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.

1158: Forking One's Dongle

Some of you may have been following this recent unfolding story via the social Web and other avenues, but I thought I'd mention it here for those who haven't seen it. I am talking about the recent incident at PyCon, a conference for Python developers all over the world.

There's a comprehensive rundown of what happened over at VentureBeat (and follow-up here), but in case you can't be bothered to read all those difficult words, here are the pertinent points:

"Evangelist" is an actual job title these days outside of the religious community. Sweet Jesus. No pun intended.
Adria Richards, a "developer evangelist" for a company called SendGrid that has something to do with email (I don't really understand it, to be perfectly honest, but that's not massively important) "called out" two male developers during a keynote session at PyCon for making allegedly "sexual" jokes about "forking repos" and "big dongles". She did this by taking a photograph of them and then posting it to Twitter.
"Forking a repo" apparently refers to taking a piece of source code and developing it into a new piece of software not, you know, fucking it, despite the fact "I'd like to fork that" is a somewhat innuendo-laden phrase, particularly if you say it like a Cockney while rubbing your thighs, which reports don't suggest these two gentlemen did.
"Dongle", a piece of hardware that allows a particular function to happen, is an indisputably funny word because it has the word "Dong" in it. "Dongle" is also ripe for innuendo because it has the word "Dong" in it.
The inevitable Twitter shitstorm kicked off as a result of Richards' tweet.
Richards started receiving rape and death threats but continued to feed the trolls.
One of the developers in the photograph was fired after the incident.
One of the developers (I'm not sure if it's the same one who was fired offhand) apologised to Richards.
SendGrid suffered a DDOS attack following the incident.
SendGrid fired Richards today, explaining that the company supported her right to speak out against content she found objectionable, but not in the very public, provocative manner in which she did so.
???
Profi– wait, no, that's something else.

Now, I've said a number of times on here that I recognise and accept that women in the tech industry generally — not just the video games sector — are in a difficult position, having to compete against something of a "boys' club" mentality. And these women should speak out when something inappropriate is said or done to them.

This incident, though? I could tell yesterday when it all kicked off that it was going to be a real mess. The big issue we have here is that the things the male developers said weren't really sexist comments. They weren't directed at a woman, they clearly weren't maliciously intended and for all we know, they really were talking about literally wanting to fork the repo under discussion rather than making the rather childish joke it seems they were making. (And come on. When your profession requires you to talk about "dongles" with a straight face, even the most sour-faced git has to crack a smile every so often.)

There's also the issue of Richards and whether or not she invaded their privacy. The comments were made between the two men as a "private" joke — or as private as a joke can be in a crowded conference hall, anyway. Richards, the argument goes, eavesdropped on their conversation then shared details of it to the social Web when what she should have actually done was spoken to the two men herself, told them that the things they were saying made her uncomfortable, given them the opportunity to apologise if they wanted to, and that should have been that.

The flip side to the issue, of course, is that by making innuendo-laden jokes at a tech conference like this, these gents could be seen to be perpetuating the "boys' club" mentality — even if the comments weren't directly addressed to a woman. But in response to that I would again point out that at worst they were indulging in a childish, harmless pun that even a primary school kid would shake their head at, and at best they were simply using programmer slang with absolutely no intended sexual connotations whatsoever. Besides, I know plenty of women who are a dab hand at the old innuendo game themselves. And even Richards herself was caught making jokes about stuffing socks down someone's pants for when the TSA felt them up at the airport.

In short, the whole thing ended up being rather surreal, and no-one really came out of it a winner. Richards came out of it looking like one of the stereotypical feminists that those ridiculous "men's rights" groups get up in arms about, getting offended at something that really wasn't worth getting offended over. The developers who made the comments have had their names and faces dragged through the mud. And in the meantime, two people have lost their jobs and at least one of them is suffering a considerable amount of bullying and abuse as a result of this whole situation.

Ultimately, Richards' "speaking out" against the two developers' behaviour has probably done more harm than good, not least because the manner in which she did it cost her her own job and attracted the wrath of the very worst the Internet has to offer. I sympathise with her from that perspective, having suffered cyberbullying on a far smaller scale than this incident — but I also think she was a complete pillock for inciting this whole shitstorm in the first place. To reiterate: that doesn't justify the atrocious behaviour and abuse that has been directed her way, but at the same time, she's not at all blameless in this matter.

The social Web is a powerful tool and can be a force for good. But it can also destroy lives. Think about that before you do or say anything stupid.

1155: The Tablet Revolution

I've come to the conclusion that I'm a dusty old bastard who is set in his ways like an old man. That or everyone else is just plain wrong. Or perhaps a combination of the two.

I'm specifically referring to the "tablet revolution" — that futuristic gubbins that supposes everyone is going to replace their computer/console/handheld/everything with a tablet such as an iPad or whateverthefuck the bajillion Android tablets are called these days. I even read an article earlier where someone from Zynga said that tablets are "becoming the ultimate game platform".

I must respectfully disagree — at least for my needs and wants, anyway.

Our house has three tablets — an iPad 2, a Motorola Xoom and a Nexus 7. The Nexus 7 is currently in for repair, but got a fair amount of use by Andie, largely for free-to-play mobile games and Kairosoft titles. The iPad 2 also gets a fair amount of use by Andie for the same reasons. My Xoom gets barely any use, though the fact I have SNES, Mega Drive and various other emulators on there ready to go at a moment's notice is pretty cool.

But yeah. The fact stands: I hardly use these devices at all. Why? Because for my purposes, they don't offer a superior experience to other bits of kit. For gaming, I have consoles, dedicated handhelds, a laptop PC and a desktop PC. For work, I have my Mac, the aforementioned laptop PC and the desktop PC at a pinch. For browsing the Internet, I have… you know how this goes by now. For me, all of these devices offer a considerably superior experience to all of the tablets we have in this house.

Oh, sure, tablets can ably perform several of these functions, but they don't do any of them as well as the pre-existing devices. About all they do offer, really, is the fact that they're incredibly quick to turn on (assuming they have some charge left in them, which my Xoom in particular rarely does) and are a lot more portable and lightweight than many other devices.

But personally speaking, the fact that, say, the iPad is thin and lightweight isn't enough to make up for the fact that it's a lot more difficult to type on than an actual physical keyboard. And yes, I know, you can pay through the nose and get an iPad-compatible wireless keyboard (or a generic one for Android) but not only does that remove one of the main benefits of a tablet — its all-in-one portability — there's other issues too: the pain in the arse it is to access the file system (on iOS, anyway; this is one area where Android is marginally better), the fact that proprietary iOS and Android apps rarely play nicely with established formats (just try getting a Microsoft Word file with any formatting or layout whatsoever to look even a little bit right in Pages for iOS), the fact that some of the work I do requires the precision of a mouse rather than the cack-handedness of a touchscreen, the fact that some websites I want to use are designed for use on a computer with a keyboard and mouse rather than a touchscreen and a virtual keyboard.

And don't get me started on the games. "The ultimate gaming platform"? Don't make me laugh, Zynga. While mobile and tablet games have been enormously successful in getting more and more new people into video games, and that's a good thing for the industry as a whole, there is no way you can say with any good conscience that tablets are an adequate replacement for more established systems — and better-designed control schemes in particular. Have you ever tried to play a first-person shooter on a touchscreen tablet with no buttons? It is one of the most bewildering experiences you'll ever encounter: why would anyone want to put themselves through that? There are certain genres that work well, of course: strategy games, board game adaptations, word games and adventure games are all good uses of a touchscreen interface… as are the never-ending throng of isometric-perspective building/farming/dragon-raising games that are little more than vehicles for monetisation. There are very few tablet-based games that hold my attention for more than a couple of minutes, in short — the last was Ghost Trick, which doesn't really count as it was a conversion of a Nintendo DS game.

I guess that's sort of the point, though. The main benefit of tablet devices (and smartphones, for that matter) is their immediacy — you turn them on, you tap a button and you're (almost) straight into a game, and you can be out of it again within a matter of minutes if you just needed to fill an awkward silence or wait for someone to come back from the toilet. And that's good, in a way; it just doesn't really fit with how I play games. As I noted in a reply to Anne on yesterday's post, I play games as my main form of entertainment. I don't watch much TV, I don't watch movies, listening to music is something I tend to do while engaged in some other activity, and so games are my main "relaxing time" activity. I want to sit and play something for an hour or two (or more) at a time, and between freemium energy please-insert-credit-card-to-continue bullshit and the "bite-size", disposable, forgettable nature of most mobile/tablet games, I just don't get a satisfying experience from them.

Meanwhile, the laptop I bought a short while back is easily my favourite piece of kit in this house. It's powerful enough to play pretty-looking games like TrackMania, yet portable enough to carry around in a bag. Its battery life is decent (though not a patch on a tablet) and it has a nice screen. It's a good means of playing visual novels without having to tie up the TV, and it copes well with anything I might want to throw at it while working on the go. In short, it's an all-in-one device that does absolutely everything I want it to without making any compromises or dumbing the experience down at all. Sure, it takes a bit longer to turn on than the iPad, but it's also infinitely more useful and fun to me.

Fuck the tablet revolution, basically. Long live the laptop. And the games console. And the desktop PC. And the dedicated handheld. And, you know, sometimes, just a piece of paper.

1151: Twitter Let Me Down (Or: Why I'm Not Going Back)

Let's recap.

About a month ago, I was the victim of an organised "cyberbullying" campaign on Twitter. (Aside: I hate the term "cyberbullying", but it seems to be the accepted terminology so I will use it for now.) Members of an Internet-based organisation known as the "GNAA" (NSFW Wikipedia link) started harassing me, attempting to spread slanderous rumours that I was a paedophile, and copying me in on their pronouncements, presumably attempting to get a rise out of me. I blocked and ignored them as is the sensible thing to do in this sort of situation, but still they kept coming.

They started phoning people close to me — specifically, my brother and the owner of Games Are Evil, both of whose phone numbers are stored in the "WHOIS" information for their respective websites. Not just one phone call, either — several, each increasing the intensity of the threats to get the authorities called on me for my supposed (and, I'm sure I don't have to add, fictional) perversions.

The reason for this group's attack on me, it transpires, was the fact I had the word "Brony" on my Twitter bio. ("Brony", for those who don't know, is the term for adult-age fans of the recent My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic TV show, a group which I identify myself as being a part of. Seriously, that show's great.) This group had been attacking Bronies for a while and attempting to slander them in similar ways. They were also responsible for a high-profile attack on the social networking/blogging platform Tumblr back in December — said hack was also an attack on the Brony community.

Because this unprovoked assault on both me and my reputation was frightening and unpleasant, I reported it to Twitter. Because it was spilling out of the online sphere and into the "real world" with the phone calls, I also reported it to my local police station. The latter weren't able to do much about it — I wasn't really expecting them to be able to, to be honest — but I did at least feel somewhat reassured that I'd done all the things they would have suggested I do in this situation: change my username, block the perpetrators, do not engage with them, let other people know what's going on. Eventually, the perpetrators tracked down my new username and hijacked my old one, using it to impersonate me with the most obviously fake "this is what a paedophile does" sort of posts you'd ever see.

I reported the impersonation to Twitter as a separate issue, which required me to fax them a copy of my passport at my own expense to prove my identity. (Fax? Seriously?) It took them a few days to respond to this, but they eventually suspended my old Twitter username to prevent it from posting further offensive content in my name; in the meantime, I closed my Twitter account completely.

What I'm particularly disappointed about is Twitter's handling of the rest of the issue. I reported the problems I had been having back when that original post I linked to was written — mid February — and only received a response last night. The response I received was boilerplate text that simply said there had been no violation of Twitter policy, and that they didn't mediate in disputes between users. No attempt to address my concerns. No response to the fact that I had clearly laid out a series of tweets that showed an organised — and demonstrably unprovoked — campaign of hate against me. No concern for my wellbeing.

There is a difference between a "dispute between users" or a "difference of opinion" and an organised campaign to victimise someone based on their tastes and preferences. The offenders in this particular case went above and beyond simple name-calling into full-on harassment of not only me, but also my family and friends — and not only on the Internet, but also over the phone. None of this appears to have been taken into account in the month that Twitter's safety team have had to review this situation. In the meantime, the unpleasant individuals responsible for causing me such upset remain at large and unpunished, free to do it again to someone different for just the same stupid reasons they attacked me.

For this reason, I will not be returning to Twitter as a means of personal communications or social networking. While I appreciate a network of that size is difficult and time-consuming to police, that doesn't mean that the site's user safety department should get to just sit back and say "deal with it." This incident caused me considerable personal distress, and doubtless it upset and confused my family and friends who were dragged into it, too. The complete lack of concern Twitter's user safety department has shown towards a demonstrable case of organised harassment and bullying means that I do not feel comfortable trusting them in future; consequently, I will not be returning.

I doubt they care, of course; one user is but a drop in the ocean. I felt the need to share my frustration regarding this issue, however. Cyberbullying is a real problem that destroys lives — literally in many cases — and for Twitter to just turn a blind eye like this doesn't strike me as particularly acceptable.

If you used to follow me on Twitter, please feel free to share this post with any of our mutual friends. I would like to spread the word about this if at all possible.

Thanks, as always, for listening.