1298: Far from the Valley

Jeez. I am so glad I'm not reviewing mobile and social apps any more.

I know I've said this numerous times before, but I feel like every day I come across something even more offensively vapid and pointless that makes me want to punch everyone involved in the face for thinking it could possibly have ever been a good idea.

Today, I came across an app called "Kahnoodle." Here it is.

Kahnoodle is a "relationship app" that, according to The Atlantic, "wants to make maintaining your relationship automatic and easy — as easy as tapping a button. Its options include sending push notifications to initiate sex; 'Koupons' that entitle the bearer to redeemable movie nights and kinky sex; and, of course, the love tank, which fills or empties depending on how many acts of love you’ve logged."

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Kahnoodle isn't the only app of this type, I might add. As the Atlantic piece linked above notes, "couples' apps" have been around for a while now, and represent some of the most pointless implementations of social media I've ever seen: they're social networks designed for just two people. I reviewed one a while back called either Couple or Pair (I forget which one it was, because they changed the name from one to the other, which made all the App Store reviewers of it disproportionately angry at the developers) with Andie, and we both agreed within a matter of seconds that it was an utter waste of time.

The reason that apps like Couple/Pair and Kahnoodle are utterly pointless, of course, are because there are infinitely better ways to do the same thing already available that don't require their own dedicated app. You can privately message people via Facebook, Google, AIM, Skype, email, text message, What'sApp, Kik… hundreds of other potential apps, from which you can talk to, you know, other people as well as your partner.

Kahnoodle's selling point is that it "gamifies" your relationship, and as we all know from listening to Silicon Valley startup tosspieces, "gamification" increases "engagement" and "brand awareness" or whatever bullshit they're talking about this week. Because these apps, despite appearances, aren't really about bringing people together and helping them communicate at all; they're about building up a captive audience who can then be either advertised at or monetised straight up the bumhole — sometimes both, in some sort of hideous business double-penetration scenario.

I apologise for that mental image. But if you need to "gamify" your relationship in order to remember to have sex or whatever, then perhaps you should sit down and have a very serious talk with your partner, because I would suggest that's a sign that Things Aren't Going All That Well. A real-life relationship is not like The Sims, where you can get yourself out of the doghouse by grinding the Chat, Compliment and Joke options until the meter climbs out of the red.

Sigh. Anyway.

One of the big reasons the App Store, Google Play and its ilk are such frustrating places to browse these days are because there are so many of these ridiculous apps available that provide nothing of any particular worth to society. The few useful apps that are available for phones inevitably get buried under this torrent of digital sewage, leaving those who are making good things consistently frustrated at the fact their stuff can never get noticed. It's not just in mobile games this is happening — it's in all types of apps. I've pretty much given up looking at the App Store now — I use my phone for basic communication through Twitter, Facebook, email and the like, and only download something from the App Store if I know precisely and specifically what I'm looking for.

So good job, shovelware merchants; you've pretty much destroyed the concept of "discoverability" with your relentless pursuit of the crap. I hope you're pleased with yourselves.

1283: Dislike

I find myself thinking more and more about deactivating my Facebook account. I realise that in this day and age doing such a thing is tantamount to unplugging yourself from The Matrix, but I really don't feel there's a lot of value there for me any more.

The thing that has stopped me from closing my Facebook account in the past is the fact that "it's the only real means I have of staying in touch with certain people." That may be true, but the real question is how often I actually speak to the people for whom the only means I have of reaching them is Facebook? I have a lot of doubling-up between Facebook and Twitter, and in the case of most of my "real-life" friends I have their phone numbers. If I want to make plans with someone, I'll generally text them. If I don't have their phone number, I'll reach for Twitter. Facebook messages are frequently ignored.

The reason Facebook's value has declined for me over time is because the social media landscape has changed. What was once a cool means of communication has been roughly shoved in the direction of "branding" and advertising. It's obvious the moment you read anything in tech journalism about social media, whether it's Facebook or the latest pointless mobile app that lets you manipulate photos no-one cares about in a slightly different way to all the other apps that let you manipulate photos no-one cares about. None of the press coverage about new social media apps has anything to do with people communicating with one another; it's all about how brands can leverage their social graph and monetize their core demographics. It's about how a seemingly innocent app that allows you to subtly manipulate photos no-one gives a shit about is actually a means of getting your "brand" in front of as many people as possible. It's about "engagement", "ROI" and "CPC".

I don't give a fuck. And I don't want to be a part of it. I don't want to be confronted with an ad for an app or game I don't give a shit about before I see anything my friends have posted — which, nine times out of ten, I probably don't give a toss about anyway. I don't want to be continually confronted with "sponsored posts" festooned with comments from complete imbeciles who think telling an ad to "fuck off" will make it go away. And I really couldn't give a flying honk what George Takei's PR team (spoiler: that's not George Takei writing those posts) saw on Reddit last week and is only now getting around to sharing with everyone on the Internet.

Even outside of "branding" and advertising, though, the way people use Facebook has changed, too. With more and more different types of post available, the service has become more of a means of simply broadcasting pointless, impersonal shit into the void of the Internet rather than a way to start discussions or have conversations. What was once a two-way discussion is now a largely one-way street. (I'm aware a blog is exactly the same, but at least a blog is under no illusions about what it is and is not; Facebook, meanwhile, has always marketed itself as some form of communication tool, when this is, in fact, a relatively minor part of its reason for existence these days.)

All this may be hypocritical, because I've been guilty of all of the above at one time or another. But that was a process of discovery and exploration, leading me to the realisation I'm at today: aside from Twitter, which genuinely is still a reasonably useful means of communication for me, most other forms of social media carry little value to me besides giving me something to fiddle with on my phone when small talk dries up and I don't want to just sit there looking like some sort of mute twat.

I haven't decided yet whether or not I'm actually going to close down my Facebook account, but now I don't work reviewing awful, exploitative and, hell, just downright crap social games for a living, I have no real "need" for that particular ball and chain any more. I'm going to do some very serious thinking about whether Facebook has a place in my life any more in the next week or two, and come to a conclusion then. If you've been having similar thoughts to me, then I urge you to do the same. I have a strange feeling we'll feel better without that particular annoyance in our lives.

1271: Don't Read the... You Know

Popular gaming site IGN has decided to crack down on shitty comments. Given that a single IGN article attracts thousands of comments — the post describing the proposed changes currently has 2,309 and it was only posted a few hours ago — this is very much a good thing.

I've never really read IGN all that much. I had a couple of pieces posted there a few years ago — here and here (I was not responsible for the dreadful headline on that one, by the way) — but I've never really felt the need to engage with the community. There's a few good writers there — a couple of whom I know personally — but it's not, on the whole, a site I check regularly. And, by extension, it's not a site I tend to look at the comments form.

My God.

Yeah. They need this crackdown. The comments section is a mess. Just on that one post linked above, there's a surprising amount of negativity ranging from people insulting the writers (and their names… yes, his name is Steve Butts; grow the fuck up) to perpetuating stupid fanboy platform wars. The few positive comments that are there are quickly drowned out or reacted to with further abuse, and the "upvote/downvote" system the site has in place courtesy of popular third-party comment solution Disqus is completely abused; "good quality" comments aren't upvoted, but dumb comments from "popular" posters are. Meanwhile, people advocating reason and praising the site's changes are downvoted. Ridiculous.

I have to question how on Earth it got like that in the first place, and I can only assume it was a matter of complacency — of assuming that problems would sort themselves out after a while. But, since a lot of Internet commenters on sites like IGN are seemingly children and teenagers (or at least act that way), they'll try and push the boundaries. If they encounter no resistance, they'll continue to push further. It's exactly the same as in teaching; if you don't set expectations up front, you are only making life difficult for yourself down the road.

I've been fortunate with this blog that I only get a few commenters, all of whom are very welcome, and pretty much all of whom I'd call friends. Meanwhile, over at my new professional home USgamer, we're already building a strong community of intelligent, articulate commenters who have plenty of value to add to the conversation. The quality of our content and the way in which we have written it — to provoke and inspire discussion — has helped set those initial expectations in place, so hopefully things will continue in a positive direction. I have no doubt we'll have to deal with troublemakers before long — we've already had one charming chap call Kat Bailey a "bitch" for not liking Project X Zone as much as he did, and we swiftly and positively dealt with it — but for now, I'm very much liking the rather mature, erudite community we appear to have attracted for the most part so far.

Internet comments are both a blessing and a curse, as the cliché goes. On the one hand, it's great to be able to have discussions around things that writers have posted on the Web; on the other hand, there's little value in them if they always descend into trolling, name-calling and insulting. Fortunately, a lot of sites seem keen to put a stop to the bullshit; it remains to be seen if, in the long term, anything good will happen.

1268: Printing Press

Print media is very much on the way out, particularly in the games industry, but I enjoy keeping some around for old times' sake.

Specifically, as I've probably mentioned a few times before, I have several back issues of the now defunct PC Zone magazine on my shelf, each of which contains a single article that I wrote on a freelance basis — mostly game walkthroughs, because no-one likes writing those.

Occasionally I like to have a flip through those old magazines. It's nice to look back on what the games industry looked like nearly 20 years ago (jeez) and see what people were excited about. It's also interesting to ponder which grand plans came to fruition and which didn't; which supposedly "big games" ended up being massive successes, and which were big wet farts.

One of the most interesting things about reading an old magazine in 2013, though, is realising what an impact the Internet has had on our brains. More than once I caught myself reading something in one of these old Zones and habitually looking to the end of the article for the comments section. Of course, being a magazine, there is no comments section (unless you scribble on the page yourself) and thus this is a stupid thing to do, but I found it interesting that the way The Internet works is now so firmly ingrained into my brain that I just do things like that on reflex.

The letters pages are also interesting to look at. One of the most fascinating things I rediscovered recently is that people have been whingeing about tacked-on multiplayer modes ever since 1997 — one chap got a Letter of the Month award for complaining about how X-Wing vs Tie Fighter wasn't as good as either X-Wing or Tie Fighter because it didn't have the story-driven campaigns of its predecessors. (He had a point.)

The other one that raised a bit of a smile was a selection of gentlemen defending the fact that they found Lara Croft attractive — yes, the low-poly, big-lipped, pyramid-breasted Lara from 1997, not the gritty one from the recent reboot. Of all things, it brought to mind the popular otaku discussion of whether "2D" or "3D" is better. (Inevitably, to most otaku, the answer is "2D", but that's a topic for another day, I think.) "Lara is a collection of pixels," runs the slightly flawed argument, "and Pamela Anderson is just a collection of pixels or ink on a page, because none of us are ever likely to actually meet her." Well, true, I guess, but… oh, let's not get into that now.

Anyway. If you happen to have any old magazines lying around, think twice before you throw them out; they make interesting cultural artifacts to look back on, as they take a snapshot of how people thought and felt at a particular point in time. They're also something to do on the toilet on the off-chance all the electronic devices in your house are out of battery.

1257: You Ess Gee

I'm really happy with the way USgamer is going.

Lest you've somehow missed me going on about it, USgamer is my new job. It is the American counterpart to the well-established European gaming site Eurogamer, but it is absolutely not a reskinned Eurogamer. It is its own beast, and the small team we have working on it are carving out a great little niche.

In order for a new gaming site to make sense in this crowded content marketplace, it needs to offer something different and interesting. There are already far too many sites doing the "daily news, occasional previews and reviews" thing, and after a while they become all but interchangeable. That's not to say that there's anything inherently wrong with that model, but there are already a whole bunch of well-established sites out there that do that, and so jumping head-first into the fray and hoping to compete is, frankly, lunacy.

Instead, what we're doing with USgamer is a combination of original reporting and personal, opinionated editorial pieces. The news that has already been covered by other sites gets put into our front-page "feed", allowing us to acknowledge that things have happened but not waste any time on rewriting things that have already been written five or six times over — and will be rewritten several hundred more times by the time the day is over. This frees us up to write interesting features, interviews, reviews, previews and opinion pieces, with a strong focus on us writing in our own personal "voices" in order to provoke discussion. It's the kind of site I'd like to read if I weren't actively writing for it; in fact, I still read the stuff my colleagues write and comment on it, and we're building a very pleasant little community in the process.

This is the first time I've really been present at the birth of a website like this. I was around when my brother launched the now-defunct What They Play, but in a freelance capacity rather than as a regular staffer, so I didn't really get to see in detail how the community built up and responded to things. With USgamer, however, it's interesting to observe the new community members showing up, tentatively commenting, engaging in discussions and subsequently growing in confidence, becoming regular posters in the process.

It's early days yet — our most commented-on piece has about 30 comments or so, which is a fraction of what a fairly throwaway story on Eurogamer attracts on a daily basis — but we're setting a good groundwork. By having high-quality stuff on the site at this early stage and actively participating in discussions with the community, we're setting high expectations both for ourselves and our readers, and I really think that's going to pay off in the long term. We're never going to be a Kotaku, but we're not trying to be; Kotaku posts far too much stuff to keep up with in a single day anyway.

Basically, I'm having a blast with it so far, and I hope you like it too. On the off-chance you haven't taken a peek just yet, get thee hence, even if you're not an American. You might just like what you see.

1250: Anger Leads to Suffering

I've been back on Twitter for a little while. I know I said I wouldn't, but for professional reasons, it made sense to have it as a means of communication now I'm on USgamer — I've already managed to get in touch with a number of different devs and write stories thanks to that bloody service.

Twitter remains infuriating, however, because people still don't quite seem to get that 140 characters is not a good amount of space in which to have a discussion. You can spill over into more and more tweets and rant on and on, but as soon as you start spamming like that, people switch off.

The other thing that Twitter encourages is kneejerk, usually furious responses. Sometimes these are justified; other times, all they do is damage the perception of the people who are trying to make otherwise coherent arguments.

By far the most consistently-occurring issues that come up in my Twitter feed are matters relating to any and all of sexism, feminism and transphobia in particular. As I've said on numerous occasions in the past, I support the causes that these people are trying to forward: women are just as awesome as men and should be treated as such; a person is a person, regardless of biological sex and/or gender, and shouldn't be treated as a second-class citizen based on prejudice; most importantly, just don't be a dick.

However, where the people campaigning for these things lose me is in their behaviour when it comes to advancing their causes. I do not and will not believe that the best way to enact change is to get really fucking angry at something, mock people who don't subscribe to your exact viewpoint and then publicly shame people repeatedly until they clam up and don't want to say anything. That shit is viral — if you behave that way, people will see the way you act towards others, and that in turn will make them not want to engage in discussions we should all feel confident and good about having. In trying to further a cause of equality and encouraging oppressed minorities to stand up for themselves, in other words, you're actually silencing people in the process. It doesn't matter whether those people you silence are the "privileged" — usually white men — because all you're doing is… doing what you want people to stop doing. Do you see where the problem is, here?

Most recently, Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade attracted the ire of these particularly vocal people on Twitter by making some ill-advised and ill-informed comments about transgender people. This isn't the first time he's said something stupid, and it probably won't be the last. I honestly believe he's not saying these things from a position of genuine hatred; he's just naturally a jerk towards a lot of people — and, as he notes in an apology on Penny Arcade, the first time these issues raised their heads he wasn't even aware of many of them. To be fair to him for a moment here, I knew absolutely nothing about transgender people at all prior to this year, either; the subject simply hadn't come up, so it's not at all unreasonable to assume that he hadn't come into contact with this particular group of people before and thus didn't know the "appropriate" or "acceptable" ways in which to talk about them.

There's a degree of common sense required here, of course, which Krahulik didn't always display, particularly as the most recent incident was actually the second time he had run headlong into being perceived as "transphobic", but for him to be immediately labelled a "bigot", a "sexist" and outright insulted is, frankly, a little much. People don't teach you these things. (Well, perhaps they do now; it's a long time since I was at school and took a Humanities lesson.) And as such, when people are confronted with unfamiliar things, sometimes mistakes are made; things are said without thinking; sometimes offence is caused. The appropriate response to someone making a mistake is to point out that they made a mistake and then educate them so they don't do it again in the future.

Key point: both the pointing out of the mistake and the education should be done in a calm, respectful manner that acknowledges ignorance isn't the same as bigotry. If your first response to someone saying something that you believe is offensive is to start swearing at and insulting them, then of course they are going to get defensive and start flinging mud back at you rather than attempting to engage with you — particularly if they don't understand what they did wrong in the first place, however silly that might seem to you as someone more well-informed.

It's a natural response; look at how children respond to being yelled at as opposed to having positive behaviour reinforced, or calm explanations as to why the thing they were doing was inappropriate. These reflex behaviours continue well into adulthood for many of us; no-one likes to feel like they did wrong, so the more aggressively people shout and scream, the more the recipient of the ire will dig their heels in and just escalate the whole situation. In Krahulik's case, this happened previously with the "rape culture/dickwolves" incident a while back — people yelled, he got defensive, discussion was shut down before it could begin — and again with this more recent incident.

There are a number of sad things about this whole situation. Krahulik could have had the opportunity to learn about part of culture he's unfamiliar with, but the immediately aggressive response shut down any hope of rational discussion and education and caused him to get defensive. The aggressive response didn't stop, either; it grew and grew into a seething ball of hatred, with people referring to him and his Penny Arcade partner Jerry Holkins (who had remained very quiet throughout this whole debacle — a sign which some saw as tacit approval of Krahulik's actions) as "dicks" and other, far more spiteful terms. People started calling for boycotts of PAX. One indie developer even publicly pulled out of PAX's indie showcase.

None of this had to happen, and it is not solely Krahulik's fault that it did. He's not blameless at all, no, but I place as much blame for the subsequent fallout squarely at the feet of the people who did the aggressive yelling, the swearing, the insults, the death threats as I do at the feet of Krahulik. This could have been an opportunity for everyone involved to grow; instead, it was just yet another sign that people like nothing more than a good fight rather than actually talking and educating one another. And I worry that serious damage has been done on all sides of this issue; there are no winners here.

The really sad thing, I think, is how much this sort of thing erects barriers between people. Every time I see something like this happening, I feel genuinely afraid to open my mouth for fear of saying something that will make everyone hate me; and that little nagging voice in the back of my head says "you're not allowed to have an opinion on this; you're a privileged white male". I have seen how quickly people can turn on someone for one little thing that they said, and no-one will ever back down or attempt to understand or educate. It's just shout, shout shout. It kills discussion. It kills education. And it achieves the absolute opposite of what many of these "social justice" types are supposedly fighting for; instead of promoting inclusivity and harmony, it sows discord and excludes people. We're better than that.

So everyone, try a little harder to get along and understand one another, please.

1242: Sod Off, LinkedIn

I have a LinkedIn account. It is one of those things that people recommend you have. And yet I don't think I have ever used it. Not for finding a job, not for "professional networking" and certainly not for socialising. In fact, I find the whole thing massively irritating.

The thing that irks me so much about LinkedIn is that the people who do actually use it are inevitably the sort of greasy smarmballs who refer to themselves as "entrepreneurs" and "gurus" (neither of those are jobs; sorry to burst your bubble) and run "startups". They communicate exclusively in that particularly annoying brand of business-speak that gave us such awful additions to the English language as "monetise" and "leverage" used as a verb.

That's not all, though. LinkedIn itself perpetually bombards you with emails about what's "hot" on their network each week, and again, the articles linked to are almost certainly written by people who woke up one day, decided they were an expert on "business" and promptly started vomiting their thoughts all over the Internet.

This sort of thing occasionally spills over onto other social networks, particularly Google+, which appears to harbour a healthy number of LinkedIn refugees. You can spot one of these people's posts a mile off — they're inevitably an image post featuring some sort of "inspirational" image, and the accompanying text usually makes the person posting the image sound like they're a 50-year old discovering Imgur for the first time.

But I digress.

No, I find LinkedIn utterly useless because no-one I have come into contact with on there appears to use it for… well, anything at all, really. I have a "professional network" that is, apparently, 236 "connections" strong, and yet I have never spoken to any of them on LinkedIn. Many of them I speak to daily on Twitter and Facebook, which leaves LinkedIn rather — if you'll pardon the employment-related pun — redundant. The people I have as connections on LinkedIn who I don't speak to daily on Twitter and Facebook are generally people whose mobile apps I might have reviewed once in the past, and this apparently makes me a "professional connection", even if I slated their app for being shit. (I did that a fair bit; there's a lot of shit out there.)

I find myself wondering why I keep an account open at that God-forsaken website, but everyone I mention it to seems to think that you "must" have a LinkedIn account these days, otherwise you're some sort of unemployable nobody. I guess if nothing else it provides a reasonably convenient means of creating an electronic CV that can be easily shared with employers. The Recommendations thing is a good idea in theory, too — though the fact that they don't show up on your "public" profile, only to people who have actually added you as a connection is irritating — but these appear to have been superseded by "endorsements" whereby people who remember to log in to LinkedIn every so often click through a few automatic prompts to confirm that yes, I do indeed have skills in "Facebook" and "iOS", without even thinking about it.

Basically, LinkedIn represents all that is wrong with the social Web. It's full of self-important imbeciles who believe they are the ones who know how the world works, and that everyone else is wrong. It's utterly vapid and useless to 95% of the population, and the other 5% you probably wouldn't want to speak to anyway.

So yeah. Fuck LinkedIn.

1221: How Do You Make Friends Again...?

One of my earliest and most enduring memories of my time at secondary school is also, coincidentally, the first time I was consciously aware of what I now recognise to be a longstanding case of social anxiety.

It was the first day of secondary school. Everything was big and new and scary — I'd come from a small village school in which the entire school population was roughly the size of a single year group in my secondary school. I'd chosen to go to said secondary school because a lot of my friends were going there, and also my brother had attended there some years previously and had come out of the experience as what is generally accepted to be a Good Person. Also, a lot of the people who had been bullies to me in primary school were going to a different secondary school, so I knew that I wanted to avoid that one like the plague.

But I, as ever, digress.

It was the first day of secondary school. I was sitting in my new seat in my new tutor group, and our tutor, Miss Quirk (yes, really), had tasked us with spending a few minutes getting to know the people around us.

I gazed around me. I was sitting next to a boy named Murray whom I didn't know. In front of me was a girl named Claire, whom I had instantly fallen in love with due to her long shiny blonde hair and the fact she wore short skirts with tights — something which I found (hell, find) inexplicably attractive. (Hey. I was eleven years old and easily pleased — but to be fair, she did remain consistently stunning throughout our entire school career.)

Behind me was my sometime best friend from primary school, Matthew. I say "sometime" because he wasn't always my best friend — he was a somewhat fickle chap rather prone to occasionally deciding he'd rather hang out with the "cool" kids, whose opinion of me tended to flip-flop back and forth on an almost weekly basis. Needless to say, I ditched him fairly soon into my secondary school career as a result of two events: one, him sneezing so hard he snotted over his hands and then ate it — mmm — and two, him deciding that sitting in his chair, miming masturbation and bellowing "I'm a wanker! I'm a wanker!" would be somehow amusing. (To be fair, it was sort of amusing, but perhaps not in the way he intended; needless to say, I didn't really want to be associated with him after that.)

Anyway. Our seating arrangements were the way they were in order to encourage us to interact and get to know each other. We'd been deliberately seated next to people we didn't know to encourage us to break out of our primary school "cliques" and widen our friendship circles — a theoretically sound idea that even at that tender age, I could see the benefits of.

Unfortunately, I couldn't act on it. Given the prospect of being thrown into enforced interaction with someone I didn't know from Adam, I froze up. I had no idea how to begin a conversation, how to get to know this person. Frantically, I turned around to gaze at Matthew (a pre-"I'm a wanker! I'm a wanker!" Matthew, I might add) and looked at him pleadingly.

"I can't remember how to make friends!" I said quietly to him. He just laughed and motioned for me to turn around and talk to Murray. He obviously hadn't taken my statement seriously, and that was frustrating, but I had little option but to try. It was a terrifying experience, though, and obviously I didn't set a particularly good first impression on Murray, because he became a complete bellend who bullied me on a regular basis. (I got my own back by punching him in the face just as the principal was walking around the corner and, although I was punished for lashing out like that, the unspoken consensus between my parents and the teachers involved was that he probably deserved it — and to be fair, he didn't bother me again after that.)

That first day and that pitiful statement — "I can't remember how to make friends!" — stuck with me, though. Because I can't remember how to make friends. It just sort of happens. I have made friends with people over the years, of course — the friends I made after I abandoned Matthew following the "I'm a wanker!" incident (such as Edward James Padgett, who has been mentioned in this post since it was first written, he just didn't see it); my university flatmates; my fellow students on my music course (though not on my English course — I didn't really get to know anyone on that side of things); and people I've worked with — but if I'm thrown into a new situation with unfamiliar people, or simply decide that I want to get to know new people who perhaps share my interests… I still have no idea how to do this.

This is, as I'm sure you can appreciate, frustrating, particularly as at the age of 32 I finally feel that I have found a number of geeky "niches" that I fit nicely into, and would like to share these experiences with like-minded people. I greatly enjoyed spending time with Mark and Lynette while we were over in Canada because they are both My Kind of People who enjoy the things I do — but I also found myself somewhat envious of them for having a group of friends they play Dungeons & Dragons with, watch anime with while drinking cocktails and all manner of other things that are in keeping with their interests.

This isn't to say I don't have friends, obviously. The friends I see most frequently are my regular(ish) board gaming group, and I wouldn't exchange them for anything, since I really, really appreciate the time I spend with them indulging in our mutual hobby. However, we do have our own incompatibilities — two of our number are really into football, for example, while the rest of us either have no strong feelings or actively hate it. (I fall into the latter category.) Similarly, I very much like Japanese video games, while several of the others cling to common misconceptions about them and thus either refuse to play them or have little interest in exploring them and having their misconceptions disproven — though at least they are patient and willing to listen to me talk about them. Conversely, a couple of our number are big into Skyrim, a game which I found almost unbearably tedious after a while. To continue the pattern, I'm a big fan of anime and would really like it if I could have a semi-regular viewing session with a small group of people, but no-one from that particular group is biting for various reasons — some don't like or don't see the point of sitting and watching something together as a group; some aren't interested in anime.

You get the picture, anyway. I obviously don't begrudge my friends these incompatibilities we have — everyone is different, after all, and thus has their own tastes — but I find myself wishing on a regular basis that it was a bit easier to find additional friends (note: not "new" friends, because to me that implies a degree of "replacement", which I don't want) who have common interests.

Actually, let me qualify that somewhat: I find myself wishing that it was a bit easier to find additional local friends who have common interests. It's obviously no problem whatsoever to find new friends on the Internet who have similar tastes to me, and I'm very grateful for the fact that I do have so many people on the Internet that I can rant and rave about how awesome Ar Tonelico is or how much Kana Little Sister made me cry or whatever. But as much as I appreciate these friends in far-flung corners of the world, it's not quite the same as having someone you can just pop over and see at short notice, hang out and do some things that you both enjoy.

So, uh, anyone want to hang out, play some games and watch some anime?

1200: It Was Just a Joke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1194: Courting the 'Core'

Social games, it's fair to say, have a bad reputation among those who are euphemistically referred to as "core gamers". This bad reputation isn't altogether unjustified, of course — social games are, in many cases, derivative, exploitative or just plain boring — but despite the prevalence of Men In Suits (or, probably more accurately, Men In Trendy T-Shirts And/Or Turtleneck Sweaters) who have never played a video game before in their life running the show for the most part, there's a lot of talent in that particular sector of the industry.

So why the hell doesn't this part of the industry do more to attract the "core"?

It's at this point that, if I was talking about this in person with someone directly involved with the industry, that they would point to one of the following facts: 1) Candy Crush Saga having approximately 15 million daily active users; 2) CSR Racing on iOS earning somewhere in the region of $12 million a month when it launched; 3) The Top Grossing chart on iOS being dominated by games that are free to download.

These are all facts, and cannot be ignored. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're good things. As I've said many times in the past, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Candy Crush Saga has 15 million daily active users because it nags them via notifications to come back and play; CSR Racing earned $12 million a month by forcing people to pay up for "gas" for their cars if they didn't want to wait; and don't even get me started on what I think of the Top Grossing chart on iOS and the awful crap therein.

Aside from these matters, the fact that the social and mobile games sectors aren't courting the "core" more aggressively is just baffling to me. While those who identify as "core" gamers — i.e. those who will happily sit down in front of a computer or console for several hours at a time to use it as their primary means of entertainment rather than an idle timewaster — do not exist in as vast a number as those who have a Facebook account and who have tried Candy Crush Saga at least once, there are some important things to bear in mind.

Most crucially, of those 15 million daily active users that Candy Crush Saga has, only a tiny fraction of them actually pay anything. Some of them might pay a lot — these people are rather revoltingly referred to as "whales" by people in the industry — but an awful lot of them will either refuse to pay out of principle or just not enjoy the game enough to want to spend money on it.

Here's the thing: "core" gamers spend a lot of money. "Core" gamers will happily spent £40 on a brand new game without having read a review. "Core" gamers will pay a premium to get pointless cool stuff that they can show off. "Core" gamers are a lucrative source of income, in other words. Much as it pains me to break it down that way — I'd much rather games be seen as creative works than business products — it is, in fact, true.

So, then, I have to question why more of an effort isn't being made to make "core" gamers take social and mobile games seriously. Because it's not. "Core" gamers see the majority of social and mobile games as a massive joke — a festering boil on the arse of the industry; a source of interactive entertainment that doesn't create "proper games" and instead puts out the very worst sort of shovelware.

They're right, to an extent. So here's a few things the social and mobile sectors could do to be taken a bit more seriously by potentially one of the most lucrative markets out there.

Stop ripping the same things off all the time.

Seriously. Cut it out. We've all played Puzzle Bobble. We've all played Bejeweled. Stop trying to make out your puzzle game is new and innovative when, in fact, it is simply either Puzzle Bobble or Bejeweled (or, in a few cases, Jawbreaker).

If you must draw inspiration from past titles, that's fine; just stop drawing inspiration from such a small pool. Just in the puzzle game genre there are hundreds of great games begging for a social adaptation — Columns, Klax, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, Puzzle League, Dr Mario, Baku Baku Animal… I could go on — so why are we constantly subjected to the same "match-3" bollocks over and over?

This isn't just an issue in the puzzle genre — social RPGs all rip off Mafia Wars; farming sims all rip off FarmVille; citybuilders all rip off CityVille, and none of them were actually that good in the first place.

Stop ripping yourself off.

If you already have a match-3 puzzle game in your portfolio, you don't need another one. King, currently the biggest social game company in the world thanks to the aforementioned Candy Crush Saga, is terrible for this. Now that Candy Crush Saga is the top performing game on Facebook, they've put out another game. What kind of game do you think that is? That's right; a game where you swap coloured things around to make groups of 3 in horizontal or vertical lines. Only this time they're fruit and vegetables!

Or how about Kabam, who have now released the exact same game with slightly different graphics and a different name four times (Kingdoms of Camelot, Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North, Arcane Empires, The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-Earth) and no-one (except me) has called them on it.

The fact that people buy into this is just depressing.

Hire some fucking writers.

Quite a few social games these days are very well presented, with quality graphics and decent sound and music. In many cases, they actually create quite an impressive atmosphere… until the player is asked to read anything and it becomes very apparent that the "plot" of the game, such as it is, was written by a dyslexic Russian 10-year old who had just played Magic: The Gathering for the first time.

Good writing is just as important as the more immediate parts of your game's presentation. Don't skimp on it. And even if you're not going for an epic plot in your game — incidentally, puzzle games do not need plots, so just stop trying to cram one in — at least get someone to proofread the in-game text, fix any typos and glaring grammatical errors… and make sure if you're releasing it in English-speaking territories that all of the game's text is actually in fucking English.

A shout-out to 5th Planet Games here, who actually make an effort with this sort of thing, even if the gameplay of the games sometimes isn't up to much; Legacy of a Thousand Suns may be a Mafia Wars ripoff in terms of gameplay, but at least it has some consistently well-written story text throughout, unlike Mafia Wars, which didn't even try in this regard.

Stop using outdated tech.

Adobe is winding down Flash support, so it's time for Web-based games to do the same. Relying on Flash means that you limit yourself to those using a computer that supports Flash, and excludes those on tablets and mobile phones. There are a ton of cross-platform solutions available now that allow you to deploy an app on the Web, mobile platforms and as a standalone PC, Mac or Linux executable, so there's really very little excuse for not using one.

Not only that, but your average computer these days is more than capable of dealing with some simple 3D graphics — in fact, most are more than capable of handling decent-quality 3D graphics. Unity is a solid option that makes porting between platforms a snap; use it.

Stop using stupid, inappropriate aesthetics.

This is what the artwork for the CSI Miami Facebook game looks like:

This is a screenshot from the official House M.D. Facebook game, developed by the same team:

And this is what a zombie looks like in the Walking Dead social game:

I don't think I really need to say anything else on that note.

If it doesn't belong in the game, don't put it in the game.

You want to keep your players coming back day after day? Don't shoehorn in a stupid roulette game that makes absolutely no thematic sense whatsoever; instead, simply make a good game that people will want to keep playing.

Stop assuming I'm an idiot.

"Core" gamers have played games before. They don't need your tutorial to unfold over the course of the first 20 levels of your puzzle game. Make it brief, and make it skippable.

Along the same lines, it's okay to tell someone to do something and then not put a gigantic flashing arrow over the top of it and simultaneously darken the rest of the screen, just in case they missed the gigantic flashing arrow. Allow the player to experiment and discover things for themselves rather than pointing every single thing out to them. At the same time, provide a detailed Help file and/or tooltip system so that they can look things up if they aren't clear.

On a slightly different but related note, it's okay for games to be complex. Again, "core" gamers have played games before and are okay with complex mechanics. Important note: "complex" is not the same as "boring". Kabam and anyone else making "midcore strategy games", please learn this.

Make it so fun I want to pay, not so inconvenient I have to pay.

This is the biggie. Monetisation is the biggest challenge in free-to-play gaming in general, and particularly in mobile and social games, which often attract huge audiences but relatively tiny proportions of paying customers.

"Core" gamers do not like feeling nickel and dimed. Look at the negative response to stuff like Dead Space 3, or Real Racing 3 — both of which, not coincidentally, are by EA.

"Core" gamers also do not like having their time wasted. This does not mean that they will pay to bypass wait timers in your game; it means they will simply stop playing.

Provide "core" gamers with stuff they can buy that improves their experience, but which doesn't break the game. Throw out that stupid energy system — a "core" gamer will stop playing when they're good and ready, not when you tell them to stop. Throw out that "it takes three hours of real time to harvest your crops" bullshit — if you explicitly send them away, they won't come back. Instead provide them with cool stuff that they want to show off — new outfits for their character, new paint jobs for their car, new background music or even whole new levels or areas to explore. If you want a good example of how to do it right, look at stuff like DC Universe Online and Perfect World's free-to-play MMOs — all are satisfying to play for free, but all offer a ton of non-game-breaking benefits to those willing to pony up and buy some premium currency.

Talking of which…

Quit the "pay to win" crap.

"Core" gamers complain. A lot. Particularly when they believe that a game isn't being fair. They'll whinge about mages being nerfed, shotguns being OP'd and generally anything else that breaks the game balance. "Core" gamers play a lot of games and are thus very good at spotting when a game is unbalanced to an unfair degree. Do not make your game so that a crap player can buy their way to dominance over a skilled player; make it so the crap player wants to get better at the game. Reward the skilled player with cool stuff and allow the crap player to see all the awesome stuff they could earn if they were just a bit better; but don't allow them to buy their way to success.

Along the same lines, quit the "Get More Coins" nonsense. Part of the satisfaction of experiences like role-playing games and business sims for "core" gamers is feeling like they've struggled against all odds to earn their rewards. The second you allow them to simply purchase all the money in the game world for $50, you devalue those rewards and make them meaningless. You also, again, break the game balance. Instead, pace your game in such a way that the rewards are earned at a good, satisfying rate, and save the paid stuff for purely cosmetic items. If you must use a virtual currency for premium items, make it a completely separate currency that it's clear can only be acquired through spending money. Keep the "Cash Shop" stuff separate from the normal shop. And for heaven's sake stop plastering the screen with special offers and other sparkling icons — nothing breaks the atmosphere of your otherwise well-rendered fantasy world quicker than a large flashing icon bellowing about "20% Off Gems!"

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I accept that many of these things are more difficult to implement than what is being done by many mobile and social games now. But they, among other things that I've undoubtedly forgotten — feel free to chime in in the comments — are why "core" gamers do not take mobile and social games seriously.

Court the "core" and you'll make a lot of money. Continue to alienate them, however, and you'll always be a big joke to a significant proportion of people who are willing to spend a lot of money on their favourite hobby.