#oneaday Day 87: The most toxic person in retro gaming

One of the things that continually surprises me is quite how toxic the retro gaming community, particularly in the UK, can really be. I’m fortunate that I have only ever really encountered people who are thoroughly nice and lovely — and, even better, have been able to draw inspiration from them to make my own creative work better.

In this regard, I’d particularly like to throw some love (and some links to their YouTube channels) at, in no particular order and off the top of my head, RoseTintedSpectrum, WhatHoSnorkers, Timberwolf, Gouldfish on Games, Dudley of Yesterzine, Kim Justice, Slopes Game Room, Digitiser, More Fun Making It, Beyond the Scanlines, Gears of Games, Yawning Angel and doubtless myriad others that I’m forgetting. All of these folks are thoroughly lovely, supportive people that I am happy to have had direct contact with to varying degrees at various points over the course of the last few years. Click those links and subscribe to all of them. They do amazing work.

Sadly, there’s a really unpleasant underbelly to the retro gaming community in the UK, and a lot of it centres around an individual known variously as “George Bum”, “George Cropper” (not his real name), “Funky Spectrum” and any number of other aliases. “George” is a serial harasser who has been thrown off YouTube for his behaviour, and now festers in his own filth on his own little website (which, no, I’m not linking to), surrounded by chirruping sycophants who hang on his every shit-encrusted word — many of whom are very much old enough to know better.

I’m not pulling any punches here: “George” is an absolutely vile human being, and the way he has picked on several members of the retro gaming community for years at this point without any sort of punishment is utterly repugnant. He has particularly targeted the YouTuber Octavius with stalker-like obsessiveness, and is almost as bad with his fixation on Peter “Nostalgia Nerd” Leigh and his Norwich-based vegan bar-cum-arcade Barcadia. Most recently, he’s had Kim Justice in his sights, because he thinks her well-researched book is not as good as his AI-generated drivel that he listed on Amazon for £250.

And yet no-one does anything about him. Because there’s not really anything that can be done about this festering waste of space any more.

He’s in his element on the Twitter of 2024, which is a disgusting sinkhole full of the absolute worst people on the entire Internet — many of whom are openly spouting their garbage under their real names — although I take some small comfort from the fact that anyone with any sense has abandoned the platform long ago.

He’s been banned from YouTube for his harassment videos. (Of course, he maintains he did “nothing wrong”.) Now, at least, he’s confined to his stupid website. Sadly, as it’s self-hosted I suspect there’s not much anyone can really do about him short of actually raising a legal objection to some of the things he posts on there. And I doubt anyone wants to go through the time, energy and expense involved in doing that.

Which sucks, really, because it means this festering boil on the arse of UK retrogaming will never truly get lanced. All I can really do is encourage anyone reading this to never go anywhere near him. He is Bad News.

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 85: Find another word than “weird”

It seems that people of a certain — I don’t even know if it’s age, but it’s definitely a specific social group of some description — are incapable of describing something via any word other than “weird”. This is particularly apparent on YouTube, where there is a veritable surfeit of videos called, simply, “[x] is weird”.

Here’s one:

And another:

Here’s a brand new one with no views:

And here is part of what is apparently a whole series of the bloody things:

What these videos inevitably go on to describe is something that is emphatically not weird, usually rather mundane and which could have probably been better served with a more descriptive title.

At this point I’m sure someone desperately wants to bring up the American left-wing tendency to refer to anyone on the right of them as “weird”, which is a current trend in the run up to the next U.S. presidential election. This is a separate issue — and one which, I have to say, I’m kind of on board with, because nothing shuts down a raging idiot like telling them they’re being weird and making an idiot out of themselves — so I am not including it in the trend I am describing above, which has been around a lot longer.

I often find that the “[x] is weird” trend goes hand in hand with the tendency for Certain Types of People (again, not necessarily age-specific, but a definite type) to write things all in lower-case. You can see this in the first video example above. Nothing in the video title or the text on the thumbnail uses a capital letter, even when one is really needed (such as in the word “I”, on the name “Tony Hawk” and the abbreviation “THPS” for “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater”). And, again, the people who do this sort of thing often like to make out that exceedingly mundane things are somehow outlandishly remarkable.

I’m not even entirely sure why this bothers me so much. I think it’s that “[x] is weird” does the video (it’s usually a video), the subject matter the video is covering and the creator of the video a disservice. I’m sure many of these “[x] is weird” videos are actually quite interesting, but I am, at this point, completely put off from clicking on them almost as much as if I see “I played 100 days of [game]”.

I guess it’s just another example of Stuff That Isn’t For Me. And judging by the viewing figures on a couple of those videos I posted above, it seems I’m in a bit of a minority. But still. If you ever catch me posting a video with the name “[game name] is WEIRD” you have full permission to slap me. Even if I’m covering a French home computer game from the early ’90s. Now those really WERE weird.

#oneaday Day 59: Popularity produces pricks

And not in the way you might be thinking. Okay, there are times when someone getting popular or enjoying some success with something leads to them becoming a prick, but that is not what I’d like to talk about today. I’d like to talk about life as a small-scale creative person on the Internet, and what happens when something you produce manages to extend far outside of its usual audience.

I’m prompted to talk about this as a result of the thoroughly lovely RoseTintedSpectrum’s recent video on the first series of beloved video game TV show GamesMaster, which, to put it mildly, has been doing numbers since he released it. If you haven’t watched it yet, I highly recommend giving it a look:

What we’ve all been noticing since the video started blowing up, however, is how much more frequent comments from complete arseholes become once you cross a particular popularity threshold. Not necessarily comments that are being directly insulting to the video maker, but comments from people who are just being dickish. People who use terms like “woketard”. People who think the ’90s was a utopia where white people flourished and you never, ever had to look at those filthy Muslims. You know the sort of people. The same sort of people who cry “DEI” anyone someone with a slight tan appears on screen.

When this first started happening, we were discussing the phenomenon in a Discord server that hosts a number of UK-based retro gaming and retro tech YouTubers, and we all had similar stories to share. There comes a point, it seems, usually after you cross the 1,000 views mark, where there’s a marked uptick in comments from twats.

It makes sense when you think about it. A video blowing up and getting a lot of views means that it’s being pushed by the ever-mysterious YouTube Algorithm to people beyond your usual audience and subscriber base, which means people from circles you might not normally mix (or want to associate) with may start stopping by. And boy, do they love to hear themselves talk.

I had something similar a while back when I had my own video “blow up”. It was this one, a video I’m still pretty pleased with, but which left me feeling well and truly vindicated in just making videos about what pleases me, rather than what is guaranteed to be “popular”.

Because what no-one tells you about getting popular and suddenly attracting all these complete penii is that it’s genuinely stressful and often quite upsetting. I got to a point where I had to “pause” comments on the video above because the influx of them was stressing me out so much. And I wasn’t even getting nearly as many dickheads as Rosie is getting on his video. It was just overwhelming, and not in a good way; I did not like it at all.

The same is true for anything tangentially related to social media or online presence. Post something — be it picture, video, blog post, article, whatever — that manages to get a significant reach, and it’s seemingly inevitable that you’ll have to deal with dickheads. This is, of course, frustrating, because one would hope that it’s possible to get a significant reach on something without attracting the very dregs of Internet society, but with every “success story” like the ones I’ve described above, it seems increasingly inevitable that the dickheads? Oh they will come. They will come in droves.

I wonder how many people have been put off from a potential career of making creative things online by this sort of thing. I guess after a certain point you start to get used to it and be able to tune things out — and once you reach a certain size as an online personality, you can start hiring staff to take care of things like the comments section for you, so you can focus exclusively on actually making the videos.

But for everyone who gets to the point where they’re able to hire a staff, I’m sure there are myriad more who gave up the first time they saw mild success, because the dickheads came. And I can’t help thinking that’s a real shame. Online culture shouldn’t have come to this. But it has, and we just have to live with it, it seems, because no-one seems in a particular hurry to do anything about it.

Thank heavens for YouTube’s “Hide user from channel” setting, at least, which means the dickhead of your choice is banished to the abyss; you’ll never see them in your comments section again, and neither will the rest of your audience — but, here’s the fun bit: they’re still able to rage impotently at you, never knowing that you’ve effectively “blocked” them because YouTube doesn’t tell them that.

This is the one bit of YouTube I can honestly say is absolutely masterful. There are few things better than knowing that there are dickheads who think they’re posting amazing putdowns of your latest work, only for their comments to be silently banished to the abyss before they get anywhere near you.

Anyway, the Internet sucks, but go subscribe to Rosie ’cause he makes good vids. Ta-ra.

#oneaday Day 58: Was Ignorance Bliss?

There’s some nasty shit going on in the world right now. Without getting bogged down in the details, there are some vicious riots going on “Up North” in this green and pleasant land, following the horrible killing of several young girls at their dance class.

It’s hard to understand quite how outrage over the murders has escalated to what it is, but it’s fair to say that things have gotten A Bit Racist, to say the least. Last I heard of the situation, a Holiday Inn Express that was supposedly housing immigrants — immigrants completely unrelated to the murders, I might add — was besieged by exactly the sort of people you’re probably picturing when talking about people who are A Bit Racist Against Immigrants.

I won’t dwell on the situation because I haven’t read up much on it, so I’ll refrain from commenting further about specifics. But it’s brought something into focus for me which is a tad worrying: the fact that despite how we’re supposedly a lot more tolerant, progressive and understanding these days, as a society, a lot more of this horrible shit appears to be happening.

Whether it’s racist riots against people who had nothing to do with a horrible crime, transphobia at the Olympics (against someone who isn’t actually trans) or just general foul behaviour and intolerance, we seem to have hit something of a bump in the road in attempting to create a 21st century utopia.

Who am I kidding; we absolutely were not on the road to a utopia. Everything has been going to shit for a while, so it’s perhaps not altogether surprising that people are starting to act up, even if their behaviour and attitudes are completely misdirected. So I have to ask myself: was ignorance actually bliss?

I think back to my time living through the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s and I don’t remember ever feeling the sense of existential anxiety and dread over the world that I do these days. It’s entirely possible that this was entirely due to our collective ignorance of various groups of people who were downtrodden and oppressed, which of course carries its own problems, but I don’t remember encountering anywhere near the sort of outright hatred that is expressed today towards certain groups.

And it wasn’t as if we weren’t aware of the people who come in for the brunt of the abuse today. I just legitimately don’t remember the hatred being anywhere near as vicious as it is today.

At least some of that is down to social media, of course. It’s entirely possible that hatred like this was going on, but no-one saw it because not everyone had the means to plaster all their odious beliefs over every available space online. There was no “collective public space” like Twitter once was (and I don’t think it is that any more, since a significant portion of people have abandoned it completely, and the most active of those remaining tend to veer fairly hard right) and so people tended to stick to their own communities.

On the one hand, that probably allowed hate groups to thrive in private; on the other, well, you can see the result of everyone being thrown together just from a casual glance at Twitter on any given day. It’s not pretty.

Part of the existential anxiety and dread I feel over this whole situation is whether or not I “should” be doing something more, or even if that’s possible. I’ve always settled for some variation of “treat others as you would like to be treated”, and even take that as far as not commenting mean things on YouTube videos I really dislike (because I hate it when I get horrible comments). But is that really enough today? And if not, what can one do, other than simply actively not be a racist transphobic shit, and not go deliberately seeking fights?

#oneaday Day 56: Disconnect

I’m officially on holiday for a week! I don’t have anything much planned for the time off, aside from our trip on Thursday to go and look at pianos, but I’m going to try and be vaguely “productive” with my time. That means I’m going to try and force myself out in this heat and into the gym — once I’m in the air conditioning, I’m sure it’ll be fine — and I’m going to record some videos, and perhaps write some stuff.

One thing I’m going to try and make an effort to do is not look at “online” stuff as much as humanly possible. I’m not going to look at Twitter (easy, since I don’t have an account any more except the official one I use for work), I’m not going to look at Facebook (ditto), I’m not going to look at BlueSky (easy enough) and I’m probably going to try and ration my Discord usage as much as possible also.

I just don’t want to know, you see. I don’t want or need to know what people are arguing about today, or what the worst people on the Internet are being sexist, racist or transphobic about today. I don’t want to know about the seemingly endless parade of layoffs in the games industry. And I don’t want to know how shit online media in general is. I know all these things. They are not going to change.

Instead, I would like a nice, quiet week off, away from it all as much as possible. This will demand a certain amount of willpower, of course, but I’m confident I can find enough things to occupy myself with that I won’t need to idly flip through social-related apps on my phone. I have games to play, books to read, episodes of Deep Space Nine to watch, music to play, videos to make and all manner of other things. So why should I waste my time with stuff that, on balance, makes me miserable?

I shouldn’t, obviously. So that’s the plan. Minimise looking at anything potentially upsetting, frustrating or annoying online and just enjoy the things I have around me. I will, of course, still be checking in here and those videos I’m making will be up on YouTube, but aside from that… a bit of “digital detox” is just what the doctor ordered for a week. I hope it leaves me feeling refreshed, because heaven knows I feel run-down right now.

Time for the first sleep of the holiday, then. Bring on the aircon!

#oneaday Day 51: The Art of the Thumbnail

I’m in a Discord with some other (relatively) low-subscriber retro gaming and tech YouTubers, and we’ve had some interesting discussions over there. One subject that comes up frequently that I think I’ve derived the most value from is that of video thumbnails.

To put this in context, prior to joining this Discord, and for quite some time, my YouTube channel looked something like this:

I don’t dislike this look. I was rather fond of how each “series” I was doing had its own distinct appearance, and I feel each thumbnail got nicely to the point: telling viewers that it was a video about a particular game on a particular platform.

But that’s not really how YouTube works. However nice it looks to have a lineup of games with lovely consistent thumbnails Criterion Collection-style, it doesn’t necessarily bring the views in. And so, with the advice and encouragement of the folks in the aforementioned Discord, I do things a little bit differently now.

This is how my channel looks today:

I’m pleased with this. Because I feel like these thumbnails do a much better job of intriguing and attracting the viewer’s attention without assuming knowledge — i.e. “what is ‘Atari A to Z’?” — while still allowing me a certain degree of consistency and coherence that makes my work immediately identifiable if you know what to look for.

Best of all, I haven’t resorted to any of the more flagrantly transparent “clickbait” techniques, and “YouTube Face” is nowhere to be seen. The videos I make on YouTube are not for the same audience as Mr. Beast, so I make zero effort to court the sort of people who respond to those sorts of thumbnails.

And it works. At least I think so. Some of my videos perform about as well as what I considered a “solid performance” two or three years ago — that is to say, breaking three figures in the view count — but quite a lot more of them exceed that by two, three or even four times. And I’ve had a few breakout successes: my Super Woden GP 2 video sits at 86K views to date, my look at Ultima love letter Moonring has 21K views to date (and a very long tail), my video covering the announcement of The400 Mini attracted 14K views, and most recently a video on Project Gotham Racing 3 brought in a relatively modest but still impressive-for-my-channel 2.5K pairs of eyes.

I don’t do this for the views, as I quite frequently state; I do it because I enjoy it. But I won’t pretend it’s not nice when a video does well — at least partly because it results in a bit of pocket money for me. That Super Woden GP 2 video made me over a hundred quid within a few days of it being posted. And now I get a small payout from YouTube earnings (i.e. the minimum payment threshold) every couple of months, whereas once it was a far-off goal I thought I’d never achieve. That’s nice.

The secret behind those thumbnails? It’s not really anything complicated. The most effective advice from the Discord I’ve followed is to keep text to just a few bold words, and present those words using at least two of the following: a bold outline around the letters; a bold drop shadow; and slightly rotating various parts of the complete text so that the eye is drawn to lines that aren’t quite “straight”. That’s about it. I don’t overuse colour; I don’t overdo the “big red arrow” or “circling the obvious thing” tricks (although I put in a big red arrow occasionally as an in-joke to the group, which refers to itself as the “Big Red Arrow Club”); and, as noted, I don’t do the “YouTube Face”.

It works for me. The result is a channel full of videos I’m proud to call my own, and which a gradually (very gradually) growing number of people are coming to appreciate. That’s pleasing to me.

YouTube and YouTube culture has myriad problems, but it’s still the best place to create and share stuff like this. It’s a valuable means of self-expression and sharing one’s interests, and it’s something I’m glad I decided to get stuck into exploring properly.

You are subscribed, right?

#oneaday Day 49: No Hate

I have little to no time for cynical negativity, and I’ve felt this way for quite some time. I’ve been trying to pin down exactly why I feel like I can’t participate in a conversation where one or more of the participants has switched to “cynical negativity” mode, and I think I’ve just answered my own question: it’s because it feels like those who are being negative are trying to close the conversation.

I don’t always mean literally, as in “let’s not talk about this any more”, but I tend to find that a negative opinion about something almost certainly stops people from wanting to pipe up and say “actually, I liked it”, because these days that often seems to lead to an unnecessarily heated argument. Both sides become entrenched in their respective positions, and both inevitably come out of the encounter feeling worse about the other person.

I know. I have been there on a frustrating number of occasions. There are Discord servers that I have come to feel less than welcome in because I liked something that someone with a louder voice than me didn’t. And I feel it’s genuinely quite hard to find a place where you can just go and be enthusiastic about something any more, without some killjoy jumping in and rattling off a laundry list of its “flaws”. And the negative one always seems to come off better than someone who feels positively about something — even when the positive one clearly knows a lot more about the thing in question.

Once someone has opened that initial negativity valve, one of two things tends to happen: 1) the conversation ends, with the positive person left feeling like they can no longer talk about something they like, or 2) other people, some of whom have no experience with the thing under discussion, feel emboldened to jump on board with the person being negative, leaving the positive person feeling like they’re being ganged up on.

There are responses to this, and I’ve heard them all.

“If you really love something, you criticise it.” That may be true, but “criticising it” is not the same as shitting all over it and, in some cases, casting aspersions on those who do like it.

“Stop being so defensive.” I am defensive because you are attacking something that is important to me.

“People are allowed to have different opinions.” If that is the case, why do I now feel like I cannot open my mouth and express my support for the thing that “the room” has now decided is “bad”?

“Stop playing the victim.” I’m sorry, but after probably over a decade of this at this point — of feeling like I have no place to really “belong” — I feel somewhat hard done by.

More than anything, though, it’s just boring. I know we can all have a good laugh at the creative ways in which people talk about things they dislike — it’s a lot harder to be “amusing” when you’re being positive, it seems — but when no-one seems to like anything any more, it becomes extremely tiresome.

I’m not saying no-one is allowed to dislike things. I’m not saying no-one is allowed to hate things with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns. I’m saying I wish people would just be a little more considerate of those who like things, and want nothing more than to be able to talk about the things they like with other people.

Someone liking or loving something is an opportunity to learn and grow. Even if you end up not feeling the same way about the thing in question, you can learn something about the person you were talking to, and why the thing might be important to them. Meanwhile, if you close them down by saying you hate the thing before they’ve even had a chance to express themselves fully, that’s a potential relationship that is never going to go anywhere.

I feel bad that I even have to justify this. But with every passing day, I feel more and more alienated from people who should, in theory, be my friends, based on our shared interests. But when I’m confronted with negativity, I don’t feel welcome. I don’t feel like anyone wants to understand me. And I don’t feel like anyone wants to be my friend.

That’s a really shitty way to be feeling, let me tell you. And I hope it never happens to you.

#oneaday Day 32: Lies, Damned Lies

A lot has been made about the supposed proliferation of “fake news” and, regrettably, because discussion about it started around the time of Trump’s last ascendancy (and to quite a significant degree from the Trump camp), not everyone takes the concept entirely seriously. But it’s definitely something that happens, and it’s making the Web less and less useful.

Earlier today, a member of a Discord I’m in posted a link to the following tweet:

The screenshots are of Windows Defender supposedly finding a plain text file containing nothing but the text “This content is no longer available.” to be a piece of malware — specifically a Trojan called Casdet!rfn. Obviously a plain text file is not malware, so this is ridiculous, and thus Microsoft must have made a silly mistake and we can all laugh at them, ho ho ho.

I tried it.

Windows Defender did not find it to be malware.

I Googled it and found several outlets reporting on this “story”, including some that really should know better (looking at you, Tom’s Hardware) — and not one of them had seemingly put in the minimal amount of effort required to verify that this was actually a thing. In other words, none of them had done what I did above: recreate the situation by composing a blank text file, putting the words “This content is no longer available.” in it and then scanning it with Windows Defender. A two-minute job, tops.

No, instead the most rigour anyone put in was to look at the replies to the Twitter post, which are fairly slim in number, making me wonder exactly how this misinformation had spread in the first place. The tweet in question has nearly 700,000 views, though only 800 of whatever the Muskrat is calling “Retweets” this week, suggesting the majority of its minor virality has come about through situations exactly like the one I describe above: people sharing it via means other than Twitter.

Now, I don’t blame the chap on Discord. He was just sharing something he thought was funny. I don’t even blame the original Tweeter, because it’s entirely possible that this was true once and it was quietly fixed in a Windows update. But I do blame all these people, and Google.

Not only for reporting on this without doing the absolute bare minimum of fact-checking, but for not correcting these stories if indeed it was once true and now is no longer correct.

Either way, the result is the same: a lot of misinformation gets spread very easily, often by people who have no ill intent. It’s not the fault of the people who share this stuff — although I personally would check any sort of claim like this before resharing it myself — but it absolutely is the fault of outlets authoritatively sharing this as “news” without doing any sort of research beyond looking at a few Twitter posts.

Sadly, this is what “news” is these days. Get a good hook for a story that might be the slightest bit clickable and/or shareable, then write it up (with at least 600 words for SEO purposes, of course) and just make some shit up in the middle if you need to. Doesn’t matter if the story is true or not; by the time people have clicked or shared, the article has done its job, and it doesn’t matter if anyone twigs that it’s bollocks or not.

In some respects, I’m sad that I’m no longer working the games journalism beat. But in others, I know that if I was still a newshound, I’d likely be gently encouraged into this sort of odious practice in order to get the numbers up.

I had more integrity and rigour when I was covering stuff for GamePro and USgamer. I’d find stories, research them myself and report on them only when I was good and sure that there actually was a story there. And I didn’t have to make a big deal out of doing that at the time, because that was the expectation for someone working a News Editor position.

Now? Engagement above all. Who cares if something is true? Numbers go big, suits stay happy. Fuck the actual audience who might want the publications they read to be reliable and trustworthy; they are, after all, the least important part of the whole equation these days.

If you’re looking for the Web as it once was, then I’m sorry to inform you that This content is no longer available.

#oneaday Day 22: Trends Have Made the Internet Boring

See? I told you I’d be back. And I thought I’d talk about something other than Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail. Specifically, as the title says, I want to talk about how trends have made the Internet boring. Or perhaps more accurately, why everyone all wanting to do the same thing all at once makes things deathly boring.

There are a few practical examples I’d like to give. First is a YouTube channel I was introduced to recently called Obscurest Vinyl. This channel is run by a designer and musician who found some joy in creating fake record sleeves for songs with names you definitely wouldn’t have gotten away with in the eras they’re parodying. Songs like the wonderful Pullin’ Out My Pubes (She Loves Me Not) by The Sticky Sweethearts:

You’ll notice from that video that the record label now has some music attached to it. I was initially a little perturbed to discover that the person behind the Obscurest Vinyl YouTube channel had been using AI music generation to create the tracks, though my mind was set somewhat at rest by how he had written the lyrics (which are generally far too offensive to be the product of the typically rather po-faced Large Language Model AI bots) and tinkered with the initial output to make it flow properly, incorporate all the filthy language and sound consistent with the other works from the same fictional “artists” on the channel.

Of course, what the YouTube algorithm then did was go “oh, you watched a video about a fake record with lyrics about someone gluing their balls to their butthole, HERE, HAVE A MILLION MORE OF THEM”. And it became very apparent that Obscurest Vinyl has a lot of copycats out there, none of which have anywhere near the same magic; these other channels are just trying to ride a trend.

This, of course, is symptomatic of one of the main things that is killing the Web right now: excessive Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. Have you ever searched for some information on something, only to find a billion unrelated websites all magically having articles headlined “What Time Is The Superbowl On?” or “Where Do You Unlock Pictomancer in Final Fantasy XIV?” That’s SEO at work, and that’s a problem that is only getting worse with the amount of AI sludge that is being fed into the Internet at large. Sites want quick and easy clicks, so they look at what people are searching for — the trends of the hour — then provide a hyper-specific article about the thing.

Helpful? Arguable. I hate it, because I’d rather have the information directly from the original source — in the latter case above, for example, it took me a fair bit of scrolling before I got past all the websites jockeying for SEO juice to the actual website for Final Fantasy XIV, the thing I was looking for.

More than being frustrating if you want the information straight from the horse’s mouth, it just makes the Web boring as fuck, because every site (including a lot that should really know better) are doing the exact same thing. Daily Wordle solutions. Individual articles for things that would have been much better incorporated into an FAQ. Outright copying and plagiarism of other sites. It really is a shame to see what online media has become — and frustrating to see that certain portions of the creative types on sites such as YouTube are more obsessed in chasing trends with transparently copycat material rather than, you know, being creative.

I don’t know what the endgame of all this is. I hope we’re in a “things will get worse before they get better” kind of situation, but honestly right now, it feels unlikely that the “get better” part will happen. The Web gets demonstrably worse, less useful and less fun day by day. And we’ve all let it happen. I don’t know if we can undo that.

#oneaday Day 16: The Youth of Yesterday

I’m compelled to write today by the thoroughly lovely Neil and Dave of the This Week in Retro podcast, who had a discussion about “the youth of today”, and how some parents are concerned that their children spend the vast majority of their time on an endless cycle of Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft, perhaps punctuated by social media in between times. The show and its discussion can be found below:

People who grew up pre-Internet doubtless all have their own experiences to share. The listener who wrote in with the question described how while they did spend time with their computer playing games, they also played outside, rode their BMX bike and all manner of other things, while both Neil and Dave described their own experiences as being a bit different, both from one another and from the listener’s recollection. So I thought I’d share my own experiences, with the benefit of hindsight.

I grew up in a country village that, at the time I lived there, had somewhere between 800 and 1,000 people living there. It was seven miles away from the nearest town, there was no bus service unless you went to the next village over (and even then, it was pretty much a “once a week” sort of affair) and… I guess you could look upon it as either being ideal or terrible for growing up in. Ideal because it was quiet, safe and full of places to go on childish “adventures”; terrible because, particularly once I reached adolescence, all of my friends were a car journey away.

I went back and forth on my feelings about living in that village. When I was of primary school age, I attended the village school, and as such my social circle was pretty much all people who lived nearby. I had a small group of friends, only one or two of whom I actually went to see outside of school time, but mostly kept myself to myself. In retrospect, my relative lack of socialisation compared to some of my peers was likely down to the social anxiety I felt as a result of my then-undiagnosed autistic spectrum condition.

But at the time, I didn’t really begrudge living in the village. I knew it was a nice place, that I lived in a nice house with supportive parents and a stable home life. I enjoyed when my grandparents came to visit and we’d go for a walk, inevitably to landmarks around the village that had acquired nicknames; “The Kissing Gate” (one of those awkward gates into a farmer’s field), “The Brook” (a pathetic little stream that, these days, has mostly dried up and smells awful), “The Bullocks” (the farmer’s field beyond The Kissing Gate that sometimes, but not always, had bulls in it). Looking back on it now, I have lots of fond memories.

When I entered my teens and started attending school in the aforementioned town seven miles away, my feelings changed a bit. While I was still somewhat anxious about social situations, I started to feel a bit more left out. As I grew older, I started to feel like there were lots of things that I couldn’t do because I didn’t live close enough. These feelings persisted until I turned 17, passed my driving test and suddenly had a lot more independence… so long as my Mum didn’t mind me borrowing her car of an evening.

I promise I’m getting to the video games.

Point is, I don’t remember spending a lot of time as a kid or a teen “playing outside”. I didn’t learn to ride a bike until well after many of my peers — memorably, I suffered a rather large setback on my initial efforts when I came a cropper and skidded along a rough concrete farm road, shearing a significant chunk of skin off my legs and arms, which made me a little hesitant to try again for a while — and I didn’t spend much time with many of my peers, except on rare occasions when I’d go over to a friend’s house for one reason or another.

Throughout all that time, I was fascinated with computers. Not just games, but computers in general. I knew my Dad worked for IBM, but didn’t really know what he actually did (and still to this day don’t think I could actually tell you). I knew my brother and Dad both contributed to an Atari computer magazine that we got regularly known as Page 6. And I knew all of my family, at one point or another, were keen computer users for various reasons. My Dad used it for “serious” software and subLOGIC’s Flight Simulator II (which he insisted was “not a game” and was thus still counted under the “serious software” category”); my Mum liked the occasional blast on Millipede and Space Invaders; my brother was the one who was into games, though he had a much more active social life than I did, helped at least partly by being ten years my senior.

Since I determined quite early on that I rather enjoyed — or at least felt most comfortable — in solitude, I was grateful for the company of the computers of our household: initially the Atari 8-bit and ST, then later the MS-DOS and Windows 3.1/95/98 PCs. In the early days of the Atari 8-bit, I devoured books and magazines about the computer, typing in listings and learning how to program in BASIC myself. I never really got what I’d call good at it, but I developed a basic (no pun intended) competence that was greater than that of someone who just used their computer to play games.

But I also played games. A lot of games. I learned a lot from those games, too. Text adventures helped me with my reading (and, indirectly, my writing); keyboard-based games played a significant role in developing the typing skills I still have to this day; puzzle games helped me with my general intelligence and problem-solving; action games helped me develop my imagination and my motor skills.

It’s stereotypical to say that “games help with hand-eye coordination”, but I was diagnosed dyspraxic in primary school, which basically meant I was a bit clumsy with certain things; video games helped me feel like I was competent at something, even if I was unable to hold a pencil “properly”. Playing games, and more broadly “going on the computer”, was important to me. It felt like it was something I could enjoy without compromise; I didn’t feel like I had to make any sort of adjustments, or have people “go easy on me” as I did in activities like sports. It was just something for me to enjoy. And, as I moved into my teens and broadened my circle of friends at secondary school, they proved to be a good backdrop for social interactions, too.

More often than not, if I went over to a friend’s house or had a friend over to mine, we would spend our time playing games together, or at the very least just using the computer. I have fond memories of spending time with several friends just messing around with speech synthesis programs on the Atari ST and Amiga, and even programming in STOS, a dialect of BASIC for the Atari ST, or making silly in-joke games with Clickteam’s wonderful Klik and Play and The Games Factory. I was happy that my formerly solitary activity was something I could share my enjoyment of with others.

This continued as I came to the end of my time at school and moved into university. I made new friends, at least partly through computing and video games, and many of those folks are people I still make an effort to spend time with today — even if sometimes that effort doesn’t feel like it’s reciprocated with quite the same enthusiasm. Computing and gaming remained something that was important to me, even as the Internet came into its mainstream ascendancy in the late 1990s.

I have some fond memories of those early days of the Internet. Chatting with strangers on CompuServe’s “CB Simulator”, aka just a public chatroom. Posting messages on CompuServe’s GAMERS forum, which eventually let to me earning $200 for making ten Wolfenstein 3-D levels that were included in an official expansion pack. Chatting with my friends from my course on MSN Messenger. Randomly getting into a conversation with a young woman on AOL Instant Messenger, only to discover that, completely by chance, she was the housemate of one of my existing friends.

Computing was always there as part of my life, but I think a key difference between then and now is that in my formative years, it was there as a backdrop to socialisation, rather than the means of socialisation itself. The This Week in Retro listener commented that their children feel genuine anxiety and FOMO (“Fear Of Missing Out”) if they have gaming time privileges revoked for whatever reason, because rather than Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft being the backdrop for their socialisation, those activities are the socialisation.

There’s also social media to take into account. I am genuinely glad that social media did not exist when I was a child, because I’m not sure I would have made it through my adolescence intact. Sure, there are positive aspects to it, such as being able to reconnect with people you haven’t spoken to for a long time, but there’s also the insidiously manipulative nature of all the major platforms today, and how none of them are really concerned with being a platform for communication; they are, instead, platforms for advertising.

The thing that really makes me feel like social media may well have done me in, though, is how easy it is for it to be used for bullying. I suffered a fairly significant amount of bullying throughout both my primary and secondary school life, and it was hell. It left me wary of trusting people; it made me frustrated about communicating with others; it made me feel like it was, at times, simply not worth making the effort to interact with people.

For a long time, I used to say that the Internet allowed me to “be myself” for the first time… well, ever, really. I could find like-minded people who understood me and respected me for who I was, and I felt like I was among friends. I don’t feel that way any more; nowadays, I feel the same way about online interactions as I do about interacting with real strangers: genuine anxiety and fear. I dread getting notifications in apps or on websites where I’ve posted something publicly. And yet, I still do it — here I am, after all — because I feel like it’s important to not let the bullies win, whether they’re real or imagined. I need to feel like I can still express myself the way I want to express myself; to enthuse about the things I want to enthuse about. That’s why I write here and on MoeGamer, and why I make videos over on my YouTube channel.

Even then, though, I feel a lot of frustration, because I know a significant portion of the world looks on the Internet, social media and general social interactions in a different way to me. That can often leave me feeling lonely and isolated. But the one thing I’ve always had as a constant is being able to immerse myself in a video game or other activity on the computer, and feel like I am, for once, at peace — even if, with each passing year, it feels like it’s getting harder to share that haven of peace with others.

That went a tad deeper than I perhaps thought, and I’m not sure I have an answer to the original poster’s questions or concerns. I do know, however, that spending time on the computer isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, particularly when it brings someone comfort and stability. It’s when that “safe” activity starts to get “unsafe” things encroaching on it that you need to perhaps take action — but that’s going to be something that is different for everyone. For me, it’s meant largely removing myself from the public-facing part of the Internet except in places where I can very much control and curate my experience, and continuing to enjoy those things that I always have enjoyed in peace and quiet. No video game ever betrayed me, after all.