#oneaday Day 540: Googlopoly

It's strange how the dominance of some companies (Facebook, Activision and, occasionally, Apple) is seen as a negative influence, yet in other cases (Google, Valve and, occasionally, Apple) their prevalence is seen as very much a Good Thing. This is particularly apparent when it comes to looking at Google and what it offers to the denizens of the Web.

Up until a while back, I'd flitted between various email addresses on a semi-regular basis thanks to moving house a lot and getting a new broadband connection in every house. New connection from whichever company had the best deal at the time meant new email address, and it became a running joke between my brother and I that I would eventually get to the point where I'd have an email address for every day of the week.

Fortunately, I managed to nip that in the bud, first with a Yahoo account and then with a MobileMe (formerly .mac) account which, I hasten to add, I got for free during the time I worked at Apple (and a little while afterwards due to them apparently not figuring out I didn't work for them any more until almost a year later — wish they'd carried on paying me, too, that would have been nice). Anyway. I ditched the Yahoo account because of the ridiculous amount of spam it attracted, and Yahoo's spam filters are beyond awful. I used MobileMe and was quite happy with it for a while, as I hadn't used an IMAP account before and it proved to be very useful, particularly when the iPhone came along.

But then I discovered GMail, and since then, I find it very difficult to understand a couple of things: firstly, why people are resistant to Google when it offers a usability experience of such an order of magnitude better than everything else on the market; and secondly, why more people haven't just ripped off Google's ideas wholesale.

Take something as simple as the way you manage your inbox. It's very easy for one's inbox to become completely flooded with bullshit, with unread counts tumbling (err, upwards) into the thousands, particularly if you're subscribed to any mailing lists or get sent endless press releases. It's tempting to select all and delete everything, but you just know that if you do that, you'll really need one of those emails at some point in the near future. You could file it, too, but then you run into the problem of getting increasingly obsessive-compulsive about your filing systems, wondering if a "Friends" folder is good enough or whether you'd rather subdivide it into individual friends… and so on. But no — in GMail, we have the wonder that is the Archive button, which makes the email go away but doesn't delete it. That way, you can find it by searching, but it doesn't clutter up your inbox any more. Genius.

And talking of searching, the most frustrating thing about MobileMe Mail's otherwise pretty good web interface is the fact that you can only search one folder at a time. This is absolutely useless if you want to use it for the purpose of finding out which fucking folder you put that really important email in. In GMail, it's a snap.

You can download all attachments at once. You can preview files in your web browser. You can set up your browser to redirect mailto: links to GMail rather than your soon-to-be-defunct mail client. And the fact it's web-based means that you can get at it from anywhere.

And this, of course, is just GMail. I have to confess that I haven't used some of Google's other services such as Google Calendar a great deal, but I have been spending some time with both Google+ and Google Docs, and frankly we're at a stage now where, for the average user, standalone productivity software is nigh-on irrelevant. Assuming you have an Internet connection — and with broadband and 3G adapters so affordable now, chances are you do — then you have access to all your stuff from anywhere.

The downside, of course, is if your Internet connection fails, or if Google's servers fall over (like they did the other night when they ran out of disk space on the server which stored G+ notification emails) then you could have a problem. But in my time using Google's various services so far, I've never had a problem so serious it compromised my productivity — and most of the time, it's fixed within a matter of minutes or even seconds at times.

Most importantly, though, I don't feel like Google wants to be my sole window onto the Web, which is where I think it differs from Facebook in quite a key way. Zuckerberg's Facebook wants to be the only destination that people will ever need on the Web — hence all the apps, brand pages, games and other bollocks that clutters up the once-clean and simple service. Google, on the other hand, wants to help me out with things I need to do, and then set me loose on the rest of the Web — perhaps sharing some of the cool things I find via G+. It facilitates rather than dictates, and for that reason, barring them doing something really, really stupid I predict that Google services will be a big part of my online life for some time to come.

#oneaday Day 534: Who's Buying the Crap?

I'm pretty sure I already knew this some time ago, but I've come to the not-so-startling conclusion recently that I'm the one buying the crap games and listening to terrible music and enjoying awful films. It's not a conscious decision to be contrary, but I do find myself more willing than some to give creative works that have been somewhat maligned the benefit of the doubt — and more often than not actually end up enjoying them.

The first time I recall this happening was one summer when I was home from university. I got very bored and decided that I was going to go to the cinema by myself, just pick a movie that happened to be on, sit down, watch it and attempt to enjoy it. It was partly borne from a desire to prove wrong the unwritten rule that going to the cinema by yourself is somehow shameful (if it is, why is watching a DVD by yourself OK?) and partly just out of a desire to get out of the house.

The movie I went to see? 2 Fast 2 Furious. It was terrible, of course, but I enjoyed it a great deal. And the reason for this was the fact that I didn't feel "accountable" to anyone — there was no-one with me judging my tastes or making me believe that I should feel a certain way about this piece of entertainment that was bombarding me with nonsense. ("Wow, bro, it's like a ho-asis in here!") Judged entirely on its own merits and on whether or not it performed the function I wanted it to at that specific moment in time — to entertain me without making me have to think too much — it succeeded admirably.

More recently, I found similar joy in Duke Nukem Forever. The thing that annoyed me most about the vitriolic reviews scattered around the web was the fact that all the critics seemed to feel somehow "responsible" for their audience, like they had a moral obligation to dislike it because of its more questionable elements or its rough edges. I played it and enjoyed it — genuinely — and was surprised there weren't a few more people willing to stand up and be counted, saying "look, yes, it is crass, it is rude, it is inappropriate, but for fuck's sake lighten up." But that's by the by — if you found it objectionable, that's your business, but it doesn't make me wrong either.

Most recently, the recent Steam sale encouraged me to pick up Alpha Protocol, a game I've been curious about for some time. Roundly panned on its release for poor AI, questionable game mechanics and outdated graphics, most people seemed to think it was one to pass by. But for three quid I wasn't about to let that happen. So far I've enjoyed it greatly. I don't mind that the shooting and the AI isn't great because I'm not very good at shooters or stealth games. What Alpha Protocol has provided for me so far is a 24-esque espionage plot with action sequences where I at least feel like I'm a badass spy, even if the execution means it's quite difficult to mess things up, from what I can tell. The key thing about the game is its story, and for that, I'm willing to forgive its flaws — some may say too forgiving.

This is a pattern I've continued for as long as I remembered. Back when I bought CDs (oh so many years ago) I tended to purchase music on something of a whim rather than with the charts or peer reactions in mind. I bought things out of curiosity, because I liked the cover art, because I thought the singer was hot. And there's very few of those decisions I regretted, because it gave me the opportunity to experience some things that many other people might never have been exposed to.

I'm cool with that. It gives me interesting things to talk about when people want to know about obscure games, cheesy music or crap films. Everyone knows Halo and Call of Duty are good. But how many people can vouch for the awesomeness of Doom: The Roguelike?

#oneaday Day 533: More Thoughts on Google+

So I've been using the service for a few days now and the fact I've made it a Pinned Tab in Chrome should tell you how much I like it. I think it's got a huge amount of potential, and I sincerely hope that it takes off. I also sincerely hope it doesn't just morph into an identikit Facebook — but hopefully that won't happen, because although Google is gradually spreading itself over all aspects of the web, they haven't (yet) done anything that particularly offends me from a privacy or usability perspective. In fact, every change they've made to their services while I've been a user has been for the better.

So let's go over some thoughts, tips and tricks in handy bullet-point form, for those of you who are just getting started — or those who have been using it for a while. Or those who tried it once and immediately gave up. Or, well, just anyone interested, really.

Circles are made to be used. Use them! Make as many as is practical for you. Don't stick with the Facebook approach of keeping everyone in one Friends list. There will be some crossover between Circles as a natural process, particularly if you and your friends share some common interests, but they're there to be useful. Case in point: today I shared my GamePro articles only with those who are specifically interested in video games (which, as it happens, is most of my friends currently on G+) — once more people get in there, that facility will be a godsend.
The photo interface is gorgeous. The photo viewer looks great and has a nice layout, and the way the photos are tiled on the album page is attractive and distinctive. My only quibble is that you can't rename an album — or so I thought. As it happens, since G+ photo albums are actually albums on Picasa, to change an album name all you need to do is go to Picasa's website and change it there. Hopefully Google will add the facility to do this within G+ shortly — because, as I found out tonight, long album titles break the page layout.
You can format stuff with special characters, not HTML. Putting *asterisks* either side of a word/phrase/sentence/paragraph makes it bold. Putting _underscores_ either side of something makes it italic. Putting -dashes- either side of something makes it strikethrough. You don't appear to be able to underline things.
Buzz is shit. I turned on Google Buzz because it adds a tab to your profile where your Twitter feed, Google Reader shared items and various other goodies can be automatically shared. However, this only appears on your profile and takes literally hours to update, making the auto-import from Twitter in particular utterly useless.
No ads is nice. I know it won't last, but using a social network with no ads makes for a lovely, clean experience.
Face recognition when tagging photos is a good start, but needs work. It doesn't recognise some faces, and it would be nice if it "learned" faces like iPhoto does. Still, it automatically spotting where faces are is a good start.
Resharing should be an option. You can post something then disable reshares and/or comments for it after it's been posted — but that might be too late. You should be able to choose whether or not a post is resharable or commentable before you post it.
+1 is a useful bookmarking function. More sites are starting to use it now, and having a tab on your profile for all your +1s is handy. However, as the feature grows, this list is going to become long and cumbersome. It needs to be searchable, taggable or able to be organised into some sort of hierarchy. +1s also need a Share button if you want to post them to your Circles, as currently your +1s around the Web have nothing to do with G+ besides appearing on this tab.
The current absence of brand pages is wonderful. Another thing that won't last, as every corporation believes it needs a presence on every major social network. But for now, the fact that G+ remains a truly person-based social network is thoroughly pleasant.
Notification bar across all Google apps is great. This means you're always engaged with the service, yet it's not overly intrusive. The fact this is already integrated hopefully means further service integrations in the future — Events auto-syncing with Google Calendar, for example, would be smashing.
Things I'm looking forward to: Themes, non-obtrusive extensions, the iOS app, further integration between Google services, the service being open to everyone.
Things I'm not looking forward to: Social games, brand pages, ads.

#oneaday Day 528: Thoughts on Google+

You can't say I don't provide you with variety here, dear readers. Just yesterday I was talking about underage boys simulating anal sex in a school library in order to avoid doing work, and today I'm telling you about what may or may not be the next big thing in social networking: Google+, Google Plus, Googlyplus, G+ or whatever the hell you want to call it.

If you haven't got in yet, don't ask me for an invite at the moment as they've switched them off for now. Keep an eye on Twitter or Facebook, though — I'll let you know if I have any more spare.

So, to business. What is Google+? Well, the cynical would say it's a rebranded Facebook, and indeed we've already seen at least one article today bemoaning the fact that Google+ has some features in common with Facebook. I'm not sure why they felt the need to draw attention to this, as the features they show are pretty commonplace in all social networks.

But are those cynics right? Well… yes and no. Google+ does indeed resemble Facebook. You have a news feed, people can comment on posts, people can Like things (or "+1" in this case) and people can share content. The key difference between Google+ and Facebook is how it handles the way you interact with people. There are no "friend requests" on Google+, simply Circles. Circles is an evolution of Facebook's Groups system, in which you can categorise your friends, acquaintances and family members into, well, categories. Then, when you post something on the network, you can choose which individuals or Circles it's visible to — or even make it completely public. This is a nice idea. It allows people to tailor the content they spew out to different social groups without feeling that they need to have a "work" profile and a "professional" profile. So long as, of course, you remember to keep the stories about the hooker you threw up on to your "Drinking Buddies" Circle and don't accidentally copy in your boss.

So the way you deal with people is different. But there's more; the photo interface is simple, elegant and much better than Facebook's slightly clumsy lightbox. While I think that the lightbox was a good addition to Facebook's interface, many disagreed, and the fact it's difficult to view the image and look at the comments at the same time unless you have the highest-resolution screen in the world is not great. Google+ takes a different approach. Not only does the service allow you to upload pictures at considerably higher resolution than the artifacted messes that Facebook's compression creates, but the interface allows for simple inline commenting while still viewing the picture. It's a simple case of putting the comments in a sidebar rather than underneath the picture, and it works beautifully well.

Then there's the fact that the Photos feature on Google+ integrates with Google's Picasa service. Anything you post on Picasa will be available on Google+, and vice-versa. You can even use Picnik to edit the photo, add text and generally arse about with it, save it back to Picasa (even overwriting the original if you don't need it any more) and the modified version will be right there in your feed without you needing to refresh the page. Clever. Since Picnik is a third-party service, though, this isn't integrated quite as well as it could be — an "Edit with Picnik" option when viewing a photo on Google+ would be nice, for example — but it's early days yet. And Google+ allows simple iPhoto-style edits of colours and the like to be applied to pictures without having to leave the page, which is nice, particularly for those who either don't know a lot about photo editing or don't have the software to do anything fancy-pants.

This isn't even getting started on the excellent Sparks feature, where you can subscribe to topics of your choice and be fed a constant stream of relevant articles — which can, of course, then be shared with the Circles of your choice if you see fit.

As you can tell, I'm quite enamoured with the new service and genuinely hope it takes off. My only worry is that it, like Facebook, might try and do too much. Facebook was an excellent service when it felt personal, but now it's as much a home for businesses to engage with their clientèle as a means of communication, it's becoming increasingly irrelevant to people who just want to talk to their friends. Google+'s simple elegance that it has at the moment doesn't have any of that noise — and none of the associated spam from social games and endless "What Length of Pubic Hair Are You?" quizzes, for that matter. I'm sure it won't stay that way, as social game and app developers are already pricking their ears up at the buzz surrounding the service, but I hope it stays that way for at least a little while. There's definitely a market for a clean, clear social network with minimum fuss that offers something a little more than Twitter but a lot less than Facebook. And I think Google+ has the potential to be it if the developers handle it correctly.

#oneaday Day 522: Addressing the Audience's Demands

So in an attempt to better understand my audience, such as you are, I've been delving once again into the top search terms for my blog. I'm going to take the top ten search terms from the last year and address each and every one of them individually so that hopefully if you've been in attendance on this page at some point in the past and found it to be wanting for further information on the topic you searched for, you'll feel better and more satisfied in your choice of Google links that you clicked on.

Divine Divinity (303 hits)

Divine Divinity is an action-RPG from Larian Studios which bears more than a passing resemblance to Blizzard's Diablo series. The difference is that the world is not randomly generated and there is a more robust quest and interaction system more akin to something like the Baldur's Gate series. The entire world is available to explore from the get-go and aside from some appalling voice acting of the very worst kind, it's a great game. Pity its sequels aren't up to much. You can grab it from Good Old Games.

I'm Not Doctor Who (81 hits)

That's the name of this site, because my name is Peter Davison, though I usually go by "Pete" because I prefer it. Peter Davison, as you may know, was the stage name for Peter Moffett, who played the Doctor in Doctor Who between 1982 and 1984. I am not him, therefore I am not Doctor Who.

Offensive GIFs (73 hits)

Here's one.

Teaching Sucks (65 hits)

Teaching does indeed suck. I've worked as a classroom teacher on two separate occasions in my life and on both occasions it nearly killed me. In the first instance, I stuck it out for three years in the secondary school music classroom — my first year in a run-down school half a million quid in the red where I was threatened with being knifed on a regular basis, and my second in an ostensibly "nicer" area but which still reduced me to a literally gibbering wreck by the end of my time there.

The reasons why it sucks? Poor behaviour and teachers' lack of power to do anything about it. Ridiculous amounts of bureaucracy. The fact that one person is expected to do what, in any other job, a team of at least four or five people would take on between them.

If you can stick it out, fair play to you. It's not for me.

"Mandatory Sex Party" (35 hits)

This was a term coined by Allie Brosh, who at one point wasn't sure whether or not it was an actual thing that happened. I'm still not sure, but there's certainly a lot more than one Google hit for it now.

Persona 4 (35 hits)

Persona 4 is one of my favourite games of all time. Featuring a hugely lengthy quest, genuinely loveable characters, a gripping (if crazy) plot and a love-it-or-hate-it catchy soundtrack, Persona 4 is one of the greatest JRPGs of all time and I will fight you if you disagree.

Fatal Labyrinth (34 hits)

Fatal Labyrinth is a graphical roguelike for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis. You can play it as part of the Sega Mega Drive Collection on the Xbox 360 and PS3, but I bet you haven't.

"Get Rich or Die Gaming" (27 hits)

Get Rich or Die Gaming is an absolutely terrible Xbox Live Indie Game with artwork that looks like it was put together in Microsoft Paint, voice acting that would make a school play's director blush and designs on being a point-and-click adventure. Fair play to them for actually releasing it, but it really is not very good.

NSFW GIFs (26 hits)

Here's one.

Memes GIF (25 hits)

(Click to embiggen. Some NSFW. Some NSF anybody. Apparently this character is called "optimized GIF dude" and is something of a meme. I'd never heard of him, actually.)

So there we are. I hope you feel suitably satisfied now. If not, go and have a sandwich and a wank.

#oneaday Day 521: It's Your Turn Now

I've discovered the most terrifying thing in the universe: the man who very politely, but incredibly loudly, tells you "It's your turn now!" on the iPhone version of Carcassonne. It's terrifying because hearing someone's voice when you're not expecting to — such as, say, when you're trying to get to sleep — is a frightening thing. Quite why a murderer or rapist would say "It's your turn now!" is… no, hang on, that sort of works, doesn't it? Shit.

But anyway. The terrifyingness of Carcassonne is not what I wanted to talk about — at least not directly, anyway. I wanted to take a moment to talk about asynchronous games, how awesome they are and where they can go from here.

The iPhone (and, presumably, Android) is home to a wide range of excellent asynchronous-play games, allowing people to play at their own pace at a time to suit them. The upside to this is that people even in wildly disparate time zones can play games against each other. The downside is that it's easy to forget what games you're playing, particularly if your push notifications decide not to work properly.

But that downside isn't sufficient to dampen the awesomeness that is the ability to play Carcassonne with someone across the other side of the world. The "…with Friends" series (Chess, Words and Hanging) are all excellent examples of How To Do It Correctly, too, providing a simple, intuitive interface to games that most people know how to play. The quirky and entertaining Disc Drivin', too, offers a fun experience, even if whoever goes first has a clear advantage over everyone else. (That's my excuse, anyway.)

Certain social games are taking steps to incorporate asynchronous features, too. Dragon Age Legends, for example, allows players to recruit their friends' characters — complete with equipment and abilities — into their party for combat. This allows people to play with their friends without their friends actually being there — defeating the object of a multiplayer game, you might think, but actually making the best of the fact that it's pretty rare for you and all your friends to be online at the same time.

Consider this taken to the next level, though. Why haven't we seen an asynchronous MMORPG yet, where players can party up with AI-controlled characters based on their friends' equipment and ability lists? It works in Dragon Age Legends, though admittedly that's a very simple turn-based game. But most MMORPGs have AI built in for enemy and ally characters anyway, so why shouldn't there be a way for players to "play" even when they're not actively logged in to the game? I think that'd be kind of cool, actually — and it would certainly get around my biggest bugbear with MMORPGs, which is the fact that a good 90% of my friends live in a completely different and mostly incompatible timezone to me.

On a related note, then, if you live in Europe and want to play Champions Online, Spiral Knights or anything else you'd care to suggest (preferably of the free to play variety) do please get in touch!

#oneaday Day 517: Social Peril II: The Periling

As a social network, Facebook is arguably becoming less meaningful — that is, from the perspective of encouraging meaningful interactions with one another. This, I feel, is in part due to how cluttered it is these days — cluttered with people, cluttered with businesses, cluttered with applications. I long for the simplicity of the site as it was when I first joined it, when it didn't even have a chat system and friend requests required you to indicate how you knew the person — kind of what LinkedIn does nowadays, only with people actually talking to each other instead of using phrases like "blueskying" and "monetization".

A fine example comes up if you look at the Facebook Page for any social game, ever. You can pick any random example and this will happen. Look at something the producers of the game say, then look at the community comments. You might have 25% meaningful discussion (a somewhat optimistic estimate — if the game is popular you can reduce that down to less than 5%) and 75% people just going "add me". This also happens on App Store reviews for "multiplayer" (and I use the term loosely) games.

It's not just that, though. Posts on Pages vaguely related to Xbox/PS3 will bring the fanboys for both camps out in force, ranting and raving at each other and not even addressing the point that was made in the original wall post — burying any meaningful discussion amidst the usual spray of bile, hatred and testosterone.

Beyond that, though, a lot of the trouble lies with the changing way people use Facebook nowadays. When it was a simplistic, app-free system, people used it to communicate. People would write a status, other people who knew the original person would comment. People might post a link or a photo, people would comment. Simple, effective. Now, though, with the fact that everyone and his dog has a Share to Facebook button, this simple clarity of communication has been almost completely lost. You get the occasional aberration where a topical post can bloom into an interesting discussion between friends, but soon enough it's lost in the never-ending cycle that is your News Feed, devaluing the interaction until it's gone, forgotten, meaningless.

The simple answer is, of course, to adapt. Realise that Facebook is not about permanence and the long-term, it's about the here, the now, the narcissistic. "This" is happening right now, so you share it. Here's a photo. Here's my new Bejeweled Blitz high score. I'm playing a game with farms in it. I took a quiz to determine which colour from the Dulux range I "am". PAY ATTENTION TO ME.

Facebook's new Messages system doesn't help, either. Muddling your chats in with your actual messages is a dumb idea, because the sort of thing you write in a message is typically lengthier than what you write in a chat. And then it all gets jumbled together, so if you had a message thread with some meaningful information in it followed by a chat with said person about how much you heard they like cock due to whoever just facejacked their profile, then it becomes nigh-on impossible to find anything useful.

I'm not too concerned about the whole thing, though, to be honest. Facebook does what I need it to for now, which is to allow me to share links to my articles and work to people who might be interested or might not have another means of finding out about them, and occasionally proving to be the most reliable means of contacting people. As such, I'll likely keep my profile there, but my usage of the platform is at a bare minimum these days, as I don't feel like it's really for me any more. Twitter, on the other hand, still does everything I need it to and still remains pretty much as pure and clear as it was the day I started using it. Let's hope it stays that way.

(In other news, I had a lovely weekend away, as you may have surmised from that last post. Thank you to Andie for making it happen!)

#oneaday Day 514: Looking Back

It's ironic, really, that one of the best things about living in The Future is the ability to recapture the past at will. While we may not have managed to nail the whole time travel thing just yet, despite our speculative fiction authors coming up with a number of potential solutions, technology provides the next best thing, which is to revive things from our past in our present.

There's lots of ways this happens. We have the pixel art movement, creating art from the graphics of 20 years ago. We have sites like Good Old Games celebrating, well, the good old games of the world. We have YouTube and its magical, ever-expanding collection of tat from your childhood which someone has lovingly gone to the effort of finding, digitising and putting on the Internet for all and sundry. (On a side note, the word "digitised" doesn't seem to be used much these days. I remember it used to be a word to denote excitement in the late 80s and early 90s — "this game has digitised speech!" "WOW!" etc.)

Is this healthy, though? Wikipedia (I know, I know, I don't have an actual dictionary to hand) describes nostalgia as "a yearning for the past, often in an idealised form". The rose-tinted spectacles syndrome. Nostalgia sees you thinking back to past experiences and thinking "God, that was awesome" with an implied "but I'm not sure I'd want to go back and do it again." If you can actually go back and do those things that inspired such nostalgia, does it lose its impact?

It varies. Sometimes old things really don't hold up well to close scrutiny. And sometimes they do. In the video game world, Ultima Underworld holds up a whole lot better than, say, anything on the Atari 8-bit computer. Granted, there's more than a few years between them, but they're both things that evoke a feeling of nostalgia in people who knew them first time around — and they're both things that you can recapture the feeling of, either through an emulator in the case of the Atari computers (or indeed finding a working model on eBay) or in the cast of Ultima Underworld, through Good Old Games, which has very graciously recently made both games available once again after a very long time.

The same is true of non-gaming experiences, of course. Things that you thought were delicious and tasty in your youth might taste like crap now because your palate is more refined. Having a farting competition on the school field might not hold the same appeal. Doodling cocks on exercise books might cease to be amusing. (Though I doubt it. If I ever get to that stage, kindly kill me.)

A lot of it is due to your own attitude towards the past, of course. If you're an inherently nostalgic person, then you'll be predisposed to enjoy rediscovering old things, whether this is an old video game, a diary you wrote when you were twelve or a CD you used to listen to on repeat over and over and over. But some people prefer to move on, always pushing forward, leaving the past behind, preferring to let bygones be bygones. They get to enjoy the latest, the greatest, the biggest, the best. But they never get to do the things that once made them happy again. That's kinda sad.

You can probably guess which category I fall into. If you're having trouble, the fact that I replaced my Windows "busy" cursors with the pixelated monochrome bee cursor from the Atari ST today should make it abundantly clear.

#oneaday Day 513: Just Cut It Out

The world — particularly the online world — is proving particularly infuriating of late, what with childish hacker collective LulzSec harassing the Internet and now companies via phone, and the earlier news that 2K Games unceremoniously fired their PR company for its head honcho's passionate outburst of frustration at the overly-negative reviews of Duke Nukem Forever. (Yes, he was a tit to talk about blacklisting publications in public. Yes, it likely goes on anyway. But I kind of understand where he's coming from — to have your job being to show genuine (or at least genuine-seeming) enthusiasm for a product then to see the world unceremoniously take a large and steaming dump over it and then revel in how "clever" they're all being with their scathingness must be an awful feeling.)

It's times like this that it's easy to feel like you miss that simpler time when "The Internet" only existed when you plugged it in and endured listening to that horrendous noise of a modem connecting. (Weeeeeeeee-skkrrrrrroooooooo!!!! BEEEOOOOOOWWWWWWWWW KHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH FFFFFFFKKKKKKKHHHHHHHHHHHHH.) But now the Internet is always there, and you can't, it seems, get away from the bad things.

This is, in some ways, a good thing, as everyone is more aware of things that are going on thanks to Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and all manner of other services. But in other ways, it's a bad thing — I recall around the time of the most recent major natural disasters that many commented a feeling of "disaster fatigue" brought about by the constant rolling coverage on TV and the constant stream of articles on the Internet. In many ways, having constant coverage spread out over a course of hours, days or even weeks reduces the impact of something happening — and as a result, the media feels the need to ram it down our throats even more, and so on and so on and so on. It also happens with reality TV shows, with the media going X-Factor/BGT/Big Brother/I'm A Cunt, Please Shoot Me crazy for the few weeks each of those respective shows is cluttering up the airwaves with its offensive stench until everyone is absolutely sick to death of seeing whatever Generic Talentless "Celebrity" X has had for lunch today.

Such is, presumably, the case with LulzSec. They hack someone and highlight their security flaws — that makes a point. But now it's just a case of "HAY WE GONNA KEEP DOING THIS CAUSE IT'S FUNNY". Whatever point they may have once been trying to make, it has been lost amidst some grade-A cuntishness of the highest order. And the frustrating thing — not to mention the thing they're probably enjoying the most — is that the average person, annoyed, upset and frustrated with them, is absolutely impotent, with nothing they can do about it. Of course, you can try reporting it to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, but who's to know if they'll be able to do anything about it?

I suppose the way to deal with it is to follow the advice your primary school teachers gave you when dealing with bullies — just ignore them and they'll stop.

But will they? Perhaps a punch in the testicles will work just as well — perhaps even quicker.

#oneaday Day 510: Come Play with Me

Some of you may not be aware that I've been writing regular pieces on up-and-coming social games for Inside Social Games. A number of things have become apparent during my ongoing whistle-stop tour of the social gaming space. Firstly, Facebook games are getting better, and secondly, there's still a lot of work to do.

Here's a few things that, to my mind, would improve the Facebook gaming experience immensely. I'm not a professional analyst, nor have I done extensive research into online usage habits, so I imagine a man with a beard bigger than mine will probably be able to counter each and every one of these arguments, but anyway. This is my opinion — and some games do one or more of these already, so fair play to them, I say.

Stop copying each other.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but when you're making a game that is mechanically and aesthetically identical to a competitor's product, you're not giving a potential player a reason to play your game. Differentiate yourself — and not just by making the game in a different setting. Ripping off two distinct but similar titles does not count either, so if you make a city-building game where you can farm crops, think of something better. Little Cave Hero is a good example — while the city-building mechanics are similar to a million other titles out there, there are extra bits, such as your "factory" structures producing crap that either you or a friend have to clean up, user-generated content, and then the meat of the game — puzzle-based mine exploration.

Stop insisting I "share" everything.

The number one complaint people have about Facebook games is when a player spams their wall (and, in worst cases, other people's walls) with bollocks about what they've just "achieved". The reason for this is that in the vast majority of social games, completing any mundane task pops up a huge window inviting you to share your "achievement" with friends. In some more extreme cases, the "Share" button is much more obvious than the "No thanks, kindly piss off" button.

Sure, there's a viral marketing thing at work here — but at least make it optional for people who just want to play the game. Add a Share button, sure, but don't make it quite so in-your-face. Better yet, add the option for players to switch off notifications like this altogether.

Stop insisting I "give you a five star review".

By all means solicit user feedback. But to be perfectly honest, many average Facebook users either aren't that bright, aren't very computer literate or — in some hopeless cases — are neither. As a result, many of them are apparently incapable of doing anything other than what is written in front of them. Invite them to "write an honest review" rather than "give a five star review" and you might get some honest, if badly-spelled, feedback. Invite them to "give a five star review" and you'll get lots of five-star reviews, very often with no feedback whatsoever. This not only makes Facebook's app rating system utterly worthless, it also removes a potential way for players to get their voices heard.

If you want me to Like your page, post something worth following and commenting on.

Screenshots of your game are not interesting — I've played it. I know what it looks like. Attempts to engage with the community are interesting. Take a vote on what new quest you should add next, or what character you'd like to see more of. Let the community play a part in the development of the game.

Stop claiming you're the "first/best/most [something] on Facebook".

If everyone says it — and they do — no-one believes it. If your game's good, word will spread, both via the press and word of mouth. The elusive "core gamer" market isn't going to flock to your Facebook game just because you say it's built for core gamers.

Give my friends something to do.

Yes, being able to look at a friend's town is cool. But it's ultimately pretty meaningless if I can't interact with anything there. Let us do stuff together. Provide some multiplayer content, or rebalance the single player content for people to play together — perhaps even simultaneously! Diablo did this years ago.

My friends aren't going to want to play or add me as a neighbour if there's no real reason to do so.

Don't break the game with your premium items.

By all means monetize your game — you made it, so you deserve to earn something from it. But don't make paid-for items into "win buttons". Also, don't allow people to buy their way out of quest objectives. Allow players who pay to make quicker progress — perhaps increase their experience gain — or customize their character/city/world to a greater degree, but don't undermine the game mechanics.

Offer a subscription.

Someone who plays your game regularly will be quite happy to spend a fiver a month to get access to additional features or make quicker progress. Microtransactions can mount up easily without people noticing — good for business, not great for ethics.

Let me fail.

If I fuck something up, give me a consequence. Life isn't all about happy-happy-joy-joy. Sometimes you get things wrong, in which case I should have some sort of penalty more severe than "wait five minutes and try again". In city-building games, don't let me move my buildings. If I built something in the wrong place or planned my city ineffectively, punish me by making me demolish my hard-earned building and spending the time and money to construct it again.

Make the tutorial optional.

Some Facebook gamers need step-by-step help on how to get started. Others have played games — either Facebook or otherwise — before and already know how it works. Offer the opportunity to skip the tutorial — especially if it's a long and incredibly boring one.

Provide a reference manual.

Perhaps I've forgotten what one of your beautifully-designed but obtuse icons does. Perhaps I can't remember how to do something. Let me look it up.

Let me start again.

Maybe I called my character the wrong thing. Maybe I hate my city and want to build a new one. Let me wipe everything out and start afresh.

Try a different look.

The vector-graphics Farmville look is old hat. Try a different look. This is one of those few instances where it's actually desirable to have something that's a bit more dark and gritty than normal. If your Facebook game is based on an established franchise, do try and make it look like other entries in the same franchise. You don't have to "kiddy it up" for Facebook — grown-ups use Facebook, too.

Ditch game mechanics that don't belong in a particular genre.

A game about completing wordsearches and crosswords has no place for an experience system. Allow players to unlock new challenges via their progress, not via arbitrarily-issued experience points. Similarly, ditch the Energy system, as it often leads to players being stuck halfway through something and then forgetting what they were doing when they come back to it. If you must control how much people play (and monetize the ability to play more) then find a different way that allows players to complete something before they get locked out.

Provide a meaningful mobile experience.

Create, at the very least, an iPhone and Android-compatible web experience. Ideally, you'd create an app for both iPhone and Android that allows players to participate in your game when they're on the go. Don't make a mobile version of your game that has nothing to do with the Facebook version!

Polish your game.

Proofread your text before you release to the public. Spelling mistakes and grammatical errors look unprofessional. Make sure the game works and fix it promptly if it doesn't. Little details like this can make the difference between a popular game and a laughing-stock.

Have some character.

Games are fun! Stop being so po-faced and get a proper writer to inject a bit of wit into your dialogue. If people are made to smile or even laugh by your game — or even be scared or upset by it — then they're more likely to return for further emotional experiences. If the whole thing is very businesslike and dull, despite a cartoonish appearance, then it's not going to hold anyone's interest.

There we go. Some free advice for any of you developing or considering Facebook game development. As I say, I mention all these things with the caveat that I can't develop games as I don't have any programming experience. Many of these games are undoubtedly impressive technical, creative achievements. But for them to be taken more seriously by some parts of the community, changes need to be made — but making those changes will not only please those who feel turned off by Facebook games, it'll also present additional revenue streams for the developers and publishers in question. Everyone's a winner.