#oneaday Day 76: Nopegrade

I’m due a phone upgrade. This is probably the first time I’ve come to that point and haven’t been tempted to immediately get a new shiny phone. And the reason? So many of the latest models appear to be absolutely rammed to the gills with “AI” features I don’t want anything to do with.

And it’s a shame, because some of these phones do otherwise look good. The Google Pixel 9 looks like it has an excellent camera, for example, and that’s pretty high up my list of priorities these days. The newest Samsung devices also look quite nice, and having had a Samsung device for my last couple of phones, I’d be quite happy to go with them.

If it wasn’t for the bloody AI crap, that is. I know I could just “not use it”, but that’s not really the point. I don’t really want to send any sort of message that AI junk is something that I’m interested in in the slightest, and my concern is people happily jumping on with Google Pixel 9 and “just trying out” Gemini will just prolong the amount of time we all have to suffer with AI garbage being jammed into places we don’t want it.

I’m sure there are some “valid” uses for AI, but honestly, I don’t really see the usefulness right now. Earlier on, I watched a Marques Brownlee review of the Google Pixel 9, and everything that was “AI-powered” seemed very superfluous and unnecessary. An on-phone image generator? Cool, now I can steal artwork wherever I am in the world! An assistant I can talk to about what I should do about a wasp infestation? I’d rather talk to a real person that doesn’t hallucinate, thanks. The ability to turn on my lights with my voice? 1) I can already do that with several other devices and 2) I don’t want to do that. The ability to insert myself into a photo I wasn’t in? Cool, now I can create “memories” of things that didn’t actually happen. I’m sure that’s healthy.

It’s the voice stuff that really gets me. I genuinely do not understand how any of that is desirable. How is getting an Amazon Alexa, Google Gemini or whatever to read out your email headers better than tapping on the email icon and looking at them? How is getting a device to give you a “daily briefing” better than just doing a quick round of your favourite websites to check on the headlines? How is bellowing “SET A TIMER FOR THREE MINUTES… no, THREE minutes. THREE. MINUTES.” better than going to the clock app and typing the number “3”?

It isn’t. These things are all gimmicks. They’re not actually useful. The grand dream is presumably some sort of omniscient, omnipresent Star Trek-style capital-C Computer that we can call upon to dispense its knowledge and information wherever we are at any time of day. But we’re not there yet. We’re not even close to being there yet, with how unreliable and hallucination-prone modern AI still is. And if reports are to be believed, we’ve already pretty much hit a cap on how good the current “AI” tech can get, because the various models are already starting to feed on themselves, making hallucinations more likely, not less likely, as they inadvertently guzzle up AI-generated swill rather than material that has had a human involved at any point during its creation.

And it disgusts me to see how many publishing companies are gleefully signing up to feed their writers’ work into ChatGPT, almost certainly without consulting the actual writers for their consent beforehand. Today it was Condé Nast. Previously it was Vox Media. And I’m sure there’s a lot more all over the place, too.

I cannot wait for this odious trend to be over. And I suspect it will be over within a few years, as the money is almost certainly going to run out. None of these models are sustainable; none of them have a “killer app” that convinces naysayers that actually, AI might be quite good after all; none of them even really have a marketable product beyond “look at this thing that might one day be able to do something vaguely useful (but doesn’t just yet)”.

The sooner that fucking sparkly magic icon goes away, the better.

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 19: The AI Rot

Look at this bastard little icon. You probably see it every day right now. Hell, I see it every time I pop open the WordPress toolbar, because Automattic, makers of WordPress and Jetpack (back-end technology that helps WordPress sites do what they do) are cramming it in absolutely fucking everywhere, just like every other tech company is right now. No-one asked for this, no-one wants it, no-one is happy with the results it produces.

And yet, look at that bastard little icon. Such promise it carries in its little sparkly starbursts! The suggestion that magic is about to happen! The implication that, were you just to click that bastard little icon, creativity will be magically produced from nothing, allowing you to truly express yourself without any of that pesky “thinking”! You will truly be once and for all free!

As a creative type, naturally I object to generative AI being jammed in everywhere that it doesn’t belong. I’ll admit to having found some uses of it potentially interesting — music generation is intriguing, feeling like a step onwards from a program we used to have on the Atari ST called “Band In A Box” — but whatever use case I come across, it’s hard to shake the feeling that its only real use is to enable laziness, and to prevent having to pay a real person for doing the creative work that is their specialism. (The actual computing and environmental cost of such tech doesn’t matter to AI zealots, of course.)

That’s not to say there’s no money in AI, mind; no, by golly, the big tech companies are falling over themselves to hoover up investor cash right now, and every big generative AI site features some sort of predatory monetisation system, usually involving “credits” that obfuscate how much you’re actually paying, and/or “monthly” subscriptions that are actually charged annually, because apparently that’s just a thing you can lie about now and no-one calls you on it.

I think one of the clearest signals I’ve felt that AI bullshit has gone too far is its encroachment into pornography. It’s now easier than ever to produce “deepfake” pornography featuring people who have not consented to appear in pornographic material. Of course, AI-generated slop has plenty of telltale signs, still, but the fact this stuff exists at all was already cause for concern even before it was easy to produce it.

On top of that, sites that were once about posting collections of erotic art and animations from artists, movies, anime series and video games are now overflowing with AI-generated swill; a cursory glance at e-hentai’s front page earlier revealed a multitude of galleries tagged with “[AI Generated]”, making them virtually worthless. Of course, e-hentai and sites like it already skirt the borders of morality by often including artwork artists intend to be kept behind Patreon, skeb or Fantia paywalls — but many of these galleries seem to suggest that there are a significant number of individuals out there attempting to position themselves as “artists” when all they are, in fact, doing is plugging prompts into an AI model that doesn’t chastise them in a patronising way when requesting erotic material.

I’m sick of it. I’m sick of Jetpack emailing me to join an AI “webinar”, I’m sick of ClickUp, the productivity tool we use at work, constantly spamming me about some AI feature I don’t care about, I’m sick of the breathless zealotry from the cryptobros who have found the next big thing to latch onto before it all inevitably comes tumbling down in burning wreckage… and I’m sick of the uneasiness that I’m sure anyone in a vaguely creative field is feeling right now.

And I’m not sure it’s going to go away for a while. Big Tech seems determined to make “AI” a thing. And while I’m not averse to actual, helpful uses of it — which I’m yet to see a convincingly working example of that can’t be better fulfilled by other, existing methods — I think we all know that with the people we have in charge, those actual, helpful uses are inevitably going to take a back seat to ways of screwing poor old Joe Public and his friend Struggling Artist out of their hard-earned money more than anything else.

(Aside: I tried running this article through Jetpack’s stupid “AI Assistant” to “get suggestions on how to enhance my post to better engage my audience”, and the thing just crashed. Good show!)

So fuck that bastard little icon. Take your magic sparkles and jam them right up your robotic arse. The only things allowed to sparkle like that are fairies and ponies, and AI is neither of those things. So into the trash it goes, so far as I’m concerned.

2529: Mobile Phone Apathy

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I’ve always thought of myself as something of a gadget-head, but over the last few years I’ve become increasingly underwhelmed and bored with those most ubiquitous of devices, the mobile phone.

I remember getting my first mobile phone towards the end of my schooldays. It was a big fat Motorola thing with an extendable aerial, and I remember the most exciting thing about it was discovering that I could hold down a button to write lower-case letters in text messages, whereas I’d previously been writing in all-caps like a grandmother learning to use email for the first time. (We were all writing in all-caps like a grandmother learning to use email for the first time at the time.)

Every year or two after that, there was the excitement of The Upgrade. I upgraded from my Motorola to a Nokia 3210, which was exciting because it had Snake on it, and everyone loved Snake, despite it being something that I’d played some 15 years earlier on my old Atari 8-bit computers. Then I upgraded to a Nokia 3330, which had Snake II on it (which was essentially Snake with mildly better graphics). These two phones were pretty similar to one another, though this was also the age that phones were getting smaller rather than bigger, so the 3330 was pleasingly compact after the relatively bulky 3210.

After that, I went for a Sony Ericsson phone that had a colour screen and a camera. Well, I say it had a camera; actually, the camera was a separate unit you had to snap on to the bottom of it which took photos at approximately the size of a postage stamp that weren’t any use to anyone. The colour screen was nice, though.

After that, I got a phone whose make and model I can’t remember, but which I think was actually one of my favourite phones of all time. It had a pretty big screen — in colour again, a reasonable quality camera and, best of all, the ability to record sounds that could subsequently be used for ringtones, message tones, alarm tones and all manner of other things. It was a lot of fun, and an early phone to support Java, too, which meant you could download games for it. And there were some decent games available, too — most notably the excellent puzzle game Lumines, which had previously been something exclusive to PSP owners.

If I remember correctly, my next phone after that was the ill-fated Nokia N-Gage, which I picked up out of interest in its gaming capabilities. I actually ended up liking it as a phone more than a gaming device, since its vertically-oriented screen made a lot of games impractical and tricky to play, but the dedicated directional pad, the way you held it and the big, bright, clear screen made it a very comfortable personal organiser device. Sure, you looked dumb talking on it — it was notorious for its “side-talking” posture, whereby you looked like you were holding a taco up to your ear while talking on it — but I rarely talked on the phone anyway, so this simply wasn’t a big issue for me. It’s actually one of my most fondly remembered phones.

I forget if I had any other phones between the N-Gage and the iPhone that I was given for free while I worked at Apple — I was working retail during the launch of the device — but none spring to mind. The iPhone, meanwhile, was actually a little underwhelming when it first launched; while its bright display and capacitive touchscreen certainly looked lovely, iOS 1.X was severely limited in what you could actually do with it. About the most interesting thing you could do with a first-gen iPhone was browse the “full” Internet rather than only WAP-enabled mobile-specific pages. (Interestingly, with responsive sites, we’ve now actually gone back to having mobile-specific pages, albeit with a lot more functionality than old-school WAP sites.)

The iPhone was a bit of a watershed moment for mobile phones, though, because it’s at that point that devices stopped being quite so different and unique from one another. Each and every iPhone is much like the last — perhaps a little faster, a little bigger, a little clearer, a little more lacking connection ports we’ve previously taken for granted — and each and every Android phone is much like the last too, except, of course, for the ones that function as inadvertent incendiary devices.

I’ve had my HTC One M8 phone for over two years now. I picked it up as an upgrade from my crusty old iPhone 4 because I was bored with iOS and wanted to see what Android was like, and discovered that yes, I liked Android, though it’s just as boring as iOS is. Now, even as I’m eligible for an upgrade to the newest, latest and greatest, I have absolutely no desire to investigate my options whatsoever. The M8 works fine for what I use it for, and I find most new phones virtually indistinguishable from what the M8 offers. Again, they might be a little bit faster or offer a higher resolution screen — although at the size of a mobile phone, there comes a point where resolution becomes completely irrelevant, since individual pixels are too small to distinguish — but they don’t do anything new or exciting in the same way that my pre-smartphone upgrades offered.

Each and every upgrade before the iPhone I had was genuinely thrilling, and something I wanted to show off to people. Each phone was unique from the last, and each brand offered its own particular twist on things. Now, the actual devices themselves are uninteresting and virtually indistinguishable from one another; simply a delivery medium for their operating system of choice. And operating systems aren’t interesting.

I think a big part of my growing cynicism and apathy for this particular side of technology also comes from the fact that the mobile marketplace in general just feels a bit sleazy. Ever since the world was given in-app purchases — something which I knew would be a terrible idea as soon as it was announced — we’ve been subjected to revolting, exploitative free-to-play garbage, ad-infested messes and all manner of other bullshit. Rather than being the cool, exciting gadgets they once were, mobile phones feel increasingly like just another way for advertisers to invade your life and snake oil salesmen to part you with your case — although what part of life isn’t this way these days?

All this is a rather long-winded way of saying that I’m in no hurry to upgrade my HTC One M8, and in fact, I’ve considered on more than one occasion actually “downgrading” to a feature phone rather than a smartphone. Maybe I should see how much N-Gages are going for on eBay…

2469: OK Google

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With the courier work I’ve been doing for the past few days, I’ve been relying heavily on Google Maps for navigation around the area, and I’ve been discovering the benefits of voice controls — it’s much easier to simply say “take me to…” and Google work it out for you than to type in a postcode using Android’s cumbersome and clumsy keyboard.

I’ve actually been pretty impressed with the accuracy of the voice recognition, since it even recognises non-standard words such as street names without too much difficulty, and it uses your location to make an educated guess at which one of the many Alder Roads in the world you might have actually wanted to go to. I counted only two hiccups in an entire day’s work: one when it wanted to send me to Hedge End (which is the other side of the Southampton conurbation to where I was working) and one when it wanted to send me to Birmingham. Granted, one of those mistakes was pretty large, but given that it understood me on all the 50+ other occasions throughout the day, I think I can forgive it.

I find myself wondering if voice recognition will actually become particularly widespread or accepted. Apple now includes Siri with Mac OS as well as iOS, Microsoft has Cortana in more recent revisions of its operating systems, Google seems keen to bake voice recognition into Android and all its services and even my TV will let you talk to it. The technology is certainly there and seems to work reasonably well in most cases — certainly considerably better than it did even just a few short years ago — but it’s still painfully awkward to use, particularly if you’re in an environment where there are other people around you. And while I’ve seen the benefit of being able to shout at my phone while I’m in my car, I don’t see the same benefit from talking to my computer, TV or games console when its physical controls are right there and allow me to complete the task I want to complete just as quickly “manually”.

I think we’re still lacking a certain degree of artificial intelligence necessary to make voice activated technology truly useful, worthwhile and ingrained in society. The aim, presumably, is to have something along the lines of Computer in Star Trek, where you can say pretty much anything to the voice activated computer and it will successfully parse what you say (within reason) and perform any task from turning the lights on to inverting the phased magnetic resonance coils into a Gaussian feedback loop. Specify parameters.

I wonder whether that’s something that is truly desirable, though. Is it really more convenient to be able to vocalise something you want your computer to do? It probably is for those who aren’t as computer-literate, but then there’s still a chunk of the population who don’t use computers or mobile phones at all. A shrinking chunk, admittedly, but a chunk nonetheless, and I’m not sure fully voice-capable hardware — which will probably still be on the expensive end of the spectrum — will convert that sort of person into being a believer in technology.

Still. “OK Google” helped me find my way around today, and that, at least, impressed me. Perhaps I’ll discover more interesting uses of it in the future.

2462: I Don’t Need Any More Tutorials or Updates

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I was out today, making heavy use of my phone to assist with some part-time courier work I’ve picked up recently. At some point during the day, the Google Maps app updated, at which point it felt the need to give me a tutorial.

Nothing, so far as I can tell, has changed in the Google Maps app since its last iteration, so quite why it felt the need to deliver an irritating and persistent tutorial is beyond me.

Google Maps isn’t the only app to do this. Pretty much any “productivity” app on mobile these days feels the need to bore you with a pointless (and often non-skippable) slideshow before you can start using it — even in the most simplistic apps.

I get why these tutorials are put in there — it’s to cater to stupid people and/or the technologically disinclined, who might not be familiar with the conventions of interface design. But they should be skippable. And if the app has clearly been on the device — and used heavily — prior to the latest update, it should automatically skip the tutorial by default.

And while we’re on, I can do without pointless, unnecessary updates, too, even though App Store, Google Play and Steam reviewers seem to think that they’re essential to an app or game remaining useful and/or fun. (These people never lived through an age where your word processor came on a floppy disk, and that was it, no more updates unless you shelled out for a new version.) These people are the reason why we get stupid, idiotic revamps to things that worked perfectly well the way they did before, like Twitter and Google Hangouts.

The latter is one I find particularly irritating, particularly in its Chrome extension incarnation. Previously, the Chrome extension was a discreet little affair that took the pop-up Google Hangouts interface from GMail and rendered it in an “always on top” version that could sit on your desktop — tucked away when you didn’t need it, yet just a mouseover away when you did.

Now, however, it’s in its own separate window for no apparent reason — a window that opens up every time you start Chrome, whether or not you have new messages to read — and, presumably in an attempt to “look like Android”, it has one of those annoying mobile-style “drawer” menus on the left. These are fine on mobile as they’re built to be usable with a touch interface, but on the big screen they’re clumsy and unnecessary. I honestly don’t know why we don’t still use drop-down menus any more; they may look boring, but they work. At least Mac OS still uses drop-down menus for most apps, though Office for Mac still has that horrible “Ribbon” thing at the top instead of the old-school toolbar from early versions of Office.

Updates are fine when they add something meaningful: look at something like Final Fantasy XIV, which adds meaningful new content with every major version number update. But when they’re change for change’s sake — like Hangouts’ new format, and Twitter’s insistence on reordering your timeline even when you have repeatedly asked it not to — they’re just annoying. And, moreover, that inexperienced audience the developers were hoping to capture with their tutorials will likely end up being turned off by having to “re-learn” their favourite app every few weeks.

And don’t even get me started on the three system restarts I did the other day, with a notification that there were new Windows updates available every time. At least I managed to excise the cancer that is the Windows 10 nag prompt, so I should be grateful for small victories, I guess.

2453: A Meeting of Generations

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After a bit of fiddling around and faffing (and eventually giving up on the OSX side of things) I managed to get a 35-year old Atari 800XL talking to a modern-day Windows computer. Not only talking, but even reading and writing files back and forth.

The secret to this black magic is twofold. Firstly, you need a bit of kit called an SIO2PC module, which converts the signal from the Atari computer’s SIO hardware — used for communicating with peripherals such as disk drives and cassette decks — into something which can be interpreted by modern systems, since SIO was a proprietary format and cable type. The SIO2PC module I had was serial-based, so I then had to run it into a modern computer using an RS232 to USB converter cable, since many computers these days don’t come with serial COM ports as standard. The cable effectively sets up a “virtual” COM port via USB, tricking the serial device into thinking it’s plugged into an actual serial port on the PC.

Once you’ve got that bit sorted, you need some software. There are three pieces of software I’ve experimented with today. Firstly, SIO2OSX just didn’t work at all. I don’t know if I didn’t set it up correctly or if the Mac simply didn’t have the appropriate drivers to set up the virtual serial port — though said virtual port certainly appeared for selection — but eventually I gave up and switched to my laptop PC, which has been gathering dust for a little while now.

Second up was Atari Peripheral Emulator, or APE for short. This Windows-based tool emulates a stack of Atari disk drives, printers and modems, allowing you to mount disk images and (theoretically, anyway) boot from them. I had trouble getting this part of the program to function correctly, but what did work was a separate application distributed as part of the APE package called ProSystem. This is a much simpler tool that allows you to either “rip” Atari disks to .ATR disk image files, or take an .ATR disk image and write it to a physical 5.25″ disk to use in the Atari disk drive. While APE failed to do what it was supposed to, ProSystem had no problems whatsoever, reading from and writing to my ageing Atari 1050 disk drive with no problems whatsoever.

The final tool I tried was AspeQt, which is still in active development. AspeQt is pretty much an open-source tool that does most of the things APE does — APE is shareware — but I found it to work much more reliably than APE for simply mounting disk images and using the PC as a “virtual disk drive” for the Atari. AspeQt also has an excellent feature that I was specifically looking for: the ability to extract individual files from .ATR disk images and save them as standalone files on the PC filesystem. It even automatically converts from ATASCII — Atari’s proprietary take on the now-standard ASCII character set — to standard ASCII, meaning that files such as AtariWriter documents can be easily transferred to PC for dumping into other applications with all the requisite line breaks and suchlike intact rather than being replaced with special characters.

My current Atari setup, then, is a bit of a kludgey mess, using ProSystem to rip and write complete disk images and AspeQt to mount and use individual files on a disk or image — ideally APE would act as an integrated solution for all of this — but it works, by God. And, boy, was it exciting to hear the 1050 snark into life when I clicked a button on my Windows PC. Just to prove it really worked, I downloaded a disk image for the AtariAge forums’ current High Score Club games and wrote it to a blank disk. A few minutes later, I had a bootable floppy disk that you’d never know I’d downloaded from the Internet running on original Atari hardware. Black magic, I tell ye.

Getting all this working opens up all manner of exciting possibilities, and I’m sure I’ll be exploring them more in the coming weeks.

2447: Left Behind

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I think one of the biggest sources of my anxiety these days is the growing feeling that I’m being “left behind” by the rest of the world thanks to the fact that everything changes so damn quickly these days… and moreover, if you don’t keep up with it, you may well end up having difficulties.

As I type this, I’m occasionally stealing glances over to my dining room table, upon which sits an Atari 800XL and a CRT TV-monitor for which I’m currently awaiting a cable to allow the two to talk to one another. I’m excited to get the 800XL up and running not just because “woo, wow, retro”, but because it formed such an integral part of my early life that it feels like a small piece of “stablity” in the turbulent waters of the modern age; a rock I can cling on to in order to avoid getting swept away.

This might sound like an odd thing to say with regard to a 30+ year old computer that I’m not entirely sure still works (I’m pretty sure it does), but since tracking it down I’ve become quite interested — excited, even — in the idea of using it for various purposes other than just games. Specifically, I’m perhaps most excited to use it as a “distraction-free” means of word processing; once I get it up and running, I fully intend to fire up the old copy of AtariWriter and actually do some ol’ fashioned plain text composition. (My one nod to it actually being 2016 is the addition of an “SIO2PC” cable, which will allow me to transfer files from the Atari to a PC or Mac for safekeeping rather than relying on 30+ year old floppy disks.)

This probably sounds like a lot of effort to go to, but I’m excited because it allows me to focus on one thing rather than constantly being bombarded by the distractions that life in 2016 — and computing in 2016 — offers. Multitasking is all very well and good, but when you’re trying to get anything done and Google Chrome is right there willing you to go and, I don’t know, hunt for rare Pepes or something, it’s sometimes hard to resist. Boot up a word processor that you have to load from disk and can’t do anything else while it’s running, on the other hand, and you have a situation much more conducive to Getting Shit Done, because once you’ve spent a couple of minutes listening to the soothing (and occasionally terrifying) sound of that disk drive snarking and zurbiting its way to your chosen program, it feels like something of a waste to then just shut it all down without actually doing anything.

I’ve drifted off on a tangent a bit, but my point is fairly simple: I long for the simplicity and the single-mindedness of days gone by, and am feeling increasingly stressed out and anxious by the constant demands for attention we get from all angles these days in 2016. I’ve attempted to minimise my exposure to these distractions as much as possible — primarily through minimising my contact with social media, which is probably the biggest distraction of all for most people these days — but with each passing day, I feel more and more inclined to just want to shut myself in a dark room and have a bit of peace and quiet to myself.

2237: The Insufferable Frame-Rate Obsessives May Have a Point

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I upgraded the processor on my PC yesterday. It was the last bit that needed upgrading to make it decently up-to-date, and I’d been meaning to do it for a while. It was also a good excuse to wipe everything, reinstall Windows and have a nice fresh, clean system that wasn’t clogged up with all manner of crap. For a little while, anyway.

PC gaming, for many people, is the relentless pursuit of ever more impressive frame rates, preferably at ever more impressive resolutions. I’ve never felt particularly strongly about either, given that my PC is hooked up to my TV and thus is limited to a maximum of 60 frames per second at 1920×1080 resolution; in other words, anything above 60 simply wouldn’t benefit what was on screen at all, and in fact would often result in unsightly “screen tearing”, where different parts of the screen update at different times. Consequently, I habitually play everything with VSync on, which limits the frame rates to 60 and completely eliminates any tearing. It’s kind of deliberately hobbling performance to look better.

That said, even with a theoretical maximum frame rate of 60, my old processor couldn’t quite keep up with some of the more modern games. I have a decent graphics card, so nothing was actually unplayable, but I knew that I could probably get more out of said graphics card with better base hardware. Final Fantasy XIV, for example, ran perfectly well at anywhere between about 30 and 60 frames per second depending on how much was going on at the time — it would be pretty damn smooth in the relative peace and quiet of instanced dungeons, while the frame rate would drop a fair bit in densely populated areas or busy battle scenes with lots of players. I’m not someone that these frame rate disparities bothered a great deal, but they were noticeable.

So with some degree of curiosity, after assembling the new bits and pieces and putting my computer back together, I fired up Final Fantasy XIV to investigate if the performance was any better. After a little fiddling with settings — previously, it ran better in “borderless windowed” mode, while now it runs better in dedicated full-screen mode — I was very pleased to discover that it was now running at an absolutely rock-solid 60 frames per second, constantly, regardless of what was happening on the screen at the time. It didn’t make a massive difference to the visual fidelity of the game, but it was nice.

Then I jumped into a dungeon, and the true nature of the improvements better hardware brought on became apparent. While the graphics had never really struggled much in dungeons — except with the bizarre bug in the old DirectX 9 version of the game where facing certain directions would cause your frame rate to tank, presumably because the game was trying to render more “out of sight” stuff at once — what really became obvious as I was running with my new hardware was how much more responsive everything was. While the background graphics never really struggled much on my old rig, you could occasionally see things like the interface elements juddering a bit, particularly the damage numbers and status messages that scroll up and down the screen during combat, keeping you informed of what’s happening.

Now, those messages are just as smooth as the animations and effects. More importantly, the controls are significantly more responsive, because there aren’t any “dead frames”, for want of a better word, where the game doesn’t register a button input for whatever reason. It was a minor issue before; now it’s completely absent, which is lovely. I hadn’t anticipated quite how lovely it would be, but it really is; knowing that my performance can no longer be hampered by the complexity of the visuals on screen or how much is happening at the same time around me is a thoroughly pleasant feeling, and, surprisingly, makes the game more enjoyable.

So okay, I’ll admit it; frame rate does make a difference. Sometimes. I maintain that “cinematic”-style experiences such as adventure games and their ilk don’t particularly benefit from 60fps visuals — they can look nice, but if you’re going with realistic imagery, 30fps can sometimes look more “natural” as it’s closer to the frame rate of film and TV — but in games where precision and split-second timing are important — fighting games, shoot ’em ups, arcade games, MMOs such as Final Fantasy XIV — smoother hardware performance leads to smoother player performance. Which is kinda cool.

Oh, and no, I haven’t tried Crysis yet.

2234: Is VR Really Going to Take Off?

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I have, believe it or not, a friend. I have several, in fact, but this friend’s name is Tom. Tom primarily spends his money on bits and pieces for his PC, and is extremely excited about the impending virtual reality revolution — so much so that he’s bought an incredible “gaming chair” with attached steering wheel, pedals and HOTAS (Hands On Throttle And Stick) control scheme, ready to play everything from Elite: Dangerous to a variety of racing games in glorious, stereoscopic, head-tracking 3D.

Me, I’m yet to be convinced by the value of VR. I know that theoretically it should be enormously exciting, but at present, there are two big things that put me off: firstly, the cost, which, for however much HTC and Oculus might try to argue that they’re making VR more mainstream, is well out of the budget of most people; and secondly the fact that there’s still a fundamental disconnect between yourself and the virtual reality into which you’re trying to immerse yourself.

There’s not a lot to say about the cost, really — it’s a lot, I can’t afford it, because I’d have to upgrade my PC as well as buy all the hardware, that’s about it — so I’ll focus on the latter aspect, because that’s what bothers me about the technology long-term.

There are certain applications for which VR seems ideally suited. Something like Elite: Dangerous, for example, will likely be very good indeed, because the entire Elite experience is based on you sitting in a chair in your spaceship cockpit, flipping switches and jiggling joysticks in order to fly around and do spacey things. Likewise, driving games will also be very good, since again, the experience is based around you sitting in a chair holding on to a steering wheel for dear life. In other words, the experiences that my friend Tom is already pretty much set up for will probably be pretty good, though I do still find myself wondering how you’ll find the right buttons to press with a bloody great helmet attached to your face — particularly if you’re not using a fancy-pants HOTAS setup.

It’s when we get into other types of experience that I feel the disconnect between the real and the virtual will be somewhat more jarring. Anything first-person would theoretically be excellent in VR, were it not for the fact that you’re not actually going anywhere; the lack of physicality to motion through the world seems like something that would be very disconcerting indeed. There are companies that are attempting to get around this very issue, most notably with a big-ass treadmill-like thing that allows you to actually physically walk in order to control your motion through the game world, but at this point you’re escalating the already substantial costs of VR even further just to get the feeling of immersion that VR is theoretically supposed to provide.

I don’t know. I think my issue is that I’m yet to see a true “killer app” for VR; something which, without a doubt, shows that VR is the absolute only way to do this. Until that killer app comes along — or technology improves to allow things like true haptic feedback and a true feeling of physically inhabiting “another world” — then I shall remain both cautious and skeptical about the whole thing, and very surprised if it takes off with anyone but the most dedicated enthusiasts of expensive lumps of plastic wired up to their computer.

1888: Put the Phone Down

I’m coming to detest my phone, not necessarily for what it is, but for what it’s done to me.

I don’t specifically mean my actual phone, either; more the general concept of smartphones and the “always-connected” nature of modern existence.

I don’t even specifically object to the “always-online” nature of modern society, more the habits — or, more accurately, compulsions — that it tends to instill in people. I’ve become very conscious of my own compulsions in this regard recently, and I’m making an effort to try and change my habits.

Here’s the problem for me: picking up a phone and fiddling with it (usually checking Twitter and/or Reddit) has become a default thing to do if no better activity is available. Phones are great for that; with the wide variety of apps available these days, there’s something sure to distract and entertain even the most attention-deficient individual, even if only for a few seconds. That “even if only for a few seconds” thing can become a problem, though; the fact a phone can fill an empty few seconds easily means that it’s easy to reach for it while you’re in the middle of something else, breaking your concentration and perhaps immersion.

I became particularly conscious of it while I was playing Criminal Girls the other day. (Side note: I’ve now completely finished that, so expect a comprehensive writeup on MoeGamer very soon.) I noticed that even mid-battle, I was reaching for my phone and fiddling with it while animations were playing, or sometimes between turns. There was no good reason for it, either; I wasn’t particularly interested in what Twitter had to say at that moment, and I was genuinely enjoying the game. It was just a nigh-uncontrollable compulsion to reach for it and look at it.

It happens in the night sometimes, too. I can’t get to sleep, so I pick up the phone and look at whatever vapid nonsense social media is spewing at any given hour. There’s rarely anything meaningful — although there’s occasionally an enjoyable late-night conversation with some of my friends in other timezones — and it doesn’t really have any value; it certainly doesn’t help me get to sleep when I find myself mindlessly refreshing for minutes at a time instead of putting the damn thing down, closing my eyes and trying to disconnect from the stimuli of the outside world.

So I’m trying to stop myself from doing these things. When I’m sitting down to play a game, unless I’m specifically intending on “liveblogging” my experiences as I play, I’ve started putting my phone out of reach or, at the very least, covering it over so I can’t see the notification light and screen. When I go to bed, I’ve started switching my phone off altogether rather than just leaving it in standby mode. And while a phone is a convenient thing to fiddle with to stave off social anxiety when dealing with other people face-to-face, I’m going to try and make an effort to keep it in my pocket unless it becomes clear that I really am surplus to requirements in a particular social situation. (Not necessarily in a negative way; I may just be along for the ride while others are discussing making arrangements for something or other that doesn’t directly involve me, for example.)

I feel like smartphones have done serious damage to our collective concentration spans over the last few years. And I’m quite keen to get mine back.