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!"

____

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.

1191: Social Burnout

I've been thinking this for quite a while, as you've probably noticed from past posts I've made on the subject, but I'm beginning to feel completely burned-out on social media. Everything has to be social these days. Everything has to have little like buttons and little comment buttons and allow every denizen of the Internet to spew their ill-informed thoughts and opinions over it, or to share it pointlessly to Facebook.

Earlier today, I was distressed to discover that an official Pizza Hut app is coming to Xbox 360, presumably aimed at those people who find phoning, using a mobile phone app or using the Internet to order a pizza too easy and would instead prefer to do so by navigating the monstrosity that is the Metro interface. One line in the Polygon article about it — here — jumped out at me and kind of drove it home how "way too far" we've taken social media these days. Here it is:

"After submitting an order, users can share their choice with friends via Facebook."

Why. Why. Why why whywhywhy would you want to do this?

Pizza Hut aren't the only offenders in this regard, of course — Amazon offer a convenient facility to tweet or share on Facebook anything that you've just bought, as do a lot of other websites. You can even set up the PlayStation 3 and Vita to automatically share every purchase you make on PSN to Facebook. And every time I see this facility, I wonder why on Earth anyone would want to use it. But apparently people do.

This glut of auto-sharing is killing the original point of social media, which was to allow people to engage in conversations with one another by sharing things that were important to them. Now, it's more like a convention of ADHD sufferers running around going "I JUST BOUGHT A PIZZA! LOOK AT THIS VIDEO OF A DUCK RUNNING! HERE'S A PICTURE OF A CAT! I'D SAY SOMETHING PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE BUT 'SOMEBODY' WOULDN'T LIKE IT!" rather than what I remember my early experiences with Facebook being like.

I vividly recall resisting signing up to Facebook in its early days, because everyone seemed to be doing it and I just couldn't be arsed with it. When I eventually started using it, however, I was impressed to discover a site that was seemingly built for real-life friends. Any time I added someone to my friends list, I had to indicate how I knew them, and the other person had to verify that story. My profile was only visible in full to those whom I had marked as a friend, and there weren't really any privacy settings to worry about. Stuff that was shared was the sort of stuff you'd share if you were actually in the same room with friends — what you'd been up to, some photos from your holiday, perhaps a longer piece of writing in the form of a "Note". No games, no spam, no "I Fucking Love Science" posts. Just actual interactions. The Like button was there, but it didn't have the all-encompassing power it has now, and people hadn't really started using it as a substitute for actually saying things.

Now, though, with the proliferation of "LIKE IF YOU HATE CANCER, SHARE IF YOU LOVE KITTENS" posts, the signal-to-noise ratio is all out of whack, and people are used to posting tons of crap while simultaneously saying nothing of value. This has the side-effect of meaning that when you actually want a response from someone, it's quite difficult to get one. The other day I attempted to find someone to take care of our pet rats while we're on holiday in Canada; the only responses I got were jokey, non-serious ones, and within a couple of hours it had dropped off the face of everyone's News Feed, never to be seen again… unless I were to slip Facebook $7 to "promote" it, of course.

Or take today, when I saw someone post an actual non-rhetorical question that needed an answer, and the first response was a "Like".

Not helpful. At all. You "Like" my question? Great. Do you "Like" it enough to actually fucking answer it, perhaps? No? Then piss off. I'm not so desperate for validation that I count the number of "Likes" a particular post gets and see it as some form of brag-worthy e-peen.

That said, if you want to "Like" my new "K-On Girls Wear the Union Jack" fanart cover photo, feel free.

Sigh. I'm such a hypocrite.

I've been rediscovering forums recently — I was a member of a My Little Pony forum for a while before it shut down due to admin drama, and I'm currently taking some tentative steps into the RPG Maker community. While forums have their own issues — largely people being a little lawyerish about the community rules and regulations — I'm beginning to think they're not such an outdated means of discussion as many seem to think…

1186: Don't Hate

There's a curious phenomenon in comments sections around the land. And that phenomenon is that it is seemingly the law that someone, somewhere, must hate everything. Actually, that's badly phrased; I don't mean that one person hates everything — though I'm sure there are people who do — but instead I mean that whatever the thing that has been posted, there will always be at least one person who dislikes it for some reason and is inevitably the sort of person who is very vocal about their dislike of it.

This seems to happen particularly frequently in sectors that already have passionate userbases, or in which the userbases are seen as being a "subculture" and/or outside the "norm" somehow. I'm thinking specifically of the video games and anime sectors here — and before you start on me, for all the massive steps forward these media have made in terms of mainstream acceptance over the last 20-30 years they are still indelibly tarred with the "geek" brush to one degree or another.

Today, I was exploring the RPG Maker community who, by all accounts, appear to be a fairly friendly and helpful bunch for the most part, as I've previously mentioned. I was curiously browsing through some of the other users' projects in progress and came across a few interesting-sounding games. One of the users noted that they had submitted their game to Steam Greenlight, the process whereby a game can end up being sold on Valve's popular PC gaming digital download storefront if it gets enough positive votes from the community.

The game, by all accounts, sounded interesting and unconventional, and something I'd be intrigued to play. It was an "artistic" game, for want of a better word, designed as a means for the author to show what it was like living with depression. The author said upfront on the site that it was a mostly-linear, narrative-centric experience with a lot of text, and made no apologies for this fact. (For people like me, the terms "narrative-centric" and "lot of text" are selling points, not things to be ashamed of!)

Sadly, the Greenlight comments section was less than supportive for various reasons, featuring disparaging remarks for everything from it being "another depression game" (oh, sorry, there have been so many of those) to dismissing it simply because it's an RPG Maker game. I've made my feelings on the latter point quite clear in the past, but they bear repeating: if a tool is available to help someone realise their artistic vision, there's no reason why they shouldn't use it, regardless of how many other people are also using it. And besides, some of my favourite games in recent memory have been RPG Maker titles — Corpse Party, To The Moon, Cherry Tree High Comedy Club… all of them were made in earlier versions of RPG Maker that were considerably less sophisticated than the excellent toolset that is VX Ace.

But I digress. The point is that the comments section was filled with hate for the sake of hate rather than actually constructive feedback. The fact that the game in question (Actual Sunlight, I believe it was called) was "another depression game" and an RPG Maker project had nothing to do with its quality, or its "value" to the Steam community as a whole, and yet these things were used as reasons to reject it, without even bothering to check it out.

In the anime sector, it seems that it's fashionable to hate on whatever the biggest name show is at the time. Most recently, this has been seen with Sword Art Online, which I found to be a rollicking good time with an astonishingly spectacular soundtrack, some memorable characters and an interesting, intriguing and pleasingly mature (for the most part, anyway) storyline. It was a good show, in short; while it perhaps wasn't the most intelligent anime you'll ever see, it was certainly far more than a dumb, formulaic show.

Perhaps not something everyone would want to watch, no, but certainly far better than the overly-negative comments that would appear on J-List's Facebook page any time site owner Peter Payne posted a piece of artwork relating to SAO. (Granted, J-List's Facebook page is a place where any time a picture of a vaguely attractive anime girl is posted, one specific user will always be along within three comments of the start of the thread to helpfully inform everyone that "[he] would fuck her", so it's perhaps not the best place to go for objective criticism, but still; you'd expect a community of Japanophiles such as the followers of J-List's page to be a bit more enthusiastic about the things they supposedly like!)

I honestly don't get why this happens, and it seems to happen a lot. Why waste your time on hate when there is so much stuff out there to get you excited? Wouldn't you rather feel happy and intrigued by something than angry or upset?

1185: Top Ten Panty Shots in Video Games

I'm not normally a big fan of Ben Kuchera's work (for reasons I won't go into right now because they're not relevant to what I want to talk about) but he's bang on the money (no pun intended) with this piece.

I shan't reiterate Kuchera's points here — read the feckin' article! — but I will say that on this note, I do agree with him.

The Internet's (and tech in general's) reliance on advertising has to end. It's not sustainable. It simply isn't. And in the meantime, all it's doing is devaluing content, pissing people off and causing us to continually circle the plughole, drawing ever closer to being sucked into oblivion forever, or at the very least into that weird, disgusting black smelly goo we found in the end of the pipe the last time our sink got blocked.

Whenever a site like, say, Kotaku (who are usually the ones who get picked on for this sort of thing, but they're far from the only offenders) posts some bullshit story that gets everyone riled up about how irrelevant/pointless/offensive it is, the war cry that goes up is that they're doing it "for the hits". More accurately, as Kuchera says, they're doing it for the pageviews, because like it or not, the bullshit stories that make everyone angry are the ones that lots of people take a look at "just to see what the fuss is about". The Daily Mail makes a living from posting this sort of garbage on a daily basis; Kotaku at least punctuates its rubbish with some interesting and thought-provoking pieces, while the Mail is just uninterrupted crap. As Kuchera notes, though, the bullshit more often than not pays for the interesting and thought-provoking pieces.

It's not just professionally-written content that suffers from this problem, though. Look at Facebook and the idiotic, illiterate ads that festoon its sidebar on every page. Look at Facebook (again) and its obnoxious, obtrusive "Sponsored Posts" thrusting themselves in your face uninvited. Look at Twitter and its "Promoted Tweets" that you don't want to see. Look at whatever bullshit ad WordPress has decided to serve up underneath my writing on this site (although only on the mobile site, seemingly) Look at the mobile app I reviewed today, which rammed two full-screen ads down my throat before I could even open the main menu, and two more when I started picking a photo from my device's photo library to manipulate. (I was not kind to said app in the review.) Look at the ads you get for casinos and shady-sounding "download services" any time you browse for porn or torrents or anything else you wouldn't admit to looking for in polite company, but which we all know everyone looks for. (Yes, even you, you pervert.)

Internet advertising isn't positive or helpful. It is, for the most part, shady, misleading, obnoxious and obtrusive. Which is, of course, why it's so understandable that so many people — particularly the tech-savvy among us — run ad-blockers and thus deprive many sites of what little revenue they are scraping in from these revolting blights on the otherwise awesome nature of the Internet's global community.

I don't run ad-blockers. Honestly, this isn't for any particularly noble reason — I simply haven't set one up. But knowing what I know of the online publishing industry from the inside, I don't intend to run one, either. Those "One Weird Tip to Peel Your Skin Off and Whiten Your Teeth in the Casino that One Weird Old Florida Mum Found While Downloading Now!!" ads are many sites' main means of income. This isn't the magazine industry — there's no "cover price"; no newsagent looking over your shoulder and asking rather bluntly "you gonna buy that, mate?" (The magazine industry is, of course, in decline, meaning its model isn't necessarily particularly desirable either — but what do you think damaged it beyond repair in the first place?)

It's clear that this situation has to change. But it's not going to be an easy process. Readers used to consuming content for free and blocking ads are going to have to suck it up and start paying for their content. Content creators need to be confident enough in their work to make it worth paying for. And those responsible for the sort of bullshit ads you see on the Internet every single day… well, frankly they need to find a new career, because they've done more than enough damage to the media biz already.

If things don't change, there are going to be big problems down the line. Whether these problems take the form of the entire "new media" industry turning into the most stupid parts of your Facebook News Feed over and over again or the business collapsing entirely remains to be seen — but I'd rather not see either of those things happen if at all possible.

1184: For the Love of God, Please Learn About Snopes.com

Hello, you, random acquaintance and/or friend of my parents on Facebook. Yes, you. The one who has been clicking "Like" and "Share" on everything from posts that imply you want cancer to kill everyone if you don't click "Like" to posts that wilfully spread misinformation, such as accusations that Red Bull causes brain tumours, that baby carrots are saturated with chlorine, or that aspartame causes cancer, brain tumours and multiple sclerosis.

You know who you are.

I'd like to introduce you to a website. I'd like you and this website to become best friends. I would like you to go to this website any time you find yourself questioning the validity of something that someone else asks you to share. I would like you to check this website before you share the thing that someone asks you to share. And if this website informs you that the thing that someone asks you to share is not, in fact, true, please politely tell the person who asked you to share the thing about this website, and direct them to the relevant entry debunking the thing they asked you to share. (Conversely, if this website informs you that the thing that someone asks you to share is, in fact, true, feel free to share as you see fit, but please stop using quite so many exclamation marks.)

This website is called Snopes.com.

It may not look like much, but it has been around in one form or another since 1995, and has been debunking chain letters and other urban myths ever since. It is a valuable resource that has been proven on numerous occasions to be both accurate and reliable. Please use it.

The reason I bring this up is that the unpleasantness that accompanied the Boston Marathon yesterday has brought with it a number of stories that are complete fabrications, and which have nonetheless found themselves spreading at an alarming rate across all varieties of social media. There is a convenient page summarising all of the claims made about the Boston Marathon and the events which supposedly occurred there right here. Please read it. Please familiarise yourself with it. Please take note of which stories are completely false and/or based on inconclusive, unproven information. Please do not share stories which have been proven to be false, or which are based on inconclusive, unproven information.

You may feel that there is "no harm" in "raising awareness" of issues by sharing things like this, even if they are not true. Unfortunately, that is not the case. By polluting social media with falsehoods, it becomes difficult for people who are personally invested in an unfolding story such as the Boston Marathon bombings to determine what the facts really are. By polluting social media with falsehoods, you run the risk of causing considerable distress to these people who are likely already very emotional. By polluting social media with falsehoods you continue to perpetuate a cycle where people willingly share misinformation in lieu of actually doing something useful, because clicking "like" and "share" feels like you've done your bit. And, frankly, by polluting social media with falsehoods, you make yourself look uninformed at best; gullible and stupid at worst.

So use a bit of common sense, will you? The next time something sounds unbelievable, it probably is; before you jump on that "Share" button, pay a quick visit to Snopes.com and look up the key points. And if Snopes.com tells you that the claims are complete rubbish, for heaven's sake don't just share them anyway. Educate the person you saw them from. Teach them about Snopes.com. And hopefully together we can make the world a less ignorant place.

1169: Suffering Fools

The Internet has ruined April Fools' Day.

That's the sentiment that seems to have been prevalent on social media for most of today. And to be fair, it has. Between Operation Rainfall's teasing of games that will never exist (Catherine 2, The Last Story II, Theatrhythm Deus Ex) to the utterly cringeworthy press release I received earlier claiming that Doodle Jump is becoming a Broadway show (seriously, guys, 1) Doodle Jump hasn't been relevant for several years now, and 2) try harder) it's been a thoroughly irritating day to be online. Thankfully, a significant proportion of the press seems to have grown up a bit and is refusing to play along with these shenanigans, but there's just as many reputable publications putting out exceedingly lame "jokes" that they really should know better than to post. The Guardian producing special liberal glasses that block Richard Littlejohn columns? Hilarious. The New Statesman rebranding entirely in Comic Sans? Oh, help me, Doctor Tendo, for my sides have split.

Thinking about it, though, I'm not sure April Fools' Day has ever been particularly… well, fun. Sure, the stuff Google comes up with is often mildly amusing, but for the most part it seems to be a day where people think that lying as much as possible is an adequate substitute for being genuinely entertaining. That's sort of mean when you think about it, really.

I'm trying to think back to a time before the Internet (yes, young 'uns, we did live in such dark times once) and whether or not April Fools' Day was fun then. I have a peculiar feeling that it wasn't. I recall a time at school when everyone suddenly and inexplicably learned the word "gullible" simultaneously for some dark purpose, and it was a hellish few weeks of people making up outlandish stories and then jeering "HAAHAHHAAH GULLIBLE" and running away if you even looked like you were about to say "really?" April Fools' Day is just like that, really. An opportunity for unfunny twats to be particularly unfunny twats and think they're being Comedy Gods.

I know it's all a bit of fun and I shouldn't be so grumpypants about it. But as with so many things on the Internet, oversaturation leads to cynicism and active dislike. And over the last few years, we've seen so many painfully obvious April Fools' Day jokes that it's just a bit old now. By far the most laughable example was the Doodle Jump press release I mentioned earlier — that actually really made me quite cross, though I restrained myself from rebuking the sender with a tersely-worded response — but that's far from an isolated example.

To quote my former editor Mr Jason Wilson: "Journalism isn't about jokes. No one for a journalistic site should be making up shit. No one at a PR agency should be, either. Send me that BS and you go straight into my 'you suck at PR' folder."

Quite. The news is enough of a disorganised mess in which it's a nightmare for some stories to get noticed anyway; quit cluttering these channels up with your made-up crap. It's not big, it's not clever and it's not funny.

This has been your Grouch for the day. Tomorrow I will write about something nice.

1165: Endless Infinite Discussion

Around this time of year in 2011, one Mr Tom Ohle, a fine upstanding gentleman at the forefront of promoting games you might not have heard of quite so much as the games you have heard of a lot, wrote this post, named The Case of the Great Game Nobody Saw.

Lest you're too lazy to follow the link, allow me to summarise: Tom works in PR for video games. The titles his company Evolve PR has represented over the years include things like CD Projekt Red's The Witcher series, the deep strategy games of Paradox Interactive, TimeGate Studios' Section 8 series, the Anomaly series and numerous others. As all good PR people should, Tom believes in the games he's paid to promote — some more than others. Sometimes games come along that are genuinely excellent — games that, in Tom's words, are "magical, revolutionary, disruptive or otherwise worthy of consumers' awareness" — and, as you'd expect, Tom and co. would very much like to see these titles succeed, and they do their utmost to try and convince various outlets that these games are worthy of coverage and promotion. When these games don't get the coverage they deserve — either because of "bigger" games monopolising the front page or simply through being rejected outright — it's enormously disheartening, not only for Tom and co. but also for the makers of these games.

"At its core, this is an issue that pervades entertainment and consumerism as a whole," writes Tom. "People stick with brands they know. Everyone craps all over themselves (myself included) when a new Rockstar game is announced. That's fine; they make great games. But in an industry that so often complains about derivative sequels, soulless big-budget productions and a lack of risk-taking, isn't it about time we started focusing on quality? Shouldn't those companies looking to push the boundaries of the medium begin to reap the rewards? If things keep going the way they are, we'll never shed the $60 price point, we'll get sequels to major franchises every year, and we'll all keep complaining and wishing things were different."

Almost two whole years have passed since Tom wrote that post, and I don't think things have improved at all since then. If anything, I think they've got worse. For all Polygon's posturing about reinventing games journalism and for all Kotaku's posting of random bullshit only tangentially related to games, we're still in a situation where an alien visiting the games industry would believe there were only a few interesting games released every year, and that they're often entries in the same series. Call of Duty. Battlefield. Assassin's Creed. And so on.

Most recently, I've been becoming somewhat frustrated with Bioshock Infinite. I have no doubt whatsoever that it's a fantastic game, and everything I've heard seems to indicate that it is, in the words of a friend of mine, "intelligent Hollywood… a 'The Matrix of gaming'" and that is, on the whole, a good thing. We need creators like Ken Levine in the mainstream of the industry to push things forward and prove that there's a market for intelligent experiences as well as Mildly-Racist Brown Michael Bay Manshoot #327. I am glad that Bioshock Infinite exists, that it is apparently living up to the hype and that, I imagine, it is probably selling quite well as a result of all that hype.

What I'm less thrilled about is the fact that it's not really solving the problem Tom was talking about in his post. Bioshock Infinite may be "intelligent Hollywood", but it's still Hollywood. It's still a single game from a high-profile creator monopolising press coverage and social media, completely dwarfing smaller-scale experiences that — shhh — might actually be more interesting. Do we need videos explaining "why you should play Bioshock Infinite on Hard mode", articles about its ending, articles about why Ken Levine doesn't believe in Utopias, articles about how to edit the INI files, tips articles, articles about why having it spoiled didn't matter, articles about… have I made my point yet? This is a disproportionately large amount of coverage for one game — one very good game, admittedly, and one which has a lot of expectations to live up to, yes, but still just one game, and one game that people were already very much aware of in the run-up to its release. I'm already absolutely fucking sick of hearing about it, and the more I hear about it, the smaller the already-miniscule chance I will ever play it becomes — a phenomenon I discussed in this post.

The standard response to this is, of course, that this is what the greater audience is hungry for. Millions of people are going to buy, play and love Bioshock Infinite, and they should be catered to, as those millions of people are probably also going to want to read lots of things about Bioshock Infinite.

However, here's my (slightly selfish) question. What about me? What about people like me? What about all of the people out there — I'm sure I'm not the only one in the world — who didn't really like the first Bioshock all that much (I played System Shock 2 almost immediately beforehand, which just made the fact that Bioshock wasn't System Shock 3 all the more painful and frustrating) and consequently are not all that interested in this new one? What about the people who are more interested in other types of games? Don't we deserve some quality and wide-ranging coverage of the things that we're interested in? (Where's my "Tips for playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory" post, hmmm?) We have fan communities and enthusiast blogs, sure, but where's our high-profile professional outlet covering this stuff that's a bit off the well-worn path? (Besides Games Are Evil, of course, which I'm not going to pretend is anywhere near as big as I would love it to be!)

The gaming medium has grown up enormously in the last few years. With constantly improving software and hardware technology providing more and more flexibility for interactive artists to realise their digital dreams, and the rise of the indie space and Kickstarter allowing game makers to break free of the shackles of corporate culture, we're most definitely undergoing the "Cambrian explosion of possibilities" that SimCity, The Sims and Spore creator Will Wright talked about back in 2008. It's a great time to be someone who enjoys playing games.

But the games press has not evolved alongside the medium as a whole. The medium as a whole is now, as I've said numerous times in the past, far too broad for one outlet to be able to do justice to all of. And yet pretty much all of the big outlets choose to focus on the same part of this massively diverse medium. It's the part with the biggest audience, the biggest budgets and the biggest amount of money involved in it, yes, but it's still just one part of a whole. Read the news pages of one big site and you've read them all. Read the reviews section of one site and you've read them all. The sheer volume of things on display at events like PAX East and GDC help a little, but more often than not you still just hear about the same things from slightly different perspectives. Or you hear about Battlefield 4.

Why haven't we got to a stage where big outlets can feel confident enough to distinguish themselves from one another yet? Don't give me a reason to stick with one outlet, give me a reason to read all of them because of their completely different content. (Right now, I don't read any of them with any degree of loyalty, because very few of them provide coverage of the sort of thing I'm interested in any more!)

It's massively frustrating, and I don't even work in PR. I can bang my drum all I like about the types of game I'm interested in and want to experience more of… but is anyone really listening?

1164: Urgh

I'm exhausted. Mentally and physically. It's one of those times of year where everything seems to be dull, grey and miserable, both literally and metaphorically. It's cold outside, it's often raining or snowing, everyone is getting pissy with everyone else and I'd just quite like Existence to be a bit nicer, please.

The thing I think I'm finding most tiresome and exhausting at the moment is how short everyone's fuse on the Internet seems to be at the moment. I'm not even on Twitter any more and I'm still seeing stupid, ill-informed, pointless arguments erupting all the time. I'm deliberately avoiding all of them because I know from past experience attempting to provide some sort of rational viewpoint on any even vaguely "hot-button" issue will just get everyone yelling at you for no apparent reason. If they want to yell at each other, fine; it's just frustrating to see it happening, and Facebook's refusal to allow users to take control of their experience so they can insert advertising into mental orifices you didn't know you had means that it's all but unavoidable.

The current thing that seems to be getting everyone riled up is the current gay marriage Supreme Court thing that's going on in the States. Not being American, I don't know all the details of what's happening but I know my feelings on gay marriage, which are as follows: if you love each other and would both like to get married, you should be able to get married, whoever you are. Simple as that.

But this isn't about my views on gay marriage or indeed anyone else's views on gay marriage; rather, it's about one of those "Internet solidarity" things where everyone changes their avatar to the same thing to show support for a cause, "get people talking" and "raise awareness". I personally think that this is an idea that never works properly (I wrote about it when it happened for a different issue here) and sparks more arguments than it raises awareness — particularly when people don't explain what their sudden change to an abstract avatar is all about — but ultimately it's something that people are going to do if they think it helps, and I've learned it's really not worth arguing over.

Why? Because no-one on the Internet actually listens to anyone else. (That's a generalisation. There are exceptions. But check out any comments thread on a hot-button issue like this and you'll see.) People stick staunchly to their viewpoint and refuse to entertain the possibility of acknowledging (let alone embracing) an alternative outlook. And because people on both sides are so resolute that Their Way is the Right Way, tempers inevitably flare, people start calling each other hypocrites and trawling back over old social media posts to find that one post they know where their opponent did something that doesn't match up with the viewpoint they're advocating now.

I'm tired of it. Really tired. And I feel selfish saying that, but I'm saying it anyway. I'm tired of feeling like the exhausted teacher sitting at the front of the room powerless to do anything while a classroom full of children fight over silly "he said, she said" quarrels that aren't really addressing anything at all. (I speak from experience.)

I remember in the early days of the Internet, when communication with like-minded strangers was exciting. I remember spending hours on CompuServe's "CB Simulator" chat room talking to people — I even made some actual friends through it. I remember being polite and treating strangers with respect, and I remember them doing likewise. I remember being excited about this awesome-seeming future whereby anyone in the world could communicate with anyone else at the touch of a button.

Fast forward fifteen years or so and everyone is using this frankly amazing technology to call each other wankers. Good job, world.