As I may have mentioned once or twice recently, we’re going on holiday tomorrow. We’ll be away from Monday to Friday visiting Center Parcs in Elveden Forest, which has been a thoroughly nice place to have some time away on all the previous occasions we’ve visited.
My intentions for this holiday are to unplug almost completely. I will post on this blog daily because of the whole #oneaday thing, but outside of that, I intend to avoid any sort of attachment to the Internet whatsoever, except where absolutely necessary to research things. That means I am making the following promises to myself:
I will not worry about writing anything for MoeGamer or making any sort of video for YouTube.
I will not poke my head in on Discord channels that are likely to annoy me.
I will not look at Twitter at all.
I will minimise my use of Bluesky.
I haven’t really talked about the last one at all, but as you may have surmised from the sidebar, I have been dipping my toe back into social media with Bluesky recently. And for the most part, I’ve found it a thoroughly pleasant environment that feels very much like Twitter did in the early days. It’s very left-leaning, which can at times be a little insufferable, and wherever you look you’re very likely to run into either a particularly horny furry or someone proud of the fact they’re wearing a cage on their cock, but for the most part it has been a remarkably stress-free social media experience so far.
Part of the reason for this is that the platform is built to discourage “dunking”, whereas Twitter outright incentivises it these days. The main way Bluesky differs from Twitter is through its absolutely nuclear block function, which means that if someone quote-posts or replies to someone they have subsequently blocked, if you are following the person who made the quote-post or reply, the original post will appear as blocked to you also. This discourages people from going “looking for trouble” because you can’t even see the username of the blocked post. This can be frustrating at times if you missed the original context, but for the most part I think it’s a positive thing.
So anyway, as a result of all that, and the fact I have a few friendly faces there, I have been using Bluesky a bit recently, and thus, if I’m going to share anything about the holiday that isn’t on this blog, I’ll likely do so there. If you’re a Bluesky user and want to follow me, here.
But yes. Anyway, the main point of this post is to note that I will be disconnecting from the greater part of the Internet as much as humanly possible while I am away, because I need it. I need some time away where I just don’t put any unnecessary pressure on myself, or potentially put myself in situations where I might end up getting annoyed. I’m tempted to outright leave a few Discord servers to remove the temptation altogether, but probably won’t go that far.
This holiday is to rest, relax and genuinely get away from it all. My mental health has been in the toilet of late, and the Internet has played a big part in creating that situation. So instead I’m going to be among the trees, play some video games, go swimming and look at friendly deer. We might go and fire a crossbow (not at the deer) and play some pool, too. We haven’t decided yet. But it’s going to be nice.
Today, meanwhile, it’s last-minute packing and tidying up ahead of my mother-in-law coming to look after the cats — sorry burglars, the house will still be occupied while we’re away — and perhaps finishing off Silent Hill 2 later.
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.
One of the things that really annoys me about modern websites is the obsession with feature creep, and nowhere is that more apparent than on social media and adjacent sites, with YouTube being a particularly prime example.
As if the scourge that is YouTube Shorts wasn’t enough, the latest feature that it’s impossible to dismiss permanently — telling it to go away only makes it disappear for a month at most — is “YouTube Playables”, a range of bottom-of-the barrel mobile game crap designed to placate the ever more attention-deficit body of users who can’t possibly just do one thing at a time.
I honestly don’t get it. Who looked at YouTube and went “you know what this needs? Shitty mobile games!” Who looked at Netflix and decided that needed to be a gaming platform? For that matter, who looked at fricking Facebook and thought games on there would be a good idea?
The argument that usually gets trotted out with this sort of thing is that it “gets more people into gaming”. Frankly, I’ve always thought this to be bollocks. Gaming has never been more accessible and affordable on platforms that are specifically built for it, and there is only one possible reason it is being shoehorned in everywhere that it doesn’t belong: to monetise the crap out of it, be it through ads, in-app purchases or subscription price hikes.
At this point I’d almost pay YouTube a fee to not have to see garbage like Shorts and Playables ever again. There are fundamental features of their platform that still don’t work properly and they waste time with this shit? Someone wants firing.
But I guess someone, somewhere has decided this junk “adds value”, so here we are, stuck with it, in yet another example of the Web being enshittified. At least there’s no “AI” features in YouTube… yet. Don’t you love our cyberpunk dystopian future?
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.
Just recently at the day job we’ve been having some Thoughts about using social media for marketing. I won’t go into the details for obvious reasons, and I will note that everything I say here is my own opinion and no-one else’s. But I feel like the age of social media marketing is coming to a close.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve never been on board with social media marketing from a consumer’s perspective. Facebook went from being tolerable to almost unusable once The Brands™ arrived, and it’s only gotten worse year after year. And back when I was an active user of Twitter, I not only didn’t follow any Brands™, I actively went out of my way to block any that ended up in my feed through “promoted” tweets or whatever.
Y’see, I’ve always had the somewhat controversial viewpoint that social media is best used for socialising. I used to actually quite enjoy using Facebook when it was a place to interact with friends. Likewise Twitter used to be a ton of fun when it was just people hanging out and shooting the breeze. But today? Both of those platforms are nigh-unusable for different reasons. And with people jumping ship from both, I struggle to see how their usefulness as marketing tools can continue.
This comes particularly to mind after the recent news that the “live service” game Concord has taken the unprecedented step of not only ceasing its online features, but actively refunding anyone who bought the game just 11 days after it hit store shelves. The writing was already on the wall for it; reports shortly after its launch suggested it had made “just” $1 million and only about 25,000 sales; these might seem like big numbers, but they really aren’t in today’s gaming industry, particularly towards the big-budget end of things, which is the space Concord occupies.
This occurrence got me thinking: how much of Concord’s disastrous launch was down to the troubled landscape of social media today? A few years back, a big game launch like this would be accompanied by a frenzied Twitter campaign in an attempt to drive “organic” (ugh) word-of-mouth promotion. To put it in non-marketing speak, the game itself would post something on social media, then other people would share it, gradually spreading word of the game through shares, replies and retweets.
Today, we live in a world where Twitter is fast becoming a dirty word, as Elon Musk’s “X”, as Twitter is now known, is increasingly becoming prone to the “Nazi Bar Problem“, since his constant bleating about “free speech” and “wokeness” has meant pretty much the only people left there now are some of the absolute worst dregs of humanity imaginable. It’s no longer fun or useful to the vast majority of people who used to hang out there, so a lot of people have jumped ship — either abandoning social media entirely, or moving to alternative platforms such as BlueSky. So one has to wonder how much value there is in marketing to what is rapidly looking like a room full of Nazis.
The same can often feel like it’s true of other platforms that are less of a “problem”. I talked recently about the issues we had attempting to enforce rules more specifically on a Discord I help manage, and it’s hard not to think about that “Nazi Bar Problem”. We don’t have a problem with “Nazis” as such (the few who have shown inclinations in that vague direction have been shown the door) but there are a few people who have become so entrenched that they’re a problem… and it’s honestly making us wonder if the time, effort and mental health expended on said server is worth it.
Can a product or Brand™ survive without social media? The assumption has always been “no”, but like I said above, I’ve found myself actively repulsed by Brand™ presences on social media for the most part, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Sure, there are some Brand™ accounts that post interesting things — and the one I’m in charge of I try and make an effort to use in such a manner — but are they really adding any value?
I’m not convinced they are. We are living in a peculiar time, and I don’t think anyone quite knows what’s going to happen next.
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.
There’s some nasty shit going on in the world right now. Without getting bogged down in the details, there are some vicious riots going on “Up North” in this green and pleasant land, following the horrible killing of several young girls at their dance class.
It’s hard to understand quite how outrage over the murders has escalated to what it is, but it’s fair to say that things have gotten A Bit Racist, to say the least. Last I heard of the situation, a Holiday Inn Express that was supposedly housing immigrants — immigrants completely unrelated to the murders, I might add — was besieged by exactly the sort of people you’re probably picturing when talking about people who are A Bit Racist Against Immigrants.
I won’t dwell on the situation because I haven’t read up much on it, so I’ll refrain from commenting further about specifics. But it’s brought something into focus for me which is a tad worrying: the fact that despite how we’re supposedly a lot more tolerant, progressive and understanding these days, as a society, a lot more of this horrible shit appears to be happening.
Whether it’s racist riots against people who had nothing to do with a horrible crime, transphobia at the Olympics (against someone who isn’t actually trans) or just general foul behaviour and intolerance, we seem to have hit something of a bump in the road in attempting to create a 21st century utopia.
Who am I kidding; we absolutely were not on the road to a utopia. Everything has been going to shit for a while, so it’s perhaps not altogether surprising that people are starting to act up, even if their behaviour and attitudes are completely misdirected. So I have to ask myself: was ignorance actually bliss?
I think back to my time living through the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s and I don’t remember ever feeling the sense of existential anxiety and dread over the world that I do these days. It’s entirely possible that this was entirely due to our collective ignorance of various groups of people who were downtrodden and oppressed, which of course carries its own problems, but I don’t remember encountering anywhere near the sort of outright hatred that is expressed today towards certain groups.
And it wasn’t as if we weren’t aware of the people who come in for the brunt of the abuse today. I just legitimately don’t remember the hatred being anywhere near as vicious as it is today.
At least some of that is down to social media, of course. It’s entirely possible that hatred like this was going on, but no-one saw it because not everyone had the means to plaster all their odious beliefs over every available space online. There was no “collective public space” like Twitter once was (and I don’t think it is that any more, since a significant portion of people have abandoned it completely, and the most active of those remaining tend to veer fairly hard right) and so people tended to stick to their own communities.
On the one hand, that probably allowed hate groups to thrive in private; on the other, well, you can see the result of everyone being thrown together just from a casual glance at Twitter on any given day. It’s not pretty.
Part of the existential anxiety and dread I feel over this whole situation is whether or not I “should” be doing something more, or even if that’s possible. I’ve always settled for some variation of “treat others as you would like to be treated”, and even take that as far as not commenting mean things on YouTube videos I really dislike (because I hate it when I get horrible comments). But is that really enough today? And if not, what can one do, other than simply actively not be a racist transphobic shit, and not go deliberately seeking fights?
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.
A lot has been made about the supposed proliferation of “fake news” and, regrettably, because discussion about it started around the time of Trump’s last ascendancy (and to quite a significant degree from the Trump camp), not everyone takes the concept entirely seriously. But it’s definitely something that happens, and it’s making the Web less and less useful.
Earlier today, a member of a Discord I’m in posted a link to the following tweet:
The screenshots are of Windows Defender supposedly finding a plain text file containing nothing but the text “This content is no longer available.” to be a piece of malware — specifically a Trojan called Casdet!rfn. Obviously a plain text file is not malware, so this is ridiculous, and thus Microsoft must have made a silly mistake and we can all laugh at them, ho ho ho.
I tried it.
Windows Defender did not find it to be malware.
I Googled it and found several outlets reporting on this “story”, including some that really should know better (looking at you, Tom’s Hardware) — and not one of them had seemingly put in the minimal amount of effort required to verify that this was actually a thing. In other words, none of them had done what I did above: recreate the situation by composing a blank text file, putting the words “This content is no longer available.” in it and then scanning it with Windows Defender. A two-minute job, tops.
No, instead the most rigour anyone put in was to look at the replies to the Twitter post, which are fairly slim in number, making me wonder exactly how this misinformation had spread in the first place. The tweet in question has nearly 700,000 views, though only 800 of whatever the Muskrat is calling “Retweets” this week, suggesting the majority of its minor virality has come about through situations exactly like the one I describe above: people sharing it via means other than Twitter.
Now, I don’t blame the chap on Discord. He was just sharing something he thought was funny. I don’t even blame the original Tweeter, because it’s entirely possible that this was true once and it was quietly fixed in a Windows update. But I do blame all these people, and Google.
Not only for reporting on this without doing the absolute bare minimum of fact-checking, but for not correcting these stories if indeed it was once true and now is no longer correct.
Either way, the result is the same: a lot of misinformation gets spread very easily, often by people who have no ill intent. It’s not the fault of the people who share this stuff — although I personally would check any sort of claim like this before resharing it myself — but it absolutely is the fault of outlets authoritatively sharing this as “news” without doing any sort of research beyond looking at a few Twitter posts.
Sadly, this is what “news” is these days. Get a good hook for a story that might be the slightest bit clickable and/or shareable, then write it up (with at least 600 words for SEO purposes, of course) and just make some shit up in the middle if you need to. Doesn’t matter if the story is true or not; by the time people have clicked or shared, the article has done its job, and it doesn’t matter if anyone twigs that it’s bollocks or not.
In some respects, I’m sad that I’m no longer working the games journalism beat. But in others, I know that if I was still a newshound, I’d likely be gently encouraged into this sort of odious practice in order to get the numbers up.
I had more integrity and rigour when I was covering stuff for GamePro and USgamer. I’d find stories, research them myself and report on them only when I was good and sure that there actually was a story there. And I didn’t have to make a big deal out of doing that at the time, because that was the expectation for someone working a News Editor position.
Now? Engagement above all. Who cares if something is true? Numbers go big, suits stay happy. Fuck the actual audience who might want the publications they read to be reliable and trustworthy; they are, after all, the least important part of the whole equation these days.
If you’re looking for the Web as it once was, then I’m sorry to inform you that This content is no longer available.
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.
See? I told you I’d be back. And I thought I’d talk about something other than Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail. Specifically, as the title says, I want to talk about how trends have made the Internet boring. Or perhaps more accurately, why everyone all wanting to do the same thing all at once makes things deathly boring.
There are a few practical examples I’d like to give. First is a YouTube channel I was introduced to recently called Obscurest Vinyl. This channel is run by a designer and musician who found some joy in creating fake record sleeves for songs with names you definitely wouldn’t have gotten away with in the eras they’re parodying. Songs like the wonderful Pullin’ Out My Pubes (She Loves Me Not) by The Sticky Sweethearts:
You’ll notice from that video that the record label now has some music attached to it. I was initially a little perturbed to discover that the person behind the Obscurest Vinyl YouTube channel had been using AI music generation to create the tracks, though my mind was set somewhat at rest by how he had written the lyrics (which are generally far too offensive to be the product of the typically rather po-faced Large Language Model AI bots) and tinkered with the initial output to make it flow properly, incorporate all the filthy language and sound consistent with the other works from the same fictional “artists” on the channel.
Of course, what the YouTube algorithm then did was go “oh, you watched a video about a fake record with lyrics about someone gluing their balls to their butthole, HERE, HAVE A MILLION MORE OF THEM”. And it became very apparent that Obscurest Vinyl has a lot of copycats out there, none of which have anywhere near the same magic; these other channels are just trying to ride a trend.
This, of course, is symptomatic of one of the main things that is killing the Web right now: excessive Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. Have you ever searched for some information on something, only to find a billion unrelated websites all magically having articles headlined “What Time Is The Superbowl On?” or “Where Do You Unlock Pictomancer in Final Fantasy XIV?” That’s SEO at work, and that’s a problem that is only getting worse with the amount of AI sludge that is being fed into the Internet at large. Sites want quick and easy clicks, so they look at what people are searching for — the trends of the hour — then provide a hyper-specific article about the thing.
Helpful? Arguable. I hate it, because I’d rather have the information directly from the original source — in the latter case above, for example, it took me a fair bit of scrolling before I got past all the websites jockeying for SEO juice to the actual website for Final Fantasy XIV, the thing I was looking for.
More than being frustrating if you want the information straight from the horse’s mouth, it just makes the Web boring as fuck, because every site (including a lot that should really know better) are doing the exact same thing. Daily Wordle solutions. Individual articles for things that would have been much better incorporated into an FAQ. Outright copying and plagiarism of other sites. It really is a shame to see what online media has become — and frustrating to see that certain portions of the creative types on sites such as YouTube are more obsessed in chasing trends with transparently copycat material rather than, you know, being creative.
I don’t know what the endgame of all this is. I hope we’re in a “things will get worse before they get better” kind of situation, but honestly right now, it feels unlikely that the “get better” part will happen. The Web gets demonstrably worse, less useful and less fun day by day. And we’ve all let it happen. I don’t know if we can undo that.
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.
I’m compelled to write today by the thoroughly lovely Neil and Dave of the This Week in Retro podcast, who had a discussion about “the youth of today”, and how some parents are concerned that their children spend the vast majority of their time on an endless cycle of Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft, perhaps punctuated by social media in between times. The show and its discussion can be found below:
People who grew up pre-Internet doubtless all have their own experiences to share. The listener who wrote in with the question described how while they did spend time with their computer playing games, they also played outside, rode their BMX bike and all manner of other things, while both Neil and Dave described their own experiences as being a bit different, both from one another and from the listener’s recollection. So I thought I’d share my own experiences, with the benefit of hindsight.
I grew up in a country village that, at the time I lived there, had somewhere between 800 and 1,000 people living there. It was seven miles away from the nearest town, there was no bus service unless you went to the next village over (and even then, it was pretty much a “once a week” sort of affair) and… I guess you could look upon it as either being ideal or terrible for growing up in. Ideal because it was quiet, safe and full of places to go on childish “adventures”; terrible because, particularly once I reached adolescence, all of my friends were a car journey away.
I went back and forth on my feelings about living in that village. When I was of primary school age, I attended the village school, and as such my social circle was pretty much all people who lived nearby. I had a small group of friends, only one or two of whom I actually went to see outside of school time, but mostly kept myself to myself. In retrospect, my relative lack of socialisation compared to some of my peers was likely down to the social anxiety I felt as a result of my then-undiagnosed autistic spectrum condition.
But at the time, I didn’t really begrudge living in the village. I knew it was a nice place, that I lived in a nice house with supportive parents and a stable home life. I enjoyed when my grandparents came to visit and we’d go for a walk, inevitably to landmarks around the village that had acquired nicknames; “The Kissing Gate” (one of those awkward gates into a farmer’s field), “The Brook” (a pathetic little stream that, these days, has mostly dried up and smells awful), “The Bullocks” (the farmer’s field beyond The Kissing Gate that sometimes, but not always, had bulls in it). Looking back on it now, I have lots of fond memories.
When I entered my teens and started attending school in the aforementioned town seven miles away, my feelings changed a bit. While I was still somewhat anxious about social situations, I started to feel a bit more left out. As I grew older, I started to feel like there were lots of things that I couldn’t do because I didn’t live close enough. These feelings persisted until I turned 17, passed my driving test and suddenly had a lot more independence… so long as my Mum didn’t mind me borrowing her car of an evening.
I promise I’m getting to the video games.
Point is, I don’t remember spending a lot of time as a kid or a teen “playing outside”. I didn’t learn to ride a bike until well after many of my peers — memorably, I suffered a rather large setback on my initial efforts when I came a cropper and skidded along a rough concrete farm road, shearing a significant chunk of skin off my legs and arms, which made me a little hesitant to try again for a while — and I didn’t spend much time with many of my peers, except on rare occasions when I’d go over to a friend’s house for one reason or another.
Throughout all that time, I was fascinated with computers. Not just games, but computers in general. I knew my Dad worked for IBM, but didn’t really know what he actually did (and still to this day don’t think I could actually tell you). I knew my brother and Dad both contributed to an Atari computer magazine that we got regularly known as Page 6. And I knew all of my family, at one point or another, were keen computer users for various reasons. My Dad used it for “serious” software and subLOGIC’s Flight Simulator II (which he insisted was “not a game” and was thus still counted under the “serious software” category”); my Mum liked the occasional blast on Millipede and Space Invaders; my brother was the one who was into games, though he had a much more active social life than I did, helped at least partly by being ten years my senior.
Since I determined quite early on that I rather enjoyed — or at least felt most comfortable — in solitude, I was grateful for the company of the computers of our household: initially the Atari 8-bit and ST, then later the MS-DOS and Windows 3.1/95/98 PCs. In the early days of the Atari 8-bit, I devoured books and magazines about the computer, typing in listings and learning how to program in BASIC myself. I never really got what I’d call good at it, but I developed a basic (no pun intended) competence that was greater than that of someone who just used their computer to play games.
But I also played games. A lot of games. I learned a lot from those games, too. Text adventures helped me with my reading (and, indirectly, my writing); keyboard-based games played a significant role in developing the typing skills I still have to this day; puzzle games helped me with my general intelligence and problem-solving; action games helped me develop my imagination and my motor skills.
It’s stereotypical to say that “games help with hand-eye coordination”, but I was diagnosed dyspraxic in primary school, which basically meant I was a bit clumsy with certain things; video games helped me feel like I was competent at something, even if I was unable to hold a pencil “properly”. Playing games, and more broadly “going on the computer”, was important to me. It felt like it was something I could enjoy without compromise; I didn’t feel like I had to make any sort of adjustments, or have people “go easy on me” as I did in activities like sports. It was just something for me to enjoy. And, as I moved into my teens and broadened my circle of friends at secondary school, they proved to be a good backdrop for social interactions, too.
More often than not, if I went over to a friend’s house or had a friend over to mine, we would spend our time playing games together, or at the very least just using the computer. I have fond memories of spending time with several friends just messing around with speech synthesis programs on the Atari ST and Amiga, and even programming in STOS, a dialect of BASIC for the Atari ST, or making silly in-joke games with Clickteam’s wonderful Klik and Play and The Games Factory. I was happy that my formerly solitary activity was something I could share my enjoyment of with others.
This continued as I came to the end of my time at school and moved into university. I made new friends, at least partly through computing and video games, and many of those folks are people I still make an effort to spend time with today — even if sometimes that effort doesn’t feel like it’s reciprocated with quite the same enthusiasm. Computing and gaming remained something that was important to me, even as the Internet came into its mainstream ascendancy in the late 1990s.
I have some fond memories of those early days of the Internet. Chatting with strangers on CompuServe’s “CB Simulator”, aka just a public chatroom. Posting messages on CompuServe’s GAMERS forum, which eventually let to me earning $200 for making ten Wolfenstein 3-D levels that were included in an official expansion pack. Chatting with my friends from my course on MSN Messenger. Randomly getting into a conversation with a young woman on AOL Instant Messenger, only to discover that, completely by chance, she was the housemate of one of my existing friends.
Computing was always there as part of my life, but I think a key difference between then and now is that in my formative years, it was there as a backdrop to socialisation, rather than the means of socialisation itself. The This Week in Retro listener commented that their children feel genuine anxiety and FOMO (“Fear Of Missing Out”) if they have gaming time privileges revoked for whatever reason, because rather than Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft being the backdrop for their socialisation, those activities are the socialisation.
There’s also social media to take into account. I am genuinely glad that social media did not exist when I was a child, because I’m not sure I would have made it through my adolescence intact. Sure, there are positive aspects to it, such as being able to reconnect with people you haven’t spoken to for a long time, but there’s also the insidiously manipulative nature of all the major platforms today, and how none of them are really concerned with being a platform for communication; they are, instead, platforms for advertising.
The thing that really makes me feel like social media may well have done me in, though, is how easy it is for it to be used for bullying. I suffered a fairly significant amount of bullying throughout both my primary and secondary school life, and it was hell. It left me wary of trusting people; it made me frustrated about communicating with others; it made me feel like it was, at times, simply not worth making the effort to interact with people.
For a long time, I used to say that the Internet allowed me to “be myself” for the first time… well, ever, really. I could find like-minded people who understood me and respected me for who I was, and I felt like I was among friends. I don’t feel that way any more; nowadays, I feel the same way about online interactions as I do about interacting with real strangers: genuine anxiety and fear. I dread getting notifications in apps or on websites where I’ve posted something publicly. And yet, I still do it — here I am, after all — because I feel like it’s important to not let the bullies win, whether they’re real or imagined. I need to feel like I can still express myself the way I want to express myself; to enthuse about the things I want to enthuse about. That’s why I write here and on MoeGamer, and why I make videos over on my YouTube channel.
Even then, though, I feel a lot of frustration, because I know a significant portion of the world looks on the Internet, social media and general social interactions in a different way to me. That can often leave me feeling lonely and isolated. But the one thing I’ve always had as a constant is being able to immerse myself in a video game or other activity on the computer, and feel like I am, for once, at peace — even if, with each passing year, it feels like it’s getting harder to share that haven of peace with others.
That went a tad deeper than I perhaps thought, and I’m not sure I have an answer to the original poster’s questions or concerns. I do know, however, that spending time on the computer isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, particularly when it brings someone comfort and stability. It’s when that “safe” activity starts to get “unsafe” things encroaching on it that you need to perhaps take action — but that’s going to be something that is different for everyone. For me, it’s meant largely removing myself from the public-facing part of the Internet except in places where I can very much control and curate my experience, and continuing to enjoy those things that I always have enjoyed in peace and quiet. No video game ever betrayed me, after all.
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.
One of the “innovations” of modern tech and software that I am most consistently baffled by is the concept of “Suggestions”.
Don’t get me wrong, I am under no illusions as to what “Suggested Content” really means on websites and social media platforms (it’s advertising, in case you somehow weren’t savvy enough to know that by now) but I’m talking more in contexts where it’s not obviously advertising, or where it doesn’t make sense for advertising to try and worm its way into places.
Places like, you know, just Microsoft Windows in general. Or Google Drive. Both of those have features where they provide you with a list of “Suggested” files, and I absolutely, genuinely do not understand why that feature is there or what it is for. Right now, for example, my Google Drive “Suggested files” list is a non-chronological index of things that I have opened or edited recently. Fine, you might say, except there is a perfectly good “Recent” option in the sidebar which does give me a chronological list of things I have opened or edited recently.
Likewise, the Windows 11 start menu on my “work” computer (it came preinstalled, otherwise I would have been quite happy continuing with 10 as I do with my “play” computer) appears to “suggest” applications almost completely at random, with its first two suggestions usually being the things I have installed most recently, and the others being… pretty much anything that I have installed, for no discernible reason.
Under certain circumstances, I get the idea. When it comes to media, a “suggestion” feature might inspire you to look at photos or listen to music that you haven’t enjoyed for a while — though this can also backfire somewhat. Earlier today, my phone’s “Gallery” app decided to send me an unasked-for notification that I presume someone somewhere thought was “cute”, with the text “Feline footprints in Southampton”. The attached image? Our dearly departed cat Meg. I’m still quite upset about Meg’s passing, so I emphatically do not want my phone randomly bringing her up out of the blue for no apparent reason. I will look at pictures of her when I’m good and ready, thanks very much.
The push for “AI” in everything is only making this shit worse, too; the Gallery app on my phone recognising that the image in question was a picture of a cat is a result of improving image recognition technology, and I suspect as generative AI becomes more and more pervasive and invasive in our daily online life, situations like this are only going to become more and more common — because you can bet your bippy that all these “Suggestion” features are going to be turned on by default.
What happens when your phone decides to “suggest” a photo of something you’d rather keep private at an exceedingly inappropriate moment? Well, some might say you should keep your private photos private, but realistically, practically speaking, most people these days are not that organised, because we’ve made the mistake of trusting our software and online services to do the organisation for us. I actually like the fact that Google Photos can pick out, say, pictures of cats, or pictures that mention something specific in a piece of text, because that is indisputably useful — but what I don’t want is my phone going “HEY REMEMBER YOUR CAT THAT DIED? HUH? HERE SHE IS, I PICKED HER OUT FROM ALL YOUR PHOTOS, AREN’T I SMART?”
There’s a place for some — some — of the innovations that are currently going on in tech. But, as always, it seems we’re going to have to endure a period of people pushing things to absolute breaking point before we settle into something approaching a useful routine. And, unfortunately, that period appears to have been going on for quite a while now… and people don’t seem to be willing to push back against the more unreasonable uses of these features.
“Suggested Content” can get in the fucking bin. I know what I need on my computer and when. And, more often than not, when I’m browsing the Web, I know what I’m looking for, too. Sadly, it feels increasingly unlikely that I’m going to be left in peace these days.
If anyone mentions Linux, they are getting a slap.
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.
I’m sure discussing things with people online wasn’t always as exhausting as it feels these days.
I have some extremely fond memories of time spent on 1up.com’s forums and “club” pages talking about games with a varied crew of folk, all of whom had come together through our shared interest in the video game medium. We didn’t always agree on things, but that made for interesting discussions as we strove to understand one another’s viewpoints. There was no shaming, there was no telling each other we were wrong (apart from on one podcast, where a couple of participants got a little more heated than a reasonable person perhaps should over whether Fallout 3 was playable from the third-person camera) and there was just a nice atmosphere of mutual respect.
These days, it’s becoming more and more of an effort to open my virtual mouth online in places supposedly made for “discussion”, because to a disproportionately large number of people, “discuss” appears to mean “disagree vehemently and aggressively”. And it’s inevitably over something that simply doesn’t matter, but the nature of such exchanges make it easy for hot heads to prevail and things to get stupidly, absurdly aggressive over an absolute nothing of a subject. (No, I’m not citing specific examples, for reasons that I hope are already obvious.)
This is a disappointing development to me, because 20 years ago, I would have sat here and quite confidently said that on the Internet, I could be my “real” self much more than I could be in “the real world”. I actually do still feel that way to a certain extent — outlets such as this blog, MoeGamer and my YouTube channel allow me to express myself in the way I want to, rather than how I’m “supposed to” — but even in those places, there’s always the risk of some weirdo turning up and getting weirdly angry about something which absolutely does not matter.
Thing is, I sort of get it. I get why those people exist, because there are times when I’ll read something online and I’ll feel my own heckles rising (you feel it start around the balls) and contemplate posting some sort of snippy remark in response. Most of the time, I’ve conditioned myself to not do that. Occasionally one slips through, and I pretty much always regret it, because it inevitably leads to a disproportionately furious argument over something I actually don’t feel that strongly about, because the whole “sense of honour” thing kicks in and you want to save face, no matter the cost.
It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting when you get pulled into situations like this, and it’s exhausting making an effort to avoid situations like this, because it’s very easy to take things much too far and end up simply not wanting to talk to anyone. I have definitely reached that latter end of things, as there are times when I feel extremely lonely but unable to reach out to someone because I simply don’t have the mental fortitude to be able to fully process how today’s online interactions tend to work.
I think about this sort of thing quite a lot, and when I do, I always end up asking myself if it’s really worse than it used to be, or if my perspective has just changed. And honestly, I’m not completely sure of the answer to that. I suspect it’s a bit of both, because I know I have deliberately changed my online habits for the sake of a quiet life — but then I’ll look at something like this legendary thread from Usenet circa 1997 and see that people getting really very cross about things that don’t matter was still a thing back when I thought the Internet was much nicer.
I guess the difference is that there was a certain “barrier to entry” for the “tougher” parts of the Internet back then; I never went on Usenet, so I never saw any of that sort of thing. These days, that aggressive means of interacting with one another is just the norm; social media has become what Usenet was, only rather than being neatly segregated into interest groups, everyone has all been plunged into the same vat of boiling piss to fight it out among themselves and see who has the loudest voice. I’m aware that was an utterly tortuous metaphor but I don’t care. My blog, my rules.
The other difference, of course, is that today I am aware of my own mental health conditions, including depressive and anxious episodes that occur sporadically, along with my underlying condition of Asperger’s. Being aware of why I find certain things about socialising difficult is useful, but it can also make me feel more hesitant than I perhaps “should” be to engage with certain scenarios.
I don’t really have a conclusion for all this; I just felt like thinking “out loud”, as it were. And so there you have it. Now I’m off to go and eat chilli.
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.
There are a few main reasons for this, and I’d like to talk about them a bit today.
Firstly, Elon Musk’s idiotic changes to the terms of the Twitter API, which has priced literally everyone out of being able to use it, have made the platform next to useless as a means of automatically sharing your work to an audience that supposedly signed up to follow your updates. It’s both hilarious and tragic to see company after company sharing news posts that effectively say “lol, fuck Twitter”.
Secondly, my previous justification of keeping my Twitter account around for the sake of friends and contacts just doesn’t really feel like it’s… justification any more. The friends in question rarely bother to get in contact, and there are other means for professional contacts to get in touch.
Thirdly, I’m just fucking sick of the most likely response you get to posting literally anything on there being vitriol and hate.
On the latter point, I recently posted an article about my negative experiences trying Ubisoft’s Riders Republic via PlayStation Plus. The gist of the article, if you’re one of those Internet denizens whose attention span has been shot too much to bother clicking on a link, was that the game was designed in such a way that it is genuinely insulting to the intelligence of anyone over the age of about 12. It doesn’t let you just play; instead, you’re bombarded with hours of mandatory tutorials and obnoxious zoomer slang, and this was enough to make me not even want to bother seeing if the game “got good” later.
I think this is something worth talking about, because it’s the first time that I, as a 42 year old video game enthusiast who has been involved in the medium since the Atari days, felt completely alienated by a brand new, supposedly mainstream game. So I talked about it. Then I shared that article on Twitter.
One of the first responses I got was from someone who yelled at me, based entirely on the assumption that I’d said the exact opposite to what I’d actually written in the article. He’d obviously read the headline, made an assumption and then decided to shoot his dribbling, zit-encrusted mouth off at me, despite it taking nothing more than a single click and a minute or two of reading for anyone to see that he was talking complete horseshit. But you can bet anyone who “liked” his dumbshit comment wouldn’t go and check whether or not he was right.
I spent a few hours last night and this morning feeling stressed and anxious about this. But then it just sort of dawned on me: fuck it. Why the fuck should I care what some obnoxious cunt on the Internet thinks? Why the fuck should I let one idiot have such power over my mental wellbeing, based entirely on the fact he’s too much of a lazy shit to actually read something I wrote?
And the answer to that is that I shouldn’t care; I shouldn’t let one idiot do that. And since Twitter is the primary means of allowing idiots to do that, it needs to go. Completely. So it has.
On a related note, this news isn’t finalised or official as yet, but it’s pretty much confirmed that as of the beginning of July, I will be getting out of the professional “content creation” (ugh) game completely.
I won’t go into details for now because things are still being hammered out, but suffice to say for now that it’s nothing anyone needs to worry about — I’m simply changing my professional role in such a way that it means I can focus my attention entirely on the Evercade project, which I’m incredibly passionate about and is something where I feel genuinely valued by both my colleagues and by my “audience”, such as they are.
I’m both happy and sad about this. I’m happy because it means that I can focus my professional life on something that I love, and because it means my free time will genuinely, completely be my own again. No more will I find myself “having” to play something for the sake of timely coverage; instead, I can just enjoy things at my own pace, and I’m really looking forward to that.
I’m sad, however, because I spent so much of my early life desperately wanting to follow in my brother’s footsteps and be part of the games press — and yet by the time I actually managed to get there, it had changed irreversibly from what it used to be. And it only got worse from there.
Again, I won’t go into details for now, as that’s something to talk about in more detail once everything here has been finalised. But I’ll say again, it’s nothing to worry about — I’m proud of what I’ve worked on to date, will continue to work on things like this until the beginning of July, and this change is my decision rather than anyone else’s.
I’m just tired. So very tired of “content creation” being such a completely thankless task. The modern Internet has set up a completely adversarial relationship between writers and their audiences, exemplified by the Twitter exchange I described above, and that is emphatically not why I got into this.
I got into writing about games because I love them. I got into games writing because I think they’re culturally important. I got into games writing because I think despite that cultural importance, they’re not being written about and analysed in anywhere near the depth they deserve.
And I got into games writing because while the big, dumb, obnoxious games like the aforementioned Riders Republic get to ride the wave of commercial success regardless of how shit they are, there are myriad games released literally every day that run the risk of languishing in obscurity without people telling others about them.
The trouble is, I’ve discovered over the last decade and a half or so, is that no-one really seems to actually care. Online, “content” is piss in the wind. It’s only relevant for the day it’s posted — if you’re lucky enough to get anyone to notice it in the first place — and it’s fucking impossible to get people to give a shit about something after the fact, unless, as I’ve seen on MoeGamer, you’re literally the only person to have written something meaningful on a particular topic. (In my case, sex sim Honey Select Unlimited.)
Google is flooded by manipulative, exploitative, SEO-optimised sites posting vacuous individual “guide” articles for things they don’t care about for no other reason than it brings in the clicks. And no-one at any point in the process gives a shit; the average Internet user doesn’t have enough in the way of critical thinking skills to see the cynical way all this has been set up, and the writers at the sites themselves don’t give a toss as long as the numbers go up.
All of this is the fault of everyone who has normalised the idea of “consuming content” rather than “reading interesting articles” and the like. You, collectively, have ruined both the games press specifically, and the broader Internet in general.
It’s demoralising and infuriating, and if you’ve been around all this for as long as I have, seeing the way things have been going, it should be no surprise that I very much feel like stepping down from it all.
And so that’s what I’m doing. From hereon, my professional work will be in something that actually matters, that I care about — and that other people actually care about, too. I suspect I’ll be a lot happier as a result, but I can’t help but feel a bit bad about that dream young me once had, and how it was never really possible.
