effectively wreck it by blasting its most important components for rule violations — but it's also hard not to feel a little uncomfortable about it. That, I suspect, is kind of the point.

I'm intrigued to see where the story ends up going, as it's definitely been intriguing so far — even though it's mostly been little threads you can tug at as much or as little as you want up until the point I'm at. I suspect some sort of "big plot" will reveal itself before the end, though, and I'm looking forward to investigating it further. I'll post some more in-depth thoughts about it over on MoeGamer once I've finished it.

For now, then, a thumbs up, particularly if you lived through this era of the Web. While it's very much a parody rather than a completely loving recreation, a lot of it is bang on for how things really were back then — and it blends this nicely with a thoroughly modern tale about controlling the flow of information, censorship and self-expression. Good stuff.

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