#oneaday Day 546: Why are we still arguing over "games as art"?

Back in April of 2010, the first time around on this #oneaday malarkey, I wrote a post responding to the late Roger Ebert's ill-advised argument that "video games can never be art".

Today, on the 5th of December 2025, some 5,710 days later (or "over 15 years" if you want to be a bit more normal about it), we are, apparently, still having this argument. Roger Ebert is, of course, dead, so this time around it has come from someone else: Ian Bogost, a professor at Washington University, St. Louis and hilariously forever doomed to be "most known for the game Cow Clicker" so far as the broader Internet is concerned.

A bit of context if you've not come across this chap before: Cow Clicker was designed as a satirical take on the rise of "social games", as they were known when they first started appearing on Facebook. You know the sort of thing: wait for timer to expire, click on thing, get stuff. Pay up if you want to get stuff more quickly. Marvel at the meaninglessness of existence.

Cow Clicker was good satire! It made some solid points about the way social games abused not only their players, but the broader community surrounding those players. Anyone who lived through Facebook in the 2010s will almost certainly remember being spammed with "invitations" to "help" on someone's "farm" or similar, because although it was patently obvious to anyone who had ever played a video game before that social games were absolute dog eggs, they introduced a lot of people who had never touched video games before to the idea of playing games on their computer or mobile phone. And, as a result, they are indirectly responsible for those tedious shitheads who argue that Candy Crush Saga is relevant to modern gaming rather than yet another abusive, predatory free-to-play game.

Anyway, I hadn't seen Bogost around for a while, but I'd always thought that he had vaguely… sensible ideas. Today he came out with these humdingers — relating to, of course, HORSES, the hot topic du jour (as you will know if you have read my last two posts and my piece on the game over on MoeGamer):

(Bluesky screenshot)
‪Ian Bogost‬
‪@ibogost.com‬

I’m going to get in trouble for this, but fuck it.

I’ve been at this a long time. Games culture wants the spoils of cultural sophistication without doing the work. It wants a guarantee that the intention to make work guarantees not just a living but a thriving one. It is a medium for children.

(Quoting the following post:)
‪Aftermath‬
‪@aftermath.site‬

Despite the controversy, Horses is only shocking if you're unfamiliar with the history movies, theater, literature, or basically any art form that does not have stats.

(Bluesky screenshot)
Ian Bogost
‪@ibogost.com‬

The interesting, sophisticated thing about games is not whether they can tell stories as well as books or movies (they can’t) or float shocking themes as well as fine art (honestly, who cares).

It’s the manipulation of systems, the play of contingency, the brokenness of machines.

(Bluesky screenshot)
Ian Bogost
‪@ibogost.com‬

Q-Up and Candy Crush, say, are more serious works of game than Horses (which seems fine and even innocuous!) or whatever embarrassing anime RPG trash is on Steam or Nintendo EShop.

There are some truly amazing bad takes in this mini-thread, but his argument appears to stem from "I am older than you, therefore my opinions are the correct ones." At least he correctly assumed that he would "get in trouble for this".

He falls into the usual traps of assuming that books and movies are inherently superior forms of media because they have been around longer and are thus more refined, but this exceedingly shallow viewpoint fails to accommodate the existence of books and movies that are unashamed to be absolute pulp fodder, trash, blockbuster nonsense or whatever other mild pejoratives you might care to fling at them. Not only that, but gaming is a medium that has grown much quicker than both books and movies, at least partly because it was able to draw on artists' experiences in developing those mediums, and adapting the things that work into the interactive space.

Now, one area where I do kind of sort of align with Bogost is where he notes that games are "the manipulation of systems, the play of contingency, the brokenness of machines". However, where I drift apart from him is his seeming assumption that that is all there is to gaming.

Games can be about the manipulation of systems, the play of contingency and the brokenness of machines. There are some truly compelling games that focus exclusively on those things — and yes, there are plenty of those that I would well and truly describe as exhibiting their own form of artistry. There is an elegance to a well-designed, well-balanced game — it keeps you playing; it keeps you invested; it plays on your mind even when you're not directly engaging with it, in much the same way as a great work of art that you, personally, found particularly impactful "stays with you" long after you were in its physical presence.

This side of things is something that I feel the more "artsy" side of game criticism — and the more artsy side of gaming enthusiasts, for that matter — could do well to study more. As someone with an appreciation for both narrative-centric and mechanics-focused games, it is inordinately frustrating to see those who prefer narrative experiences completely dismiss the artistry of mechanics-centric games. At the same time, it is also frustrating when people who are primarily appreciators of mechanics will completely discount the artistry of a good story.

You see, games aren't one or the other! They can be both, or they can be one of those things — or they can probably be neither of them if you're determined enough. But in most cases these days, there's a little of column A and a little of column B in there — and both of those aspects have been developing rapidly as the medium and technology have evolved, to such a degree that it is an astonishingly galaxy-brained take to say that "games cannot tell stories as well as books and movies" as a blanket statement.

HORSES is an interesting one because it's not a very "good" video game in terms of its mechanical aspect, and there are arguments to be made that its narrative aspects aren't anything particularly out of the ordinary either. I enjoyed my time with it well enough — I found it compelling enough to play through in a single sitting — but I also found myself wondering if anyone would remember it a year from now, particularly if the whole situation with it being "banned" from various platforms hadn't happened. There are plenty of artsy-fartsy walking simulators out there, and some have done their job better than others; it's actually a surprisingly challenging genre of game to get "right", and opinions vary wildly on exactly what getting it "right" really means.

But that's art! Art provokes discussion and debate. It sometimes makes people feel uncomfortable. It sometimes carries deep meaning for people. It resonates with some people more than others, and for different reasons even among those who all found it "meaningful" to a similar degree.

I'm truly astonished that we're still in a situation where games are having to justify their existence as an incredibly creative, artistic medium in 2025. Yes, there's garbage out there — although let's not even get into the casual racism of Bogost's "embarrassing anime RPG trash" statement right now, which is another matter entirely — but there are garbage books, movies and paintings out there, too. To put "established" forms of media on some sort of unassailable pedestal purely because they've been around longer and because the Big Scary Professor At Washington U Says So is just absurd. Because if video games as a medium are not "established" by this point… exactly when is the cutoff point for them to be taken the slightest bit seriously?

There are certain people out there who seem weirdly desperate for video games to forever be regarded as toys for little children — particularly little boys. We are long past that. And I would expect someone like Bogost to know better by this point.

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.

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#oneaday Day 545: Couldn't drag me away

I played HORSES this evening. I wrote about it in depth over on MoeGamer, so go read that if you want to find out a bit more about it. Short version: it was a decent Art Game, I'm not sure it'll be remembered in a couple of years' time, and the controversy surrounding it is, frankly, laughable.

That side of things is worth pondering a moment, because it's been an absolutely absurd game of telephone that has culminated in some people — including professional games journalists! — coming out absolutely convinced that the game was justified in being banned because at one point during its development it had something they considered to be child sexual abuse material.

For context, this is the scene as it ended up in the final game. The only change is that the woman atop the horse-masked individual is now in her twenties rather than being fourteen.

If you think that scene is in any way sexual, I really don't know what to tell you. There's nothing the slightest bit titillating about the whole scene, and for the majority of it, it looks like this:

That's "you" on the left, and the girl on the right is the daughter of a wealthy businessman considering purchasing one of the "horses" in the game (actually enslaved, naked humans) — during this scene even the dialogue isn't remotely sexual; instead, the woman delivers a lengthy diatribe about how people should know their place in society, how those with morals perceived to be "loose" tend to have "dangerous" ideas, and how those who live their lives "recklessly and indulgently" end up getting what they deserve.

HORSES is provocative — deliberately so — but honestly, having played through the whole thing this evening, it is so laughably tame compared to some other video games out there that the entire situation just feels bizarre. There are people thumping tables out there arguing that this game deserved to be banned while having absolutely zero knowledge of what the whole thing is actually about, but for once it seems like the majority opinion — even among games journalists — is that this game doesn't deserve the treatment it's gotten.

And that treatment is worth talking about. As Chris Person notes in his excellent piece on the game over on Aftermath, HORSES encountering such difficulty with getting a widespread release is a troubling sight for the industry. "If this is what's considered the limit for which games can and cannot be sold on mass marketplaces," he writes, "then we're all in trouble, and everyone involved in that decision should be thoroughly embarrassed."

The problem is that Valve holds a near-monopoly on the digital PC games market with their Steam platform, and thus a game from a small, independent team with a limited budget not being able to release their game their is very bad news for that team and their game. HORSES has probably sidestepped this particular issue thanks to the widespread press coverage it has had, but it's a solid case study in why the present situation is a bit of a problem.

"Well, just release it elsewhere!" some of you might say. And sure: you can buy the game on GOG.com and Humble. But for most PC gamers, neither of those storefronts are the first place they look to get new games. For most PC gamers, PC gaming begins and ends with Steam — particularly if they do their gaming on a device like a Steam Deck, which, as the name suggests, obviously prioritises Steam as its main source of material.

As I say: HORSES itself is probably going to be all right after all the coverage it's gotten. But will the next game to suffer this situation be as lucky? Probably not.

And besides, part of the reason the HORSES situation specifically is so absurd is the fact that there is much worse stuff already on Steam with zero issues. Not only do reasonably big-name recent releases like Silent Hill f feature more explicit, disturbing content than HORSES does, but you also have shovelware shit like the Sex With Hitler (yes, really) series happily existing with zero issue. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that this is a rather major problem with consistency and transparency.

Transparency is, honestly, probably the biggest problem with all this. HORSES' developer Santa Ragione did their best to try and work with Valve on ensuring that it was compliant with all appropriate platform policies, and when its initial version was rejected, they changed everything that could have been remotely considered to be a bit dodgy — even if, as outlined above, it almost certainly wasn't dodgy. But they were given no chance to appeal, no second chance — it was just gone from the platform, and with it a significant opportunity at organic discovery.

The Epic Games Store situation is even more bizarre. It seems like Epic themselves re-submitted the game to IARC, an international body that issues local content certifications for digital games, and that caused the game to end up with an "Adults Only" rating from the ESRB, which isn't allowed on Epic (except for blockchain and NFT-based games, because Tim Sweeney is a cunt). This is unusual because it's not Epic's place to submit games to IARC or any ratings bodies — it's the responsibility of developers and publishers, and a storefront going out of their way to re-submit something that had already attained a rating is unheard of, and probably not actually allowed.

Anyway, it's all a shitshow, and with this coming amid payment processors continuing to cut off adult content creators and sex workers from their sources of online income, it's just generally a pretty dark, shitty time for various forms of self-expression.

I enjoyed my time with HORSES. I wasn't blown away, but I enjoyed it. It's definitely worth four quid and a couple of hours of your time if you're on board with narrative-centric games that have minimal mechanics. I wonder if it will be remembered in a few years for anything other than this whole situation with the platform holders.

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#oneaday Day 544: Wild HORSES

The latest casualty in the ongoing wave of New Puritanism which appears to be spearheaded by Visa and Mastercard is a short, arty game known as HORSES. Thus far, it has been banned from release on Steam and withdrawn from sale on the Epic Games Store and Humble's store. (Edit: apparently Humble have put it back now.) At the time of writing, you can buy it from GOG.com. It's £3.99 and is apparently 2-3 hours long. If you're in the mood for something arty, unsettling and apparently the worst thing that has ever happened to society so far as payment processors are concerned, go grab it while you still can. I'm certainly intending to after this.

This whole ongoing situation has been really disappointing to see, because, as I say, it's a real wave of Neo-Puritanism that has been affecting all sorts of different online storefronts, types of media and subject matter. And, as people working in the more "adult" end of things have been yelling for a long time at this point, once these things start happening to material that you, personally, might find distasteful, it's not long before things that you, personally, are completely okay with start getting affected. Which is what has happened here.

The frustrating thing about this is that no-one wielding any of the power in this is ever honest about things. Visa and Mastercard won't say "no, we're not letting people buy porn". Valve won't say "this specific scene is why you can't put your game on Steam". Epic seemingly even went so far as to overrule the developer's content rating submission to ensure that it couldn't be sold on their storefront. And let's not even get into why it's ridiculous that the ESRB (or equivalent) "Adults Only" rating should preclude adults from being able to purchase material on an online storefront.

For quite some time, it looked like we were making some real progress in that area. The European games rating board, PEGI, allows explicit sexual content under its 18 rating now — there are even Nintendo Switch games that have explicit nudity and sexual content, though the fully "uncensored" versions tend to be physical exclusives. And yet, probably not coincidentally alongside the worst United States politics have been for many, many years, we are seeing legitimate businesses being forced to sit around twiddling their thumbs, potentially not being able to pay the bills, because someone, somewhere got a stiffy and got scared because it had never happened before.

It's ridiculous to see the amount of misinformation flying around, too. In the case of HORSES, the developer admitted that there was, at one point, a scene in the game that featured a 14 year old girl riding on the shoulders of a naked woman clad in a horse mask — and to those inexplicably defending the decisions of Valve, Epic and Humble, this is the same as illegal child sexual abuse material. Never mind the fact that the scene involved nudity but was not sexual — the two things are different! — or that the scene ended up being changed to involve a young woman in her twenties because the developers thought that fitted the tone of the scene better. No! To these people, HORSES is, was and always will be kiddie porn and thus the big, powerful corporations — step on me, Daddy, and I will lick your boots — are absolutely right to banhammer it so hard it leaves a crater right down to the Earth's core.

It's really discouraging to see the world continuing to find new and exciting ways to suck more. But I am glad that people — press and public alike — appear to be rallying behind the HORSES developers, and that people who might have previously gone "ew, porn is icky" are starting to see why sex workers and those who work in various forms of adult media are often considered to be the proverbial canary in the coal mine when it comes to matters of censorship.

I'm off to buy a copy of HORSES now. If this is the world's cleverest marketing campaign, I salute the people responsible. But somehow I think it's just the world reminding us that we're living through a really shitty age right now.

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#oneaday Day 543: Tabbed browsing

I like browser tabs. I think they were a good invention, and a good addition to modern user interfaces in general — although not universally, as some application and website designers seem to think.

I find it convenient to be able to switch back and forth between things I might need to keep looking at. But I quite regularly come into contact with opinions that make me feel like I'm not using them in the same way as a lot of other people on the Internet.

For example, these are my tabs that are open right now:

Yes, that's all of them.

And yet just a few minutes before I started writing this entry, I saw this Bluesky post from Aidan Moher, one half of the delightful FunFactor Podcast that I've extolled the virtues of previously on this site. (Twice, in fact.) The fact the post is from Aidan isn't particularly relevant to what I'm talking about here. I just thought I'd take the opportunity to plug the excellent podcast he's involved in.

What Aidan's talking about here is by no means unusual, but it is completely alien to me. I have never left a browser tab open longer than 24 hours, and even then it's only to remember something that I will need in the very immediate future; in most cases I will use either a bookmark or a note in Google Keep instead and close a tab when I'm not using it.

This is the bit where I, apparently, differ from the "norm": when I'm done with the contents of a tab, I close it. Why would I leave it open if I no longer need that information right now?

These are my tabs right now, incidentally:

A few more, due to me checking the links on things that I've mentioned above, but all still mostly relevant to what I'm doing right now. In fact, hold on.

There. I don't need my email right now, so I closed it. See how easy that is? In fact, you know what?

Fuck yeah. Two tabs. One window. I probably don't even need Bluesky right this moment. In fact, yeah. Let's remove all distractions.

Hoo boy. I bet some of you are getting the collywobbles right now. How can this human being function with only one tab open? Quite easily, as it happens! The Thing I Am Doing Right Now is Writing A Blog Post, so that's all I need to have open. If I needed to research something specific while I was writing, I would have a tab open for it (or perhaps a separate window so I could see the research materials side-by-side with my post while I was writing it) — but since I don't, I don't have anything else open.

I hear horror stories about people having literally thousands of tabs open at once, and all I think when I hear that is… how the hell did you get yourself into that situation? This, for me, is the threshold of when it is Time To Close The Entire Browser And Start Again:

You know, the point where if you don't know a site's favicon, you're never going to find the right tab again? (It probably says something that I actually found it very difficult to find enough websites to open that many tabs without resorting to stuff like PornHub and Wikipedia.) Honestly even this is uncomfortable:

Basically I reach that right margin — the point where tabs start to contract and become less useful — and I find myself contemplating existence. Once you get to this point — which is everything on my Bookmarks bar, incidentally — I feel like you really start questioning whether you can feel God's light any more:

Like… help me out here. How is that useful? This isn't even a lot of tabs before it becomes a nigh-unusable mess of icons, and there are people out there using hundreds or even thousands of tabs at once? How do you function? How do you sleep at night?

There, that's better. Sorry, was hyperventilating a bit.

But seriously, I don't understand this peculiar relationship some people seem to have with tabs. Are you the sort of person who reads a magazine or a book and then just leaves it lying around randomly in your house, open on the page you last read? Do you open all your emails in individual windows and then leave them all open? Do you have over a hundred active WhatsApp messaging groups?

I ask these questions because I know there are people who do those things. And yet I, as someone who can often be disorganised and messy, is definitely autistic and quite possibly has ADHD tendencies (though those are undiagnosed, so I don't wish to concretely label myself in that regard) feel physically uncomfortable if more than about five tabs are open at once — and the concept of leaving some tabs open for a week or more is completely alien to me.

Browser tabs might have been a mistake for some people, apparently. But I feel like I'm using them "correctly", if such a concept exists. Put your shit away when you're done with it. It's very easy to do that in the digital realm. Just click that little cross button!

And mobile browsers who think I might want "tab groups"? I do not want "tab groups". Please stop adding new tabs to "tab groups" seemingly at random based on some indeterminate (and possibly inconsistent) context clues that I am not privy to. Just follow the basic rules of the Old Web: open a new tab if you're taking me off the website I'm on; just change the page if you're taking me to a different page on the same website.

Am I the only one who remembers that?

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#oneaday Day 542: Vrr vrr vrr

I didn't buy much in the Black Friday sales this year. In fact, I only bought one "thing" and one Steam game (Mini Motorways, which is lovely).

The "thing" I bought is an under-desk elliptical trainer thing, ostensibly for "seniors", but also, I figured, eminently suitable for someone like me who needs to get some exercise, but has difficulty with the whole "motivating oneself to go outside the house" thing for various reasons.

Also I wanted something that would allow me to give my legs in particular a bit of gentle exercise, and that I could use while doing other things, and that wouldn't be discouragingly difficult to use for someone as unfit as I am.

I forget exactly how I ended up looking at these things. I do know that the first product I saw was a vibrating foot massager thing that supposedly "mimicked the motion of walking", but just looked hilarious to see people using in the promotional videos. From there, it recommended me these under-desk elliptical doodads, and from there I picked one that 1) had good reviews and 2) wasn't obscenely expensive, and now here we are, with me the proud owner of a Lubbygim [sic] Under Desk Elliptical Machine Quiet Motorized Leg Exerciser with Smart Remote, 12-Speed Manual Programs Auto/3 Auto Programs LCD Display & Bidirectional Motion for Home/Office.

Yes, as that absurd product name will probably tell you, I was shopping on Amazon. As loathe as I am to further line the pockets of billionaires and contribute to the exploitation of workers, they had something I was looking for, offered it at a good price and got it to me in good time. So /shrug, I guess.

And the thing seems pretty good! Its supposedly "non-slip" feet do, in fact, slip, so I have paired it with a non-slip mat (which also slips, but less than the feet did) and installed it under my working desk, so now I can make use of it during the working day, on my lunch break and any time I'm just sitting in my study doing things. The way I have it set up makes it ideal for using while watching a long YouTube video or TV programme.

It's a fairly no-frills device. As the ridiculous product name suggests, it has a fully manual mode where you can control the speed and direction of the pedals, and also three automatic modes that vary the speed and direction over the course of a half-hour programme. I'm not entirely sure if the three different programmes are supposed to be varying degrees of "difficulty" or intensity, but I'm assuming they are; I did a "programme 3" earlier and it seemed to spend a lot more time at the higher speeds than the rather gentle "programme 1".

What I like about it is that it's easy to just stick on and let your legs do the walking while you forget about it. This, to me, is the optimal way to exercise; the absolute worst thing you can do while attempting to get some exercise is to watch the clock, because that's what makes a ten-minute session on a treadmill feel like you're hiking up Mount Everest. With this thing being the way it is, though, today I've found it absolutely easy to put in nearly two hours of wibbling my legs around a bit in total. And that, I hope, will be beneficial in the long term.

I'm under no illusions: this thing doesn't offer an intense enough workout to really play any significant role in exercise for weight loss, but that's not why I wanted one of these. I just wanted something that would get my legs moving a bit, because I spend all day sitting working, and all night sitting entertaining myself, and frankly my legs are old and stupid enough to have started going "nope, not having that" any time I want to get up and actually do something. And I don't like that. It worries me a bit; I don't want to end up in a situation where I just can't use my legs. I'm pretty certain that it wouldn't come to that without some sort of drastic accident, but I also don't want to put myself in a position where it's even a slight possibility.

And so sticking this thing on and going vrr vrr vrr for at least half an hour every day is my way of preventing that. Hopefully, anyway. It's only been two days so far, so I'm not entirely sure I'm feeling any specific benefit just yet, but over the long term, I hope it will help me be even a little bit more active — or I'd settle for it just helping my knees hurt a little bit less.

See that? Personal growth, that is. Probably.

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#oneaday Day 541: Back to school

I often think about my time at school and, while there were certainly elements of my experiences as a teenager I am very glad to have left behind, there's a lot I miss — to such a degree that I often find myself wondering if there is any sort of way one can get oneself into a situation, as an adult, that works similarly to school. A situation that isn't, like, prison or something.

I thrived in school — particularly secondary school. For the most part, I dealt well with the inherently predictable nature of a timetable — though I have recurring quasi-nightmares about being back at school and not having a clue what my weekly schedule is — and I didn't even mind having homework all that much. I did well in lessons, though I tended to be fairly quiet rather than the sort of person who was always the first to answer teachers' questions, and I ended up with good grades. Not perfect grades, mind, but good grades, nonetheless.

I'm not really sure what it is about the school experience — as opposed to, say, university — that I find so particularly appealing. Perhaps it's the inherent variety of things that you study, at least up until you start choosing "Options" for Years 10-11 and, if you're going on to do them, Years 12 and 13. There's definitely an element of that, because when I think back on some of my fondest memories of time at school, the visual part of the memories is very much associated with my "lower school" experience — Years 7-9.

That was the time when you study all sorts of things, with multiple subjects every day, and each and every day was packed with things to do. Sure, you didn't always like every one of those things you had to do each day — for me, Maths and P.E. were my particular bugbears — but you endured them, along with the things you actually liked, and sometimes you'd even surprise yourself with how well you ended up performing. I have zero achievements of note in P.E., but I did get an "A" in Maths at GCSE, which was pleasing.

Early secondary school is a time you get exposed to a lot of things you wouldn't have thought about studying, too. I remember being surprised how much I enjoyed language lessons — particularly German, which I liked more than French — and Science, although not a subject I had any intention of pursuing beyond a passing interest, was always full of interesting and unusual situations.

As you might expect, my biggest strengths were English and Music. In English, I relished the opportunity to write a lengthy essay about something we'd been studying — whether it was on the "language" or "literature" side of the fence — while in Music, I was often quite ambitious with my compositions, and in terms of performance I was considerably ahead of anyone else in my class thanks to the years of private piano lessons I'd had by that point.

It was nice to be good at something, and to have tangible proof that I was good at it in the form of good grades, certificates and, eventually, qualifications. I think that might be one of the things I miss the most in life as an adult — the simple knowledge and confidence that you can do something, and that someone is going to acknowledge that you are good at something, even reward you for it. It didn't have to be a big reward — I was a sucker for the "Merits" and "Commendations" we had at secondary school, and those were just little signatures on a page of our Journal and occasional certificates — but that little bit of acknowledgement that yes, there was something you were good at, and that gave you value as a human being, was pleasant.

I am not, obviously, advocating for modern employers to start implementing systems of "Merits" and "Commendations" for their employees, because I feel that most people would probably find the whole thing incredibly patronising. Interestingly, back during my brief period of time working for the shithole energy company SSE, I found myself thinking that a lot of the way the company did things was like how it was back in school — but in that situation, it was a negative thing. The difference? SSE wasn't interested in celebrating the successes of people and the things they were good at — they were, instead, obsessed with making themselves, as a company, look good, and specifically going looking for things they could reprimand their employees for.

Schools have to have a solid behavioural policy in place, of course, but I always found it pretty easy not to run afoul of it — and on the few occasions when I did, I knew it was a completely fair cop. SSE, meanwhile, would bollock you if you didn't hold the handrail when going up some stairs, for going under your desk to pick up a pen you'd dropped without wearing a "bump cap", and for not reporting the fact that you'd spilled a tiny bit of water from your cup carrying it back from the cooler to your desk — and all that absurdity meant that there was no time left to actually praise anyone for doing a good job.

So you can't just transplant elements of the school structure into a corporate environment without thinking about the things that make school good for those who thrive in that environment. I don't know what the answer is, and at this point I'm not even entirely sure what the question is any more either. I'm rambling. I'm tired. I'm a bit cold. So I think I'll leave that there and go to bed!

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#oneaday Day 540: Actual socialisation

This evening, we had some friends over! Good Lord. Actual socialisation. We even played a board game — Betrayal at House on the Hill, if you were curious. This is a game that hasn't hit the table for a long time — hell, no games have hit the table for a long time, for a variety of reasons I won't bore you with this evening — so I was excited to be able to get some use out of it. And, as usual for this wonderful game, it offered a completely different experience to any of the previous times we've played.

For the unfamiliar, Betrayal at House on the Hill is an interesting theme-centric game that unfolds in two distinct phases. In the first, a veritable Scooby gang of adventurers decides to investigate the titular House, which is generated semi-randomly by drawing tiles and laying them out across the board. At various points, new rooms will cause the people discovering them to have to draw items, "omens" and events, and these will have various effects.

So far so conventional cooperative dungeon crawler, you might say. The big twist, as you may have surmised from the title, is that partway through your jolly little jaunt to the abandoned house, things go horribly wrong. Specifically, each time you draw "omen" cards (which typically represent spooky items you find around the house which can be used later) you roll for a "haunt", with the likelihood the "haunt" will happen increasing with every omen card drawn.

When the haunt is eventually triggered, the combination of the item drawn that triggered it and the room the triggerer was in determines which of a multitude of scenarios the game will follow from thereon. One or more players are designated as "traitors" according to the scenario, and they are then given their own, usually secret goals to accomplish. The remaining regular players then have their own goal to accomplish, also. At this point the game switches from being cooperative to competitive, with the "hero" players attempting to defeat the "traitors", thwart their schemes or whatever.

It's a really interesting game, because each scenario not only has a different story setup, it also tends to have radically different mechanics. In the probably seven or eight times I've played this game now, we've never had the same "haunt" twice, and each one has been markedly different from the last. It really is a lot of fun, and I'm glad we had the opportunity to get it out for the first time in ages this evening.

Now, I've had a drink or two so I think I will probably sleep well this evening. Remains to be seen if I feel up to making any videos tomorrow…!

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#oneaday Day 539: Adults need 2,000 calories a day

One thing I always find difficult to get my head around is the concept that "adults need around 2,000 calories per day", as quoted on most nutritional information labels. Because there's one thing that counting calories each day makes very clear to me: it is very easy to burn through 2,000 calories or more (as a big lad, I can have a few more and still be within my "allowance" for theoretically losing weight) while barely realising it.

I had a Meal Deal the other day that calculated to well over a thousand calories. A thousand! For a thousand calories I want something better than a soggy supermarket sandwich and a bag of all-right-but-nothing-special crisps. (Okay, there was a chocolate bar and a Red Bull also. But still.)

I know the answer to this is "eat more fruit and vegetables", since both of those things are, in theory, 1) filling and 2) low in calories, comparatively speaking. But they're so boring. That's the trouble. If fruit and vegetables were more interesting, and if they didn't run the risk of going off before you have a chance to get to them, it'd be much easier to prioritise them. I suppose the answer to that is to not have things in the house that you'd rather eat than fruits and vegetables, but I tend to find that is when you start getting into the "I'm bored of everything we have in the house, I'm going to go to the shop and blow a thousand-plus calories on a Meal Deal" territory, which is counter-productive.

So what's the answer to that? Balance, probably. But it's frustrating when you, say, have what feels like an eminently modest breakfast (a bowl of cereal, say) and an unremarkable lunch (a jacket potato, for example, or a simple sandwich) and you've blown through so many calories in the process. And if you eat less, then you just end up hungry and wanting to eat more, and you overcompensate with snacks.

How the bloody hell does anyone get through a day with just 2,000 calories? More to the point, how does anyone stay slim (or at least "normal-sized") with the myriad, highly calorific temptations that are everywhere in modern life, even if you're not specifically going looking for a "treat"?

If I can figure all that out, this whole "weight loss" thing might be much easier. But unfortunately I'm not any closer to working things out just yet. Maybe it's one of those things where you just have to take it a bit at a time. Perhaps the next time we go shopping I'll try and prioritise some form of nice fruit for snacking purposes rather than other, potentially more calorific options, and then go from there. We'll see.

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#oneaday Day 538: Coiled spring

You can tell the end of the year is rolling around. Everyone's getting ill, and everyone is getting stressed. I am, of course, no exception to either of these things — though I do appear to have mostly shaken off my last bout of Seasonal Cold, at least. That feeling of my mind being scrunched up into a tight little ball, ready to explode outwards in thoroughly stressed-out frustration, though? Present and correct.

It's been an exhausting period at work with the Black Friday sales and whatnot. What makes things doubly exhausting is the knowledge that I'm going to be escaping the one part of my job that I don't enjoy at some point (hopefully) early in the new year, so I just have to survive until that happens. In that "meantime" period, though, I just have to put my head down and plough ahead with the less enjoyable aspects of doing what I do. And that's all the detail I'm going to go into on that for the moment.

Having to "just put up with" things is, I'd wager, a common stressor, and there are quite a few things that I've resigned myself to "just having to put up with". Weight loss continues to be a challenge, of course, and that means that I "just have to put up with" having an often painful and always unsightly hernia making me feel even worse about my overall body image than I do at the best of times. One day, I hope, I will be in a position where I can finally get it sorted, and that day will be a good day. (Well, that day specifically probably won't be, given that I am terrified of surgery, and I believe getting a hernia repaired continues to smart for at least a few days after the procedure. But still.)

Existence is exhausting right now. After this, I'm strongly tempted to just go and curl up in bed for a bit. It's 7.35pm.

Still, I do have some things to look forward to, at least. The aforementioned change in my job role and responsibilities. Christmas with the family. The work Christmas Do. All these things are happening varying degrees of "Soon", so they are things I can aim for and use as milestones as I continue to muddle through the increasingly challenging act of surviving this modern world we live in.

I won't lie, there have been times in my life where it felt very much like I should just Give Up. It hopefully says something vaguely positive about me that, even when faced with such challenges — and I have faced significantly tougher challenges than the tepid mental health I'm experiencing right now, to be sure — I have not, to date, Given Up.

It is hard. I'm acknowledging that it is hard. But these things tend to go in peaks and troughs, don't they? So here's hoping the upcoming holiday period is a build-up to a nice peak from the trough I'm most definitely in the depths of right at this exact moment.

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#oneaday Day 537: Old dogs

Since I've exhausted both Death in Paradise and its spin-off series Beyond Paradise for the moment, I was looking for a new "detective" show to watch. I considered the other Death in Paradise spinoff, Return to Paradise, but thought I fancied something a bit different. And BBC iPlayer was certainly keen to provide suggestions.

I settled on a show called New Tricks, which I hadn't heard of before, but which apparently first aired all the way back in 2003, and concluded its complete run in 2015. I've watched two episodes so far, and while it's a very different sort of show to Death in Paradise and Return to Paradise, I've enjoyed what I've seen so far.

New Tricks (at least initially) follows the semi-disgraced Detective Superintendent Sandra Pullman (Amanda Redman) of the Metropolitan Police who, after a botched hostage rescue in which she shot a dog and the person she was supposed to be rescuing flung himself out of a window, paralysing himself when he landed on a car several storeys below, has been placed in charge of the fictional "Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad", or UCOS. This is a branch of the Met specifically tasked with re-investigating unsolved "cold cases", with the officer in charge, initially Pullman, charged with wrangling a small group of retired former officers in the hope of their insights being able to put the various cases to bed once and for all.

Conceptually, it's a tad silly, particularly since the initial lineup of old men all initially appear to be somewhat comedic caricatures. There's Brian Lane (Alun Armstrong), who struggles with severe mental health issues and an obsession over the case that ended his career on the force; there's Jack Halford (James Bolam), who talks to his dead wife when no-one else is around, but is otherwise the most well-grounded of the bunch; and there's Gerry Standing (Dennis Waterman, the only constant member of the cast throughout the entire run of the show), who is a bit of a geezer and a "naughty boy", in his words, with a string of failed marriages behind him and a somewhat unorthodox approach to following the rules. The characters are all introduced as each having their own sort of "thing" that defines them, but just the initial two episodes shows that there's clearly potential for some interesting character work going on.

What I've found quite fun about New Tricks so far is that it blends quite a few disparate elements and comes out feeling quite coherent. There's the obvious conflict between Pullman being a modern police officer (by 2003 standards, anyway) — and a woman, at that — and these retired former officers, all of whom are set in their ways to varying degrees. And then there's the friction between the private lives of all the characters and their professional responsibilities. The show is, on the whole, somewhat on the "gritty" side, with the struggles the various characters encounter all being somewhat realistic and relatable rather than the easily resolved fluff or material for comic relief that the Paradise series tended to favour, but there's also plenty of comedy inherent in the whole situation — particularly when Pullman shows herself to be the sort of woman who takes absolutely no shit from anyone.

The fact that the show premiered in 2003 with a 90-minute pilot before going into full production in 2004 is an interesting consideration, too. In some respects, the way the show is presented makes it clear it's from a different time — and while I try not to think of 2004 as being too much "of a different time" to right now, the fact is, it was over 20 years ago — and it's quite pleasant to return to that world. I'm not talking thematically or in terms of societal norms displayed in the show, obviously, but rather literally the way it is presented. It has a theme song, for Heaven's sake, and one sung by one of the cast members (Waterman), at that! What was the last show you watched that had a full-on theme song — and, more to the point, one that had been specifically composed to include the show's title as part of its lyrics?

Anyway, that's about all I want to say about it for the moment. I'm looking forward to getting to know the series a bit better. I'd actually never heard of it before, somehow, but I guess if it ran for twelve seasons, it must have had something to it, no?

Or, to put it another way: it's all right. It's okay!

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