2309: Ingress’ Real-World Cyberpunk Shows Us What Mobile Games Should Aspire To

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One of the most popular buzzphrases that mobile game developers use is “console-quality graphics and gameplay”. (This ranks just behind “THE #1 RPG ON MOBILE!!” — as voted by the developer’s mum, presumably.) And indeed, it certainly is impressive how powerful today’s mobile phones are; I remember when Epic first released that cool tech demo showing Unreal Engine working on the iPhone (and it later turned out to be the rather uninspired Infinity Blade) and everyone lost their shit over mobile phones killing dedicated gaming handhelds.

Here’s the thing, though: I don’t want a console-quality experience on my mobile phone, and I doubt many other people do, either. In circumstances where the only gaming-capable device I have on my person is my phone, I probably don’t have the time or inclination to sit down and play some sort of battery-guzzling game that looks great but takes ages to load, demands more than a couple of minutes of my time for a meaningful play session and controls like complete ass because touchscreens suck for traditional input schemes. To put it another way, if I want to play games while I’m out and about, I’ll have my Vita in my bag; a device with actual buttons on which I can play games that are actually good, don’t require an Internet connection, don’t try and fleece money out of me at every opportunity and, as previously mentioned, don’t control like complete ass.

Mobile games are very much in a rut at the moment, with the vast majority of the most successful titles being Asian-origin “gacha” games, in which you draw cards/items/heroes/weapons of varying rarity with real money or in-game currency, add them to your party and level them up until they overpower everything the game has to offer. The exact execution of these games varies — Granblue Fantasy looks and plays somewhat like a traditional JRPG without the exploration, for example, while Love Live! School Idol Festival is a rhythm game — but their basic structure and game loop is always the same:

Log in, get daily bonus
Spend all your energy points (or equivalent) on either linear main story quests (if you’re trying to level up) or daily dungeons (if you’re trying to collect specific items)
Draw a free crap card/hero/item/weapon
If you’ve earned enough premium currency/paid for premium currency, draw guaranteed “rare or above” card/hero/item/weapon
Use collected crap cards/heroes/items/weapons to fuse with “rare or above” cards/heroes/items/weapons to level them up
Close game, wait for energy to regenerate
Repeat

Once you’ve played one, you’ve played them all, with the only real variation being the exact execution of how the quests play out. Even then, they tend to be grossly simplified versions of what you’d get on a full console — Granblue Fantasy’s combat, for example, has very little strategy beyond picking the right element for each enemy and/or overpowering them with overleveled or rare heroes.

It’s this rut that mobile gaming has been stuck in that means I have very little interest in modern mobile games — and it makes the original, bold claims that mobile gaming was something new and revolutionary that was going to take over the whole gaming industry look somewhat laughable.

However, there are some experiences out there that do make good use of mobile gaming’s unique capabilities, and Ingress is one of them. Ingress is a daunting prospect to get into, but I’ve spent a bit of time with it today, and it turns out it’s not nearly as scary as I thought it was.

Ingress is an augmented reality game — that is, it’s a game that overlays fictional game elements on the real world. The concept is that “exotic matter” or “XM” has started leaking into our world, and aliens called “Shapers” are up to some sort of mischief. Two factions have risen up to try and deal with the XM situation in their own way: the Enlightened want to learn more about it and how they can use it to help humanity, while the Resistance want to get rid of it and protect humanity from the unwanted machinations of the Shapers.

At the start of the game, you pick one of these two factions, and that’s your team for the duration you play the game. You can switch sides, but it’s a lengthy process to do so and effectively entails you starting the game all over again, so there’s not a lot of point unless you really need to play for the other team.

Ingress’ augmented reality nature comes in the form of “portals” scattered around the real world. It’s the job of the Ingress players on both sides to proceed to these portals — like, actually go to the places they are — hack them to acquire various useful items, and capture them for their respective faction. You can then use the items you’ve acquired to protect your own portals from enemy attack or go and try to cause some mischief on enemy portals. There’s an overarching metagame that tasks you with linking nearby portals strategically and covering the map with triangles made up of three linked portals to score points for your faction, too, and meanwhile the game’s overall plot unfolds organically in the background with special, live events around the world, video clips that you can loot from portals and all manner of other goodies.

Even its core game loop is interesting:

Check the intel site for portals you’re interested in visiting/hacking/attacking/capturing
Go to the portal location
Hack the portal to acquire items if it belongs to your team
Attack the portal’s resonators with weapons if it’s an enemy portal
Capture the portal with your own resonators if you sufficiently weakened it
Link captured portals together with Portal Keys acquired through hacking — but note that links can’t intersect, so do this strategically
Form Fields by linking three portals together in a triangular formation, capturing a region of the map for your team and adding MU (Mind Units — overall score) to your faction’s overall rating.

Within that, there’s plenty you can do to mix things up. You can collaborate and coordinate with other nearby players to carry out a heavy assault on a well-defended portal. You can strategise with teammates on what will be the best formation for linked portals and fields. You can post and follow “Missions” — sequences of portals designed to take you on a tour. Or you can simply use the game as an excuse to get out and about to visit some places.

By far the best thing about Ingress is that it’s something that couldn’t be done anywhere other than on a mobile device. Everything about it — the fact that it’s GPS-based, the fact that it pulls information from the Internet, the fact that it’s an inherently social game, the fact that it works best on a device you can keep on your person at all times — is made for mobile gaming: it’s a completely unique experience that simply wouldn’t work anywhere else, and it’s a much, much better experience for it.

Also its cyberpunk-style aesthetic is absolutely gorgeous, with neon, glowing colours on a black background; stereotypical “computer” noises and speech synthesis; dramatic “ping” noises as you approach a portal; and well-produced videos to advance the ongoing plot. It’s an extremely well-crafted product, all round, and best of all it’s completely free to play, with no play throttling attempting to squeeze money out of you at any point by preventing you from playing as much as you’d like.

I spent a good couple of hours just wandering around the local area experimenting with Ingress earlier, and I enjoyed the experience enough to know it won’t be the last time I do so. It’s one of the most interesting mobile games I’ve ever played, and studios considering churning out yet another identikit gacha RPG should take a long, hard look at Ingress to see how to really take advantage of mobile devices as a platform for unique, fascinating gaming experiences.

2242: Another Frustrating Way Clickbait Ruins the Internet

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Earlier today, I was browsing around the Internet looking for some tips and tricks on how to better play Dungeon Travelers 2. I tried GameFAQs, and the content there was disappointingly light, though there is a good character guide at least. Then I resorted to Google, and I was reminded of something that’s been bugging me for a while.

Here’s my Google results for “dungeon travelers 2 walkthrough”:

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“Oh,” I thought, skipping past the GameFAQs entry because I’d already checked it out. “There’s some more walkthroughs out there. IGN have got one, huh? Well, that should be decent enough.”

As anyone who has ever attempted to look at one of IGN’s walkthroughs — or indeed one on the “GameWise” site above it — will know… no. This is emphatically not the case. Here is IGN’s walkthrough for Dungeon Travelers 2:

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That’s right! There’s absolutely fuck all there besides the most basic database information for the game itself. And if you thought GameWise might be any better, being higher ranked on Google? Nope.

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GameWise takes considerably more words to say that it doesn’t have any content for the guide, and outright lies to the reader by saying its “team of contributors will help you work through the game via a step-by-step tutorial” and that it will “take you all the way through the game to 100% completion including unlockable quests and items”. It’s boilerplate text, of course, but it’s complete bollocks and, more to the point, it’s evidence of a particularly dishonest practice that goes on alarmingly frequently these days: sites that put up “landing pages” for things that people might be searching for, then don’t populate them with content right away (or sometimes, as we can see here, at all) so that they can get some of that sweet, sweet ad revenue by someone who doesn’t know any better clicking on them without having to put any actual work in.

This is actively making the Internet less useful, particularly as both IGN and GameWise have clearly made the effort to get themselves highly ranked on Google as a “trustworthy” source. And indeed both of these sites may well have helpful walkthroughs and guides for more mainstream, popular games, and in that instance, them showing up on Google is absolutely fine. But to list a “false positive” result like this is extremely dishonest and incredibly frustrating for the reader.

I’m reminded of the evolution of my time at USgamer. When the site launched, each of us on the team were specifically given pretty much free reign to cover what we wanted in our own personal style: the thinking was very much along the lines of 1up.com back in the glory days, when there would be distinct “personalities”, each with their own specialisms, building up their own communities of readers. It was great; it was fun to write, and the community appreciated this honest style of writing.

Unfortunately, it didn’t satisfy the suits as it wasn’t raking in enough ad revenue. So out went the freedom and in came a more strict regime. Whereas once I took the approach that I had once taken so successfully on GamePro — look out for things that looked interesting that other sites hadn’t covered in detail, then cover them in detail — I was reduced to having to seek approval for every news story I posted, and this led USgamer’s news section to start looking more and more like every other gaming news site out there, covering the same old stories in the same old way.

This only got worse once I got laid off and was working out my notice; the site started to post guide content for recently released games, partly through the site’s partnership with Prima Games, whose website was also part of the Gamer Network umbrella. I had to split guides into parts so they could be published across several days and rake in more clicks than they would have done if posted all in one lump; worse, I didn’t have the creativity to write my own stuff, since all the content was already done and I was pretty much reduced to being a data entry person, editing and tidying up the raw copy so it looked good on the site. And, of course, even worse than that, the hours that I was tied up pissing around with these stupid guides were hours that I couldn’t spend writing more interesting things or telling people about games they might not have heard of before. (I am 100% sure that this was deliberate.)

Guide content has its place, but it should be on a dedicated site that specialises in it — such as GameFAQs — not used as insultingly transparent bait to get people to visit your site and cross your fingers that they might read something else you’ve written while they’re there. (They won’t.) And it absolutely, definitely should not be used in the way IGN and GameWise use it, which is to hook people in without actually providing any content at all.

It’s not just guide content, of course — IGN in particular has been caught playing the SEO game with articles about games and tricking Google into thinking they are “reviews” when they’re nothing of the sort — but guide content represents by far the most egregious examples of this bullshit going on.

If you are engaging in this, you are making the Internet a less useful place to find information. Stop being a cunt and write something helpful to go with your beautifully optimised search engine bullshit, or don’t list the page at all.

1699: A Note to Anyone Following Me on Twitter, Facebook or Google+

Posts that essentially boil down to “I’m Leaving [insert site name here] And Here’s Why You Should Care” are the very worst kind of egocentric narcissism, as most of you probably know. This is because they usually amount to someone attempting to attract attention to themselves flouncing off in a huff after they feel they’ve been slighted, only to return a week/month/year later to repeat the cycle anew. If you’ve had the patience and willpower to follow Fez developer Phil Fish over the last couple of years, you’ll have witnessed this action firsthand.

And yet here I am making a largely similar post, and not for the first time. I shall try and keep the egocentric narcissism to a minimum, however — though I’m making no promises.

This post is about two things: 1) why I don’t intend for Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to be part of my daily routine any more, and 2) how you can reach me if you’d still like to talk to me online — because despite the things I’m going to say under heading 1, I can’t deny that I’ve made a lot of good friends across all three networks over the years, and it would be a shame to abandon that completely.

To begin at the beginning, then. There are a lot of words ahead, but I would appreciate you sticking around to read them — particularly the last section about keeping in touch.

Don't worry, there will be pictures. They'll be irrelevant pictures, but there'll be pictures. — Don’t worry, there will be pictures. They’ll be irrelevant pictures, but there’ll be pictures.

Why I don’t intend for Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to be part of my daily routine

Those of you who have been following this blog recently will know that I decided to subject myself to a voluntary social media blackout this week. Specifically, I logged myself out from Twitter, Facebook and Google+, deleted the relevant apps from my phone, ensured that anything that might bug me with notifications from them was well and truly switched off and finally settled down to a week of peace.

It’s now a week since I started that blackout, and the time at which I decided I was going to review whether or not I needed social media in my life any more. And the conclusion I’ve reached is that I don’t think I do. I opened Twitter earlier today to see how I felt, and felt no urge to scroll down to see if I’d missed anything — I closed it straight away without even scrolling off the first page of tweets. I didn’t even feel the urge to open Facebook or Google+ at all. I have broken the “habit”, it seems, and I don’t feel like I “need” to develop it again.

Because it is a habit. It’s compulsive behaviour — at least it was for me. You may do it yourself without realising it; you reach a quiet moment in the day, and out comes the phone or up comes the web browser, and you do your “rounds” of your social networking sites of choice. You scroll through the reams and reams of content the millions of members of these sites worldwide have made, rarely taking anything in, rarely stopping to appreciate, say, the composition of a photograph on Instagram, or the witty headline that someone came up with for a news story on Facebook. It’s page after page of noise, little of it meaningful, all of it vying for your attention with equal fervour. And yet still around and around and around you go.

Some people deal with this noise better than others. Some people can discipline themselves to set aside a little bit of time to check their networks, then put them aside for hours or even days at a time. That can be a valid strategy, but with the speed at which modern social networks move, if you’re not there when something happens, your contribution to the “discussion” — and I use that term loosely — is likely worthless, since conversation will have moved on by then.

This matter of “discussion” is worthy of consideration, so let’s ponder that a minute.

The approach most people tend to take to discussion online.

One of the things that drove me to start my week-long blackout a couple of days earlier than I intended was the whole #GamerGate thing on Twitter. For those who don’t follow the video games field — or those who simply aren’t on Twitter — in simple terms, this was an argument between video game journalists (particularly those who err on the “feminist” side of the sociopolitical spectrum) and those who self-identify as “gamers”, i.e. people who play, enjoy and are passionate about video games and would rather not be told they’re awful people whenever possible.

I don’t really want to get into the details of the events surrounding #GamerGate as that would be long, tedious and, more to the point, has already been summed up in a great amount of detail elsewhere on the Internet. (As always, note that there are two sides to every story — something that both sides on this particular argument have been guilty of forgetting.)

Suffice to say, however, that #GamerGate brought out the very worst in a lot of people. It brought out some of the most unpleasant trolls the Internet had to offer, who, predictably, went after a number of people who — let’s be honest here — often court controversy to make a point. On the other side, those loud-voiced members of the press and their numerous sycophants continued down a path that I’ve been unhappy to see them proceeding down for the last year or two: belittling, ridiculing, publicly shaming and even outright insulting the very people they are supposed to be writing for.

Whatever fair points both sides had — and make no mistake, both sides had fair points — were lost amid the noise, and discussion never got anywhere. It was frustrating to watch; I tended not to participate as much as possible as I learned a while back that any attempts to call for moderation in such matters tended to result in accusations of “tone policing” — which, ironically, is itself a form of deflection attention away from a point being made — rather than genuine attempts to calm down and discuss things like rational adults. And thus nothing was ever resolved.

As I said above, different people deal with different things in different ways. My frustration with these endlessly circular arguments — in which no-one was really listening to anyone else and in which any fair points were inevitably lost in all the blind anger and insults being thrown in both directions — manifested itself as anxiety, stress and depression. I was genuinely afraid to contribute to these discussions for fear of attracting the wrath of one, the other or both of the angry mobs involved. And it was having an effect on my mental health.

If you can take yourself out of a situation that is causing you problems with your mental health and not cause yourself further problems, you should do. So that’s exactly what I did. I extracted myself from the whirling miasma of rage, quietly slipped away for a while to reflect, contemplate and heal — and now, here I am, a week later, with no desire to jump back into the fray.

This isn’t to say that Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are nothing but whirling miasmata of rage and other negative emotions, but frankly, the other stuff there has seemed of little value to me for some time, too. There’s only so many “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!” videos you can take seeing before you just don’t care What Happened Next; only so many “adorbs” pictures of cute things you can see before you never want to see another squirrel again; only so many baby photos you can scroll past before your only reaction to a friend enjoying a new addition to the family is… well, nothing.

It’s all noise to me, in other words; an overwhelming swathe of constant content; a never-ending stream of consciousness in which meaningful life events are ascribed equal importance to a video of a cat drinking water from a squirt bottle. I don’t need that. I’ve always been one for social anxiety, but right now I’d rather hear important things from the lips of the people involved rather than read it on Facebook or Twitter; I’d rather actually hang out with friends than hope I get more than a couple of “Likes” on the picture of the bag of chips I’m about to eat, or a couple of comments on a post I made about how much I’m enjoying Tales of Xillia 2.

I’m not saying there’s no place for these sites in society at all — clearly a lot of people get great joy, excitement and enjoyment out of them. But for me, their value has dwindled significantly over the last year or two, so it’s starting to make sense to cut them out of my daily routine and instead seek other means of staying in touch with the people I actually care about.

Which brings us neatly on to the second part of this post.

Well done for reading this far. Have a cake.

How to stay in touch with me

I’m not retiring from the Internet altogether. Rather, I’m being more selective with how I communicate and with whom. Consequently, I’m focusing on ways of communicating that allow me to take more control over my online presence, and which are more inherently personal than just shouting into the void of social media.

Note that I’m not closing down my Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts — they’ll be used to broadcast these blog posts — but I won’t be actively checking any of them, so please don’t @mention or comment via any of those means if you want a reply from me.

Here are the main ways through which you’ll be able to contact me in future:

This site. I post one blog entry here every single day, and have done for the last 1,699 days. Leaving a comment on my most recent post is a good means of getting a message to me. I’ll try and be better about replying than I have been in the past!
Email. Close friends probably already have my email address. I don’t mind sharing it, but I’m not putting it out in the open on this site. If you’d like to chat via email, you can start a private conversation via the contact form on my About Pete page and, assuming you’re not some sort of crazy stalker, I’ll probably get back to you.
Google Hangouts. For real-time chat, I use Google Hangouts almost exclusively. I don’t do voice and I don’t do video, but text chat is something I’m happy to engage in with you, assuming I know who you are before you just pop up saying “hi” and nothing else. If you don’t already know my Google Hangouts info, drop me a message via the aforementioned contact form.
The Squadron of Shame forum. Most of my “public” conversations — “broadcast-type” messages, I like to think of them as — will now be found over on the Squadron of Shame forum. Although the Squad was originally set up as a small but well-formed group back in the 1up.com days, the modern Squad is very open to new members, with the only requirements for membership being that 1) you’re interested in games, particularly those a little off the beaten track and 2) you’re respectful to other people’s tastes in games, even if they don’t coincide with your own. Come and sign up and say hello, since that forum is where I’ll be spending most of my online “social” time these days.
Final Fantasy XIV. If you happen to play Final Fantasy XIV and find yourself on the Ultros server, look up Amarysse Jerhynsson and say hello.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post; I appreciate it. To those of you that I’ve only interacted with on social media in the past: I’m sorry to leave you behind just as, in some cases, we’re starting to get to know one another (I’d like to give particular, specific shoutouts to @FinalMacstorm and @SonyofLastation here, both of whom I’ve very much enjoyed talking to recently) — but I hope you’ll consider staying in touch via one of the means above, and I hope you understand my reasons for wanting to eliminate stressful, anxiety-inducing and unnecessary noise from my personal life. To those of you who are already firm friends beyond the boundaries of social media — well, the same, really; I hope you’ll respect my decision here, and that you’ll stay in touch via other means.

Onwards to a brighter future, then: one largely free of pop-up notifications, pointless arguments and unnecessary stress. I’m looking forward to it very much indeed.

1666: You’re Never Finished

Occasionally, my mind gets into an almost comatose loop, and I find myself going round and round the same websites, over and over again. I hate the loop — and I’m growing to hate the websites and all that they stand for in 2014 — but still I do it compulsively, habitually, regularly.

First I’ll check Twitter. Then I’ll check Facebook. Then I’ll check Google+. Occasionally I’ll poke my head in the sites for my Final Fantasy XIV guild or the Squadron of Shame, but more often than not, it’s just those three sites. And there’s rarely anything interesting to see on any of them — but still I feel compelled to do it, particularly if there’s a little red number at the top of the page.

The same is true on my phone. I’ll check it every few minutes, looking for little icons across the status bar and hoping that something interesting might have happened. But it rarely does, and still I do it.

I’m talking about “notifications”, one of my least favourite developments in modern technology. Turns out I have the sort of brain that gets extremely uncomfortable if something is left “unfinished”; if a little red number is there, suggesting that there’s something that requires your attention.

Trouble is, most notifications these days aren’t necessary. On Google+, since the Squadron of Shame moved its base of operations to its own site, the only notifications I get are from people who gave a comment I left on a YouTube video six months ago a “+1”, saying that they “liked” what I said without actually having to interact directly with me. On Facebook, where I rarely post any more, my only notifications come from replies to a comment thread I long since lost interest in. And Twitter’s 2014 incarnation sees fit to notify you not only when someone replies to you, but also when they “favourite” or retweet something you posted — or, in comedically ridiculous levels of Inception-style madness, when someone retweets something you retweeted.

The provocation of this sort of compulsive behaviour is entirely deliberate, of course; these sites’ use of notifications — and mobile app developers’ use of notifications, too, for that matter — is designed to get you doing exactly what I’m doing, which is visiting the sites or booting up the apps several times a day just to see if the notifications are anything useful. They inevitably aren’t, but there’s always the hope.

Provoking this sort of behaviour can’t be healthy. It doubtless plays havoc with people who already have more obsessive compulsive tendencies than I do, but just from a user experience perspective it’s frustrating to never feel like you’re “free” — there’s always something out there demanding your attention. Look at me, that little red number says. I’m important.

It’s because of all this that I find myself considering daily whether or not I should nuke my social media presence altogether and simply interact with people through more private channels — email, blog comments, chat messages, the Squad forum. Every day it gets more and more tempting to do so, so one of these days soon I might just do it — and this time for good. This isn’t what I signed up for at the dawn of the social media revolution.

1320: Anime After Hours

I started a new anime discussion community over on Google+. You can find it here. If you’re wondering why I chose Google+, the most-frequently-ridiculed-by-people-who-have-never-used-it social network on the Internet, it’s because Google+’s Community tools are both really good and extremely simple to use, with unnecessary fluff kept to a minimum. Also, it’s ad-free, which is lovely.

Anyway, my thinking behind creating the Anime After Hours community, as it’s called, was relatively simple. There are a number of anime communities on G+ already, but the vast majority of them tend to end up doing the same things: posting pictures without context (usually with at least one commenter yelling at the poster to remember to put a source in their post); asking the same simplistic questions over and over again; playing tagging and meme games; and only discussing the most popular, mainstream titles.

This is all fine, of course; it’s great that there are active communities that allow people to discuss the mainstream side of anime — stuff like Naruto, Pokémon and the like — and that are friendly to the younger end of the market. But, as any anime fan who’s looked a little deeper into the medium will know, there’s a lot more going on than just Naruto. A lot of anime is aimed at more mature audiences; late teens at the earliest, grown adults in some cases. And I’m not just talking about ecchi or hentai adult content; I’m also talking about shows that take in mature subject matter, or which are violent, or which kids simply wouldn’t get.

As I watch more and more anime series and find myself discovering the things I like, I was becoming more and more conscious of the fact that there was a serious dearth of places for people around my age to discuss the medium — it’s difficult to be heard in the rapid posts of G+’s more popular anime communities, for example, and they’re not saying anything particularly interesting anyway. As such, Anime After Hours was designed as a place for people to come and discuss their favourite anime, whatever form that might take. It’s an inclusive community that will accept anyone, on the understanding that it’s a community for talking and discussing, not for superficialities. Already there’s 13 members, which isn’t that much, but we’ve started kicking off some interesting discussions — and I’m sure as (if?) more people roll in, the community will become more active.

So consider this your invitation, dear reader; if you’re the slightest bit interested in anime and you’ve been looking for a place to come and discuss the medium free of Naruto-loving kids, you know where to come. All you need is a Google account.

See you there?

1139: Just Shut Up

I think I’m “over” social media. Allow me to clarify that bold statement, however, as it’s perhaps not entirely accurate as is. I think I am over social media as it exists today — a sprawling, disorganised mess of ill-defined concepts that contribute very little to the people’s understanding of one another, and more often than not is about vanity rather than actual socialisation.

In other words, I yearn for the days when social media was simple and straightforward — when its sole intended purpose was to allow people to stay in touch with each other and perhaps, occasionally, share a photograph or two with them.

Looking back on this blog, I see I have written about this subject at least twice in the past, and my disillusionment with it has only grown over the last year or so — perhaps due in part to the fact that as part of my job I come into contact with some of the most utterly pointless examples of social media that I’ve ever seen.

These days, there are social media apps to share anything you can think of. I mean, there are literally (YES LITERALLY) apps and services that allow you to share anything you can think of. There are also more specialised ones with questionable usefulness to society as a whole. I reviewed one recently where the entire purpose was to share what your current mood was — you couldn’t add any text explaining said mood, only an emoticon — and another where you could share the weather in your local area, then “like” or comment on the weather in other places. Another still allowed you to send a video or photo to someone, but they were only allowed to look at it for ten seconds, after which it locked itself and became useless (I swear I’m not making this up).

The trouble with these things is that despite their pretensions towards being “social media,” they’re not actually all that social at all in terms of the way in which people use them. They’re a means of broadcasting things and seeking approval of other people rather than a means of actually engaging in conversation with anyone. Take a look at the average comments thread on an Instagram picture of a moderately-attractive person (usually a woman) and you’ll see what I mean. No-one’s actually talking to each other — everyone’s just dropping an asinine opinion bomb and then never coming back. The poster of the selfie is seeking approval from commenters telling them how attractive they are; meanwhile, the commenters are seeking approval from the poster and hoping that their specific compliment is the one that will get them some specific attention.

This isn’t the case universally, obviously. There are still some actual conversations that go on on Facebook, for example, but these can easily be lost in the torrent of people resharing crap from pages like “I fucking love science” (do you? Then go do some rather than recycling endless fucking memes) and “LIKE AND SHARE!!” (NO!!). Twitter is a reasonable platform for discussion at times, but conversations are easily derailed and, as has been proven hundreds of times in the past year alone, 140 characters is really not enough to make a coherent argument about a complex issue. It’s also incredibly easy to be taken out of context on Twitter.

Google+ perhaps fares the best out of all of these services in my experience, though even that’s variable. Join a good, small community that has a clear focus and whose moderators keep a tight leash on discussion and you’ll have a good experience chewing the fat with people who may well become good friends. Follow Felicia Day or Wil Wheaton and you might see some interesting content, but the quality of discussion goes out of the window. Follow Google+’s own page and all you get are blithering idiots making ill-informed political rants any time the team behind the page even dare to mention the President.

I think the thing that’s been striking me most heavily recently is “do I really need to share this? Do people really need to know this?” And more often than not, the answer is “no”. I don’t feel the need to collect an arbitrary set of “Likes” with services like CircleMe or GetGlue. I don’t feel the need to “check in” to places with Foursquare. I don’t even really need to use stuff like Raptr to broadcast my gaming activity, but that has, on occasion, sparked some good discussions — as, I’m sure, the other services do in some cases. Just not mine. Not any more. Perhaps once in the past — I met some good friends through Foursquare’s now-defunct competitor Gowalla — but not now.

Consequently, since quitting Twitter a while back (and not really missing it, to be honest — though I do miss some of the people) I’ve been paring back my personal social media use hugely. I’ve closed my Tumblr account — I never really understood the point of that site, and these days all it seems to be used for is white people shouting about how guilty they are about being white and how we should all stop being such racists/misogynists/fedora-wearing perverts — and I’ve unistalled the vast majority of social apps from my phone, including Twitter and Instagram. Facebook made the cut, because as much as I dislike it at times, it’s still a good way of staying in touch with a lot of people, and Google+ also survived, as it’s the new home of the Squadron of Shame and serving our needs well.

Obviously this blog is still going, too (and will be for a long time to come, hopefully!) and I still comment on friends’ blogs — but I don’t really count that as “social media” in the same way, particularly as the discussions had tend to be (for the most part, anyway) wordy and thought-provoking rather than inspiring little more than a knee-jerk “lol”.

Everything else, though? Out the window. And life is much calmer and more pleasant as a result.

1066: Doubleplusgood

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over both Facebook and Twitter recently, mostly due to both of them tweaking their terms of service in various ways that some people don’t like very much. Me, I don’t particularly mind too much because at the end of the day, I’m not paying for either of them, so as the saying goes, “if the product is free, then you are the product” — I accepted this some time back and think back on it any time one or the other of them does something apparently stupid. I use both daily to stay in touch with various people, so quitting either is out of the question.

For those feeling somewhat wary of the big F and the big T, however, I’d encourage you to give the big G another shot. (Unless you’re one of those people who irrationally hates Google too, in which case… err, I hear Myspace is coming back soon?) Yes, G+ is still a smokin’ hot social networking service that is far from the ghost town the media likes to portray it as. It’s an active, thriving community that has only gotten better over time.

The latest addition to the service, and one which could well prove to be a “killer feature” with a little refinement, is Communities. Communities are little mini-networks within G+ that allow members to post content as they would do normally on G+, but keep it all within one community rather than sharing it publicly or having to use the slightly cumbersome “Circles” system. It’s a good way of bringing people together who want to talk about the same thing, and it’s pretty customizable, too — you can change the community’s iconic image, title, headline and basic information, but also create categories for posts to help keep things organised, too. The latter feature needs a little tweaking — you can’t reassign a post to a new category if you miscategorise it upon creating it, for example — but the groundwork is there for a solid community system.

And, crucially, people are using it. Google+ may not quite have the same number of daily active users as Facebook, but there are more than enough to make these communities active, vibrant places to hang out. The board games community I joined has over 2,000 members, for example, while there are over 3,500 bronies hanging out in the “Pony+” community. The anime community has over 20,000 members, as do various photography-related communities. G+ is an attractive destination for photographers, as it provides practically unlimited space for high-quality photo storage along with some basic editing tools — and the G+ interface is a nice means of showing off one’s work, too.

G+ is built to be used on a variety of platforms, too. The mobile apps for both iOS and Android are quick to be updated with new features and are consistent in their behaviour and functionality. Pretty much everything you can do on the desktop website can be done from the mobile app — and the mobile app has the added bonus of looking rather lovely, too, for those who like that sort of thing.

So if you’ve got a Google account, give it a shot. And by “give it a shot” I mean do more than just open it up, complain that there’s no-one to talk to and then close it down — like Twitter, you need to actually “follow” some interesting people before it starts to show its true value. The new Communities feature will help people find like-minded friends more easily, as this was one weakness of the old version — it was quite tricky to find new people to follow.

Here’s some links to get you started. Here’s my profile. Here’s the Squadron of Shame Community. Here’s the “Too Old For This” Community run by my buddies Chris and Jeff. Here’s the board game Community.

Now get on there and get chatting! I’ll leave you with this, from The Oatmeal.

#oneaday Day 573: The Completely Subjective Guide to the Current State of G+ Games

So you’re on Google+ and you’ve seen with some trepidation that social games have come to the platform. Firstly, fear not, because all the game posts are confined to their own stream that is separate from the day to day social interactions. Said game stream needs some work — you can’t filter it in any way at the moment, for example — but at least it means your conversations aren’t continually interrupted with “HEY! I NEED SOME PAINTBRUSHES! CLICK HERE AND GET FREE GIFTS!” as they are on Facebook. The lack of the “Wall” as a concept on G+ also helps with this — interactions take place in a timeline, like Twitter, but with comments, like Facebook. It’s a good system.

But you want to know about these games, right? Millions of people play Facebook/social games every day and you’ve never dared take the plunge. So here’s a brief look at each of them, gleaned from myself taking a brief look at each of them so you don’t have to. I’m not pretending these are in-depth or even fair reviews, just first impressions from the amount of time an average user might take to decide whether or not to pursue playing a game further.

Angry Birds

You probably know by now whether or not you love or hate Angry Birds and its unpredictable physics model. This is no different from the norm. Well, there is one slight difference: the “teamwork” levels. Don’t get too excited by the prospect of multiplayer action, though — all the “teamwork” aspect is is all your friends’ stars being added together in an attempt to unlock further levels.

Bejeweled Blitz

It’s Bejeweled Blitz, the one-minute twist on traditional Bejeweled play. It features a tournament system and doesn’t hassle you every two minutes to share everything you’ve done. It does feature a completely unnecessary experience point system, however.

Bubble Island

It’s Bust A Move, demonstrating ably the first refuge of an unfortunately large number of unscrupulous social game developers: ripping off someone else’s game and reskinning it. It’s not a bad version of Bust A Move, but the fact it’s a shameless clone is a little grating.

City of Wonder

Clearly trying to be Civilization, right down to ripping off the things the advisors say when they’re suggesting what to research next, this doesn’t have the depth of Meier’s game. If you enjoy building cities without having to worry about pesky geographical principles or simulation elements, then you might like this, otherwise it’s one to give a miss. Weird art style, too.

Crime City

Absolute garbage. A game about crime should be about the thrill and the tension of potentially getting caught; here, it’s about clicking on things and watching progress bars. In essence, it’s Farmville, only with guns. This might sound great, but it’s actually awful. A waste of a potentially rich theme; avoid.

Diamond Dash

A reasonable puzzle game with a simple premise — click groups of 3 or more gems that touch orthogonally to make them disappear. Repeat for one minute. It’s sort of like Bejeweled Blitz but with a different mechanic. There’s a weekly tournament option like PopCap’s classic, but you have to unlock it by levelling up to level 3. Players who play this game more have an unfair advantage by getting automatic score boosts depending on their “experience” level.

Dragon Age Legends

Probably the best of the bunch in that it demands some degree of interaction on the player, and makes use of your friends in an excellent way. Dragon Age Legends is a combat-focused RPG where they player moves from battle to battle, engaging increasingly tough hordes of enemies in turn-based combat with up to two companions initially. The social twist is that these companions are your friends who are also playing the game, complete with the equipment and skills they’ve chosen to outfit them with — essentially a form of asynchronous cooperative multiplayer. For those with no friends, the game also provides a selection of virtual friends for you, too.

While not as deep as a “real” RPG, Dragon Age Legends goes some way to showing that traditional game mechanics don’t necessarily have to be sacrificed for the sake of making the game friendly to the social network audience.

Dragons of Atlantis

This is by “hardcore social games” specialist Kabam, and is one of the most tedious games I’ve ever played, not helped by the fact that the tutorial (disguised as a list of “quests”, as usual) goes on for approximately fifteen bajillion years and steps you through EVERY SINGLE STEP YOU MIGHT HAVE ACTUALLY WANTED TO MAKE YOURSELF ANYWAY with “rewards” along the way. The game is about building your city state and then kicking the shit out of other players, but it will take you a good few hours to get to a stage where you’re able to attack another player — and you may well have been bored shitless prior to that due to the fact that some buildings take 30-60 minutes of real time to build.

Dragons of Atlantis is mildly unusual among social games in that it features a real-time chat interface, though. The community doesn’t know the words “you’re” and “they’re” exist, and there seems to be an awful lot of people trolling for cybersex. There are probably better places to do this than in a public chat window that is two lines of text high in a tedious game about running a city that’s supposedly in Atlantis (I thought Atlantis was a city?). Also there are dragons, apparently.

Edge World

Also from Kabam, this game gets going a bit quicker than Dragons of Atlantis but is fundamentally pretty much the same game, only with a sci-fi skin. It looks like StarCraft but it really isn’t — you have no direct strategic control over your troops when attacking a base, for example.

Wild Ones

It’s Worms, basically, though victory is determined by how much total damage you do, not by who is eliminated first. You have a significantly more limited arsenal than in Team 17’s classic, though.

Unusually for a social game, it offers simultaneous online play. Most of the community appear to have never played Worms before, meaning you can assure victory for yourself by having a slight understanding of physics.

Zynga Poker

A decent implementation of online poker. Not much more to say about that really! As the reviewing cliché goes, if you like poker, you’ll like this.

#oneaday Day 540: Googlopoly

It’s strange how the dominance of some companies (Facebook, Activision and, occasionally, Apple) is seen as a negative influence, yet in other cases (Google, Valve and, occasionally, Apple) their prevalence is seen as very much a Good Thing. This is particularly apparent when it comes to looking at Google and what it offers to the denizens of the Web.

Up until a while back, I’d flitted between various email addresses on a semi-regular basis thanks to moving house a lot and getting a new broadband connection in every house. New connection from whichever company had the best deal at the time meant new email address, and it became a running joke between my brother and I that I would eventually get to the point where I’d have an email address for every day of the week.

Fortunately, I managed to nip that in the bud, first with a Yahoo account and then with a MobileMe (formerly .mac) account which, I hasten to add, I got for free during the time I worked at Apple (and a little while afterwards due to them apparently not figuring out I didn’t work for them any more until almost a year later — wish they’d carried on paying me, too, that would have been nice). Anyway. I ditched the Yahoo account because of the ridiculous amount of spam it attracted, and Yahoo’s spam filters are beyond awful. I used MobileMe and was quite happy with it for a while, as I hadn’t used an IMAP account before and it proved to be very useful, particularly when the iPhone came along.

But then I discovered GMail, and since then, I find it very difficult to understand a couple of things: firstly, why people are resistant to Google when it offers a usability experience of such an order of magnitude better than everything else on the market; and secondly, why more people haven’t just ripped off Google’s ideas wholesale.

Take something as simple as the way you manage your inbox. It’s very easy for one’s inbox to become completely flooded with bullshit, with unread counts tumbling (err, upwards) into the thousands, particularly if you’re subscribed to any mailing lists or get sent endless press releases. It’s tempting to select all and delete everything, but you just know that if you do that, you’ll really need one of those emails at some point in the near future. You could file it, too, but then you run into the problem of getting increasingly obsessive-compulsive about your filing systems, wondering if a “Friends” folder is good enough or whether you’d rather subdivide it into individual friends… and so on. But no — in GMail, we have the wonder that is the Archive button, which makes the email go away but doesn’t delete it. That way, you can find it by searching, but it doesn’t clutter up your inbox any more. Genius.

And talking of searching, the most frustrating thing about MobileMe Mail’s otherwise pretty good web interface is the fact that you can only search one folder at a time. This is absolutely useless if you want to use it for the purpose of finding out which fucking folder you put that really important email in. In GMail, it’s a snap.

You can download all attachments at once. You can preview files in your web browser. You can set up your browser to redirect mailto: links to GMail rather than your soon-to-be-defunct mail client. And the fact it’s web-based means that you can get at it from anywhere.

And this, of course, is just GMail. I have to confess that I haven’t used some of Google’s other services such as Google Calendar a great deal, but I have been spending some time with both Google+ and Google Docs, and frankly we’re at a stage now where, for the average user, standalone productivity software is nigh-on irrelevant. Assuming you have an Internet connection — and with broadband and 3G adapters so affordable now, chances are you do — then you have access to all your stuff from anywhere.

The downside, of course, is if your Internet connection fails, or if Google’s servers fall over (like they did the other night when they ran out of disk space on the server which stored G+ notification emails) then you could have a problem. But in my time using Google’s various services so far, I’ve never had a problem so serious it compromised my productivity — and most of the time, it’s fixed within a matter of minutes or even seconds at times.

Most importantly, though, I don’t feel like Google wants to be my sole window onto the Web, which is where I think it differs from Facebook in quite a key way. Zuckerberg’s Facebook wants to be the only destination that people will ever need on the Web — hence all the apps, brand pages, games and other bollocks that clutters up the once-clean and simple service. Google, on the other hand, wants to help me out with things I need to do, and then set me loose on the rest of the Web — perhaps sharing some of the cool things I find via G+. It facilitates rather than dictates, and for that reason, barring them doing something really, really stupid I predict that Google services will be a big part of my online life for some time to come.

#oneaday Day 528: Thoughts on Google+

You can’t say I don’t provide you with variety here, dear readers. Just yesterday I was talking about underage boys simulating anal sex in a school library in order to avoid doing work, and today I’m telling you about what may or may not be the next big thing in social networking: Google+, Google Plus, Googlyplus, G+ or whatever the hell you want to call it.

If you haven’t got in yet, don’t ask me for an invite at the moment as they’ve switched them off for now. Keep an eye on Twitter or Facebook, though — I’ll let you know if I have any more spare.

So, to business. What is Google+? Well, the cynical would say it’s a rebranded Facebook, and indeed we’ve already seen at least one article today bemoaning the fact that Google+ has some features in common with Facebook. I’m not sure why they felt the need to draw attention to this, as the features they show are pretty commonplace in all social networks.

But are those cynics right? Well… yes and no. Google+ does indeed resemble Facebook. You have a news feed, people can comment on posts, people can Like things (or “+1” in this case) and people can share content. The key difference between Google+ and Facebook is how it handles the way you interact with people. There are no “friend requests” on Google+, simply Circles. Circles is an evolution of Facebook’s Groups system, in which you can categorise your friends, acquaintances and family members into, well, categories. Then, when you post something on the network, you can choose which individuals or Circles it’s visible to — or even make it completely public. This is a nice idea. It allows people to tailor the content they spew out to different social groups without feeling that they need to have a “work” profile and a “professional” profile. So long as, of course, you remember to keep the stories about the hooker you threw up on to your “Drinking Buddies” Circle and don’t accidentally copy in your boss.

So the way you deal with people is different. But there’s more; the photo interface is simple, elegant and much better than Facebook’s slightly clumsy lightbox. While I think that the lightbox was a good addition to Facebook’s interface, many disagreed, and the fact it’s difficult to view the image and look at the comments at the same time unless you have the highest-resolution screen in the world is not great. Google+ takes a different approach. Not only does the service allow you to upload pictures at considerably higher resolution than the artifacted messes that Facebook’s compression creates, but the interface allows for simple inline commenting while still viewing the picture. It’s a simple case of putting the comments in a sidebar rather than underneath the picture, and it works beautifully well.

Then there’s the fact that the Photos feature on Google+ integrates with Google’s Picasa service. Anything you post on Picasa will be available on Google+, and vice-versa. You can even use Picnik to edit the photo, add text and generally arse about with it, save it back to Picasa (even overwriting the original if you don’t need it any more) and the modified version will be right there in your feed without you needing to refresh the page. Clever. Since Picnik is a third-party service, though, this isn’t integrated quite as well as it could be — an “Edit with Picnik” option when viewing a photo on Google+ would be nice, for example — but it’s early days yet. And Google+ allows simple iPhoto-style edits of colours and the like to be applied to pictures without having to leave the page, which is nice, particularly for those who either don’t know a lot about photo editing or don’t have the software to do anything fancy-pants.

This isn’t even getting started on the excellent Sparks feature, where you can subscribe to topics of your choice and be fed a constant stream of relevant articles — which can, of course, then be shared with the Circles of your choice if you see fit.

As you can tell, I’m quite enamoured with the new service and genuinely hope it takes off. My only worry is that it, like Facebook, might try and do too much. Facebook was an excellent service when it felt personal, but now it’s as much a home for businesses to engage with their clientèle as a means of communication, it’s becoming increasingly irrelevant to people who just want to talk to their friends. Google+’s simple elegance that it has at the moment doesn’t have any of that noise — and none of the associated spam from social games and endless “What Length of Pubic Hair Are You?” quizzes, for that matter. I’m sure it won’t stay that way, as social game and app developers are already pricking their ears up at the buzz surrounding the service, but I hope it stays that way for at least a little while. There’s definitely a market for a clean, clear social network with minimum fuss that offers something a little more than Twitter but a lot less than Facebook. And I think Google+ has the potential to be it if the developers handle it correctly.