#oneaday Day 423: Destination X

I watched a potentially interesting new TV show the other day. I've only watched one episode so far and I'm not 100% sure if it was actually any good or not, but the concept was, at least, interesting.

The show is on the BBC and is known as Destination X. I was mostly attracted to it by Rob Brydon being in the presenting role; I have a lot of time for Brydon and his work, and this looked nicely different from his usual panel show stuff.

The concept of Destination X is that a bunch of randos are thrown together and, via various circumstances, placed in a situation where they don't know where they are going and, at various legs of their journey, where they are. At the end of each episode, each contestant has to plop an "X" down on a map of Europe where they think they are, and whoever's X is the furthest away from where they actually are is booted out of the competition.

Naturally, numerous obstacles are placed in the competitors' way, but they also have the opportunity to earn clues as to where they are, too. There are "challenges" along the way, which can potentially provide clues to everyone, but which also give a particular advantage to whoever had the strongest individual performance in the challenge.

In the first episode, all the contestants were stuck in a box, with various items of imagery adorning the walls. The box was split into an "A" side and a "B" side, and the group was asked a series of questions with two possible answers. Each contestant had to stand on the side they believed was the correct answer, and, without revealing whether the answer was correct or not, they would then have the opportunity to look out of a tiny window of the box to see either a clue (if they were on the "correct" side) or a red herring (if they were on the "wrong" side).

There's also some artificial drama added, at least in this first episode, by the person who "won" the challenge having the opportunity to bring someone else along to gain their particular advantage — and they also have the option to earn another clue, on the condition that no-one else must learn that clue, otherwise they'll be immediately disqualified. It sounds complicated, but it makes sense in the moment.

It's an interesting format, for sure, though there are some rather mean tricks played on the contestants even with the supposedly "helpful" clues — the worst of which was having a helpful guide tell them about a building they were standing in front of them in German… when they were actually in France. The added "drama" just felt a bit gratuitous, too, particularly given that the person given the opportunity to conspire with another contestant and/or screw the others over clearly was not at all comfortable with this side of proceedings.

As with any show featuring (supposed) members of the general public, too, the cast appears to have been picked to have the maximum possible number of annoying dickheads in it. There's a particularly odious-seeming individual who is obsessed with social media, and they come across as a complete tool. I have little to no doubt that there is heavy scripting and editing involved in order to make these otherwise boring members of Joe Public into "characters", but, again, it feels a bit gratuitous, and not really necessary in a show where the basic format is already kind of intriguing.

I'm not sure if I'm going to watch any more of it, but I didn't dislike the first episode that I watched. I may watch another one or two episodes to see if it's worth sticking with; you never know, you might enjoy it, though, so that's what today's post was all about!

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 422: Escape artist

We were quite surprised during dinner to see the outline of our cat, Oliver, on the other side of our living room window. Oliver is an indoor cat but has a curiosity about the outside world, so Andie built him (and Patti) a catio out the back so he can stay safe and secure while still being able to enjoy the feeling of being outside.

The concern we have is, as you might expect, exactly how the little bugger managed to get out, given that there are no windows open downstairs, and I'm pretty sure the only window we have open upstairs is the one we stick the air conditioning hose out of. This, to me, suggests that he jumped out of an upstairs window and, via some means that isn't yet entirely clear, made it down to our lounge window.

Thankfully, we got him to come back in without any difficulty, but this is, of course, a little worrying, particularly since we've kept all our cats inside ever since we lost Ruby on the road some years ago. He's never done this before, and we think he only did it this time because he saw another cat out the front and wanted to go and meet them — although, hilariously, despite this other cat being a pretty small, young thing, he seemed to be quite frightened of it — but still, it's obviously not behaviour we're particularly keen to encourage.

LIVE UPDATE! Andie has just checked our security camera footage, and it transpires that he just snuck out behind me when I was putting some things in the outside bin. He went out just as I was closing the door and I didn't notice, so he ended up shut out the front. Thankfully, it was only for a few minutes, and he seemingly knew that the front window was a good place to get our attention. So clever him, but also naughty him for sneaking out when he knows he's not allowed out the front!

Well, all's well that ends well, I guess. At least now I don't have to have a sleepless night worrying if he's going to fling himself out of a second-storey window because he saw something interesting outside. And hopefully he learned something from this whole experience.

Who am I kidding? He's a cheeky little cat, is what he is. He will have learned nothing from this. But it doesn't matter. I love the stupid little dickhead anyway.

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#oneaday Day 421: Ch-ch-ch-changes

I'll write about this again nearer the time that I'm actually going to put this into practice, but I wanted to give some advance notice of what I'm planning.

On September 8, 2025, I'll be taking a big step back from social media for personal use. I'll be deactivating my Bluesky account, removing it and Discord from my phone, and leaving a bunch of Discord servers.

The reason for this is that social media in general — even the little bit I still hold onto for some inexplicable reason — continues to play havoc with my overall mental health, and honestly, there is really absolutely nothing left that makes me feel like I "need" it for anything other than occasional contact with other people. And there are other means of achieving that contact with other people.

This isn't intended to be a big dramatic "well I'm taking my ball and going home without you!" post, and it's nothing personal, particularly with regard to the Discord servers I will be disconnecting from. This is a me thing; it's about removing myself from situations that are continually self-destructive and unproductive — i.e. spending far too much time doomscrolling on Bluesky or just rotating around several Discord servers in case someone said anything vaguely interesting — and freeing up time and headspace for doing things that I want to do, that make me happy, and that are less inclined to have me staring into space of an evening.

Thus, as loathe as part of me is to isolate myself further from a world where I already feel somewhat abandoned by and/or alienated from most of my "real life" friends, I intend to take the following steps for the sake of my mental health and overall digital wellbeing:

I will be deactivating my Bluesky account, at the very least temporarily while I am on holiday, and likely permanently.
I will be leaving a significant number of Discord communities that I am currently part of. I emphasise, again, that there is nothing personal in this; I am just attempting to cut down on the "noise" and the self-destructive habits of continually scrolling around the same servers time after time, hour after hour. I will be keeping some small, "friendship group" servers, but that's it.
I will be deleting Bluesky and Discord from my phone for the duration of my holiday, possibly permanently.
I will be focusing the majority of my online presence on this blog, MoeGamer (my video game blog) and Scratch Pad (my creative writing site).
I will only be contactable via email (you can use the Get In Touch page on this site if you don’t know my email address), Discord messages in the communities I remain active in (plus Discord DMs if we are friends on that platform), Google Chat if you know my email address, or WhatsApp private message if you know my phone number.

If you would like to stay in touch — and there are a bunch of you I would very much like it if you did! — then you can feel free to use any of the means outlined above to have a chat. It'd actually be quite nice to have some private conversations with many of you, away from the chaos of social media, so if we've had some good times in the past and I seem to have otherwise disappeared from the social channels you tend to use on the daily, please feel free to drop me a line.

Anyway, like I say, I wanted to give some advance notice of this, and I'll be posting something very similar on September 7, the day before I have a week's holiday as a last reminder. Thanks for your time, and if you have any questions or whatever about the above, well, you know where to find me!

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#oneaday Day 420: Scratch pad

Well, I did what I said yesterday and set up a new site purely for creative writing shenanigans. You can find it at https://scratchpad.moegamer.net — there's nothing there yet, but feel free to bookmark or subscribe or whatever if you feel like it. I'm making no promises as to the regularity with which I'll post over there, but it is there for me to use when I feel like it. Long-term, I might like to try and make some sort of "commitment" to doing some creative writing on a regular basis, but as with anything, it's going to be a case of establishing the habit first of all before you can actually really make it into a full-on habit.

I've been thinking about what I might want to write over there. I think I might start with some short stories rather than attempting to do anything too complicated or ambitious right away. While complicated, ambitious stories are always a delight to get started on, it's easy to get bogged down in the middle section and never get around to finishing them. One thing I found with my "NaNoWriMo But Not Really (Especially Now They're AI Weirdoes)" posts on this site was that it was those middle parts which were the most challenging. You may have a strong opening (ooer missus) and a solid finale in mind, but it's getting from one to the other that is often the challenging bit. Particularly when you're trying to ensure you meet a word (or, in the case of those projects, post) count.

So short stories would seem to be a sensible thing to start with. I can perhaps use them to explore or establish some characters, and those characters can perhaps grow into something I want to do more ambitious things with. Perhaps a collection of short stories focused on a particular character or group of characters is a solid foundation for a longer work? Or perhaps what begins as unconnected short stories can end up telling a complete narrative? I don't know. It's been quite a long time since I've done this, so my mind is, frankly, fairly awash with possibilities at the moment.

One thing I am going to take care of on the new site is to ensure that things are categorised nicely. I'm envisioning a page where you can just browse through short stories, then anything which ends up being more ambitious can, of course, have its own page also so anyone who cares to do such a thing can read from the beginning to the end without interruption. And it goes without saying that this site will remain ad-free for the foreseeable future — given that I don't have any ads on my most successful site, MoeGamer, I really don't think having them on a creative scratch pad is really going to achieve anything.

And, of course, the site will remain proudly AI-free. Not a single bit of generative AI will go anywhere near that page, and absolutely definitely not for text generation. The whole point of the site is for me to indulge in some unadulterated creativity for the first time in quite a while, so dicking around with AI kind of defeats the object there, doesn't it? Also there's plenty of quite convincing evidence right now that using ChatGPT turns you into a dribbling cunt that is totally incapable of thinking for itself, so there's that, also.

Anyway, yeah. That's the announcement, I guess. Now to figure out something to write over there!

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#oneaday Day 419: I wanna write a story

It's been far too long since I actually did some proper, honest to goodness creative writing that isn't burbling stream of consciousness blog posts or video game analysis, and I have to admit, I've been feeling an increasing hunger to just write something recently.

But what? I don't really know. There are lots of possibilities in my head, ranging from simple slice-of-life affairs to ambitious sci-fi epics — plus, of course, the Dreamwalker story I've had in my head since a teen but never quite got around to figuring out how it would finish, particularly as it started life as a Klik 'n' Play game — and I think it would probably be fun to write a murder mystery, given how many of them I've been watching of late.

I am beset with the odd mind goblin*, though. I feel like I can't write a murder mystery because I can't think through a crime logically enough to make it convincing — although honestly, with some of the absolute nonsense they get up to on Death in Paradise, I feel like particularly elaborate, bafflingly complicated murders are perfectly fine in the genre.

I feel like I can't write slice-of-life because it would either be too boring, or too unconvincing, or come across too much like wish fulfilment — although, again, thinking about the slice-of-life anime and TV shows I've enjoyed over the years, none of those things are necessarily a problem.

I feel like I can't write sci-fi because I don't know enough science to make it convincing — although, again, if you lean hard on the science fantasy angle you don't necessarily have to worry about.

Mostly, my biggest mind goblin, though, is the big question: who would read it? And its closely related question, does that matter? No-one reads this fucking blog and I'm still tapping away every night, so surely if I'm taking some time on the semi-regular to write some fiction and I feel satisfied with what I've achieved, that should be enough, no?

I think that's probably the case. So I think I'm going to figure out what I might want to write, then set up a place where I can post it easily — likely another blog, separate from both this and MoeGamer. And then all I have to do is write, whenever I feel like it. And who knows? Maybe something will come of it in the long term.

^{*Mind goblin deez nuts? Yes, I got you good. Don't try and pretend like I didn't.}

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#oneaday Day 418: A little flutter

I am not, generally speaking, a betting man, but I do have an occasional flutter on the National Lottery. This usually consists of me loading up my account with £10, playing two lines of whatever the next draw game is, then using the rest of the £10 to play a few of the "instant win" games. If, at any point, I go above the £10 I started at, I cash out. If I hit zero, I stop playing. This is how you stay in control of things.

The instant win games do frustrate me, though, because it's painfully transparent that they've worked everything out in advance of you even starting to play them, making the actual "playing" process feel more than a bit pointless at times. I don't know if this is just the side of me who understands how video games work talking, but there are a number of observations I have which make playing these games particularly annoying:

If a game has multiple ways to win a prize and you win a prize on one of them, none of the others will yield a prize, even though you have to keep playing "just to see" if you win anything else.
If a game is dependent on "random chance" such as virtual dice rolls or pulling letters out of a bag, at least one case of you taking that chance will be completely useless to you — for example, in the National Lottery's Cashword games, there will always be at least one letter you draw that doesn't appear anywhere on the board.
If a game should theoretically be based on recognisable odds — such as, say, the frequency with which different letters appear in English words — then the game will almost always be manipulated in such a way as to subvert those odds. Looking at Cashword again, don't count on pulling an "E" being particularly good for your chances, despite it being one of the most commonly used letters in English.
If a game offers you what appears to be a "1 in something" chance — e.g. a 1 in 3 chance of revealing your token beneath three thimbles, as seen in the National Lottery's Monopoly Gold Classic game, more often than not the chance is actually 0 in 3, because your token just isn't there at all.
A game will quite frequently present its outcome as being that you "nearly" won — for example, in the case of Monopoly Gold Classic, it's not at all unusual to end the game just needing one additional colour card to get the £100,000 prize. This does not mean you actually nearly won. It is, in most cases, the game artificially attempting to make itself more exciting.
Games which appear to be based on skill and timing are nothing of the sort. What a spinning wheel lands on has been determined even before you started spinning it.
Games which appear to let you use your intelligence are, likewise, nothing of the sort. They are pure chance.
Most instant win games barely qualify as "games" at all; you might as well just be paying £1 to click a button that says "DID YOU WIN?"

I think being aware of all these things and keeping them in mind any time I have a little flutter on the Lottery website is what keeps me from ever getting sucked in to anything gambling-related. Being aware that everything you do on the National Lottery website is nothing more than a prize draw, whether it is declared one or not, makes it a lot easier to set yourself some limits, have a brief little dopamine hit from thinking "it could be me!" and then not being all that disappointed when your £10 has vanished.

I appreciate that some people find it a tad harder to stop gambling once they start. I'm glad I've never fallen into that particular trap. And hey, you never know. One day it could be me. That'd be nice.

For now, though, it absolutely isn't.

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#oneaday Day 417: This content is not available

As I mentioned the other day, the UK's "Online Safety Act" came into force recently, forcing everyone to "verify" their age for everything from sending private messages on Bluesky to looking at the nastiest porn you can think of.

Just recently, I have run into age verification gates in multiple places. Discord made me do it to continue accessing channels marked "NSFW", even if there was no actual pornography in there — and then automatically enabled image blurring on "sensitive content" despite me never having given any indication that I might not want to see that. Bluesky made me do it to continue having access to the site's direct messaging feature. And, of course, it's on the porn sites.

It doesn't stop there, though. I went on Mobygames to look something up earlier, and was unable to view the cover for the game Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors on Nintendo DS without putting in my birthday; thankfully I didn't have to provide any "proof", unlike in the other cases mentioned above, but it still specifically mentioned that this was "to comply with EU law". The UK isn't the EU thanks to the shitshow that was Brexit, but I suspect it still gets lumped in with the EU in stuff like this.

Just to be clear, the cover for Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, which I was age gated from viewing immediately, looks like this:

Now, I'm open to anyone who can tell me what, there, exactly, needs age gating. The game itself is violent (and has one character with a massive honking pair of tits), but there's nothing in that cover image itself that is objectionable — and it was specifically this cover that Mobygames age-gated me from being able to see.

Elsewhere online, there are concerns that Wikipedia may find itself age-gated due to the Online Safety Act, due to the fact that the some of Wikipedia maybe possibly might not be suitable for children. It's a fucking encyclopaedia! We were looking up "sexual" in the Collins Dictionary at primary school and tittering at it talking about "penis" and "vagina"; exactly what purpose does plopping surveillance state age verification on a site like Wikipedia serve, exactly?

Well, I've said it already, haven't I. It is — it must be — at least, in part, about surveillance. You already can't speak out in support of certain groups in the Middle East without putting yourself at risk of being branded a "terrorist" and being prosecuted for hate speech. Just imagine the glee the government would probably have at knowing what porn you've been looking at, what knowledge you've been attempting to arm yourself with, who you've been talking to and how you've been communicating with them.

I hate that saying all this makes one sound like a conspiracy nut, but this stuff is actually happening. I don't trust any of these "age verification" services an inch, and everyone in the UK should be very concerned right now, regardless of what they look at online. As has often been said of late — particularly with regard to the currently unfolding Visa/Mastercard situation — it really is the pornographers and the sex workers who are the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to this. You don't have to enjoy looking at filth online to be affected by this in the long term; I'd say everyone is looking at a very dark time for the Internet, unless something is done.

You can, at least, make your discontent known, if you're a UK citizen, with this online petition, which has already attained over 400,000 signatures. It's probably worth writing to your MP, too. Beyond that, I don't know. Like I say, it's kind of scary — particularly not knowing where any of this is going to end, and what the longer-term consequences are going to be.

Anyway, this site will continue to exist, and I will continue to say what I want here, so a hearty fuck you to everyone involved with the Online Safety Act, and you can take your "robust but proportionate regulation" (which in reality is anything but) and jam it very firmly up your arse, until it comes out of your nostrils.

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#oneaday Day 416: Choose your own adventure

When I was a kid, I was really into the Choose Your Own Adventure books. I had a couple of the arguably more popular and/or well-known Fighting Fantasy ones also, but I always sort of preferred Choose Your Own Adventure. I was very much in a minority on this, but I didn't care then, and I don't care now. I am, however, now a bit more capable of reflecting on precisely why I preferred Choose Your Own Adventure to Fighting Fantasy. And, since I have a selection of the relatively recent reprints winging their way to me (one has arrived so far, but there are, I think, 11 more coming soon) I thought I might as well do just that.

To put it simply, Choose Your Own Adventure is effective because its only "gimmick" is the choices part. That means you don't need anything but the book to get started with them. Contrast with Fighting Fantasy, where you need a pencil, six-sided dice and piece of paper to play — or the oft-forgotten (and really enjoyable) Asterix Adventure Games, which came with a plastic wallet full of "props" to use as part of the proceedings.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't dislike the extra gimmicks of Fighting Fantasy, the Asterix Adventure Games and any of the other similar things I might have engaged with in my youth. Fighting Fantasy, in particular, is a good introduction to the conventions of role-playing games — particularly their use of statistics and chance-based mechanics. The Asterix Adventure Games were just thematically quite nice — with the props you'd do things like track how much magic potion Asterix had left, use a scroll to decipher passwords, and use a translation tablet to translate Latin phrases. But you still needed a bit of space to play them.

Choose Your Own Adventure, meanwhile, you can play in bed, on the toilet, in the back of a car, halfway up a tree, in a tent in your back garden… anywhere you have hands free to read a book. And that, I think, is the chief attraction for me.

But there's more. I also liked that Choose Your Own Adventure, as a series, was thematically diverse. They weren't all swords-and-sorcery fantasy tales. They weren't all horror. They didn't all involve the same characters. There were a couple that acted as "sequels" to each other, but for the most part, they were all self-contained affairs that stood by themselves, required no prior knowledge — and often taught you a few things along the way, too.

I've been struggling to remember exactly which Choose Your Own Adventure books I had as a kid. I definitely remember having Space and Beyond, Supercomputer and, I think, Treasure Diver — the latter was enough to put me off ever wanting to try scuba diving myself thanks to its painfully vivid descriptions of getting "The Bends" — and probably a few more besides. Thus far, the only that has arrived from this new batch is Mystery of the Maya, a South American adventure which, depending on the paths you take, may or may not involve time travel. That in itself is quite impressive — the fact that it is not necessarily a time-travel adventure, depending on one of the first choices you make, should give you an idea of the flexibility of these books. This one alone claims to have 39 different endings; I've seen two so far.

I'm looking forward to exploring these books again, and I think I'm actually going to make some videos of me "playing" them, because I think that will be fun. I don't know how easy it will be to make them visually interesting, but it would seem to me that taking a "Let's Play" format for a Choose Your Own Adventure book could potentially make for an enjoyable video.

I'm going to wait until a few more have arrived before I jump into doing that — I didn't fancy doing it this weekend because I was knackered and just wanted to relax — but watch out for those soon. I can't wait to try some of the books from the series that I always wanted as a kid, but never managed to get hold of!

I've also just learned that the series came about when author Edward Packard used to tell stories to his daughters about a character named Pete, and ask them what they thought "Pete" should do next. It's like it was meant to be!

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#oneaday Day 415: Last time happy

Something got me thinking earlier: when was the last time I felt really, actually, genuinely happy? I feel like living through the 2020s (so far) in particular has given me such a sense of malaise and misanthropy that it's honestly quite difficult to remember what it felt like to just… exist in a sense of contentment and satisfaction.

A lot of blame can probably be laid at the feet of what I saw someone the other day describe as "breathing Internet fumes all day" — and I love that, apologies to whoever I stole it from — but it's also clear that even if I wasn't plugged in to online culture, it would still be readily apparent that these are not happy times we live in.

I often consider closing down every last bit of my social media and going completely off-grid. I don't have much of it left any more — the only standalone social media I still have is Bluesky, and some people also count Discord and YouTube as social media, though to me those are both a little bit different — so it's not like it would be a big effort to do so. But is that what I really want? Even with those few remaining connections to the "outside" world, I still feel isolated, disconnected and incredibly lonely on a daily basis. Surely it makes no sense to cut off what, from some respects, can be looked on as a lifeline?

I dunno. There are people I like talking to on Bluesky and Discord, and YouTube is a valuable creative outlet for me, just as this blog and MoeGamer are. The thing I find myself asking, though, is if anyone would actually notice if I were just to disappear from one or all of those services one day. I suspect that they would not, at least not immediately. Someone might, a few months down the line, think "oh, I haven't heard from that Pete guy for a while" and discover a closed profile page, but would they, then, feel inclined to reach out to me via other means? Again, I suspect that they would not, given that these days, if you are not on social media or in a WhatsApp group chat, you seemingly do not exist. The only person who emails me on a semi-regular basis is my mother; the rest of my daily emails are promotional offers, order confirmations or blogs/newsletters I've subscribed to.

Email used to be exciting. While my short-lived penpal relationship with a girl named Julia in my teens pretty much fizzled out when we finally met — at least partly my fault for being completely socially inept in person, for reasons I did not understand then but very much do now — I still have fond memories of the excitement I felt every time I received an email from her.

Going even further back, I actually still have a couple of hand-written penpal letters from a primary school friend that I was very close with, who subsequently moved away. I don't really know why I've kept those — I am unlikely to ever see or hear from her ever again, given the many years since we last had any contact whatsoever — but, I don't know. Something about the enthusiasm with which she asked me if I was still playing football (multiple times in one letter) and how I was getting on at Cub Scouts (which should give you an idea of how old I was when writing and receiving these letters) was… thoroughly pleasant. I felt like I mattered, like I had a place in someone's life, even if it was just as the recipient of an occasional letter.

The advice people normally give to this sort of situation is "get out there and meet people". And it's probably sound advice. Trouble is, with my general physical and mental state, I'm kind of… I guess "afraid" is the right way to put it. Honestly, at this point I don't really have anything to lose by trying it, but I'm still… afraid to lose whatever it is. Maybe if I'm able to work on some of my own problems first — and I am doing so — I might be able to tackle some of these broader issues. And, with any luck, I might actually feel happiness again by the time I'm 60.

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#oneaday Day 414: Two types of game

Finishing up Old Skies today (read my article on it over on MoeGamer!) and then jumping right back into Donkey Kong Bananza, I was suddenly struck with the clearest way yet to express something I've been pondering for quite some time. And it stems from the core differences between those two games.

I put it to you, dear reader, that there are just two types of video games: ones where someone watching asks "what's it about?", and ones where someone asks "what do you have to do?"

Old Skies? "What's it about?" (Time travel, regrets, grief, making your mark on the world.) Donkey Kong Bananza? "What do you have to do?" (Find all the bananas.)

Essentially what this boils down to is the game's main priority: does the game primarily exist to tell a story, or does it exist as a form of "play"? To put it even more simply, is it a "narrative" game, or a "mechanics" game?

There's crossover, of course — narrative games can have strong mechanics, and mechanics games can have strong narratives. But pretty much every game you'll ever play will strongly skew one way or the other, to such a degree that in some cases, fans of one won't enjoy something from the other category.

Donkey Kong Bananza is a good example of this. It's a mechanics game; the narrative setup is flimsy at best, and there's not really a "story" to follow as you go through. Instead, you visit a bunch of places, meet some characters, unlock new abilities, then use all of those abilities to explore the broader world and, as noted above, find all of the bananas.

The fact that Donkey Kong Bananza doesn't really have an unfolding story is enough to put some people I know off from playing it completely. And while I maintain that those people are missing out on one of Nintendo's finest games to date, I completely understand. For the longest time, I felt like I favoured narrative games to the exclusion of all else, but as I've grown older — and, perhaps more crucially, I've developed my knowledge of how games are designed, how they work and the many different approaches developers can take when constructing an interactive experience — I have a much more balanced approach: I can (and do) enjoy both. This, of course, stands me in good stead for my day job, which involves enthusing about everything from Atari 2600 and Intellivision games up to PlayStation and NEOGEO titles.

I suspect at least part of this also stems from the fact that I grew up playing exclusively mechanics games, because the technology didn't really exist to deliver narrative games effectively. Except that's not quite true; text adventures and early graphic adventures existed pretty much from when I was old enough to use the computer, but as a child, they often felt a bit too complicated for me, even as an avid reader. So the vast majority of games I played on my first gaming systems — Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, Super NES — were "what do you have to do?" games, where narrative was typically reserved for introduction and/or ending sequences, if indeed the game had any in-game storytelling at all.

Things started to change when we switched over to MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 for our daily driver computer. Point-and-click adventures really came to the forefront, with titles like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and The Secret of Monkey Island proving that story-centric games could absolutely be a thing. And by the time I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time, I was absolutely all-in on video games as a storytelling medium, leading me to primarily focus on "what's it about?" games for the longest time.

In fact, you can see the evidence here on this blog how long this attitude lasted: a post which actually got showcased by WordPress.com, back when they actually cared about the community rather than garbage AI, highlighted my desire to play a racing game with a story. I felt that the racing game genre had been done something of a disservice by never having a game that took the Wing Commander approach of alternating narrative scenes with mechanics scenes, and on some level I think this might actually still be a fun idea… except I've played a few games where they've tried that, and the story scenes are just… not very good.

I'm not sure if it's just that the scenes weren't particularly interesting, inspiring or well-written, or if racing games really don't actually need a story to be fun — I suspect a little of both — but these days, I'm much more happy to let the racing game genre, a type of game in which "what do you have to do?" is so obvious that most people don't need to bother to ask, pootle along in the way it always has done. In fact, I've often found it quite refreshing to go back to games like the Project Gotham Racing series, where there's no open world or overcomplicated metagame to engage with, just a series of "levels" that you complete, one at a time, and gradually unlock harder challenges.

I suspect some games may even be different things to different people. Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar is a good example; to one person, it's a "what do you have to do?" game, where the answer is "wander around, explore, beat up monsters, find treasure", while to another, it's a "what's it about?" game, where the answer is "proving your worth in the Eight Virtues and becoming the Avatar". In other cases — The Last of Us, say — the distinction is probably pretty clear-cut.

Anyway, that was my meandering thought for the day. You're welcome to borrow my theory for your own pointless discussions with your friends if you want to. I'll let you. Or you can just leave it to rot here on this forgotten corner of the Internet as we all, gradually, bit by bit, turn to dust. Your call, really.

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