Category: INTERNETZORZ

1108: Countdown to Internet

Page_1We finally get Proper Internet installed in our new flat tomorrow. If you are, at this point, scratching your head and pondering how on Earth I am writing this post when I do not have Proper Internet installed in our new flat already, fortunate circumstances meant that our new neighbours have BT as their service provider and thus have part of their bandwidth set aside as a public hotspot. Because we're also with BT, it means that we're able to make use of this hotspot for free.

You may think that sounds ideal, and it's certainly been better than nothing — without it I'd have spent about a billion pounds on working from coffee shops by now, or have struggled on with a data-capped 3G dongle — but it's had its share of annoyances. The main issue is that our neighbours' router is just slightly too far away for a reliable connection on devices like the iPhone and iPad — it's been fine on my laptop, but my Mac steadfastly refuses to stay connected for more than five minutes at a time. Since my day job requires me to download a lot of stuff from the App Store, I need my phone to have a reliable connection, because apps over a certain size are impossible to download over a mobile data connection — and besides, my mobile data connection has a bandwidth cap, too, which I hit last billing month thanks to the very issues I'm describing here.

The other irritant is the hotspot's "fair use policy", which means that "unlimited" use is, in fact, not unlimited at all — instead, once you hit a certain number of minutes used on your account (cumulative between all devices which have logged in using those details) you get put in a special Naughty Corner for people who use the Internet too much, and disconnected without warning every half an hour. This is especially infuriating if you've been typing an article into a web-based content management system such as WordPress, idly hit Publish without remembering to check if the connection is still active and promptly run the risk of losing all your work. (Fortunately, Chrome seems to cache the body of your text when this happens, but tends to lose headlines, tags and that sort of thing.) I have taken to both copying the entire body of my text before publishing and opening a new tab to any old site — usually Facebook, since I only have to type the letter "F" into the address bar in Chrome for it to suggest that to me and it loads quickly — just to make sure the connection hasn't gone tits-up.

It could, of course, be significantly worse. I've been re-reading some old issues of PC Zone recently, and they hail from the pre-broadband days when getting unlimited Internet access via your phone line was a new and exciting thing, but most people were struggling on with 0845 numbers that charged them the same rate as a local phone call while they were online. The letters page of one issue features a letter from someone who wished that multiplayer-focused games would go away — not for the same reason people say this today (oversaturation) but because, in the UK at least, it was a relative minority of people who could play these games at a practical speed and without their phone bill going through the roof.

I remember vividly trying to get a two-player game of Quake going via a direct modem connection a while back, and it was just impossible to do so. And all the while I was trying to get this going, the phone line was tied up and pissing off my parents. (You young 'uns don't know you're born, I tellsya.) We got direct-connect games of Command and Conquer and Red Alert going a few times, but Quake continually eluded us. It wasn't until I got to university and managed to figure out a way to use our free phone calls between rooms in our hall of residence to fake a Windows network connection that I was able to play a PC-based first-person shooter against another person for the first time. (Not coincidentally, those days spent playing Half-Life against my flatmates Sam and Chris are some of my fondest gaming memories of all time.)

Still, as I say… Proper Internet tomorrow. You don't realise how much you miss it until it's not there. It's such a big part of everyone's daily life now that the fact we used to only be able to use the Internet for short periods of time at specific times of day (phone calls were cheaper after 6pm!) is all but unthinkable. Nowadays, I'm bitching about the fact I can't watch Netflix and Crunchyroll over breakfast.

The perils of living in The Future, I guess.

1102: The Golden Age of Magazines

Page_1I really love re-reading old games and tech magazines, particularly those from the '80s and '90s. There's a rather wonderful sense of innocence about the monsters that video games and Internet culture would become, and an even more pleasant feeling of knowing that an article was written to be a lot more "permanent" than the somewhat disposable writing for websites we have today. I'm not saying that writing is inherently worse today, of course — on the whole I think it's a lot better for the most part — but that the sheer volume of it these days makes it more and more difficult to build up a portfolio of specific pieces you're really proud of rather than stuff that's just been churned out for the daily grind.

Taking video games magazines specifically, I particularly enjoy the completely different approach to games criticism seen in the mid- to late '90s. Because reviews came out on a magazine's street date rather than under the carefully-timed embargo of a PR department, you could generally feel pretty secure that the writers in question had spent a healthy proportion of the preceding month with the game, and that you knew they would have explored it inside out in most cases rather than rushing through. Consequently, we got a lot of reviews that were more like multi-page features, filled with big images, annotated screenshots, quotes from the developer and all manner of other things. Sometimes you even got reviews in a completely different format — PC Zone magazine, which I was loyal to initially because I liked it and later because my brother became the big boss man over there (also I wrote a number of articles for it), liked to experiment with short-form quick reviews for budget or crap games, and also held regular "Supertests", in which they took a variety of different games in the same genre (often flight sims of various descriptions) and compared them directly to each other to determine which one was "best".

You know what the absolute best thing was, though? No comments sections. I must confess that when reading a 1998 copy of PC Zone on the toilet the other day, I instinctively found myself glancing at the end of a somewhat contentious article (written by none other than Charlie Brooker, who used to be a regular for Zone, believe it or not) to see the ranty comments. I had already flipped the pages to the end of the piece before I realised I was holding a magazine in my hands, and that its content was static and non-interactive. It was probably for the best; Brooker's article was a candid exploration of "why girls don't like games" which was very, very amusing, very, very irreverent and would not have got within a mile of today's Misogyny Police before being torn to shreds — despite the fact that it had a wealth of valid points and was clearly intended to take the piss out of anyone who believed that games were solely "boys' toys". But I digress. The point was, there was no opportunity to respond immediately to an article and belch forth the first opinionated effluvia that came into your head; if you wanted to respond, you had to damn well write a letter (or, later — much later — an email) and hope it got published in the following issue. PC Zone engaged in what is surely one of the first acts of trolling their comments sections on a number of occasions, tasking Brooker with responding to the most offensive, rude and generally disrespectful messages on a special "Sick Notes" page. Hilarity inevitably ensued, usually at the expense of the person who had written in.

I kind of feel like there was a lot more character about the old magazines in general. I read PC Zone primarily because I enjoyed the writers' work and knew their tastes and senses of humour; I knew that David McCandless was obsessed with Doom and Quake (particularly multiplayer); I knew that Chris Anderson loved X-Com; I knew that you could count on Brooker for an irreverent, hilarious article — his Fade to Black preview written entirely as a short story about "Monsieur Conrad 'Art" in Franglais was a particularly memorable example.

Different magazines had their own distinctive personalities, too — I contributed walkthroughs and tips books to the Official UK Nintendo Magazine for a while and was obliged to write using a particularly loathsome house style that effectively required me to write like a chav. Lots of "ya"s and "yer"s, and Mario was perpetually referred to as "Mazza". It was a magazine primarily aimed at children, of course, so this style was understandable, of course — looking back on it, though, it's more than a little cringeworthy.

I sort of miss magazines, then — I know they're still around and all that, but the magic just isn't there any more when you can get access to high-quality writing for free at your fingertips thanks to the Internet. That's sort of sad, really; while you can take an iPad into the toilet with you and browse your favourite sites, it's still not quite the same as having a proper magazine to leaf through at your leisure.

1097: Five Reasons Kotaku Made Yakuza Fans Angry Today

Page_1Fan of Sega's long-running modern-day JRPG series Yakuza? Then you may want to give Kotaku a wide berth today, as they published an article (FreezePage link so as not to direct traffic to the piece in question; petty, I know, but I know a few people who won't click Kotaku links on principle) which has incited the ire of an angry mob of Yakuza fans. And since Yakuza is a fairly niche game with a dedicated core of fans keen to see Sega continue to bring it to the West, they're pretty passionate about the series that they love.

The main issue with the article is that it is clearly written by someone who has very little knowledge of the Yakuza series at all — the author even states this up-front, noting that prior to taking Yakuza 5 for a spin they had played nothing more than the demos of Yakuza 3, 4 and Dead Souls and hadn't felt inspired to purchase or try the full games. Leaving aside the fact that he was coming in at the fifth installment to a series that is very strict about its chronology — each subsequent game follows on directly from the previous one — the bigger question is why on Earth this writer was picked to write an "Import Preview" for this game when his familiarity with the series is questionable by his own admission?

Of course, there is merit in judging the accessibility of a long-running series to newcomers, but just as certain series of books, movies and TV shows expect you to start from the very beginning and work your way along, so too are there series of games that demand the same of their audience. Yakuza is one of these, though it does give a cursory nod to newcomers in each game by allowing them a sequence where the protagonist "reminisces" about the events of the previous installment. These are primarily intended for series veterans who have endured a significant wait between games, however, and are designed to remind them of the key events rather than the actual experience of playing through a Yakuza game. They are not really designed to tell the entire story of a whole game in 30 minutes of cutscenes. You want to know what happened in, say, Yakuza 2? Go play it — it's still out there and (relatively) readily available.

I won't go through and address all of Eisenbeis' five points in the article one at a time as that just seems somewhat petty, but it's abundantly clear from the things he says that he is unfamiliar with the series and its conventions, and has also not spent a significant amount of time with it to discover its hidden depths. Pleasingly, the comments from Yakuza fans beneath the article have mostly been relatively respectful (if incredulous) and systematically point out how most of his arguments are flawed or, in some cases, completely incorrect.

I will address one point specifically, however, and that is the matter of "unskippable conversations". This is a particular bugbear for me. Yakuza is notorious for being a story-heavy, character-focused game in which the moments when you're kicking back in a hostess club attempting to woo your lady of the hour are just as important as the times when you're punching goons in the face and smashing traffic cones over their heads. If anything, they're more important, as they're where the characters get to demonstrate their hidden depths — far from being generic, silent protagonists, the playable characters in the Yakuza series are all very complex people with interesting motivations and outlooks on life. More interestingly, they're all grown-ups.

Brief aside: a friend and I were discussing this recently, and we thought it would be very interesting if there was a Japanese-style role-playing game that instead of featuring your usual band of Plucky, Idealistic Teens Who Are Always Right getting to save the world from Some Great Evil, put the spotlight on a group of older, more jaded and cynical adults who maybe had more complex motives for embarking on whatever the game's "quest" happened to be. The Yakuza series provides just that sort of experience, with characters who age and evolve as the series progresses, giving the complete franchise a truly remarkable feeling of coherence and changing with the times. At the same time, however, certain things remain constant — Kazuma will always care for his adoptive sort-of-"daughter" Haruka; Kamuro-cho will always be by turns beautiful and terrifying; Majima's sanity will always be somewhat questionable.

Anyway, my point with all that was that the very essence of Yakuza is in the story, so why would you skip it? I'll allow you the answer "because I died on a boss fight and I've already seen this bit", but anything beyond that — such as the reason Eisenbeis gives in his article — is very much missing the point. "I started to dread playing through the plot, knowing that the game's pace would be about to grind to a halt," he writes. Good grief, man. The point is the plot. If you were hoping for a brawler or character action game — or even a Grand Theft Auto-alike — there are plenty of other titles that will better fit your needs.

One thing I will say at this point is that I'm not attempting to convert anyone to the Yakuza fold who isn't already there. As has probably been made clear by the fact I'm writing this at all, you're either "in" or you aren't, and getting "in" these days involves playing four (possibly five if you count Dead Souls) games of between 10-40+ hours that straddle the generation gap between PS2 and PS3. From the second game onwards, you also have to be able to deal with the fact that there's no English dub, either — it's all subtitled with Japanese speech (and is an infinitely better experience as a result, I might add). It's a worthwhile experience, but equally it's one I'd understand people forgoing as the perceived barrier of entry gets higher.

Consequently, I'm not denying that some of the criticisms Eisenbeis makes of Yakuza in his article are valid; many of them are, and yes, they're offputting to series newcomers. However, this article really didn't need to be written, and in the worst-case scenario, it may have done some damage to the already-tenuous chances of Sega bringing this latest installment to the West. The piece's content essentially boils down to "Guy Who Doesn't Like Yakuza Doesn't Like Latest Yakuza", which is a matter for a personal blog, not for one of the world's most heavily-trafficked video games websites. Fans of the Yakuza series who see the "Import Preview" header would likely have been hoping for some insights on the ways in which the new game has evolved its systems and what has happened to the characters in the intervening time since Yakuza 4 and Dead Souls; instead, what they get is a poorly-researched opinion piece that does nothing but frustrate the people who are most likely to read it.

I'm sorry that Eisenbeis didn't enjoy his time with Yakuza 5, but it's his prerogative to dislike it if he pleases. He should clearly not, however, have been given the opportunity to write about it in the way that he did, as it does a great disservice to both the game and its fans who were hoping for some genuine new information. I hope that Kotaku will think much more carefully about who they assign preview articles to in the future, but I won't hold my breath.

1093: 'Problematic' is This Year's 'Entitled'

Page_1Remember last year when everyone was busily calling each other "entitled" for complaining about stuff like the Mass Effect 3 ending and Capcom's absurd DLC-on-disc policies? Ah, good times. They were fun, weren't they? Particularly when members of the press who should really know better starting insulting their audience. But let's leave that aside for now, because now it's 2013, and we have bigger fish to fry.

Now, you see, the fashionable thing to do is to declare something "problematic". I can't quite work out what irks me so about this word — in all likelihood it's simply its overuse — but it really does bug me.

The declaration of something as "problematic" usually ties in with the growing trend of guilt-ridden white straight cis men to want to champion the poor downtrodden parts of society — the women, the transsexuals, the homosexuals, the people of non-white ethnic backgrounds — and show themselves to be enlightened enough to stand up to the privileged of the world. Trouble is, a white straight cis man standing up for these groups only helps to reinforce that perceived "weakness" in many ways — and in worst-case scenarios, it starts to look a bit like bandwagon-jumping.

Such is the case with many of these things that have been declared "problematic" in recent months. A while back we had that beyond-stupid Hitman: Absolution trailer, more recently we had CD Projekt Red's actually quite excellent Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, and today we had the announcement of Dead Island Riptide's ridiculous "Zombie Bait" special edition. Leaving aside Cyberpunk 2077 for a moment, which is something of a different issue, both Hitman: Absolution and Dead Island Riptide are obviously incredibly stupid marketing ploys designed for shock value, little more. I find it honestly hard to believe that either Square Enix or Deep Silver genuinely want to condone violence against women or misogyny in general, but that is what they're being accused of with these "problematic" marketing materials — in the case of Dead Island, within minutes of the images hitting the Interwebs.

The thing is, all the shouting about how "problematic" these things are actually just plays right into the marketers' hands. For every table-thumping opinion piece that decries these things as the most awful thing ever dreamed up by a game's marketing team, there will be at least a few readers who will think "well hang on, actually I'm quite interested in that now," whether or not they actually admit to it in public. The amount of "OMG THIS IS AWFUL" stuff floating around about Dead Island Riptide's bloody torso is only really serving to make people more aware of the game's striking, gross (and Europe/Australia-exclusive) special edition; the hoo-hah over the Hitman: Absolution trailer likely helped raise awareness of the game in the run-up to its release to a considerable degree, and it had been all but forgotten by most people by the time the game actually came out.

In short, they're stupid and in poor taste, but all they are are marketing ploys, little more. And they're doing their job admirably — both games now have considerably higher visibility than they once had. As they say, all publicity is good publicity. If you really want to punish them, don't provide them with any coverage whatsoever.

The Cyberpunk 2077 trailer is a little more complex to discuss. Taken out of context, it could be seen as a representation of brutality against a sex worker — until it pans out and she reveals her MASSIVE FUCKING ROBOT SCYTHE BLADES, that is — but taken in the context of the original Cyberpunk 2077 source material from the '80s, it is, to my knowledge anyway, entirely in keeping with the aesthetic and atmosphere of that which it is based on. I observed some lengthy discussions about this on both Facebook and Google+ recently, and now that I know the context, it's clear that this trailer is entirely appropriate for the setting. One may argue that the use of a scantily-clad woman is somewhat unnecessary, and you might be right about that, but that doesn't mean that this is suddenly a huge violence against women issue. It's a stylistic choice; little more — a subversion of audience expectations. "A woman being abused by the police… oh wait, no, she's actually some sort of hideous mechanical monster with very little humanity remaining." (Spoilers.)

You could also argue that the requirement to be familiar with the source material before being able to recognise the trailer for what it is is something of a failing of the marketing, but then Cyberpunk 2077 was always likely to appeal to a very specific, niche audience — those who remembered the original tabletop RPG — anyway, so is there really anything wrong in catering to that specific, niche audience rather than attempting to make something bland, unremarkable and mainstream?

My point, essentially, is that by shouting and screaming about how "problematic" these things are, you're fuelling the fire. You're helping the things that you hate. You're making people aware of them, and not in the way you probably intend. It's a catch-22, really. If you say nothing, you might feel as if you're tacitly condoning things that you don't agree with; if you say something, you actually end up bringing it to a much wider audience, many of whom may become defensive when confronted with your viewpoints that counter their feelings.

The key thing, I think, is moderation. The trouble with the number of things that have been declared "problematic" recently is that it's losing its impact. We're apparently supposed to find so much stuff "offensive" these days that it's getting difficult to keep track — and who are the people who get to say what is and isn't offensive, anyway? Following the release of the Dead Island Riptide pictures today, for example, I saw a variety of comments from female gamers (as in, gamers who just happen to be female, not girls who make a big deal out of the fact they play games or specifically identify as "girl gamers") along the lines that it really didn't bother them and that they just found this sort of thing rather childish and amusing.

That, to me, is a more healthy attitude to take. All of the outrage I've seen today has been from men — always the same men, too, so much so that any time something like this comes up it's incredibly predictable who will be the first to jump on their virtual soapbox. It's easy to play the "champion of feminism" from behind a computer keyboard, but I have to question how many of these self-appointed arbiters of taste and decency have actually done anything beyond pen an angry blog post (yes, just like this one, I know) to help make life better for these groups they're supposedly standing up for.

Dead Island's bloody tits are a horrid thing you probably wouldn't want on your mantlepiece. Hitman: Absolution's nuns trailer was an exercise in how ridiculous a trailer they could get away with. I'm not defending either of them, because they're both shit, let's not beat around the bush. But I really don't believe they're symptomatic of anything more than marketing departments that are highly adept at taking advantage of "shock value". And attempting to make these into anything more than that will achieve little more than starting arguments that have little value to the real concerns, which are a much more complex set of sociological issues.

I like women and have never, ever thought of a woman as someone "inferior" to me. The thought of perpetrating violence against a woman in reality is, to me, abhorrent, but then the thought of perpetrating violence against a man is also, to me, abhorrent. But then I liked the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, too. Does that make me an awful, hideous misogynist?

No, of course it doesn't. But what do I know? I like Hyperdimension Neptunia.

1091: You've Got... You Know

Page_1Speaking as someone who grew up with the early days of popular online activity (BBSes, CompuServe and finally the "proper Internet") I find it mildly interesting (or at least worthy of a late-night blog post, which isn't necessarily the same thing) how much the role of email has changed over the course of the last 15-20 years or so. I am prompted into these thoughts by a casual glimpse at my own inbox, which currently contains a devilish 666 messages, none of which visible on the front page are, to my knowledge, written directly to me by an actual human being.

This is something of a change from the earlier days, when clicking "Send/Receive Mail" in Outlook Express was an exciting moment, and you knew if the progress bar came up you had email incoming. Who would it be from? Would it be from someone interesting? What would they have to say? Would there be an attachment? In just a minute or two (LOL DIALUP) you would find out, and then you'd lovingly file the email into an appropriate folder to keep for all eternity. (I say "you" again when, of course, what I actually mean is "I". I don't know if everyone else was quite so fastidious with their email organisation when they first got online, but I certainly ran a tight ship… for a while, anyway.)

Looking at my inbox today, though, it's clear that email has a very different purpose today to what it once had. Whereas once it was effectively one of the only forms of social media (the others being forums and live chat rooms) it is now a general repository for crap. You'll occasionally get a meaningful message in there from someone who actually has a brain and a soul, but more often than not, if my inbox as of right now is anything to go by, it'll be a string of automated messages notifying you that so-and-so has added a new track to a playlist in Spotify (unsubscribe!), so-and-so has commented on something you don't give a fuck about on Facebook (unsubscribe!) or that that website you signed up for just so you could download a .zip file containing some porn/games that you wanted wants to wish you a happy birthday.

A relatively recent addition to the types of email you get nowadays is the guilt-trip "PLEASE COME BACK!" email. This happens with everything from mobile apps to online games, but the execution is always the same. "Here's all the great stuff you're missing out on!" it'll say, usually worded in such a way as to make you think that you're somehow doing something wrong by not using a service you currently have no need for. Often there will be some sort of bribe involved in getting you back, particularly when it comes to online games of various descriptions.

A Facebook game I reviewed a while back known as Outernauts was particularly bad for this. Outernauts was highly-anticipated by a lot of people because it was from a high-profile studio (Insomniac, for those in the know) and was aiming to be a social game that appealed to the sort of people who typically only played standalone, "pay once, keep forever" games on computer and console. It wasn't awful, but the overzealous means through which it was monetised — the ever-obnoxious "energy" mechanic — prevented anyone from being able to enjoy it for more than a few minutes at a time. Consequently, after an initial surge of interest, the very players it was trying to attract dropped it. Some months after I reviewed it and criticised it for its aggressive monetisation, it "relaunched", apparently with "fast recharging energy". It was still a pain in the arse to play. Some months after that, it relaunched again, this time promising "near limitless energy". Note: "near limitless", not "limitless".

I'm getting off the point slightly, but the fact is, every time Outernauts decided to do something a little different, it sent a begging email to me pleading for me to take it back, because it can change, it won't annoy me any more, it won't do that thing that annoys me any more. It was too little, too late, though; my experiences with Outernauts while reviewing it left such a sour taste in the mouth that I had (and still have) no desire to return, "near limitless energy" or not. That probably won't stop them sending me another email the next time they change something, though. Unless I blocked them. I might have blocked them.

Another offender in this sort of thing is a service called Earndit which I evidently signed up for at some point in the past. (I think I mistakenly signed up for it while looking for Fitocracy while the latter was still in closed testing; the two are different services but do have a few things in common.) Earndit sends me an email every week with sickly-sweet, overly-apologetic language about how I haven't earned any points this week, and that if they have it wrong I should get in touch with them PLEASE LOVE ME etc. It's annoying.

The response to all this annoying email is, of course, to unsubscribe from the mailing lists I've found myself on, send these messages to the spam folder or just to stop using my actual email address to sign up for things. But it's a pain to keep on top of. You can be as careful as you like to tick/untick the boxes that give websites permission to spam you with crap, but some will still get through, and over time there'll be so much incoming stuff that it's almost impossible to keep on top of your "unsubscribe" needs. The knock-on effect of all this is, of course, that genuine messages from real people can easily drift by completely unnoticed. If this has happened to you, it is nothing personal; you can blame Zynga, EA, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Google and indeed any of the million-and-one completely unnecessary social networking apps for mobile devices that I've reviewed over the course of the last year.

I miss the old days; the days when being notified you had a new message was exciting. Checking your email used to be a pleasure; now it's a chore.

1085: Don't (Always) Ignore the Crap

Page_1I last wrote about this topic some time ago, so I figure it's time for a revisit, given what I've been playing and enjoying on my PlayStation 3 recently.

My point today is this: you shouldn't immediately dismiss stuff that is regarded as "crap" because there's every chance that if you tried it for yourself, you might just find yourself enjoying it. (Note: I'm not saying that stuff regarded as "crap" is always going to end up being good — some stuff we can all agree is shite — but in many cases it pays to go in with an open mind!)

Let's take Hyperdimension Neptunia as a timely example. Hyperdimension Neptunia received a spectacular 2/10 panning from Eurogamer's Simon Parkin, by all accounts a well-respected critic whose opinions a large number of people trust. Consequently, a lot of people didn't even bother to pick it up. This was such an issue that the (apparently considerably superior) sequel only had a limited print run and is now extremely difficult to find a copy of. (I tracked one down from Italy — European console games tend to be in English by default, perhaps with the packaging localised.)

And yet, while I can see its many flaws, I am having a lot of fun with Hyperdimension Neptunia. It's bright, brash, colourful, silly and rather entertaining despite being the sort of game some people I know would be embarrassed to be seen playing, particularly when the occasional "fanservice" images make an appearance, or every time the character Compa trips over and flashes her panties at the end of a fight. It's genuinely amusing, though — if deliberately cringeworthy at times — and packed with plenty of things to do. It combines two of my favourite styles of game — visual novel and JRPG — into one package with some really nice features. I love the ability to set custom images on "summon" spells, for example. Seeing the "I HAS A HERB" cat setting off a wind spell never gets old.

Hyperdimension Neptunia is far from the only example of a game which was poorly received but which I have ended up enjoying. In the post I linked to at the top, I mentioned Duke Nukem Forever and Alpha Protocol, both of which endured critical drubbings for various reasons — Duke for its grossout, sexist humour and Alpha Protocol for its broken gameplay aspects and appalling console versions. And yet in both cases — for I played them both to completion — I found myself having fun, being able to look past the flaws or "problematic" material and find an entertaining experience underneath. Am I somehow "wrong" to feel this way?

Well, of course I'm not. Opinions are entirely subjective, after all. I could tell you I found the critically-acclaimed movie Drive to be stultifyingly boring, for example (I did) but that doesn't stop you from enjoying it, rewatching it a bajillion times or putting it atop your "My Favourite Movies of All Time" list. Likewise, Nier's heavy reliance on fetch quests and seemingly tedious activities may cause you to switch off completely, while I found the experience to be an interesting example of a game requiring the player to "method act" the role of the protagonist, and found myself playing it obsessively as a result. We both might tell each other about how much we like our respective Things We Like, but it's unlikely we'll sway each other around to our way of thinking. And that's just fine.

The sad thing, though, is the fact that there are people out there who hold a considerable degree of influence over the public's spending decisions, and their opinion carries an undue amount of weight that might cause some people to miss out on things they might actually like. If Parkin gives Hyperdimension Neptunia 2/10, you better believe that's going to affect a large number of people's decisions as to whether they're going to buy it or not. (Probably the latter in this instance — in the notoriously top-loaded game review score scale, a score of 2/10 is theoretically reserved for an absolute stinker that is completely broken.) How many of those people whose opinion was swayed by Parkin's review would actually enjoy the game if they gave it a chance? How many people are actually going to give it a chance after reading that review?

The other thing worth mentioning particularly when it comes to titles like Hyperdimension Neptunia and Duke Nukem Forever is the fact that some critics seem to feel obliged to act as arbiters of taste and decency, when in fact everyone's tolerance for potentially "offensive" content is completely different. Both Hyperdimension Neptunia and Duke Nukem Forever attracted accusations of sexism on their original release to varying degrees of justification — the specifics of which I'm not going to get into right now because that's a whole other matter, particularly in the former's case — and these accusations negatively impacted the critic's view of the game in both instances. That's fair enough — as I said, everyone's "good taste" boundaries are different and said critics are entitled to voice those views — but when it comes to interactive entertainment, subject matter is just one part of the whole experience. And more to the point, in all forms of media, enjoying something that contains potentially objectionable subject matter doesn't imply that the person reading/watching/playing the thing in question is, by extension, a supporter of that particular viewpoint. In other words, you can like anime boobies and still see actual real-life women as actual real-life people. (I say "you" when, obviously, I mean "I".)

If you enjoy something, you enjoy something; you shouldn't feel guilt about your own tastes. Unless, you know, your "tastes" involve bludgeoning kittens, puppies and babies to death with a sledgehammer. (In real life, not in video games, obviously.) Or, you know, actively stirring up hate against a specific social group. Or just generally being a dick. Then you should probably feel a bit guilty. Basically, so long as you're not actually hurting anyone (physically or psychologically) or actively oppressing someone with the things you like, enjoy whatever you want within reason!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to plumb the depths of the bottom half of Metacritic to see what awesome experiences I can find to enjoy next…

1066: Doubleplusgood

There's been a lot of hand-wringing over both Facebook and Twitter recently, mostly due to both of them tweaking their terms of service in various ways that some people don't like very much. Me, I don't particularly mind too much because at the end of the day, I'm not paying for either of them, so as the saying goes, "if the product is free, then you are the product" — I accepted this some time back and think back on it any time one or the other of them does something apparently stupid. I use both daily to stay in touch with various people, so quitting either is out of the question.

For those feeling somewhat wary of the big F and the big T, however, I'd encourage you to give the big G another shot. (Unless you're one of those people who irrationally hates Google too, in which case… err, I hear Myspace is coming back soon?) Yes, G+ is still a smokin' hot social networking service that is far from the ghost town the media likes to portray it as. It's an active, thriving community that has only gotten better over time.

The latest addition to the service, and one which could well prove to be a "killer feature" with a little refinement, is Communities. Communities are little mini-networks within G+ that allow members to post content as they would do normally on G+, but keep it all within one community rather than sharing it publicly or having to use the slightly cumbersome "Circles" system. It's a good way of bringing people together who want to talk about the same thing, and it's pretty customizable, too — you can change the community's iconic image, title, headline and basic information, but also create categories for posts to help keep things organised, too. The latter feature needs a little tweaking — you can't reassign a post to a new category if you miscategorise it upon creating it, for example — but the groundwork is there for a solid community system.

And, crucially, people are using it. Google+ may not quite have the same number of daily active users as Facebook, but there are more than enough to make these communities active, vibrant places to hang out. The board games community I joined has over 2,000 members, for example, while there are over 3,500 bronies hanging out in the "Pony+" community. The anime community has over 20,000 members, as do various photography-related communities. G+ is an attractive destination for photographers, as it provides practically unlimited space for high-quality photo storage along with some basic editing tools — and the G+ interface is a nice means of showing off one's work, too.

G+ is built to be used on a variety of platforms, too. The mobile apps for both iOS and Android are quick to be updated with new features and are consistent in their behaviour and functionality. Pretty much everything you can do on the desktop website can be done from the mobile app — and the mobile app has the added bonus of looking rather lovely, too, for those who like that sort of thing.

So if you've got a Google account, give it a shot. And by "give it a shot" I mean do more than just open it up, complain that there's no-one to talk to and then close it down — like Twitter, you need to actually "follow" some interesting people before it starts to show its true value. The new Communities feature will help people find like-minded friends more easily, as this was one weakness of the old version — it was quite tricky to find new people to follow.

Here's some links to get you started. Here's my profile. Here's the Squadron of Shame Community. Here's the "Too Old For This" Community run by my buddies Chris and Jeff. Here's the board game Community.

Now get on there and get chatting! I'll leave you with this, from The Oatmeal.

1058: Badvertising Revisited

[Preamble: I know I said comics would be back, but I realise this was a rather foolish promise to make given that I am in the process of moving house and my Mac (which holds the Comic Life software I use to produce them) is now packed up. So you can live without them for a little while, I'm sure — at least until the chaos of the next couple of weeks is resolved!]

As I grow older, I find myself less and less tolerant to the tactics of marketing people. I can't quite work out if this is simply my own intolerance building up as a result of my advancing years, or if adverts really are significantly more annoying than they were in the past. I have a feeling there's a touch of both, because there's a whole lot of new technology to make advertising more annoying these days.

Specifically, let's consider Internet-based advertising. Now, the vast majority of content on the Internet is available for free (connection charges notwithstanding) so it has to make its money somehow — and it just so happens that advertising is a reasonable way to do that. (Whether or not it's a "good" way is a matter of some debate, as traditional advertising models seem to be becoming less and less effective among savvy Internet users, many of whom use ad-blocking software to make their life considerably less intruded-upon by marketing people.)

I have no real problem with advertising being used as a means of keeping content free. I'll sit through a couple of pre-roll adverts when watching, say, 4OD on YouTube. I'd have to sit through adverts on TV, and there are actually fewer adverts on YouTube than when it's broadcast live on TV. No problem there.

What I do have an issue with is when adverts start to get too big for their boots and start engaging in any of the following behaviour:

  • Making noise without me telling them to
  • Monopolising my web browser and/or actively getting in the way of what I'm trying to do
  • Urging me to "interact" with them
  • Urging me to share them on Facebook.

All of these things are monumentally irritating, albeit for different reasons.

In the case of noisy adverts, they are a pain simply because they make noise and it's usually difficult to shut them off. And there tends to only be a couple of them available at once, meaning that it's entirely possible that several times in a session you'll hear that stupid woman from the air freshener advert whingeing about being "stuck in bad odours" or something. You can stay there, love.

Monopolising my web browser is something that really pisses me off because it ruins the experience of the site. The most recent example I've seen is on GameFAQs' mobile site, which occasionally gets completely taken over by a Samsung advert. You'll be looking at the page, trying to tap on a link when suddenly these stupid arrows appear, inviting you to "swipe". "Fuck off," you'll say — possibly out loud — until you realise that you can't do anything on this page until you do as it says, and then you're stuck in a stupid interactive "experience" about a phone you probably don't give a shit about. (Alternatively, you refresh the page until it goes away.)

This brings me on to another point: interactive adverts. Why? Why would I want to play your stupid game where I get to actually clean the grime off the filthy worktop? Why would I want to pick which one of your vapid Z-list celebrities tells me about your awful product? "Get ready to interact!" they'll say. "Get ready to fuck off!" I'll say, particularly if, as they so frequently are, are also browser-monopolising and noisy ads.

Finally is the seemingly-obligatory necessity to connect everything to Facebook and Twitter. I've lost count of the number of adverts I've seen recently that include hashtags, Facebook pages or even, in some cases, buttons to share the advert on Twitter or Facebook directly. Pro-Tip: if you click either of those buttons, you are a dickhead. And if you don't know why, well, I don't think I can help you.

Advertising serves a purpose, and if it keeps out of my way I'm happy to let it sit there to help pay the bills for a particular site — I don't use an ad-blocker and will probably keep it that way for the moment. But the moment advertising starts actively obstructing what I'm trying to do, that's when I start thinking about installing one. And that's not going to make me think positively about your product; it means I'm not going to see it at all.

1050: I Said A-Snark, Snark, A-Snarkitty Snark, A Snark-Snark-Snarkitty-Snark

Page_1Another day, another day of snark on the Internet. This time the sources were twofold: firstly, the Pope joined Twitter (and, apparently, his first tweet will be on December 12, begging the question why the account has been set up and announced now) and secondly, it emerged that Kate Middleton (or whatever we're supposed to call her now) is pregnant and suffering from "acute morning sickness", apparently.

Neither of these things are of particularly earth-shattering importance, and both of them can be easily ignored. I have spent most of the day ignoring them both completely, and am only mentioning them now out of frustration — not at the things themselves, of course, but rather at the reaction to them.

The Pope's presence on Twitter was, of course, greeted by numerous sarcastic replies and fake retweets; the news of the "royal baby" (as it is now known) was greeted by general disdain and constant repetition of "THIS ISN'T NEWS". Well, whether or not it is is a matter of opinion, of course, but if you don't think it's news and have no wish to contribute to making it news, you could always, you know, stop talking about it.

I don't know if my weariness with this sort of thing is just a symptom of getting older or general fatigue at having seen so much snark over the past couple of years in particular, but either way… yes, I am tired of it. Because it doesn't let up, either. You can unfollow and block the people who are being a pain, but they'll get retweeted and quoted; you can close your social media windows altogether, but then you can't talk to your friends. (And when you are, at least for the next couple of weeks, a long way away from your nearest friends, yes this is a big deal.)

It is probably related to my general fatigue with the Internet-based slacktivists (previously discussed here) who rant and rave about a particular issue (usually, at the time of writing, sexism) until they're blue in the face but then don't appear to actually do anything beyond declare certain blog posts and articles "mandatory reading" and then ignore any attempts to actually engage in discussion or education.

The ironic thing with this behaviour is that it drowns out the actual message they're trying to convey. In the case of the fervent anti-sexism brigade, who are quick to splatter anyone who disagrees with them with the "privileged white male" brush — perhaps fairly in some cases, perhaps not in others — it means that the underlying message of tolerance, acceptance and equality gets lost in all the noise of people shouting and screaming and demanding that everyone unfollow a particular person on Twitter because they said something they don't agree with. (It wasn't me.)

Not only does it drown out the message they're trying to convey, it makes me care less, which is the complete opposite of what they're trying to do, surely. I don't know if anyone else feels this way, but I certainly do. The more these people froth at the mouth and shout and bellow and point fingers and demand that people read this article by their friend, the less of a shit I give — because I don't want to be associated with them. Not because I disagree with their ideals — as I've mentioned a number of times previously, I agree with what they're arguing for in most cases! — but because the confrontational, aggressive way in which they try to get their points across is just so completely loathsome to me that I don't want anything to do with it.

So I block them. I literally silence them. Which is exactly one of the things that they complain about, usually without any sense of irony that their own furious, righteous anger is itself intimidating and silencing people who genuinely want to discuss, engage and understand these complex, non-binary issues in greater depth.

I didn't take the decision to block a bunch of these people lightly, and I occasionally feel guilty that I have done so. Many of them are supposedly "respected" figures, and some are friends with people that I consider to be friends. But I haven't unblocked them.

Why? Because I have tried to engage them in discussion. I have tried to see these complex issues from a variety of different perspectives and talk about them accordingly. I have tried to have a rational, reasoned debate. And yet the last time I attempted to do this — I forget the exact topic now, as I unfollowed the Facebook comment thread shortly afterwards feeling genuinely upset — I was shouted down with the words "get a grip". No attempt to engage. No attempt to discuss or debate. No attempt to help me understand their points of view. A simple shutdown.

I gave up at that point. That is when I wrote this post. That is when I simply decided to avoid confrontation altogether and "stay out of trouble", as it were.

This isn't how it should be, surely. People should be aware of these issues and feel able to discuss them openly without fear. Fighting hate with hate is counter-productive and achieves nothing except alienating people like me while causing both "sides" of the debate to dig their heels in and argue ever-more aggressively.

1015: JARNAWRITINGLIZMZ

The discussion surrounding the recent "Games Journalists Might Be Corrupt" debacle continues, it seems, with a recent piece by Ben Kuchera over on the Penny Arcade Report summarising nicely why it's an issue worth discussing. I don't really want to get into that conversation again right now because it's already being researched and reported on by people with more time and resources on their hands than me.

What I do want to talk about, though, is the ancillary discussion which always crops up any time Issues surrounding "games journalism" crops up — that is, a matter of what is "games journalism" and the divide between "journalist", "blogger" and any other definitions you'd care to give.

I saw an interesting quote earlier today on Twitter. I forget who it was from so I can't link to it, unfortunately, but it read something like this:

"Don't get into games journalism because you like games. Get into it because you love writing."

That's exactly the reason I enjoy writing about games — because I love writing, as the 1014 posts prior to this will attest. I mean, sure, I love games, too, but I could love games without wanting to write about them, and yet I voluntarily compose thousands of words on the subject every week — here, over at Games Are Evil and for my day job. If I didn't love it, I wouldn't do it.

There's something of an air of snobbery surrounding writing about games, though, and it's all to do with that "J" word. When outlets like Polygon publish a piece like this, you get people expressing genuine surprise that someone has "done some actual games journalism". For sure, well-researched investigative pieces are very much worthy of note and should be praised — but just as in regular newspapers, they are not the be-all and end-all of writing. In mainstream culture and current affairs, we have plenty of critical and opinion pieces alongside the deep-dive investigative pieces — so why is this sort of thing looked down upon in games writing?

It's the obsession with that "J" word. "Journalism" carries with it certain expectations — specifically, reporting and investigation, and perhaps uncovering some facts that might not have come to light otherwise. But there's just as much value in someone composing an in-depth personal response to something they've played in detail, or indeed an opinion piece on a pertinent current issue in the industry.

It's not "one size fits all", in short, and I think part of the problem in the "writing about games" sector (whatever you want to call it) is that too many outlets are trying to be one size fits all. We see sites like VG247 posting articles on everything from the latest DLC drop for Call of Duty to sales figures via who has got a new job on a magazine — something which the vast majority of gamers who are not involved in the industry probably wouldn't give a toss about. We have sites like GamesBeat experimenting with a review format that features feedback from a games critic, a business analyst and an academic, and it's not entirely clear who that's for.

We need greater focus and less generalisation. The outlets that are good at "real journalism" such as Kuchera's Penny Arcade Report (and to a lesser extent Polygon) should keep doing what they do because it's important — and it'd be good to see more outlets focusing on this side of things with properly-trained staff. But at the same time, the sites who are effectively "magazines" as opposed to "newspapers" should keep doing what they're doing too. Their work is no less valid or important, but their purpose is different — while the "journalistic" outlets' primary purpose is to inform, the "magazine" outlets' primary purpose is to entertain. There's a degree of crossover between both, of course, but I can't help but feel that focusing on either one or the other rather than ending up doing a half-assed job at both would benefit everyone in the long run.

I actually wrote a piece on this subject a while back regarding the ever-controversial Kotaku, a site which consistently draws heat for its seemingly "irrelevant" articles and often irreverent attitude. I still stand by what I say in that post — if Kotaku was more honest and open about its target audience (18-30 year old men) and tailored its content accordingly, then I feel it would be a better publication as a result.

It's also what I'm trying to do over at Games Are Evil with a limited team and resources. We're not under any illusions about being the first to report on anything or the most timely with our coverage, but in acknowledging that fact and taking a more "magazine-like" approach — weekly, focused columns punctuated by brief news snippets on subjects that are a little "off the beaten track" and regular features such as our daily Song of the Day — I feel we're building a better, more distinctive publication rather than yet another "me too" blog, and one that I'm actually pretty proud of so far.

Anyway. The "games journalism is broken" discussion will probably continue in perpetuity, particularly given recent events. I do know one thing, though, and that's that I am really glad I am not Lauren Wainwright right now.