#oneaday, Day 254: Be The First Of Your Friends To Like This

I remember back in primary school we were encouraged to never use the words "nice" or "said" because they were boring. There are always better words to use, we were told, so we should be creative and extend our vocabularies.

Fast forward to today and we have much the same issue with the word "like", a word which is rapidly losing all meaning thanks to its total domination over the social networking space. Every day on Facebook, it's a fair bet that there is at least one entry in everyone's news feed that says "Amber likes OMG!! Where did you get you're shoes LOL! on ♥." or "Bob likes I hate it when your trying 2 go 2 sleep and u cant on Likebook." Not only do these sentences make no sense, they're a symbol of a peculiar shift in communication styles that has taken place in recent years, particularly amongst teens and tweens.

Essentially, rather than just typing "I hate it when you're trying to go to sleep and you can't" and sharing that particular inanity with the world (not to mention spelling it correctly), it seems that it's now much more the done thing to go and find a website which lists hundreds of said inanities for the sole purpose of allowing people to Like them on Facebook. There's a kind of "distancing" involved. Anyone can click "Like" on something. As soon as you write it yourself, it becomes more personal, and harder to do.

Trouble is, the word "Like" is being used so much that it stops making sense sometimes. Or its context is completely inappropriate. Take the latest "check-in" craze, GetGlue, which is actually a pretty neat idea. Users tag the things that they, yes, like as well as the things that they dislike and can then get suggestions of other things they might like based on other users' tastes. Fair enough. However, when a site offers you the opportunity to not only "Like" ebola but also check into it, you have to question if the correct terminology is really being used in this instance.

And where's the opportunity to dislike things? GetGlue is unusual in that it does specifically allow people to say "I don't like this". There's no opportunity to do that on Facebook. If a friend posts a status update that informs everyone that, say, their leg has fallen off and their family are dead and not only that, someone posted a bag of poo through their letterbox then the only things to do are to "Like" it, which seems rather tactless and inappropriate, or to actually leave a comment which will probably start with "I wish there was a Dislike button" and end with too many exclamation marks.

Perhaps Facebook is attempting to make us all more positive. Instead of writing "I'm so sad. My family are dead, my leg has fallen off and someone posted a bag of poo through my letterbox" which, let's face it, no-one is going to click "Like" on, perhaps you should put a positive spin on it. "My family are dead, my leg has fallen off and someone posted a bag of poo through my letterbox. But at least I found 76p in small change in my jacket pocket, Snickers later ftw!!!"

aplenty from there on, I feel.

#oneaday, Day 253: Pay-Per-Everything

I came to a realisation today. I have a thing about the word "monetize" (or, arguably, "monetise" if you want to be English about it, although the latter is not recognised by a British English spellchecker). This is not news to those of you who have been following this blog for some time. Some of you may even recall the Money Robot, star of Day 128 on this blog, and, of course, the thing that goes around monetizing everything in sight by applying green electricity to their genital areas, assuming they have genitals.

But, as I say, I came to a realisation today. And my problem is not with the word itself as it is with the fact that we even need a word for this concept at all. "Monetize", after all, pretty much means "convince people that it is acceptable to pay money for". And sure. There are some things out there that could stand to be charged for—certain content online, for example, could be charged for in order to make sure that writers could actually get paid for once. The iPad, Kindle and other devices like them are doing a lot to help people think about how they consume content—a move away from the whole "EVERYTHING SHOULD BE FREE!" philosophy that the Internet has embraced for so long and a move towards "most things should be free, but really good stuff should be an appropriate price".

At least that's the theory of how it should work. How monetization works in practice is that you get people charging you to go to the toilet at railway stations. You get a 30p "convenience charge" for paying your parking fees via phone instead of via small change in a machine—change which some poor sod will have to come and collect at some point rather than an automated robot who steals your credit card numbers over the phone, I might add. You get charged £30 to disconnect your broadband (at least you do if you go with Orange Home, fuckers). And Endsleigh Insurance (also fuckers) wanted to charge me £85 for the privilege of cancelling my home insurance, all because I had moved house just after the policy had renewed, ignoring the fact I'd been paying them for the last ten years. Let's not even get started on bank charges, where they take the money you haven't got in order to punish you for not having any money.

You get the picture. Not everything being monetized is good. And that's why I think the fact it's happening so much that we need a new word to describe the concept is very much a bad thing. We don't need to pay for everything. I pay a bloody fortune to travel by train in rubbish, smelly, drunk-infested conditions so the least I should be able to expect is the opportunity to have a piss for free at the other end. Conversely, I'd be more than happy to pay for some exclusive content, eBooks or virtual magazines delivered to the iPad I don't have. It's all a question of value.

You may argue that the ability to have a piss is inherently more essential and therefore valuable than an eBook. But technically I can have a piss anywhere. The charge on the toilet is not stopping me from, say, pissing myself. The nice policeman standing on the corner might, however.

The eBook or virtual magazine, however, has had love, care and attention ploughed into it and therefore, it's only fair that the writers and producers should receive some recompense for that. So more premium, high-quality content, please, and less in the way of "convenience charges".

THANKS.

#oneaday, Day 252: 5 Social Norms That Need To Die The Hell Out

There are some things which have become so firmly entrenched in normal society that we just don't question them. We don't necessarily like them, but we certainly don't question them if someone happens to bring them up. They're so well-known that countless comedy routines have drawn attention to them over the years; so much so that many of them are now clichés. That doesn't stop people writing about them and perpetuating said clichés, though, as I'm about to do right now.

So without further ado, let me present Five Inexplicable Social Norms that the World can Really Do Without™.

The toilet seat thing

Alluded to above. Roughly 50% of the world's population, give or take, have to take a piss standing up. Well, they don't have to. But gentlemen who choose to urinate whilst in a seated position are generally scorned and looked upon as some sort of weirdo. For a chap, sitting is for pooing and standing is for pissing. Would the ladies out there who whinge about toilet seats being left up prefer it if said gentlemen just left it down all the time and pissed all over it instead? No? Then consider this: the seat has a hinge on it so it can be lifted up and put down. If it is in the incorrect position for one's desired toilet activity, one need simply use one's hand to move said seat to the correct position.

While we're on, those toilets whose seats don't stay up can die in a fire. Having to hold on to the toilet seat with one hand and directing one's flow with the other often feels rather precarious and I feel that anyone who inadvertently spills in a place they shouldn't whilst under such arduous pissing conditions should not be held responsible.

Man flu

Apparently, guys aren't allowed to get ill any more. Whether it's a tickly cough, some form of debilitating brain cancer, ebola or itchy scrot, it seems that everyone is quick to cry "Man flu!" at the first opportunity. The zombie apocalypse will not come from some sort of biohazard outbreak at a local lab. No, it will come from the man who caught zombie disease, went to hospital, was accused of just having "man flu" and sent on his way.

Overenthusiastic use of the word "random"

"OMG! I'm such a random person really. We went out and had a drink and it was like OMG! Random!"

No. "Random" means… well… random. Completely by chance. Out of all the possibilities that are there, everything has an equal possibility of happening. It is not "random" that you met that hot girl at The Dungeon one night, because you knew she was there. Your night out was not "so random", because you'd planned it weeks in advance with your compadres. You are not a "random" person, because otherwise your conversations would run something along the lines of "Cabbage! 352! Cocks. Horatio! England. Belching squirrel. 976!"

Settling for second-best

This could be applied to so, so many things but I'd like to particularly refer to the world of employment. How many people do you (yes, you!) know personally who regularly bitch and moan about their job, their colleagues, how much they hate what they're doing, how they "wish" they could do something "better" and then never do a damn thing about it? Some people don't have a clue what it is what they want to do. To those people I say: think harder. If you are sitting in an office surrounded by other people who clearly want to slit their wrists or take far more regular toilet breaks than a normal person because they're actually going there to cry for five minutes at a time, then you are probably in The Wrong Job.

Being unemployed has been a festival of suckitude, but I just know that if I was in that aforementioned office, while money might be coming in the way I'd be feeling would be ten times worse, because I'd feel trapped and unable to pursue the things I really do want to do. (Talking of which, I have a job interview for a job I really do want tomorrow. Wish me luck.)

Embarrassment over bettering oneself

I went out for a run today, but felt the familiar pang of anyone who is unfit going out in public to exercise: "what if anyone sees me?" This immediately jumps up to something doubly worthy of panic if you are doing some form of exercise which has the potential to hold up traffic, such as cycling along country lanes. But running! People will see you doing exercise, and they will laugh at you. Because going out and doing something about your own fitness is inexplicably somehow more shameful than just walking down the street gasping and wheezing after climbing a flight of five steps.

This whole thing also seems to apply to kids in school, many of whom seem to see success as being somehow shameful. But that, of course, is a topic I have waxed upon at great detail many times in the past.

So I know I certainly wouldn't shed any tears if any of the above norms disappeared overnight. Perhaps they're uniquely British things. In which case… anyone want to help me get a visa?

#oneaday, Day 251: Teamwork, Do It Together

I'm going to quote a LazyTown song at you and there is nothing you can damn well do about it.

Links in a chain
Tracks for a train
They're always better together.
A cocoa in a mug
A kiss and a hug
They're always better together.
When nothing seems to fit
And you just want to quit
Teamwork, do it together
Teamwork, friends forever
We're all for one and one for all, we'll—

Okay, enough already. Even I'm feeling a little nauseous*. But it's an apt introduction to the matter I would like to talk about today, which is collaborating, working together, being a team player, whatever you want to call it.

In life, teamwork is essential, even for the most inept recluse there is. At some point, they're going to have to deal with other people. So it may as well be a pleasant experience for everyone involved.

The thing I don't understand is why so many people don't seem to get this. For example, I was talking to a friend the other day and it seems that a work colleague had gone behind her back and caused an unpleasant, tense situation when in fact all that was needed was a quiet, friendly word. In fact, given the situation in question, even that wasn't warranted at all, but this isn't the time or place to discuss that.

But it seems to happen over and over again; I've lost count of the number of times I've heard friends comment about the stresses of working with other people, either because they don't pull their weight, or because they're the sort of person described above, who is only concerned with making themselves look good and balls to how everyone else feels.

If you'll indulge me a moment, here is something which truly can be learned from the world of video games. I was enjoying a friendly game of Halo: Reach with some friends earlier, and we were playing Team Slayer. For the benefit of my readers out there who don't play games at all, an explanation: this mode splits eight players into two teams of four and tasks each team with blowing seven shades of snot out of each other until one team or the other has scored fifty kills. Very simple. And yet what many people who play it don't seem to realise is that by working together—simply a case of sticking with someone else and protecting them, and occasionally telling other team members where opponents are—success can be pretty much guaranteed, at least until the other team figures out the same thing. Which often doesn't happen.

It's the same in reality, only with less shooting each other in the face with rocket launchers. Usually. Rather than striking out as a "lone wolf" that just happens to be part of a larger venture, working together with others is a far more sure-fire way to get things done. Things get done a lot quicker and everyone is a lot happier as a result. So I have to wonder why so many people try and put up barriers to this sort of collaboration. Whether it's wilfully ignoring things that they're told, making themselves inaccessible, refusing to listen to feedback or simply not chipping in their bit of effort at crunch time, it makes life unpleasant for everyone. Those who are spurned by the git who isn't helping end up feeling bitterness and resentment. And said git often starts to feel superior, like they don't "need" to get involved.

I'm very fortunate in that all the ventures I'm currently involved with are very much team efforts run by people who are friends with mutual respect for one another, and people who talk to each other. There's no bitchiness, no backstabbing, no resentment. I think. Unless I'm causing it.

Oh God, am I the git?

* inserted to draw attention away from the fact that I have listened to the LazyTown soundtrack on Spotify far more times than is really healthy. This is just between you and me.

#oneaday, Day 250: No!

The most difficult word to pronounce in the English language is not the one with the most syllables. For starters, opinion differs on exactly which word is the longest and most complicated one. "Floccinaucinihilipilification" is right up there, for one, but then "guar hydroxypropyltrimonium chloride" is pretty long too, but it is a shampoo ingredient and technically three words. Then there's some weird science thing called "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" which picky Scrabble players reject because it doesn't fit on the board and is also a word made up by SCIENCE! which therefore doesn't count.

In fact, the most difficult word to pronounce in the English language is "no". One of the shortest words there is. You can't get much shorter than one syllable really. You could say nothing, but then you're, well, not saying anything. So we can establish that "no" is one of the shortest words out there. There are ones with less phonemes or whatever that nonsense they teach in primary schools is now, but… just no, okay?

The reason "no" is a difficult word to pronounce is not because of its complexity. It is because of the emotional connotations. No is a negative, and using it often implies some sort of negative consequences.

Interactive Thought Exercise™ time! Consider how you would feel if you asked any of the following questions and the answer was "no":

Will you marry me?
Do you like me?
Is this picture I've drawn you the best thing you've ever seen?
Would you like to play Scrabble with me?
I know we've only known each other a little while, but I really like you so I thought it'd be kind of cool if we could go and, you know, grab some coffee sometime or whatever and then see what happens—what do you say?

But then what everyone forgets is that, paradoxically, "no" can actually have positive connotations too.

Interactive Thought Exercise™ time again! Consider how you would feel if you asked any of the following questions and the answer was "no":

Is it cancer, Doctor?
Do I look fat in this dress?
Have you ever been to bed with a better lover than me?
Have you ever seen anything more impressive than that awesome thing I just did?
Is there ever going to be another series of The X-Factor?

The thing is, though, it's easier to focus on negative things than positive things. Who knows why this is? It appears to be one of those things that is bundled under the heading of "human nature" when neither the scientists or the psychologists can be arsed to work out exactly why it happens. But it happens, regardless. Sometimes we want to say "no" to something because we don't want to do it, because it makes us uncomfortable or perhaps because the prospect of it terrifies us. But we don't. Because we put ourselves in the shoes of the person who is asking us something and we imagine how they'd feel or react if we said "no" to them. We don't want to hurt their feelings or look like a dick.

Chances are, of course, they wouldn't react in the way we were thinking. And a key part of learning to be assertive is learning how to say "no" to these things. But it's still difficult.

Of course, some people have absolutely no problem saying "no" to anything and everything. And, like their brothers and sisters who argue with everything, regardless of context? We also call these people assholes.

#oneaday, Day 249: Remember Reach... Uh, Kombo

The death of a website is a curious thing. In practical terms, it's no different to deleting a file, switching something off, throwing out a piece of technology that is no longer used. But it's more than that. A dying website normally knows it is dying before the plug is finally pulled. And, these days in particular, it's not just a website that dies. It's the community that the site built. The readers who came back every day, whether they were vocal ones who commented on everything or people who just diligently read every article because they'd chosen that particular site to be their "home".

I've witnessed the death of several websites I've been involved with either as an employee or an active community member of in my time, and it's never pleasant. 1up.com isn't dead, of course, but when The Great Exodus occurred some time back, the Squadron of Shame and I left the site behind and never looked back. The site still maintains an active blogging community, but it's a shadow of its former self when I think back to the glory days of the 1up Radio boards.

Then came B4HD, a relatively short-lived retro games project that I was involved with. We had a team of dedicated writers who loved games of the past with a passion and loved writing about them. But for various reasons documented in the site's final post, it had to close and those involve seek other outlets for their work.

Most recently, of course, is Kombo. Kombo is still there, of course, for now. But the staff aren't. Sure, there are some who are still there diligently posting articles on the site and holding things together as the site's last few commitments are fulfilled. But some time soon, that site and everything attached with it—the content, the artwork, the community, the recognisable writers—will cease to be.

What happens at that point? Where do all these lost souls go? Sometimes they have nowhere to go straight away, and simply have to pick another place to call home and latch on to it. Sometimes they have to start from scratch again, building a reputation from the ground up like they once did. Sometimes they float aimlessly for a while. And sometimes they immediately land on their feet and produce something awesome.

It's perhaps premature to be holding a "wake" for a site like Kombo when it hasn't even died yet. Rest assured that the talented crowd from Kombo are not going anywhere. That dedicated team who knew and loved their audience (even Wiiboy) and what they wanted to hear are alive, well and waiting.

"Waiting for what?" you may ask. That's not for me to say… yet. But let's just say that those of you who enjoyed the writing of myself, Jeff, Brad, Joey, Eric, Keri, Ryan, Mike, Matt, Joel, Dan, Ryan and Geoff won't have to wait too long to see what we're up to. It's going to be great, and we hope you like it a lot.

A love of the cloak and dagger prevents me from saying anything else right now. For those of you who care, though, we're fine. And I know that I for one am hugely happy to have met such an awesome crowd of writers, and even happier that we're sticking together for new and exciting projects.

Watch this space for the latest.

￭

#oneaday, Day 248: All Change! Again

It's been a curious few days for some people and things that are very dear to me. First up, you may have read my impassioned mourning of the apparent loss of Good Old Games the other day. Turns out that, as some suspected all along, the site was simply coming out of beta and relaunching. Not only that, but awesome WRPG Baldur's Gate is coming to the site, with more to follow. This, hopefully, means that Planescape: Torment can't be far behind. Because the one loaning incident I regret more than anything else is loaning that game to someone and never getting it back. I'm not even sure I know who borrowed it. So if you have my copy of Planescape: Torment, please return it to me. Or at least buy me a copy on GOG if/when it appears.

So that was sad and became happy, although some are still ranting and raving about GOG's handling of the situation. Okay, it perhaps wasn't the best PR stunt ever (some blaming that famous Polish sense of humour) but it got people talking about GOG, and it turns out that what they were planning was actually awesome. This isn't the place for that debate, though.

The really bad news, though, is that the gaming site I've written daily news for and called home since March of this year, Kombo.com, is folding. This is terribly sad news as the team at Kombo are some truly talented people who worked their hardest to provide awesome content every day, whether it was opinionated twists on news coverage or original content.

Former Assistant Director of Reviews Matt Green sums the situation up over at his blog, so pay it a visit and feel free to offer commiserations either there or indeed here. I sincerely hope that everyone who was involved with Kombo lands on their feet and gets the awesome writing gig (with appropriately awesome pay) that they deserve. Note: This includes me. So if you know anywhere who needs an awesome writer who is also British (which apparently adds +1000 awesome points) then let me know. You can feel free to point them to this site—I have links to samples of my work on the menu bar above—or to http://pjedi.co.uk/links, which also has said links.

So, with that said, I think it's time for a little light relief. The Internet provides many means of light relief, not all of which are appropriate for public consumption. (Hey, what you look at in your own time is your business. You pervert.)

By far my favourite means of light relief that the Internet provides is cat, monkey and/or dog videos, however, so I shall now share a few of my favourites. Thanks in part to Alex Connolly and Chris Person for having a link war on my Facebook profile earlier.

May I firstly present to you, courtesy of Dave Gorman on Twitter, an elephant playing darts:

Followed by the charmingly literal "A Monkey Washing A Cat."

And then… er… this.

How about THIS?!

Andross's enemy is my enemy!

And finishing with indisputably the best cat video on the Internet.

I thank you. For those who have had a nightmarish, difficult or stressful few days, I sincerely hope the sight of the above has cheered you, if only slightly. May tomorrow be a better day.

#oneaday, Day 247: This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Twitter broke earlier today. This in itself is nothing unusual, as the existence of the term "failwhale" will attest. But this time it was partly a result of some new changes that the service made, particularly with regard to posting links.

Twitter recently launched its own link-shortening service, called "t.co". This is one of the shortest link-shorteners out there, and when characters are a precious commodity as they are on Twitter, that's really important.

Unfortunately, some clever young person discovered that by using t.co it was, in fact, possible to embed HTML code and, worse, JavaScript in these links. It was also possible to format tweets, change their colour and black them out.

Said exploiter quickly discovered that by blacking out a tweet and adding a "mouseover" JavaScript event to automatically retweet the exploit, post giant text on the screen or in some cases, redirect to websites you wouldn't want anyone to catch you on ever whenever a user moved their cursor over the blocked text, they could cause absolute chaos. Thankfully, most people got wise to the exploit pretty quickly and retreated to the safety of Twitter client apps, as it only affected users on the website itself. Of course, there were a few people who started screaming "OMG VIRUS!!!" and panicking, but most of them were put in their place pretty quickly with a simple, calm explanation (hah, right) that an exploit and a virus are two very different things. And Twitter stepped in to plug the security hole reasonably quickly, too. So the whole thing was over within a matter of hours.

The main point of this, though, is that it wouldn't have happened at all without the new functionality that Twitter was offering. It seems that every single time something new and potentially awesome appears, there is at least one person out there who wants… no, seemingly needs to break it. Why? Because they can.

This explains the existence of "glitchers", people who deliberately play video games in order to break them. It explains the existence of software pirates, who are out to break copy protection and DRM on software. It explains the existence of hackers, people who write viruses and spammers. And, indirectly, it's the reason why every single time you turn on Windows you have fifteen bajillion updates to install.

This is all getting a bit tiresome now. It's such a shame that things that are new must seemingly go through the "initiation" of being broken by some idiot sitting in his pants in his basement, probably masturbating furiously as he watches the chaos unfold before his eyes. Because you just know it's a "he", too. (I'm all for equality, but when it comes to stupid, pointless and inconvenient things to do with computers, it's always a guy.)

Thankfully, the world seems adequately set up to deal with such dribbling idiots these days. We have spam filters, virus scanners, scripts to clean out malicious code from websites. Companies have teams to fix broken functionality like we've seen here. And of course, it's easy to say that things should be tested more thoroughly before release. But there's no way you can predict every single possible stupid thing that some member of the human race will try and do. If we could, no-one would ever go outside and the world and everything in it would be covered in sponge just in case we fell over and hurt ourselves and/or tried to kill someone else with something.

So if you know anyone who's ever come up with one of these exploits, or anyone who's ever ruined a Nice Thing for anyone else, do the world a favour and go and punch them really, really hard in the testicles.

#oneaday, Day 246: Feel the Fear

Irrational fears are weird. It's human nature to feel the "fight or flight" response, of course. But the things which trigger said response are very peculiar indeed.

Take spiders. I remember being mortally afraid of spiders when I was a kid, and I'm still not particularly fond of them right now. As in, I'd probably freak out and do the dance of fear should one start crawling up my arm. Though I'm fine with little ones now, whereas any spider of any size used to scare the shit out of me. And, growing up in the country, we got some quite big spiders.

Now, fear of the kind of car-sized man-eating spiders you get in hot countries and/or under your toilet seat in Australia? That's perfectly rational. But fear of tiny little spiders that you can literally blow away accidentally by breathing on them? Less rational.

And then you get into the more esoteric phobias out there. Pogonophobia: the fear of beards. How does that come about? I remember suffering from this one, too, when I was a kid. My father returned from a trip abroad with a beard he didn't have before and I was freaked out by it. I don't know if it was because he looked so different from how he did before, or if I just had some deep-seated need to be far away from beards at that particular age. Thankfully I've got over that particular fear now, otherwise my Bearded Justice credentials would surely be revoked.

And then there's the really odd ones, like Lyssophobia, which is fear of hydrophobia. A phobia of a phobia is almost too meta for words. Except it's not, because there's a word for it. But surely it's possible to get into an endless loop in that way? Is there someone out there who's afraid of being afraid of hydrophobia? Possibly.

The human mind is a mysterious, strange and wonderful thing, and there are some things which will probably never be understood. Fear is one of those things. It's a powerful motivating factor for some people; driving oneself to stay as far away from one's fears as possible can spur people on to do things that they really want or need to. But at the other end of the spectrum, it's surely easy for some fears to become dangerous obsessions, or crippling social disabilities.

In that sense, those of us who are just afraid of the idea of a big hairy spider with poison fangs have probably got the better end of the whole deal.

Though I think we can probably all agree that encountering a bright red spider with a beard who looked like the devil and was offering you a jar of peanut butter would be a fairly universally terrifying experience.

#oneaday, Day 245: Obituary or Rebirth?

Dear GOG users,

We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We've debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we've decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form.

We're very grateful for all support we've received from all of you in the past two years. Working on GOG.com was a great adventure for all of us and an unforgettable journey to the past, through the long and wonderful history of PC gaming.

This doesn't mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We're closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await.

On a technical note, this week we'll put in place a solution to allow everyone to re-download their games. Stay tuned to this page and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates.

All the best,
GOG.com Team

An hour or two ago, that message had done the rounds of the Internet. If you hadn't seen it yet, I apologise for being the bearer of bad news. If you head on over to Good Old Games right now, that's all you'll see. No store. No games. No community. All gone.

For the uninitiated, Good Old Games was the place to go to purchase and download DRM-free copies of old (and not so old) classic games for low, low prices. It was, for a long time, the only place to go to find the classic Sierra adventures, or sci-fi Wolfenstein 3D spinoff Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, or the best puzzle game of all time, The Incredible Machine. I wrote a number of pieces for that site, so yes, I have something of a vested interest in it and actually feel pretty sad about its apparent demise. But even if I didn't have such a personal stake in it, it was a fantastic place to go to pick up the games of my youth. Even better, they'd been tweaked and optimised to work on current hardware.

The tragic news above comes after a tweet posted by the company a few days ago:

Sometimes it's really hard being DRM-free… hard to keep things the way they are and keep management and publishers happy 🙁

It didn't sound good. Someone was obviously putting a bit of pressure on the company, and some cracks were starting to form. Those who had supported the service since the beginning knew that a DRM-free service in an age of rampant piracy was going to have its work cut out for it. But was that really the reason?

No-one knows as yet. No-one except the people at GOG, who are playing their cards close to their chest. The community are assured that this isn't the end of GOG, however, just the end of this chapter of its existence. Those who have purchased games from the service in the past will be directed to a "solution" to re-download these games in the next few days. And some announcements will hopefully be forthcoming very soon.

Personally speaking, I'm hoping it's good news. There were a ton of games on the site that I'd love to have had the chance to play again. Games like Gabriel Knight 2, which a friend borrowed some time ago and never gave back, and now I can't remember which friend it was.

The games of this era represent a time when gameplay was everything and graphics were necessarily limited by the hardware of the time. And it may just be nostalgia talking, but some of my fondest memories of childhood and adolescence come from the games I was playing at the time. It'd be shame if the memories of these games fade. But, as I say, GOG claims that this is not the end, just the end for the service in its current form.

So pour out a stiff drink, take off your hat and, I don't know, sing a mournful song in honour of GOG or something. Hopefully they'll be back better than ever sometime soon.

Rest in peace, GOG. For a little while. Then come back as an awesome zombie who wants to sell us old games rather than eat our brains.

WHATAREYABUYIN'?