#oneaday Day 128: Imminent Holiday

As I may have mentioned once or twice recently, we’re going on holiday tomorrow. We’ll be away from Monday to Friday visiting Center Parcs in Elveden Forest, which has been a thoroughly nice place to have some time away on all the previous occasions we’ve visited.

My intentions for this holiday are to unplug almost completely. I will post on this blog daily because of the whole #oneaday thing, but outside of that, I intend to avoid any sort of attachment to the Internet whatsoever, except where absolutely necessary to research things. That means I am making the following promises to myself:

I will not worry about writing anything for MoeGamer or making any sort of video for YouTube.
I will not poke my head in on Discord channels that are likely to annoy me.
I will not look at Twitter at all.
I will minimise my use of Bluesky.

I haven’t really talked about the last one at all, but as you may have surmised from the sidebar, I have been dipping my toe back into social media with Bluesky recently. And for the most part, I’ve found it a thoroughly pleasant environment that feels very much like Twitter did in the early days. It’s very left-leaning, which can at times be a little insufferable, and wherever you look you’re very likely to run into either a particularly horny furry or someone proud of the fact they’re wearing a cage on their cock, but for the most part it has been a remarkably stress-free social media experience so far.

Part of the reason for this is that the platform is built to discourage “dunking”, whereas Twitter outright incentivises it these days. The main way Bluesky differs from Twitter is through its absolutely nuclear block function, which means that if someone quote-posts or replies to someone they have subsequently blocked, if you are following the person who made the quote-post or reply, the original post will appear as blocked to you also. This discourages people from going “looking for trouble” because you can’t even see the username of the blocked post. This can be frustrating at times if you missed the original context, but for the most part I think it’s a positive thing.

So anyway, as a result of all that, and the fact I have a few friendly faces there, I have been using Bluesky a bit recently, and thus, if I’m going to share anything about the holiday that isn’t on this blog, I’ll likely do so there. If you’re a Bluesky user and want to follow me, here.

But yes. Anyway, the main point of this post is to note that I will be disconnecting from the greater part of the Internet as much as humanly possible while I am away, because I need it. I need some time away where I just don’t put any unnecessary pressure on myself, or potentially put myself in situations where I might end up getting annoyed. I’m tempted to outright leave a few Discord servers to remove the temptation altogether, but probably won’t go that far.

This holiday is to rest, relax and genuinely get away from it all. My mental health has been in the toilet of late, and the Internet has played a big part in creating that situation. So instead I’m going to be among the trees, play some video games, go swimming and look at friendly deer. We might go and fire a crossbow (not at the deer) and play some pool, too. We haven’t decided yet. But it’s going to be nice.

Today, meanwhile, it’s last-minute packing and tidying up ahead of my mother-in-law coming to look after the cats — sorry burglars, the house will still be occupied while we’re away — and perhaps finishing off Silent Hill 2 later.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 122: “We Need” and the cult of perpetual dissatisfaction

As someone who works in marketing, there are two little words I’m bloody sick of seeing. Because they always show up beneath announcements of cool things, prompts for discussion… anything, really.

“We Need”.

It doesn’t matter what you’re posting online, someone somewhere will decide that the thing you just posted about is completely irrelevant, and that they have decided to take on the heavy burden of representing the entire audience of Thing.

“We Need”.

Sometimes it’s a thing you know is coming anyway, so you can’t say anything. Sometimes it’s a thing that has been previously requested, but which isn’t practical right this second. And sometimes it’s a completely outlandish, unreasonable suggestion that no-one who knows the slightest thing about the business you’re working in would declare with such confidence that “We Need”. Always, though, it’s something other than the thing you have just posted about.

I know I’m not alone in this, because when I look at marketing posts from other companies, I inevitably see at least one “We Need” in the wild, fulfilling the exact same function outlined above. Talking about anything other than the thing that has just been announced or promoted, and instead speaking on everyone else’s behalf that “we” are absolutely, completely and utterly entitled to a thing that hasn’t even come up in conversation once.

Back around the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle — remember that? — I took umbrage at games journalists calling gaming enthusiasts “entitled” for whining at developers and publishers. I still don’t think productive discussions were had back around then. But honestly, some 10+ years later, I 100% get it. It’s downright exhausting to want to share things you’re personally genuinely excited about that you’ve been working on, only to be hit with the inevitable “We Need”s.

I’m pretty sure this all stems from a broader issue online: the cult of perpetual dissatisfaction, where a certain, loud-mouthed proportion of people on the Internet are never satisfied with the thing that has just been put in front of them, no matter how excellent it is. Cool new thing just announced? Yesterday’s news. “We need” the next thing, immediately, preferably sooner. Long-awaited and much-requested upgrade to something confirmed? Pish. “We need” something completely unrelated. Product getting excellent reviews from press and public alike? Balls. “We need” something that no-one else has asked for, ever.

This ties in with another theory I have about modern online discourse: the fact that there are people out there who don’t feel like they have anything to say if they’re not criticising. Saying “this is good” is anathema to them, because then they can’t “offer feedback” or “give constructive criticism”, even where none was asked for.

By contrast, I’ve often found that these people tend to do a better job of shutting down conversation than actually starting a worthwhile discussion. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve expressed my appreciation and enjoyment of something, only for someone to come along and feel the need to list everything they think is wrong with it, everything “We Need” to see fixed about it. When that happens, I just lose all interest in attempting to have a discussion, because that person isn’t interested in knowing what I liked about the thing. They just want the opportunity to “offer feedback”.

Feedback can be a helpful, useful thing under the right circumstances. But it needs to be asked for, or, in extreme cases, obviously needed. And by “needed” I mean “there is something demonstrably wrong with the thing”, not “this one dude doesn’t like the way the thing does something”.

“We Need.”

We need to learn to be satisfied and happy with things, because perpetual dissatisfaction is no way to live. Just stop for a moment and enjoy the thing. It’s much more fun than never reaching a point where you can do that.

#oneaday Day 121: Tedious Nostalgia

I’m all for nostalgia — hell, most of my online presence is built around it these days — but I’m becoming increasingly tired of social media accounts that are nothing but what I’m going to call “nostalgia fluff”. What I mean by this is that they post something that effectively says “This is a thing that existed.” and then don’t provide any sort of additional commentary or context. To put it another way, they are indulging in the exact behaviour depicted in this excellent video from the one and only Mr Biffo of Digitiser:

There’s a simple explanation for this, of course: it’s engagement bait, as is 90% of anything on any social media platform these days. By posting “Count Duckula is a cartoon series that was once on television”, the poster is counting on people showing up in the replies by the score to say “Wow! I remember this!” and “SO NOSTALGIC!” and suchlike.

Trouble is, all of that is completely fucking meaningless. It rarely starts a meaningful discussion, and the person who posted the thing in the first place certainly isn’t interested in leading a discussion, otherwise they would have posted something more substantial in the first place. So why do it at all?

Number go up, of course. Those sweet likes and shares. The cynical would note that many engagement bait accounts aim to attract large numbers of views, comments and shares so they can then sell on the account to someone else, but this doesn’t always happen. Some people really are convinced that their context and commentary-free acknowledgements that something indeed existed at some indeterminate point in the past are “good content”. Some of these people will even get snippy if someone “steals” their “content”, by which I mean posting something about the same thing they posted.

There’s a difference between this sort of thing and what I do. When I write an article or make a video about something, I’m not doing so just to go “this existed, look how knowledgeable I am for knowing this thing existed”. Rather, I do so for one of two reasons: one, to introduce the thing to other people, and that requires some additional context and commentary to explain why the thing is noteworthy; and two, to share my personal recollections of the thing in question, which often ties in with the first point.

That takes effort, though. That requires researching beyond a simple glance at Wikipedia to make sure you got the date right. That requires actual knowledge and experience, and a willingness to do something beyond the bare minimum to cater to the lowest common denominator online.

I often find myself annoyed at the perception that you “shouldn’t” post anything too long or in-depth online, “because people won’t bother to read/watch it”. This, to me, just leads to a situation where you are encouraging something undesirable. By assuming everyone is as stupid as an attention-deficit social media addict who can’t read more than a paragraph without wanting to Alt-Tab into Roblox, we just make that the norm. And that’s what these low-effort nostalgia engagement bait accounts are doing: making the bare minimum the norm.

I find the idea that you should make things as short as possible “because people will click off within 3 seconds” or whatever kind of insulting. It’s insulting to the people who don’t click off within 3 seconds to assume that everyone’s attention span is as addled as the worst people on the Internet, and it’s insulting to me to suggest that if the thing I’ve done isn’t “interesting” within 3 seconds it has no value. So far as I’m concerned, if someone is incapable of reading more than a paragraph of text or digesting a video that is more than 30 seconds long, I don’t really want them looking at my stuff anyway. It’s not for them.

That may sound gatekeepery but honestly I don’t give a shit any more. I hate how much the Internet has become a race to the bottom, and I fear it’s reached a point where it is actively harmful to both community and culture.

So I will keep going into things in as much depth as I damn well please, and if you don’t have the attention span to deal with it, that is 100% your problem.

(I know none of you reading this fall into this category, of course. Keep being excellent.)

#oneaday Day 103: A solution?

Following yesterday’s ponderings, something blindingly obvious occurred to me earlier: there’s quite a simple solution to what I was contemplating, and that is to actually finally start doing some streaming.

I’ve tried streaming a couple of times and not had a terrible time doing it, but I fell off from doing it because I didn’t really set aside a specific time to do it and haven’t (yet) put in the work to try and get any sort of “community” going. To be honest, it’s that “work” part that kind of puts me off a bit; one of the nice things about YouTube is that I’ve been able to just sort of do it slowly and gradually build up an audience naturally without having to faff about promoting myself or whatnot.

Twitch is a platform that is still quite alien to me. There’s a lot I don’t like about it. It’s noisy and filled with distracting features that don’t play nice with my autistic brain. I feel certain portions of the Twitch audience have unreasonable expectations of what a streamer can be expected to do to keep them “entertained”. And I’ve seen far, far too many people burn themselves out because they “needed” to get Partner, or Affiliate, or whatever their monetisation program is called.

But at the same time, I kind of like the idea of having a platform where I might be able to make some new friends, chatting about the stuff I love. If I do decide to kick off some streaming, I’ll almost certainly keep it retro-focused — at least partly because in my study, which is the place that is really “set up” for streaming, I don’t have either a gaming PC or a current-gen console — but I think there’s plenty of potential to cover things there, between Evercade, the various mini systems I have (Atari 8-bit, Amiga, C64 and, later this year, Spectrum) and, of course, the gigantic Launchbox library I have on a 5TB hard drive.

It’s kind of a scary prospect, though. Even more so than YouTube, Twitch is “putting yourself out there” and inviting comment from any old random who happens to stop by. I should probably comfort myself with the fact that the kind of people I wouldn’t want to engage with probably wouldn’t be watching retro gaming streams, anyway — but it’s still somewhat nerve-wracking.

Perhaps I’ll give it a go this weekend as a sort of trial run. My wife is going into town with a friend for a bit, so maybe I’ll take the opportunity to try some bits and pieces out back then. If you’d like to stop by, here’s my Twitch page. No promises, but I have mentally “pencilled this in” for this Saturday, and we’ll see how it goes.

#oneaday Day 102: Pondering YouTube… again

Having one of those days where I’m pondering my approach to YouTube. Y’see, my latest video, which covers Atari’s Yars Rising and is essentially just a video version of this article, has gone and done very well. Relatively speaking, I mean, and by that I mean it’s broken a thousand views.

For a small-scale sub-5,000 subscriber YouTuber like me, getting anything to break 1,000 views is significant. I’ve had a few successes over the last couple of years, and most of them have had something in common: they’ve been pre-scripted videos, as opposed to the “Let’s Play” style I built my channel on, and which I think I probably enjoy doing the most.

Probably my most significant success to date is the above video, which covers the excellent modern isometric racer Super Woden GP. This video has, to date, managed 87,000 views and is still trickling along. This was absolutely overwhelming to watch happen, to such a degree that I ended up having to “pause” the comments section because I was getting so many people commenting.

My second best is the above, which covers Moonring, an excellent modern take on the classic Ultima RPG formula, developed by one of the folks who worked on the original Fable. Plus it’s free. This one has been a slow burn; to date it’s done over 29,000 views, but it got off to quite a slow start. Compare the graphs for these two videos.

Here’s Super Woden GP 2:

And here’s Moonring:

Notice that the latter one spiked for some inexplicable reason about 250 days after I posted it. I don’t really know what happened here; I can only assume that it got shared somewhere and a lot of people showed up. But the analytics seem to suggest that YouTube just decided to suddenly start pushing it one day, so it started appearing when people were just browsing around the site:

The Yars Rising video hasn’t done anything like the numbers of these two, but it’s also still early days for it — at the time of writing, it’s just two days old. But it’s had a strong early push:

The one thing that the Yars Rising video has in common with the Super Woden GP 2 one in particular is that it was something timely. I made the video shortly after Yars Rising came out, when there was still some discussion going on about it. That, presumably, helps. But it doesn’t account for what happened with the Moonring video.

Anyway, the point is, any time something like this happens, I end up wondering if I should change tack a bit with YouTube. The approach I’ve taken for the vast majority of my videos is one where I introduce a game with a bit to camera at the start, then do a “Let’s Play”, where I explain the game as if I’m sitting down to play it with the viewer.

Some of these videos have done quite nicely. This one, on Seven Cities of Gold for Atari 8-bit, broke a thousand views:

As did this one on Beamrider for Atari 2600, though that’s over the very long term:

I like making those videos. I think they’re a good way of helping people to understand how to play and figure out the appeal of retro games. And yet the numbers don’t lie: what gets people watching is pre-scripted, more “review-style” videos.

Don’t get me wrong, those are fun to write and to make, also — plus I can generally cross-post them between YouTube and MoeGamer for two completely different audiences to see them — but any time I ponder maybe switching to doing that kind of video all the time, I think of the people who have very kindly stuck with me since the earliest days of me fumbling around with the platform, figuring out what the hell I actually wanted to do with my YouTube channel.

I suspect it’s not an “all or nothing” question. I suspect the answer is something I know already: that the optimal approach would be to do a bit of both. Perhaps “Let’s Play” style videos on simpler, earlier games, and more elaborate scripted affairs for more complex, longer games.

I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud here. If I was a bigger channel I’d just say “fuck it” and start a second channel then split the two types of video between the two channels, but it seems foolish to do that as a small creator.

But anyway. I’m glad the Yars Rising video is doing reasonable numbers, at least. It’s a cool game and I’m glad people want to know more about it. So if nothing else, I can be glad about that!

#oneaday Day 98: Feature Creep

One of the things that really annoys me about modern websites is the obsession with feature creep, and nowhere is that more apparent than on social media and adjacent sites, with YouTube being a particularly prime example.

As if the scourge that is YouTube Shorts wasn’t enough, the latest feature that it’s impossible to dismiss permanently — telling it to go away only makes it disappear for a month at most — is “YouTube Playables”, a range of bottom-of-the barrel mobile game crap designed to placate the ever more attention-deficit body of users who can’t possibly just do one thing at a time.

I honestly don’t get it. Who looked at YouTube and went “you know what this needs? Shitty mobile games!” Who looked at Netflix and decided that needed to be a gaming platform? For that matter, who looked at fricking Facebook and thought games on there would be a good idea?

The argument that usually gets trotted out with this sort of thing is that it “gets more people into gaming”. Frankly, I’ve always thought this to be bollocks. Gaming has never been more accessible and affordable on platforms that are specifically built for it, and there is only one possible reason it is being shoehorned in everywhere that it doesn’t belong: to monetise the crap out of it, be it through ads, in-app purchases or subscription price hikes.

At this point I’d almost pay YouTube a fee to not have to see garbage like Shorts and Playables ever again. There are fundamental features of their platform that still don’t work properly and they waste time with this shit? Someone wants firing.

But I guess someone, somewhere has decided this junk “adds value”, so here we are, stuck with it, in yet another example of the Web being enshittified. At least there’s no “AI” features in YouTube… yet. Don’t you love our cyberpunk dystopian future?

#oneaday Day 94: Streaks are unhealthy

I know, I know, it’s pretty rich saying that while I’m tracking how many non-stop days of blogging I’ve done, but my opinion stands. Streaks, as implemented everywhere from Wordle to Duolingo, are unhealthy. They’re transparent attempts to get “engagement metrics” up, designed to guilt-trip people into doing things on the assumption that getting people addicted to something is the same as encouraging them to develop a healthy habit.

My daily blogging here? Something I’m doing by choice, and not punishing myself if I happen to fail to live up to. Forget a daily lesson on Duolingo, though, and you can expect to be on the receiving end of multiple guilt-tripping notifications (assuming you haven’t turned notifications off for everything like I have) and emails with crying owls suggesting in no uncertain terms that you are an awful person for forgetting to study a foreign language today.

I tried Duolingo for a bit a few years back, and found it quite good, but eventually got annoyed with this. It’s always bugged me about Wordle, too, because it doesn’t just encourage you to play every day — it encourages you to cheat. Because you break your streak if you don’t get the word. And what person in their right mind would break their streak when they can just Google “five letter words that end in READ”? (Me, that’s who, though I am making no attempt to position myself as being in any way “of sound mind”.)

Building healthy habits is, as I’ve said elsewhere on this blog, a good thing. It is also a difficult thing, and I think the prevalence of “streaks” everywhere these days actually makes things more difficult. The original intent behind this sort of thing — incentivise and reward continued engagement — may well have been honourable, but now it just feels cynical and manipulative, with Duolingo being by far the most obnoxious implementation of it by a long shot.

Streaks, as implemented via technology these days, are designed to get you addicted to the Skinner Box mentality: to get you checking in regularly so you make Number Go Up. More often than not there’s no actual incentive to do anything beyond checking in to the service in question to keep your streak unbroken — though some sites (Duolingo again is guilty of this) also implement things like “leaderboards” to make things really unhealthy.

How do I know this is unhealthy? Because I’ve experienced it. Duolingo isn’t incentivising you to do well by guilt-tripping you into checking in every day, or even by inviting you to attempt to top the leaderboards. It’s encouraging you to game the system, because inevitably these systems are intensely, deeply fallible and can be manipulated without too much effort. And once you figure out how to do that — and a lot of people do — any value these systems might have once had in building healthy habits goes right out of the window.

If you need further evidence of how such systems are fundamentally broken, look at the PlayStation Trophies/Xbox or Steam achievements systems. In theory, these systems should enable people who are good at a game to be rewarded for that. What actually happens is that people deliberately purchase games where they can get an “easy Platinum” in order to buff up their statistics. More often than not, this takes the form of a visual novel that the person in question will just stick on fast-forward mode, ignore completely and then claim their completely pointless virtual shiny thing.

It’s the same with Duolingo, or anything else that uses such a system. Why bother with letting the things you’re learning truly sink in when you can just check in, quickly click through the answers until you get the right ones, then enjoy Number Go Up?

I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule — people who do find streaks helpful in motivating themselves. If that’s you, and you use them honestly, fair play to you. Keep it up. But I’ve seen enough of how people behave in 2024 to know that is not the norm at all. If there’s a way to cheat — even if doing so provides no real benefit whatsoever — then people will find and use it.

Now I’m off to go watch some Deep Space Nine. Wouldn’t want to break my streak, now, would I?

#oneaday Day 93: The Truly Tragic Tale of the “Woke Content Detector”

One of the most truly insufferable things about the “gaming community” over the course of the last decade has been the rise of the “anti-woke” crowd, which started to really raise its head around the same time as the Gamergate saga — and, indeed, which many people still point to as the real point behind Gamergate rather than any legitimate concerns over ethics in games journalism.

To be clear and completely transparent, around the time of Gamergate being active I may well have expressed some sentiments and concerns that might have got me lumped in with this crowd.

However, I made an effort to distance myself from the movement as a whole, because I could see it was something of a scarlet letter, regardless of whether or not an individual had legitimate, worthwhile concerns.

My issues were always to do with the games journalism side of things, with my particular focus being on reviews and articles that treated Japanese titles (particularly those which featured sexually provocative content) unfairly and from an ill-informed perspective. I steered well clear of any discussions where it was clear people were being full-on racist and sexist — i.e. objecting to a game because it had a woman in a leading role, or a non-white person appearing prominently. I was entirely concerned with how certain portions of games journalism were treating specific games — and the people who enjoyed them — like absolute shit: nothing more, nothing less.

To put it another way, I always thought the people who were objecting to “woke” content in games were being massive weirdoes, and I didn’t want anything to do with them. Where games did feature obnoxiously over-the-top “look how progressive we are!” content, I tended to just steer clear of those — or perhaps comment on them in terms of alternatives that did the same thing, but better. To date, my favourite example of this is Read Only Memories and VA-11 HALL-A. Both of these games unfold in the same “world”, with the latter being a spinoff of the former, developed by a completely different team. Read Only Memories is absolutely obnoxious about how it handles progressive themes; VA-11 HALL-A integrates them extremely well into the plot.

But I digress. I have zero time for people who object to games purely on the grounds that they contain “woke content”. Particularly when the definition of “woke content”, as defined by the Woke Content Detector group on Steam, is so broad. I invite you to take a look at their official spreadsheet of which games are and are not “woke” and have a good laugh at it, and we’ll pick out some classics below.

Starfield

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly Pro-LGBTQ+ messaging. Contains overtly pro-DEI messaging. Pronoun selection including the option for they/them. All populated areas are equally diverse. Many important people are POC."

Here’s a prime example of what this list is actually about: being sexist, racist, transphobic and homophobic. I’m not sure much more needs to be said about this definition, other than to clarify for those who are somehow unfamiliar with Starfield that it is an open-structure role-playing game set in space, in which you play a self-insert character. Therefore having the option to select your name, gender, ethnicity and appearance makes a lot of sense. The implication of “many important people are [people of colour]” is that in The Future, we will have moved beyond white dominance and oppression of non-white people, but this is a bridge too far for the anti-woke crowd.

Civilization VI

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly pro-DEI messaging. Contains overtly pro-climate action messaging. Race swapped Suleiman and added historically unimportant female leaders. Global warming and carbon capture mechanics."

This one is particularly hilarious. A game about running a civilisation on our planet, and considering important matters that both occurred in history and which might occur in the future is “woke” for acknowledging things like climate change. I guess we add “climate change denier” to the “sexist, racist, transphobic and homophobic” list. Some racism and sexism on open display there, too.

BioShock Infinite

A screenshot of the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly anti-western society and overtly pro-DEI messaging. Colombia's residents are hyper-exaggerated, racist caricatures of 19th century Americans. Heavy social commentary on racism."

Another good one. The funny thing about this one is that they clearly got the point of BioShock, but then got offended by it.

Forza Horizon 5

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly pro-LGBTQ+ messaging. Prnoun selection including an option for they/them. Uses unlabeled presets instead of clearly defined male and female options during character creation."

I have to include this one just for how stupid it is. Forza Horizon 5, the game in which you spend your entire time in a car, is “woke” because it allows you to choose how the in-game characters refer to you. Because only big strong boys play car games, you know.

Spider-Man: Miles Morales

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly pro-LGBTQ+ messaging. Contains overtly pro-DEI messaging. Prominently displayed pride and BLM flags. The new POC main character overshadows Peter Parker."

This one is brilliant, because it’s criticising the fact that the protagonist named in the game’s title is “overshadowing” the character who is explicitly not the protagonist. Because he’s black. Let’s not beat around the bush here: this is racism. Again.

Disco Elysium

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly pro-LGBTQ+ messaging. Features multiple LGBTQ+ characters, including the player character. Heavy social commentary regarding communism. Whether pro or anti is unclear."

I’ll take “I played Disco Elysium and didn’t understand any of the big words” for 2,000, Alex. If you played Disco Elysium and didn’t understand whether it was pro or anti communism, you don’t deserve to be playing video games that have words in.

Final Fantasy VII

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains subtly pro-LGBTQ+ messaging. Contains subtly pro-climate action messaging. Forced cross-dressing. You start the game working for an ecoterrorism group."

And I have to include this one just for the giggles. Final Fantasy VII features “subtly pro-climate action messaging”. Yeah, Final Fantasy VII is real subtle about its environmental message, guys. Real subtle.

I’m utterly amazed at how committed these people are to being pathetic and weird. Because that is exactly what they’re being. There are 386 entries on their “Recommended” (i.e. “not woke”) list, while there are 746 “Not Recommended” (“WOKE!!!”) titles and 299 “Informational” (“A BIT WOKE!!!”) titles.

That’s a thousand and forty-five games that these people will refuse to consider because they might be exposed to a black person, a gay person or, heaven forbid, a woman. There’s no way you can look at that and not think it’s utterly pathetic.

Unless you’re one of them. In which case fuck off. I don’t want to know you.

#oneaday Day 89: Under the influence

I’m not entirely sure when exactly “influencer” became a widely accepted job title, but I do vividly remember when I first heard it that I felt “…we probably shouldn’t make that a thing”. And in 2024, I stand by that. I find it horrifyingly dystopian that we live in a world where people are unironically referred to as “influencers” — and, perhaps even worse, there are people out there who see “influencers” as somehow inherently more trustworthy than traditional media.

The traditional media has its problems, of course, and it always has done. But there has always been a certain separation between editorial and commercial content — and when there isn’t, it is clearly demarcated. There are no such demarcations when it comes to “influencer marketing” — and, from where I’m sitting, there appears to be absolutely zero scrutiny or oversight of how “influencers” are doing business, with minimal obligations for them to share the fact that they’re being paid to say things.

The scourge of “influencers” is a universal one, but obviously my most direct experience with it is in the world of gaming. One of the most common criticisms thrown at old-school games journalists is that they’ve been “paid off” by publishers to do things a certain way — either to inflate a product’s review scores above what it is perceived to “deserve”, or perhaps to disparage rival products.

Having spent several years in the industry, I don’t doubt that there have been occasions where that goes on. And there have been plenty of related incidents, too, with probably the most famous being “Gerstmanngate”, where a writer was let go from Gamespot for giving a bad review to a game whose publisher had spent a considerable amount on advertising said game.

Most people would agree that a games journalist being in the pocket of a publisher is a bad thing. I don’t believe it goes on nearly as often as the most insufferable people on the Internet think it does, but I think we can all agree that if money changes hands in this way, the “journalism” on the thing in question is compromised.

And yet the same people who would take a games journalist to task for accepting money from a publisher to cover a game are all over the world of “influencers”, believing that having your face on YouTube makes you inherently more “real” and “trustworthy” than those people who hid behind all those pesky written words. And “influencers” (no, I’m not going to stop with the scare quotes, I fucking hate the term) are openly accepting paid promotional deals, then covering the products in question. Some of them remember to disclose this; not all do. But regardless of whether or not any disclosure is going on, how is that any fucking different?

I find it absolutely unfathomable that “influencers” accepting money for coverage of things is apparently just tickity-boo, whereas the exact same thing was one of the worst accusations you could throw at a games journalist. How does that make any sense whatsoever?

I feel mostly immune to influencer marketing, but it’s very clear that the younger generation in particular are very susceptible to it. And it’s dystopian. It’s horrible. And it’s one of those things that we can’t just “walk back” any more, because the influencer “industry” has become so massive over the course of the last decade or so.

I saw someone argue earlier that we’re probably overdue for a brand new “segment” of the Internet, like how we once had stuff like Telnet and Gopher alongside the World Wide Web. If the Web has become this utterly devastated late-stage capitalism wasteland, perhaps it’s time for people to move on to something else? And no, not the fucking Metaverse. Honestly, at this point, I’d welcome the ability to engage with a fully text-based Internet that wasn’t 99% controlled by advertisers. Then we can leave all the “influencers” and their mindless zombie followers to it, and build something better elsewhere.

And then wait for that to be ruined. Still, it might be fun for a few years at least, before the Brands find it.

#oneaday Day 88: Is social media marketing over?

Just recently at the day job we’ve been having some Thoughts about using social media for marketing. I won’t go into the details for obvious reasons, and I will note that everything I say here is my own opinion and no-one else’s. But I feel like the age of social media marketing is coming to a close.

To be perfectly honest, I’ve never been on board with social media marketing from a consumer’s perspective. Facebook went from being tolerable to almost unusable once The Brands™ arrived, and it’s only gotten worse year after year. And back when I was an active user of Twitter, I not only didn’t follow any Brands™, I actively went out of my way to block any that ended up in my feed through “promoted” tweets or whatever.

Y’see, I’ve always had the somewhat controversial viewpoint that social media is best used for socialising. I used to actually quite enjoy using Facebook when it was a place to interact with friends. Likewise Twitter used to be a ton of fun when it was just people hanging out and shooting the breeze. But today? Both of those platforms are nigh-unusable for different reasons. And with people jumping ship from both, I struggle to see how their usefulness as marketing tools can continue.

This comes particularly to mind after the recent news that the “live service” game Concord has taken the unprecedented step of not only ceasing its online features, but actively refunding anyone who bought the game just 11 days after it hit store shelves. The writing was already on the wall for it; reports shortly after its launch suggested it had made “just” $1 million and only about 25,000 sales; these might seem like big numbers, but they really aren’t in today’s gaming industry, particularly towards the big-budget end of things, which is the space Concord occupies.

This occurrence got me thinking: how much of Concord’s disastrous launch was down to the troubled landscape of social media today? A few years back, a big game launch like this would be accompanied by a frenzied Twitter campaign in an attempt to drive “organic” (ugh) word-of-mouth promotion. To put it in non-marketing speak, the game itself would post something on social media, then other people would share it, gradually spreading word of the game through shares, replies and retweets.

Today, we live in a world where Twitter is fast becoming a dirty word, as Elon Musk’s “X”, as Twitter is now known, is increasingly becoming prone to the “Nazi Bar Problem“, since his constant bleating about “free speech” and “wokeness” has meant pretty much the only people left there now are some of the absolute worst dregs of humanity imaginable. It’s no longer fun or useful to the vast majority of people who used to hang out there, so a lot of people have jumped ship — either abandoning social media entirely, or moving to alternative platforms such as BlueSky. So one has to wonder how much value there is in marketing to what is rapidly looking like a room full of Nazis.

The same can often feel like it’s true of other platforms that are less of a “problem”. I talked recently about the issues we had attempting to enforce rules more specifically on a Discord I help manage, and it’s hard not to think about that “Nazi Bar Problem”. We don’t have a problem with “Nazis” as such (the few who have shown inclinations in that vague direction have been shown the door) but there are a few people who have become so entrenched that they’re a problem… and it’s honestly making us wonder if the time, effort and mental health expended on said server is worth it.

Can a product or Brand™ survive without social media? The assumption has always been “no”, but like I said above, I’ve found myself actively repulsed by Brand™ presences on social media for the most part, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Sure, there are some Brand™ accounts that post interesting things — and the one I’m in charge of I try and make an effort to use in such a manner — but are they really adding any value?

I’m not convinced they are. We are living in a peculiar time, and I don’t think anyone quite knows what’s going to happen next.