2242: Another Frustrating Way Clickbait Ruins the Internet

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Earlier today, I was browsing around the Internet looking for some tips and tricks on how to better play Dungeon Travelers 2. I tried GameFAQs, and the content there was disappointingly light, though there is a good character guide at least. Then I resorted to Google, and I was reminded of something that's been bugging me for a while.

Here's my Google results for "dungeon travelers 2 walkthrough":

Dungeon Googlers 2.png

"Oh," I thought, skipping past the GameFAQs entry because I'd already checked it out. "There's some more walkthroughs out there. IGN have got one, huh? Well, that should be decent enough."

As anyone who has ever attempted to look at one of IGN's walkthroughs — or indeed one on the "GameWise" site above it — will know… no. This is emphatically not the case. Here is IGN's walkthrough for Dungeon Travelers 2:

IGN DT2.png

That's right! There's absolutely fuck all there besides the most basic database information for the game itself. And if you thought GameWise might be any better, being higher ranked on Google? Nope.

GameWise DT2.png

GameWise takes considerably more words to say that it doesn't have any content for the guide, and outright lies to the reader by saying its "team of contributors will help you work through the game via a step-by-step tutorial" and that it will "take you all the way through the game to 100% completion including unlockable quests and items". It's boilerplate text, of course, but it's complete bollocks and, more to the point, it's evidence of a particularly dishonest practice that goes on alarmingly frequently these days: sites that put up "landing pages" for things that people might be searching for, then don't populate them with content right away (or sometimes, as we can see here, at all) so that they can get some of that sweet, sweet ad revenue by someone who doesn't know any better clicking on them without having to put any actual work in.

This is actively making the Internet less useful, particularly as both IGN and GameWise have clearly made the effort to get themselves highly ranked on Google as a "trustworthy" source. And indeed both of these sites may well have helpful walkthroughs and guides for more mainstream, popular games, and in that instance, them showing up on Google is absolutely fine. But to list a "false positive" result like this is extremely dishonest and incredibly frustrating for the reader.

I'm reminded of the evolution of my time at USgamer. When the site launched, each of us on the team were specifically given pretty much free reign to cover what we wanted in our own personal style: the thinking was very much along the lines of 1up.com back in the glory days, when there would be distinct "personalities", each with their own specialisms, building up their own communities of readers. It was great; it was fun to write, and the community appreciated this honest style of writing.

Unfortunately, it didn't satisfy the suits as it wasn't raking in enough ad revenue. So out went the freedom and in came a more strict regime. Whereas once I took the approach that I had once taken so successfully on GamePro — look out for things that looked interesting that other sites hadn't covered in detail, then cover them in detail — I was reduced to having to seek approval for every news story I posted, and this led USgamer's news section to start looking more and more like every other gaming news site out there, covering the same old stories in the same old way.

This only got worse once I got laid off and was working out my notice; the site started to post guide content for recently released games, partly through the site's partnership with Prima Games, whose website was also part of the Gamer Network umbrella. I had to split guides into parts so they could be published across several days and rake in more clicks than they would have done if posted all in one lump; worse, I didn't have the creativity to write my own stuff, since all the content was already done and I was pretty much reduced to being a data entry person, editing and tidying up the raw copy so it looked good on the site. And, of course, even worse than that, the hours that I was tied up pissing around with these stupid guides were hours that I couldn't spend writing more interesting things or telling people about games they might not have heard of before. (I am 100% sure that this was deliberate.)

Guide content has its place, but it should be on a dedicated site that specialises in it — such as GameFAQs — not used as insultingly transparent bait to get people to visit your site and cross your fingers that they might read something else you've written while they're there. (They won't.) And it absolutely, definitely should not be used in the way IGN and GameWise use it, which is to hook people in without actually providing any content at all.

It's not just guide content, of course — IGN in particular has been caught playing the SEO game with articles about games and tricking Google into thinking they are "reviews" when they're nothing of the sort — but guide content represents by far the most egregious examples of this bullshit going on.

If you are engaging in this, you are making the Internet a less useful place to find information. Stop being a cunt and write something helpful to go with your beautifully optimised search engine bullshit, or don't list the page at all.

2212: The Stat Connection

"Go to your Stats page and check your top 3-5 posts. Why do you think they’ve been successful? Find the connection between them, and write about it."

Daily Post, February 9, 2016

All right. Let's have a look, then. Since we're not that far into 2016 and WordPress doesn't appear to have an "all time" function to search top posts, I'll provide the top five posts (excluding the homepage, which makes up the majority of pageviews but doesn't tell me much) for both 2016 so far and 2015. In other words, these are posts that people saw the title of (probably on social media or via a search engine) and directly clicked through to, rather than simply checking my front page each day.

Here's 2016 so far:

And here's 2015:

All right. So let's get analysing.

Since I write about a wide variety of topics on this blog — regular readers will know that it's my personal outlet for venting about whatever is on my mind on any given day rather than any attempt to provide a coherent editorial experience — it's perhaps not surprising that not all of the entries in these two lists have something in common, but there are a few common themes along the way.

How to Do Stuff

Let's look at 2016, first. Both How to Win at Omega Quintet and Helping your Squad in Xenoblade X were written in 2015 (indicated by them not having the orange bar next to them), yet have remained consistently popular since I wrote them. The reason for this is that they are instructional content: guides for video games. Instructions or guides are consistent traffic magnets, regardless of the subject matter of your site, because one of the most common things people search the Internet for is how to do something. Video games sites often use guide content for current popular games to attract visitors to their site and guarantee a baseline of ad revenue, then cross their fingers that readers will click through to other, less "baity" content. It doesn't always work like that, of course, which is why we've seen a rise in deliberately provocative "clickbait" content across the board, not just in games journalism.

Anyway. The reason that my guide content for both Omega Quintet and Xenoblade X proved popular is that these were both games that had a specific audience, but neither of them were "big" enough for a commercial site to want to devote time and column inches to them. In other words, those searching for help when playing Omega Quintet and/or Xenoblade X would be out of luck when searching the big video games sites, but a cursory Google search would doubtless throw up my posts here fairly early on — indeed, at the time of writing, my post on Omega Quintet appears sixth in my (admittedly personalised) Google search results, embarrassingly with a typo in the preview text which I have now corrected:

It's for this reason that a couple of my other previous posts have proven popular over time: my post on How to Play Pocket Academy, for example, detailing the baffling and frankly illogical mechanics of Kairosoft's mobile-based school sim, rode high in my rankings for quite some time. I tell you: if you want traffic, write posts that tell people how to do stuff, and preferably how to do stuff that mainstream sites haven't covered.

The Power of Sharing

My most popular posts are always several orders of magnitude more popular than their nearest rivals, with perhaps the most impressive example being 2015's An Open Letter to Paul Glass, Slimming World Consultant, Upper Shirley. This post was pretty far from my more regular subject matter on popular media, particularly video games, and yet it was my most popular individual post for 2015. Why? Because it had the absolute shit shared out of it.

Paul Glass was the consultant at our local Slimming World group when I first joined, and his enthusiasm and belief in the programme was and is a big part of why I've stuck with it and had so much success over the course of the last year — I've lost six stone in a year, hopefully with more still to come off. When he revealed that he would be leaving the group to spend more time with his family in far-off climes, I felt it important to express my feelings about what he had helped me accomplish in such a way that I could be clearly understood. I'm shy and socially anxious by nature, and at the time I wrote this I'm not sure how confident I would have felt saying all those words in person, but writing them down on paper is no big deal: I can "fire and forget" that way.

Something told me that I should probably share this post a little wider than just my Twitter followers, though, and so I decided to make one of my extremely irregular visits to Facebook to post a link to the letter on the Facebook group for the Slimming World group in question. That one simple action caused that one single post to absolutely explode in popularity, as it was shared by group members, Paul himself, and subsequently by other people I'd never met involved with Slimming World in various capacities, either as group members or staff.

You never can quite tell what the next big viral sensation is going to be, but there is one thing that all my popular posts do tend to have in common:

The Passion of the Post

It is, I feel, no coincidence that my most widely shared, most popular posts are those in which I feel most passionate about the things that I am writing about. I am a person who, I feel, can express their passion for something pretty clearly through my writing. And indeed, due to the aforementioned shyness and social anxiety mentioned above, I find writing to be the easiest means through which I can express that passion to an audience that can — hopefully — appreciate what I'm saying, or at least respect it.

2015's most popular posts were all about passion, from my letter to Paul to Perhaps We Should Stop Insulting Fans of Japanese Games. Four out of the five posts above were about video games — four out of the five posts were pretty much about the same thing, in fact, which was critics' regular dismissive and unfair treatment of both Japanese game developers and the fans of the games they make — but these posts all resonated deeply both with myself and with the circle of friends I've cultivated on social media, most of whom share the same interests as me.

Consequently, much as my letter to Paul got shared far and wide, so too did The Joyless Wankers of the Games Press (actually written the year before in response to an absolutely atrocious review of Fairy Fencer F on my former stomping grounds of USgamer), Some Thoughts for Critics (a response to Jim Sterling's dreadful and ill-informed review of Senran Kagura 2), Hi Games Journalism, It's Time We Had Another Chat (a response to Mike Diver's equally dreadful and ill-informed review of Senran Kagura 2, a game which is a ton of fun but which proved to be a whipping boy for self-described "progressive" types on the grounds of the female characters' big jiggly breasts) and the aforementioned Perhaps We Should Stop Insulting Fans of Japanese Games (a response to an extraordinarily narrow-minded editorial on USgamer by my former editor Jeremy Parish, and almost certainly the reason he has me blocked on Twitter). I saw these posts get shared and reshared, not only on Twitter, but also on Facebook and Reddit, the latter of which I don't really use myself.

The things I had written had clearly got the strength of my feelings across, and other people felt like they could relate to them in some way — either agreeing or disagreeing — and this caused them to explode in popularity, at least in terms of numbers. The same, too, can be said for 2016's Why It Would Be A Mistake to Not Localise Valkyrie Drive Bhikkuni, an impassioned plea for the progressive loudmouths not to stop Senran Kagura creator Kenichiro Takaki's new game making it over to Western shores.

Bovril?

I'll be honest, I have no idea why a post from 2013 about beef-and-yeast-extract black sticky substance Bovril is my third most popular post this year so far, but oddly enough this post has been consistently popular: it finished 2015 in sixth place, just after my various rants at the games journalism industry and also ranked sixth in 2014, but only managed 19th place in its original year of publication.

It's not even a particularly exciting post: it simply describes what Bovril is and how I feel about it. It doesn't even appear on the front page of Google results for Bovril. But I guess it meant something to someone somewhere. Perhaps not many people write about Bovril on the Internet, and my post offered a safe space for Bovril fans to convene and share in silent contemplation of salty beef drinks. Or perhaps it's just one of those things that can't quite be explained.

So what can we learn from this?

There are a few things you can probably see my most popular posts have in common. To my eye, these things are:

A clear, conversational title that makes it clear what the post is about — i.e. a simple subject line rather than a "title" that tries to be clever or funny
Passion for the subject — clear emotion, either positive or negative, is infectious and relatable
Scope for sharing — be it a topic that a lot of people feel strongly about, or something that is written in such a way that presents a strong argument in favour of or against something
Complete honesty — even at the expense of a few "bridges" if necessary
Instructions on how to do stuff — particularly if nowhere else has published instructions on how to do that stuff

Not all of my most popular posts have all of the above elements — although I do make a specific effort to apply the "complete honesty" element to everything I write — but these are, by far, the most common factors that all of my most popular posts have between them.

I hope that's proved as enlightening for you as it has for me: it's certainly given me some food for thought with regard to what to write about going forward from here, so I'd say both as a writing exercise and an analytical investigation, this post has been a great success.

Thanks, Daily Post!

2203: Pete Reacts to Growing Older

A significant proportion of the Internet has been up in arms over a recent copyright kerfuffle on YouTube recently, where a collective I've never heard of called the Fine Bros had apparently attempted to trademark the word "react". Digging deeper, it seems that the Fine Bros had done this ostensibly as a means of trademarking the concept of "reaction videos" and allowing others to make videos in the same format — one which the group have had plenty of success with in the past — while allowing themselves an opportunity to profit from licensing fees.

Leaving aside the whole ethical implications of attempting to trademark a common word such as "react" — one of several different "brands" that Fine Bros had attempted to trademark, theoretically as a catch-all term to encompass any specific series they might concoct in the near future — this whole debacle brought one thing into sharp focus for me, and that is that there are certain aspects of modern popular culture that I simply don't understand the appeal of whatsoever.

The concept of a reaction video is simple. You show some people — preferably from a specific demographic such as "teenagers" or "the elderly" — a thing that is Shocking in some way, then you film what they do while they're watching or looking at the thing that is Shocking. Early examples of reaction videos included various instances of people seeing the notorious "2 Girls 1 Cup" video (for heaven's sake, don't Google that if you've never heard of it) as well as well-known shocking scenes from TV or online videos such as Game of Thrones' "Red Wedding" scene.

Trouble is, in the few reaction videos I've managed to stomach, it all feels so painfully forced as to not be entertaining. No-one I know whoops and hollers at the television, bellowing "OH MY GOD!" as something shocking happens. The most I do when seeing something shocking is flinch and wince at something gory, particularly if it involves eyes, but I don't shout and scream or anything. (That said, given the general difficulty I have with expressing emotions clearly when I'm "in person", I may not be the most representative example, but none of the people I know are like this either.) In other words, it doesn't seem believable, with the whole situation being so contrived as to seem utterly pointless.

And aside from the implausibility of some reactions, I simply don't see the appeal whatsoever. Why on Earth would I want to watch a group of people gathered around a TV that I can't see all screeching and gesturing at something I may or may not already be familiar with? And, by extension, why on Earth would anyone want to trademark such an utterly inane concept on the arrogant assumption that other people would want to pay them for the dubious privilege of churning out more culturally bankrupt tat like this?

I guess you can just add reaction videos to the ever-lengthening list of things that I just don't "get" in modern online life. It joins the illustrious ranks of Twitch chat, Twitch in general (unless you're hanging out with an actual friend), MOBAs, unboxing videos and doubtless a whole bunch of other things I'm not even familiar with yet.

I'm 34 years of age. Some days I feel like I'm still 16. Today, however, I'm feeling every one of those years. Now get off my fucking lawn.

2197: Putting the New WordPress App Through its Paces

I was helpfully informed by my WordPress dashboard that there's a new WordPress app available for the desktop, so I figured I'd put it through its paces. I've used the mobile app for both iOS and Android a fair bit, so I was interested to see what benefit — if any — making use of a desktop app would have over just loading the site up in Chrome and making use of it.

Well… frankly, there's not a huge number of benefits, at least not for those who primarily make use of blogs hosted on WordPress.com. The main benefit is that the app contains the whole of the main "new-style" WordPress dashboard in local format, meaning that you can theoretically 1) use it offline and 2) write without the distractions of other browser tabs. It's also responsive to the window size, so you can scale the display according to what, exactly, you want to do with it: do you want to keep an eye on notifications, or do you want to write a full-on post?

You'll notice I pointed out that it makes use of the "new-style" WordPress dashboard, and that's an important distinction to make, because the new-style WordPress dashboard is emphatically not the same as the traditional wp-admin view. It's a lot simpler and cleaner, sure, and you can do most of the things you can do in wp-admin in the new dashboard, but there are, frankly, a number of issues that WordPress so far hasn't fixed with the main site that remain — and arguably are even more prominent — in the app.

Most notably, there are a significant number of flaws in what WordPress refers to as the "improved posting experience". Having been using this a fair amount since my initial reactions to it, I've noticed that there have been a fair few improvements and additional functions added so that now it is, roughly speaking, in line with the wp-admin-based editor. There are still some irritating factors, however, chief among them (for me) being the fact that even with the window at 1920×1080, the word counter is scrolled off the bottom of the screen so I have to manually scroll down to view it — sometimes even if my post is longer than a screen in height. This is just plain bad design, and seems to have been fixed in the Web-based editor through the use of a floating word count window in the lower right of the viewport. Apparently the locally stored version of the editor page used in the app hasn't taken this particular update on board, however; as I type this, my word count is once again disappearing out of the bottom of the viewport.

Another big flaw that requires less discussion is the fact that the Insert Hyperlink option does not include the option that the wp-admin-based editor does to search through your previous posts and link to them without having to look up the URL yourself. The absence of this from the "improved" posting experience is mildly irritating, and I have to wonder exactly why it was removed, since this is the exact opposite of an "improvement".

A few things do seem to work a little better in the standalone app, mind; when using the editor in Chrome, I've found that sometimes the cursor keys and modifiers behave in somewhat strange and unpredictable manners: sometimes attempting to move to the previous character or word with keyboard shortcuts inexplicably jumps to the end of the paragraph or somewhere completely unexpected, particularly if there a few different items of formatting (such as links or italics) used in a paragraph. So far, at the time of writing, as I type this, I've encountered no such issues — that doesn't necessarily mean that they're not there, but they shouldn't really be in there in the first place, so I've tended to assume they're a Chrome issue rather than a WordPress issue.

Since I originally looked at the "improved posting experience", too, I was pleased to discover that drag-and-drop images now work as they should: in other words, you can drag an image directly into the editor window and have it appear where the cursor was, rather than this simply being a shortcut to opening the "Add Media" window. So good job there!

Elsewhere in the app, you have access to the other features the WordPress dashboard offers, most notably site statistics and insights, allowing you to see at a glance how your most recent posts have been performing, which days you've been posting on and suchlike. The WordPress Reader system is also integrated into the app, allowing you to catch up on WordPress blogs you've subscribed to all in one place rather than having to remember to visit a bunch of sites. This is a helpful feature, but like everything else in the app, I'm not entirely convinced of the benefit of having it in a standalone app rather than just visiting the WordPress site in my browser.

All in all, then, the main benefit of the new desktop app appears to be little more than speed and a slightly more stable experience than the website under Chrome appears to offer. I suppose offline use is a benefit to those who are composing blog posts on the go using a laptop — or, indeed, catching up on downloaded Reader posts — but for me, this is some minor, not especially useful functionality, since I tend to compose my blog posts immediately before publishing them, which tends to mean that I have a stable Internet connection wherever I happen to be at the time.

I'll continue using the app for a while and see how I get on with it. If nothing else, its "distraction-free" nature due to its lack of browser tabs is quite pleasant, so it may prove to be a helpful way to concentrate, whether it's on my daily blogging "duties" or more substantial projects.

You can find out more about the app and download it for free here.

2189: Reflections on the Last Five Years, Or: Life After Games Journalism

I've had a whole lot of thoughts swirling around in my head for some time now about various matters, and I feel as a therapeutic exercise — not to mention an opportunity for some of you to get to know me a bit better — it's important that I express them somehow. I know all too well how frustrating, stressful and ultimately unhealthy it can be to have unresolved emotions and thoughts surrounding things that have happened to you — particularly bad things — and so this is my attempt to reboot my mind and try to move on a little.

Consequently, certain aspects of this post are more than likely to rub a few people up the wrong way. To those people whose jimmies are rustled I say simply: fuck you, I don't give a shit, and if you really cared you wouldn't have done the things you did in the first place.

In the interests of at least a facade of professionalism, I will not be naming individuals who have had a negative impact on my life in this post, though it will doubtless be extremely obvious to anyone who has been following me for a while who the people in question are. I will, however, be naming the companies involved, since that is less personal; everyone knows how unpleasant it is if you Google your own name and find something not terribly complimentary, whereas, unless you own a monolithic corporation, you probably care a little less about someone talking smack about your monolithic corporation. That's how I'm going to attempt to justify myself about this, anyway.

Also, this post is crazy long, so for the benefit of those who only read on my front page, here's a Read More tag.

Continue reading "2189: Reflections on the Last Five Years, Or: Life After Games Journalism" →

2181: Coming to a Head

I generally try and steer clear of Internet drama as much as possible, but sometimes it's impossible not to see what's been going on when it's all over a website you use regularly.

Most recently, Twitter has seen some interesting happenings that make it feel like the ongoing culture war between "loudmouthed, self-professed progressives (who aren't actually all that progressive at all)" and "people who just want to be left the fuck alone to talk to their friends about things they enjoy without being shamed for it" has been coming to a head. And it's been kind of fascinating to watch, particularly as the most recent happenings make one wonder what role — if any — sites that provide a means of communication, such as Twitter, have in these sort of sociopolitical debates.

The most recent drama surrounds one Milo "Nero" Yiannopoulous, a writer for the conservative/right-wing news site Breitbart. Nero is, to put it mildly, something of a controversial, divisive figure: he's brash, opinionated, flamboyantly homosexual and vehemently against the rise of "third wave" feminism — that particular ideological offshoot that we've seen in the last few years that seemingly concerns itself more with scoring "victim points" than actually promoting any sort of societal change for the better. At the same time, he's also someone who stands up for what he believes in, protective of people and groups he cares for and willing to go against the grain when he believes that the "grain" is going in the wrong direction.

I find him quite amusing to read at times. I don't follow him on Twitter, but in my occasional (non-participatory) explorations of what GamerGate subreddit KotakuInAction is up to, I tend to keep abreast of what he's been up to, and occasionally feel inclined to read some of the things he's posted on Breitbart. I don't agree with everything — many things, if I'm honest — that he says, but I do agree with some others. I find his writing entertaining to read, though, and challenging to my preconceived notions about particular issues. His writing makes me think, in other words, and contemplate how I feel about something, whether or not it's the same as what he thinks about the thing in question — and that's something that journalists should aspire to, in my opinion, wherever they are positioned on the overall political spectrum.

Anyway. The issue is with Nero's behaviour on Twitter, and with his subsequent treatment. He frequently comes under fire for "harassing" people himself, and for "inciting harassment" by drawing attention to things that people have said by using Twitter's built-in "quote and comment" functionality that they added to Retweets a while back. So strong is the backlash against him that a couple of days ago, his "verified" checkmark was removed from his Twitter account, seemingly as a punishment for the way he had behaved.

Thing is, the "verified" checkmark is not supposed to be a mark of good behaviour or anything; all it's supposed to be is an indicator that yes, this particular Twitter account is indeed the person or company that it claims to be. And Nero is Nero, no doubt about that. Taking it away for the way he has behaved on Twitter — whether or not you feel that was justified — is, frankly, insane, because it doesn't stop him being the person he is.

Naturally, as these things tend to go, the Internet reacted immediately, with a wide variety of Twitter accounts immediately rebranding themselves as "Milo Yiannopoulous" and adopting his avatar as their profile picture, making the timeline an occasionally extremely confusing place to navigate. Alongside this, the hashtag #JeSuisMilo — a reference to the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag movement from around the time the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo were attacked in Paris last year — was launched in an attempt to show solidarity with Nero and disapproval for Twitter's peculiar (and, as of the time of writing, unexplained) actions.

Various people, including writer and former Conservative MP Louise Mensch, did some digging and discovered the Twitter account of Michael Margolis, aka @yipe, the "engineering manager" at Twitter itself. Examining Margolis' retweets, likes and replies to people made it look to some like there were some conflicts of interest going on, with many people alleging that Margolis was inappropriately using his position at Twitter to do favours for "progressive" types — such as reporting Nero through means other than the usual channels.

All this is hearsay and conjecture, so far as I can make out, but it raises some interesting questions, for sure. Twitter is intended to be an open, free communication platform for everyone to use. It's not supposed to be moderated or policed — with the sheer number of users and messages that are exchanged every day, it's simply impossible to do so. Instead, Twitter operates on the (arguably flawed) assumption that, much like society, people will naturally peel off into their own groups and interact with one another, with any cross-cultural clashes able to be resolved through use of the mute and block functions — or, in extreme cases, through Twitter's formal reporting processes.

I have some experience with Twitter's formal reporting procedures. Some of you may recall a couple of years back I suffered a campaign of targeted harassment from a notorious group of Internet trolls known as the GNAA. At the time, this group were targeting people who were fans of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic TV show, and since I'd recently discovered this, I had the word "Brony" (the term for an adult-age fan of the show) in my Twitter profile bio. This, it seems, was an invitation for the group in question to start accusing me of being a paedophile, even going so far as to look up the WHOIS information of websites I'd linked to from my Twitter profile or this site, then phoning up the owners of said websites (which, in this case, were the owner of Games are Evil, a site I was running at the time, and my brother) and repeating said vile accusations.

It was an extremely unpleasant, scary experience, not so much because of the torrent of abusive tweets coming my way — those were easy enough to ignore and block using Twitter's basic tools — but because it was spilling over into the real world like this. Consequently, rather than simply shrugging the situation off, I reported it to Twitter and to my local police station. The latter were unable to do much about it — I suspected as much, but I thought it was worth doing anyway — and the former were simply useless, claiming that they were unable to intervene in this situation because it amounted to a "disagreement" rather than "harassment" by their definition.

In other words, under Twitter's definitions, you have to be receiving some pretty damn vile harassment before their formal reporting procedures will actually do anything — or, at least, this was the case back in 2013, anyway. For everything else, you have to just deal with it, or leave the site altogether — which I did for a while, but came back after I felt worse about being alone and isolated than I did about being targeted by trolls.

In a way, I understand the way Twitter reacted the way they did to my situation. I wasn't directly in danger or anything, and in retrospect the behaviour of the trolls was little more than the sort of casual abuse-hurling you'd get in the schoolyard. This isn't defending it by any means, of course — I had certainly done nothing to deserve such treatment, and I was genuinely very afraid while it was all going on — but in the grand scheme of things, it perhaps was barely a blip on the radar of Bad Shit happening in the world. By acting upon it, Twitter would be setting a public precedent, and this would then have to be followed up on in future to ensure that their policies were being enforced in an even-handed and fair manner — and I got the distinct impression that Twitter support felt that the whole thing was rather more trouble than it was worth.

This little digression is an explanation of the fact that Twitter is generally very hesitant to intervene in situations where people "disagree" with one another by their definition — and their definition of "disagreeing", at least as it stood in 2013, was rather, shall we say, lenient. So for a Twitter employee to put across the impression of giving preferential treatment towards particular individuals is not a particular fair and even-handed way to approach the situation. Moreover, Nero's behaviour in the instances where he was accused of "inciting harassment" wasn't anything out of the ordinary — he was simply using Twitter's own tools (in this case, the "Quote Tweet" function) to highlight some things he wanted to discuss or bring to the attention of his audience.

Several interesting questions are raised as a result of this debacle, however. The first is whether or not popular Twitter users such as Nero should be held responsible or accountable for the actions of their followers when they do something to make a conversation or comment public. Twitter does have tools to minimise contact with people you haven't specifically authorised to talk to you — most notably the ability to make your account private, locking it down to everyone except those who follow you — but at its core it's designed to be a means of public discourse: the world's biggest cocktail party, where anyone and everyone is free to wander around, listen in on what everyone is saying and contribute their own thoughts and feelings to a conversation, regardless of whether or not they know the existing participants.

In this instance, Nero was simply using Twitter as intended, so is it his fault if some followers took it upon themselves to be unpleasant little scrotes towards the person he quotes (whom, it has to be said, appears to be a fairly unpleasant little scrote herself — not that this justifies any sort of abuse)? I certainly don't have an easy answer to that.

The second question raised by all this — particularly Margolis' alleged involvement, which is yet to be conclusively proven — is whether or not social media companies as a whole or their employees have any sort of obligation to make decisions about users based on political or ideological viewpoints. The argument in this instance is whether or not the removal of Nero's verified status — his "punishment" — is justified on the grounds that he disagrees (there's that word again) with the views of third-wave feminism. Or, to take it as a broader picture, whether or not any user should be punished in any way for expressing an opinion that differs from the accepted "norm", or which some claim to find "offensive", or which is regarded as "unacceptable" in some way.

You get into dangerous territory with that last section. Twitter is a private company, however, so it is, of course, free to police its platform however it pleases, and if it wants to become some sort of "safe space" where third-wave feminists and their white knight "allies" can happily skip through fields of flowers (not white ones, though, because white people ruin fucking everything, apparently) then that is the company's decision entirely. Since it has always sold itself as a means of free expression and communication for people all over the world, however, there's an argument that we are taking a few tentative steps into a somewhat Orwellian area — though it is also worth noting that should Twitter actually decide to go down this route wholeheartedly, the market will be flung wide open for a new, alternative means of communication and expression for people who are no longer welcome under the New Tweet Order.

Personally speaking, I would rather Twitter remain completely apolitical, and continue to act as a means of free communication for groups all over the world covering a wide variety of viewpoints and ideologies, many of which would clash with one another if they came into direct contact. It's been a valuable tool in times of crisis, such as during the massacres in Paris, the assaults in Cologne over the New Year period, and during the riots in Egypt a while back. More than that, though, it's brought people together who may never otherwise have had the chance to talk to one another. It's allowed friendships and even relationships to blossom, and it's allowed differing viewpoints the chance to interact and attempt to understand one another. It's been inestimably valuable from that perspective, and for it to start pushing one particular political viewpoint or ideology as somehow "superior" or "correct" would go against this openness that has been its most key feature ever since day one.

More than that, though, regardless of whether or not you think Nero is a twat or a genius, removing his verified status as a "punishment" is just plain stupid. What kind of message, exactly, is that supposed to send? "You said the wrong thing, so you are no longer you?" What utter nonsense.

Perhaps this is why I don't run a huge, successful social media enterprise. Or perhaps the rest of the world really has gone completely and utterly mental.

2140: Rate Me!

0140_001

I've been thinking about user reviews. It's a long-standing joke that user reviews aren't always entirely useful, particularly when it comes to people who think they're more hilarious than they actually are, but on balance, I think they're a pretty good thing. Or, rather, I do actually look at them when considering whether or not to purchase something or make use of a service.

The reason I got thinking about this is because I tend not to leave reviews myself very often. I am, for the most part, one of those people who tends only to leave bad reviews when I hate something, and just let good work go silently appreciated.

This is no help to anyone, of course, because recommendations are just as important — if not more so — than advice to Steer Well Clear. And, given I'm a reasonably intelligent sort of chap and I make use of user reviews to inform my purchasing decisions, I should probably make more of an effort to be helpful to other prospective purchasers.

From hereon, then, I'm going to try and review more things in the hope that the things I have to say are helpful to someone. I've already done a fair few Steam reviews over the years, and I always make a point of trying to be informative when I write them. But I'm also going to try and review more of the apps I use on my phone, and software I download on my other devices such as my 3DS, Vita and PlayStation.

I'm actually quite taken with Nintendo's approach to reviews on the Wii U and 3DS; rather than allowing people free reign with their comments, it simply asks a number of simple questions that, in their own right, are quite informative and helpful. Firstly, there's the question of whether you think the game would appeal more to men or women. Then it asks you how old the person who enjoyed the game the most was. Then it asks you to give it a star rating between one and five, and finally asks you whether you think it's more suitable for "Everyone" or "Gamers", and whether it's more suited to "Casual" or "Intense" play sessions.

Five questions that give you a reasonably good idea of what the game experience is all about, and it takes a matter of seconds to fill them out. I am all for that.

In that spirit, then, I present to you a series of five-word reviews of things I've played recently.

Nintendo presents New Style Boutique 2: Fashion Forward – More fun than you'd think.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past – Still relevant now, in 2015.

The Legend of Zelda – The Dark Souls of Zelda.

DiRT Showdown – Lots of fun in cars.

Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing Transformed – Mario Kart meets Blur. Yes!

Mini Metro – Minimalist puzzler with lovely sound.

Hyrule Warriors – Impa is the most badassest.

OutRun 3D – Arcade classic still plays well.

Streets of Rage 3D – Mega Drive brawler still fun.

2044: No, Thank You

In response to The Daily Post's writing prompt: "No, Thank You."

"If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?"

I'm going to cheat a little here and not talk about a specific word, but more a general style of communication. There are numerous words that could be used to represent this style of communication, but not one that particularly stands out more than others, so I'm going to talk in more general terms.

As most of you know, the rise of the Internet over the course of the last few decades has made it easier than ever for people to communicate with one another. And with that ease of communication has come a relaxation of the rules of formality when communicating. In some ways, this is a bit of a shame, because the distinction between formal and informal use of language can often send implicit signals to the people in an interaction as to what is and is not appropriate to talk about. But in others, I'm actually very much relieved about this, because formal language is so mind-numbingly impersonal it's borderline offensive to be confronted with.

I'm thinking particularly in terms of "professional" email messages here, and I'll give you an example of the distinction. I've been doing some freelance work for a company for a while. When I started, the company was very much in its infancy, with relatively few employees and a single point of contact for the work I was doing. Said point of contact was a delightful young woman who was always chatty, helpful and charming whenever we spoke to one another. It was a pleasure to interact with her, even though for the most part we were only ever exchanging standard pleasantries and details of work assignments. But just little things like her squealing enthusiasm for me when I told her I was getting married, or chats about the extremes of weather we've seen this summer — all of those things were nice, and gave me a feeling of being "connected" to her and, by extension, a feeling of "belonging" to the company as a whole, despite simply being an outside contractor.

A few weeks ago, my former contact was replaced as she (presumably) moved on to other duties in the company as it has started to grow. She's still with the company and tends to get copied in on email messages, but I haven't heard a peep out of her since. Her replacements are like robots. And I mean that pretty much literally — every message I get from them absolutely stinks of copy-and-paste, email-by-template communication… largely because they clearly are copy-and-paste emails-by-template, and it's easy to tell this due to the fact that there are the exact same words in each one.

There's a good reason for this sort of thing, of course; as companies grow and have to communicate and collaborate with more and more people, it's not considered to be particularly efficient to manually type out each and every message. So in come the templates, the form letters, the copy-and-paste boilerplate text.

Efficient it may be, but that feeling of "connection" is gone as a result. I don't know these people, and even having sent messages to them in the same tone as I spoke with my previous contact, they've made no effort to engage with me in any way; I may as well be downloading assignments from an automated message board.

This is frustrating enough by itself, but combine it with the passive-aggressive tone that business communications tend to take — all "gentle reminders" and "looking forward" to something you haven't done yet — and it's not something that I feel is particularly conducive to a good working relationship.

It doesn't really bother me all that much, to be honest; the company in question is a means to an end (said end being "getting money") for me right now, and ultimately a personal connection with it isn't all that important to me. I just find it a little sad that what was once friendly, personal interactions between two people now feels like sending commands and requests to an automated system. You're human beings; act like it!

So, to (sort of) answer the original question, then: I would ban business-speak, form letters and email templates from general usage and insist that everyone communicate with everyone else as an individual. It would help make the world just a little bit friendlier as a result, and I feel that would work wonders for making people feel more positive about all sorts of things.

2042: Question Time

For today's post, I'm going to raid my Retrospring inbox for questions, then answer them. (I'll be posting these answers on Retrospring as I go, too, so if you follow me on Twitter and have read these already, you can safely skip this post.)

Let's begin!

Is chivalry dead?

I wouldn't say it's "dead" per se, but I do feel like it's almost frowned upon in today's hyper-sensitive culture surrounding gender. Acts that one person believes to be "chivalrous" can be interpreted as "benevolent sexism" by another, so it feels almost like chivalrous acts are being discouraged — at least when it comes to traditional things like a man holding the door open for a woman, "ladies first" and all that sort of thing. Personally speaking, I think this is a load of old tosh, but in the interests of keeping people quiet I just try and be a decent sort of chap to anyone, regardless of gender.

Ever regretted something you've done even though you know it's really just a small and unimportant thing?

Oh yeah! Many, many times. As I sit here I'm having trouble thinking of a specific example, but yes, most definitely. With the anxiety-riddled way in which my mind works, too, I inevitably end up spending hours or even days worrying about whether or not I should have done that thing.

I guess a good example would be from back before I started doing Slimming World; a hefty proportion of my weight gain could probably be attributed to simply not knowing when to stop, and consuming, say, an entire bag of sweets even though I'd maybe start feeling a bit queasy halfway through the bag and should probably have stopped then. I regretted doing that every time it happened, because I could see the consequences. It took a long time to pluck up the courage to admit it was a problem and finally do something about it, though. Now I'm 4.5 stone lighter than I was when this was an issue, and I certainly don't regret that particular decision.

What are some of your favorite Japanese Role Playing Games?

I really have trouble picking favourites, as I tend to have a positive outlook on whatever I'm playing, and it's pretty rare I will abandon something completely — I usually try to "see the good" in things where possible, because that's much more fun and rewarding than writing something off immediately. As a result of this, I've become a fan of many games that have either flown under the radar or been poorly reviewed by the media.

Favourites off the top of my head include the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, Tales of Xillia and its sequel, Criminal Girls, Omega Quintet, Final Fantasy XIV, ZHP: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman (really must beat that one day) and… oh, too many to list.

In games where you have the option of playing Good or Evil, which side do you generally pick?

Good. Always. I find it way too difficult to play Evil; I get emotionally attached to things very easily indeed, and I feel really bad mistreating them, even if they're just a collection of pixels. The only time I ever really successfully played "evil" was when I worked through the Dark Brotherhood storyline in Oblivion. Even then, once I was done with that and the Thieves' Guild's quests, I couldn't resist embarking on a journey of redemption and was pretty much a paragon of virtue by the time I was finished with that game.

How do you feel with ecchi in anime when it's not central ?

I like it! I'm a red-blooded male and I enjoy some tits and ass as much as a typical red-blooded male can be expected to. I feel ecchi is most effective when it's incorporated as part of a work's overall aesthetic, though, rather than just dropped in for the sake of a quick panty shot just to say there's a panty shot in there. Senran Kagura is a good example, though that's a game, I know: there, the ecchi is simply part of the game's overall look and feel, and after spending some time with the game it's simply What It Does.

Would you rather talk online publicly or privately?

I can't really give a straight answer to that one, because it's different for different situations. I talk about things privately with my friends when I don't want to "go public" with something, or if it would be inappropriate, unprofessional, a breach of an agreement or outright illegal to do so. But I also talk about things publicly, because that's one of the main ways you meet new people and find out more about them on the Internet. Without talking about things publicly, I wouldn't have made some of the great friends I've made on the Internet over the last few years.

Ever felt like pretty convincing evidence is staring you straight in the face but you still fervently deny whatever it is the evidence is pointing at?

I'm sure there are plenty of examples of this, but admitting what they are wouldn't be fervently denying them now, would it? Human beings are stubborn creatures; when we get an opinion on something, we sure as hell don't like to change our minds about it.

ＤＯＹＯＵＬＩＫＥＴＯＣＹＢＥＲ－ＴＥＸＴ？

Sure. The written word can be a powerful, uh, stimulus. To the… imagination. Yes, imagination.

Do you own any collector/premium/limited editions of things you like?

Yeah! I didn't used to bother with limited editions, but since getting into Japanese games and anime, I've been much more inclined to pick up special editions where possible, I think perhaps because I'm aware these things are "rarer" by their very definition of being more niche interest than, say, your Assassin's Creeds or your Call of Duties. I'm enjoying being a collector of these things, and I proudly display them on my shelf at home. They're a conversation piece as well as being something that brings me comfort, as strange as that might sound.

All right, I think that'll do for now. If you want to ask me random stupid questions now and again, pay my Retrospring profile a visit here — you can even ask questions anonymously if you want!

2025: Building Character

So, since I "rebranded" this place on day 2000, you've probably (maybe, possibly not) been wondering who on Earth the people who appear in the images of questionable quality that appear at the top of each post are. So today I'm going to explain who they are and not at all make up backstories and personalities for them on the fly. No sir,

(Layout of this post might look a bit weird if you're not viewing the site at its full width. I apologise.)

pete_001 This is me. You all know me. You may wonder why I am never facing the "camera" and the reason absolutely, positively is not that Manga Maker ComiPo! doesn't have any "beard" attachments for character faces. Rather, it is simply to maintain an air of mystery about my person and to reflect the fact that I am someone who tends to enjoy watching things unfold rather than necessarily taking an active part in them — at least when it comes to things like social situations and the like.

My choice of appearance is due to the fact that I quite like wearing suits (although damn, they are hot and unpleasant to wear in the summer) and I have messy hair and glasses. I'm somewhat larger than this depiction, but I'm on the way to a slimmer, leaner self thanks to Slimming World.

midori_001 This is Midori. She's named after my Japanese evening class teacher from a while back; while I'm not taking those classes any more, Midori inspired me and encouraged me and made me believe that one day I might actually be able to understand the Japanese language. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm on the way.

Midori is 16 years old, and an energetic, enthusiastic, sociable girl, albeit one who isn't the sharpest tool in the box. She makes up for her overwhelming lack of common sense with the amount of passion she exhibits when throwing herself into an activity — any activity. She reflects the part of me that enjoys enthusing about things with people who share my hobbies and interests, and the part of me that wishes it could just "let go" a bit and be a little less up-tight and highly-strung at times.

yumi_001 This is Yumi. I originally created her to effectively be the "opposite" of Midori in almost every way besides gender, but she started to develop a bit of her own personality in her own right as a natural result of this process.

Trope-wise, I'd describe her as a combination of kuudere and tsundere tropes; she's quiet and softly spoken, yet prone to impatience at times and doesn't suffer fools gladly. Despite this, she's been best friends with Midori since childhood, and tolerates her friend's quirks because she secretly finds dealing with her more fun than she'd ever let on in her own right.

Yumi represents the part of me that is concerned with doing things that are "right" and "respectable", and the part that sometimes just wants to get on with life without anyone else interfering.

luther_001 This is Luther. He's just a prick. Also I apparently forgot to give him any shoes when I created him, so that just makes him even more of a prick.

Luther doesn't represent any part of me in particular (except, perhaps, the part that can be a prick) and instead largely exists as a character that can be on the receiving end of various unpleasant happenings because I feel bad making bad things happen to Midori and Yumi. (Although I did run over Midori with a spaceship in yesterday's post, so…)

He was originally created so "I" had someone to punch in the face for the post I wrote about arcade games a while back. He was subsequently also kicked in the bollocks by Midori in my post about Heroes of the Storm a couple of days later.

There you go, then. I hope that was enlightening, or at least fun. Now it's time for bed for me!