We’re Doing It Wrong

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My hatred and loathing for my home country of the UK has been well documented both on these pages, on Twitter and in various other places that I’ve deposited little pockets of mental detritus around the Web. The reasons for this are manifold, of course, but the recent US elections highlighted one of the reasons that I don’t feel proud to be British, English, United Kingdomish, whatever you want to call me.

Congratulations, by the way, America. You made the right choice by electing Obama as President-elect, the first black President the US has ever seen (a fact the BBC were fond of reminding us roughly every ten seconds during their coverage). You have elected a leader who is intelligent, articulate and inspirational – a leader who certainly gives the impression that he can make a difference and who inspires trust in the things he says. His acceptance speech made me want to shed a tear and made me feel proud and patriotic… towards America.

I’m sure pretty much everyone has seen this by now, but here we go again:

The man is a fantastic public speaker, it can’t be denied – even if you don’t agree with everything he says, or doubt he’ll be able to get the job done, or whatever… there’s no denying that he knows how to instill confidence and pride in a crowd.

We get this:

This is Gordon Brown. He is our Prime Minister. Our unelected Prime Minister, I might add, who sat waiting for Blair to resign like a rabid dog waiting to pounce on a hunk of meat before jumping in and continuing the mess his predecessor had created.

There are many things I object to about Gordon Brown and his government. The biggest thing that struck me about the US election is that I actually cared about the outcome. I cared about the candidates. I was keen for Obama to win because I supported him as a person, I supported what he stood for and I found him an inspirational candidate. I felt uneasy about McCain and particularly about the Evil Ice Bitch that stood with him with her strangely plastic face. Conversely, I’ve watched several UK elections over the years and not one of them has inspired the same kind of pride, patriotism and edge-of-the-seat excitement that the US elections did. This is largely to do with the fact that our politicians are boring and uninspiring, as clearly demonstrated above.

Couple this with the fact that they seem to make consistently stupid decisions, particularly when it comes to things like criminal rights, education and the like, and I can say with some confidence that I have roughly 0% confidence and trust in our government… and the trouble is that the “other sides” don’t inspire much confidence either. David Cameron is a posh public-school boy who is widely regarded as “out of touch” with much of society. I will likely vote for him in the next election purely because I’ve seen what a hash Gordon Brown and the Labour Party have made in the last few years, but I know that it’s unlikely there will be any great change. Our “third option”, the Liberal Democrats, may as well not exist because they consistently gain so little votes in the elections that their presence is merely an annoyance to the “big two” parties.

Our MPs are fond of that particularly odious brand of management-speak and obfuscation of what they actually mean through dumb buzz-words. (I realise “obfuscation” may qualify as one of those words, but I like it.) None of them will ever answer a direct question. I realise that this is nothing new, but it does little to inspire confidence. Obama has, conversely, in the speeches I have witnessed so far, been relatively plain-speaking and comes across as honest. Time will tell if he can live up to his promises, but at least I’m feeling pretty good about him at the moment.

I don’t see any change forthcoming in the UK. Each new generation of politicians in this country is more boring, dull, morose and out-of-touch than the last. Each new generation is doing more and more damage to the country in the name of being “progressive” and encouraging “diversity” when in fact all they are doing is removing rights from people who deserve them and providing them to people who don’t, like criminals and poorly-behaved children in schools. As a result, the country is becoming apathetic, with little to no respect for authority. There’s no chance of any kind of “revolution” forthcoming because the country is so weary and exhausted by the constant beatdowns and the amount of effort it takes to get a straight answer out of a politician.

I realise this all sounds a bit Daily Mail-ish and for that I apologise. But I wanted to share my thoughts, post-election. I am filled with pride and “patriotism” (for want of a better word) towards America at the moment, but it only highlights the fact that we’re doing it wrong here.

Fuck the Internet

Okay… the irony of saying “fuck the Internet” on a blog post isn’t lost on me, but bear with me. There’s a rant and a half coming your way right about now about, paradoxically enough, people moaning. However, I feel rather more justified in my meta-moaning than the whiny little sods I will be discussing throughout the next few paragraphs.

But first, a little history lesson, if you’ll indulge me for a sec.

My family had been online junkies since before the Internet was a widespread global phenomenon. An irregular “treat” for us was to be able to use our Atari with its mighty 300bps modem to dial up to a local bulletin board system, read some messages and maybe download some BASIC games to play. At the time, I thought this was incredily cool. Looking back, at the time, it was incredibly cool. I mean, being able to use your telephone line to dial into someone else’s computer and do stuff with it? Neat.

A few years later came CompuServe, which was a step closer to the “real” Internet, at the time still very much in its infancy for consumers. CompuServe offered a service that was essentially hundreds of these bulletin board services, called “forums” along with news, entertainment and real-time chat services. Again, it was something of a “treat” to be able to go online and look at stuff and to actually be able to communicate with other people. As a matter of fact, as a result of a message exchange between myself and another chap on the CompuServe Gamers’ Forum, ten levels that I had created for Wolfenstein 3D made their way onto the official Apogee “Super Upgrades” expansion pack for Wolf3D, netting me a cool $200. I still have a (now very faded) photocopy of the cheque as I thought that was so awesome.

A while into the “CompuServe Age”, I read an article in PC Format magazine discussing this new and interesting-sounding thing called the Internet. The article was awash with buzzwords like “telnet”, “FTP” and curious sounding things with lots of dots and coms in them. But it was still quite some time before CompuServe actually offered full Internet access.

Now here we are, some ten-to-fifteen years later. Web 2.0 in all its self-publishing, self-expressing, lower-case logo glory is upon us offering anyone with a pulse the opportunity to spill their guts on the Internet and share their innermost thoughts and feelings on a whole variety of topics.

This, on the surface, is a great thing. Never before have people had such an opportunity to self-publish anything they like – be it creative writing, academic research, odes to the fit girl in class 3B or simply waffly old bollocks like this place. Why, then, do so many people feel the need to use this great medium to batter down anything around them?

I have two recent examples of this, though these are by no means isolated examples. They are merely the most recent things where this issue has cropped up. Firstly, we have the “new Facebook”. Secondly, we have EA’s new game Spore. Let’s take these two things in turn.

First up is Facebook. Facebook is such a global phenomenon that I heard on the news this week (on the radio, how old-school of me) that they’re planning on making a movie (presumably of the docu-drama variety) on the site’s rise to success.

For the unfamiliar… actually, balls to that, even my Mum has a Facebook account. You all know what Facebook is. Let’s not forget that it’s a free service supported almost entirely by ads that anyone can sign up for and use and never have to pay a penny. It’s a social tool that’s allowed millions of people across the world to connect with one another and rediscover old friendships after many years, in some cases. In short, it’s a pretty marvellous thing that both Facebook themselves and numerous third parties keep adding new features to.

So recently Facebook redesigned their site, changing the way the functionality of the site works and, to me, making it rather more streamlined and clean. It also uses more of the browser window which, when you’re working on a 1920×1200 screen, is most welcome. They’ve obviously worked hard on this site redesign and are still tweaking things even as we speak – each time I log on I see some new little feature that makes navigation and use of the site even easier.

So how does the community at large respond? By creating “OMG 1 MILLION PEOPLE MUST JOIN THIS GROUP AND STAND UP FOR OUR RIGHTS! NEW FACEBOOK SUCKS!”. You’d think that Facebook had summoned the spirit of Hitler and then allowed it to rape all the world’s children before taking a chainsaw to them, while the shareholders sat in the background wanking and laughing. But no – they’ve done what any good website does every few years, they’ve had a refresh and a redesign – and, compared to many websites’ complete overhauls that I’ve seen over the years, this has been a fairly minor one in the grand scheme of things. You can still do everything you used to be able to, and more so in many cases.

So why bitch and moan? It escapes me. Do these people seriously think that getting a million people together in a group that is HOSTED ON THE FUCKING SITE THEY ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT – the site they aren’t paying a penny to support yet are happily cluttering up bandwidth with their photos and videos – is going to achieve jack shit? Why bother? Fuck the Internet.

Why bother complaining about the complainers? It makes me feel better. One may argue that all these people are doing is “making themselves feel better” also, but the fact is, it is Facebook’s prerogative to change their site as and when they want to – whether it is from the perspective of improving the users’ experience (they must be sitting around thinking “Those ungrateful bastards” right now) or from the perspective of increasing advertising revenue (which for a site that doesn’t make much money from its users is perfectly reasonable).

Next rant. Spore.

Spore’s a great game that came out this week. From Will Wright, creator of the Sim games (and the The Sims games, natch) it allows you to… again, I’m sure you all know about Spore already, so I’ll cut to the chase.

Spore ships with some security software by Sony called SecuROM. SecuROM is a system that is designed to protect discs against being copied and installed by hundreds of people… i.e. piracy. As such, it limits a purchaser of a copy of Spore to installing it on three separate machines. That’s not, as many people have assumed, three installations and then it’s all over… that’s three machines.

Who has three machines? How many people, apart from people with more money than sense, buy a new PC gaming rig often enough to make this an issue? I buy a computer roughly once every five to seven years and it serves me fine in that time, unless I want to run something like Crysis – which fortunately I have no interest in whatsoever.

EA released a statement quoting usage and activation statistics from the Spore Creature Creator, released some months prior to the full game. While Creature Creator’s stats may not necessarily reflect exactly the same userbase as Spore, the figures were telling. Most users activated the product on one computer. A few did it on two. And about 1% tried to activate on more than three. I’m often loathe to believe company hyperbole, but in this case those figures certainly seem a reasonable assumption in my experience at least. I don’t think I know anyone who has more than one computer for gaming purposes. Sure, I know some guys who have PCs for gaming and Macs for professional/creative work, but even then, that’s still only two computers.

The nonsense with Spore went way overboard. Amazon.com was bombarded with over 1700 one-star reviews of the game, very few of which commented on the game at all. Several users bandied the word “draconian” around and many promising to go and pirate the game rather than purchase it – indeed, the main argument that many people were throwing around was the fact that somehow Spore had been leaked, cracked and torrented even before the game’s street date, thereby, to these people, making the DRM pointless.

The fact is, were there not such wanton levels of piracy on the Internet today, these measures wouldn’t be necessary – and the people on Amazon who claimed that pirating the game was “making a stand” are simply adding to the problem, not making a point. EA’s a big company and they have to be seen to be doing something more than plugging their fingers in their ears and going “lalalala” on the subject of piracy. While DRM clearly doesn’t work as it should at present, at least it represents a symbolic gesture on EA’s part to help tackle the problem.

The fact is that Spore’s actually a great game, but all this nonsense has put lots of people off playing it, for completely unjustified and ill-informed reasons. It’d be lovely if just, for once, people on the Internet could sit down, appreciate what someone else has done for them, pay for it if it’s a paid-for service (like Spore) and appreciate it being free if it’s a free service (like Facebook) without bitching and moaning any time some tiny little change to the “norm” comes along. I’m sure there’s something Orwellian in there somewhere…

Anyway. Rant over. Assuming no-one else pisses me off my next few posts will be about Spore and other games I’m playing at the moment!

In praise of slow

(With apologies to Carl Honore for shamelessly liberating the title of his book, which I haven’t read, but respect the sentiment behind the title.)

I sauntered to work today. Tomorrow I might amble, stroll, perambulate or, you know, walk. This is nothing unusual, you might think, but I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon develop over the last few years, and that is the fact that everyone seems to have somewhere more important than the place I’m going to get to, preferably much quicker than I do. As such, as I wander down the street, it’s almost inevitable, even at unsociable hours in the morning, that at least one person will come charging past me – not running, because that would look panicky – but walking at at least twice the speed I do. I don’t walk as slowly as, say, an elderly gentleman, but I still walk considerably slower than these people who are inevitably dressed in some sort of suit, wearing clip-cloppy shoes that immediately makes them somehow seem incredibly arrogant. Quite how shoes can be arrogant is anyone’s guess, but that’s what it makes me think.

Then there’s London. Anyone who’s ever visited London, however much you may have liked it, will have noticed how much of a hurry every damn person in that city is in. Traffic lights go amber and horns sound immediately like some sort of automatic reaction. Dare to stand slightly left-of-centre on the escalators leading down to the Underground and some greased-up City-boy businessman will make a snide comment like “Slow lane’s over there, mate”. Stand in a queue at Pret and you’ll see at least five people who have been waiting roughly fifteen seconds storm out in seeming disgust, muttering about inefficiency. (Contrast this with my experience a few years back when an entire symphony orchestra descended on one tiny kebab shop in the middle of Warsaw which was staffed by one rather uncomfortable looking man. Now that was inefficiency, although to be fair he was somewhat up against the wall. Almost literally.)

Then there’s the laziness of people who use computers. “Why can’t I drag that text into my subject header?” I heard one person ask of an email application – because using two keyboard shortcuts to copy and paste it was obviously just such a hassle. “Why can’t it do this?” “Why doesn’t this do my work for me?” “Computers are supposed to be efficient!”

And then – then – there’s the attention span of people on the Internet. Dare to write in more than one paragraph on a message board and there will be at least one response along the lines of “OMFG WALL OF TEXT” with nothing more meaningful to say. Well, thanks for that.

You’d think there’d be a point to this wall of text. And I guess there is. It’s to say to these people “slow the fuck down”. Leave ten minutes earlier so you can enjoy a walk to work without barging past people. Take your time over writing your emails and they might actually be spelled and punctuated correctly. Read someone’s wall of text and you might actually find something interesting that they had to say. And London? Just climb out of your own arse and realise that some people don’t want to live their lives at 300 miles per hour before dying of a heart attack at 28.

This post is dedicated to the people who take the time to sit down, chill out, relax, enjoy some time, some space and don’t mind being a little bit wordy and pretentious along the way. If you’re reading this and you’ve got this far, chances are you’re one of them. And to you I say, “Good job. Keep it up.”

Obligatory First Post Explanation

Hello. Welcome to yet another attempt at a blog. This time I’m not relying on crappy, shit-arsed web hosts who don’t reply to my emails when I politely (and subsequently, less politely) enquire exactly why they have absconded with £30 of my hard-earned for another year’s hosting and domain name ownership. But enough about 4sites.com (who, incidentally, used to be fantastic, and just appeared to vanish off the face of the planet recently) – let’s not start this as a rant, as there will undoubtedly be plenty of time for that later.

If you’ve stumbled across this blog by accident, here’s the obligatory “hello, this is me, as if you care” post. That way you can decide whether or not you feel like sticking around. So let’s lurch right in.

My name’s Pete Davison. I am not the 1981-1984 incarnation of The Doctor, hence the title of this blog. In fact, I was born in 1981, giving my parents great joy in telling the story of my brother (games industry veteran John Davison, as press releases are wont to call him) apparently insisting that my parents gave me the middle names “Doctor Who”.

It didn’t happen.

I did, however, end up with two middle names, which has meant for the longest time I have been unable to enter all of my initials into arcade machines upon achieving a high score. I suppose as names go, things could be worse. I could be called Theophilus McShitface or something like that. Now that really would be unfortunate, although at least “TMS” fits on the Pac-Man high scores list.

Anyway, who am I? I’m a self-confessed geek. I love my gadgets, I love my video games and I love my board games. I also like hot girls in lingerie, but I think that’s something less of a niche market. I live in the UK and represent one of the last bastions of traditional Britishness, doing one hell of a Brian Blessed impression (with a beard to match if I haven’t shaved for a while) and constantly shaking my head at the rancid, disgusting, despicable state that this country is in.

I’m also in the process of attempting to emigrate, for reasons which are probably abundantly clear from that previous paragraph.

But back to the geekery. One of the main things I do is take part in legendary (well, in our minds, at least) gaming “book club” The Squadron of Shame over at 1up.com. We have a podcast and everything – see the sidebar for links to subscribe. The Squadron of Shame are a group dedicated to rescuing underappreciated classic video games from the bargain bins and playing the shit out of them before deciding whether or not they actually do belong in said bargain bin or in pride of place on discerning gamers’ shelves.

I also occasionally write for industry veteran John Davison’s new site, What They Play, a comprehensive resource for parents wanting to find out more about their kids’ favourite hobby. If you’re a parent, know nothing about video games and want to know if the latest Final Metal Gears of Halo game actually does have all the graphic depictions of interracial anal sex that the Daily Mail “reported” (and I use the term loosely) featured in it, What They Play is a great place to start.

So sit back, relax, maybe drop a comment or two (but be sure to comment responsibly otherwise the government gonna getcha) and enjoy.

If this is the only post on the page when you read this, you have reached the end of the potential enjoyment of this page. Please feel free to come back and visit later.

Auf wiedersehen.