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.
Earlier today, someone I haven’t spoken to for a while popped up on Steam and asked if I was OK, because I’d been “posting way more politically than usual” of late.
Confused, I asked for more details, since I wasn’t aware I’d been doing anything of the sort, and it transpired that he somehow thought I ran the Twitter account for a certain website that I’m not going to name for reasons that will probably become obvious. (It’s not Rice Digital, the site I used to be in charge of, before you wonder!) I explained that no, that was nothing to do with me, I had never written for that site and I wasn’t even on Twitter any more, which I’m not.
Hopefully reassured, my acquaintance wished me well and that was the end of that.
He got me curious, though, so I went and looked at what the account in question had been posting, and it didn’t take me long to stumble across what the issue was. It seems that the main problem stems from a story the site in question had recently posted that was, in essence, nothing but a rumour with sources that could be called questionable if one was being charitable, non-existent if one was being realistic. The thrust of the story was that it was one of many instances of a supposed conspiracy that “DEI” (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) consultants are destroying modern gaming.
I’ll address some things up front, because I have spoken about these things in the past, often critically, and I want to make it clear what my own stance on the situation is.
Diversity, equity and inclusion are not bad things. Do some companies and individuals take things a little too far in terms of pussy-footing around protected groups in an attempt to not offend anyone? Absolutely, particularly in the corporate space. Have there been instances of games journalists slagging off games that they knew nothing about because there was sexually suggestive content in them? Most definitely. Both of those things are, I believe, still worthy of criticism. Any creative work deserves to have a fair shake at expressing what its creators want to express without interference, and without those engaging with it treating it in bad faith.
However, this current conspiracy theory — and make no mistake, it really is a conspiracy theory — goes a lot further than those things. The current belief is that a cadre of games journalists and diversity consultants are running an extortion racket on game developers and publishers in the name of making all the women ugly and not white. To these people, if this situation continues unchecked, all of gaming will be completely destroyed, because having the opportunity to select your pronouns in a first-person role-playing game where you play a self-insert avatar is somehow responsible for the complete downfall of western society. It’ll turn all your kids into immigrant transgender gays, I tells ya.
This is, of course, complete bollocks. It is true that the triple-A space has been making some marked steps towards improving diversity in many of its games, but as I’ve argued numerous times both here and over on MoeGamer, the triple-A space is just a tiny piece of the complete behemoth that is the games industry. Just because some triple-A blockbuster game has a woman with “woke chin” (an actual quote from one of these nutcases, criticising the new Joanna Dark for having a wider chin than she used to) does not mean that games with anime titties are going anywhere. Right now, you can play Final Fantasy XIV as a bunnygirl with big tits running around in bra and pants if you want, and Steam is filled with games where you can fuck your aunt. Hell, there are physical releases of Switch games that feature uncensored jizz-filled vaginas. Jizz! In a Nintendo game! (Actually, don’t, you’ll need to do more than blow in the cartridge afterwards if you do.)
Here’s the thing: diversity means that you end up with diverse things. Some of those things will appeal to you, personally, while others will not. Those things that do not appeal to you, personally, are not a personal affront to you. Consider something that you really really love, but which other people don’t seem to get. Now contemplate someone with a completely different worldview to you — be it a differing political ideology, racial background, sexuality, gender identity or any of the myriad other distinguishing characteristics we all have — finding something that they really really love, but which you don’t seem to get. It’s the exact same situation, only you’re seeing it from the other side. Neither of those things cancel out the other.
The longstanding concern that this conspiracy theory stems from is that the growth in progressivism in the games industry — and particularly in games journalism — is somehow going to be responsible for the death of games that push boundaries or cater specifically to those with particular tastes, especially if those tastes are “playing games with conventionally attractive female characters in them”. Well, ten years on from the shitshow that was GamerGate, I think we can say pretty conclusively that this has not happened. If anything, we’re far more likely to encounter boundary-pushing games today than we were ten years ago… arguably to a fault, in some situations, such as with the amount of AI-generated “Hentai”-labeled crap that infests both the Nintendo eShop and Steam.
What we have now is a landscape that has changed. Triple-A may well be taking aim at a more diverse market, and that’s entirely understandable, because with budgets spiralling out of control and layoffs happening left, right and centre, those games have to appeal to the broadest demographic possible. And just because some set-in-his-ways white dude doesn’t like that a new big-budget game has black/gay/transgender/[insert minority group of choice here] people in it doesn’t mean that others won’t like it. It makes the most sense for triple-A to try and include as many people as possible, because, cynically speaking, that’s how you make the money.
But the thing to remember is that none of this is “taking your games away” or “killing gaming”.
I will freely admit that, ten years ago, I had some serious concerns that the strong push for progressivism in games journalism in particular would push certain forms of interactive media underground or possibly even cause them to dry up altogether. I almost certainly made some ill-advised comments during that time which are likely still on this blog and MoeGamer somewhere — but I’ll say now, in 2024, those fears some of us had ten years ago completely failed to materialise, and I’m not afraid to admit that I was wrong about those things.
Triple-A has changed, yes. But ten years ago I wasn’t concerned about triple-A because I’d bounced hard off that part of the industry several years prior — and I still don’t care about triple-A today. I was worried about the games I did enjoy, which were B-tier titles, primarily from Japanese developers and publishers, that had a laser focus on their target audience.
Despite never engaging with triple-A beyond games with “Final Fantasy” in the title, I have never been short of things to play. If anything, I have too many things to play, as my rapidly filling shelves will attest. If I threw triple-A in the mix, I’d really be overwhelmed.
There’s no “great replacement” of video games. There’s no “DEI” or “Modern Audiences” conspiracy to make every woman in gaming ugly. There’s no “extortion racket” causing games journalists to circle the wagons and protect a firm of diversity consultants from the “true gamers”.
There is, however, a problem with intolerance. And it seems to be getting worse, fuelled by conspiracy theories such as this. I’ve seen way more in the way of racism, homophobia and transphobia in Internet comments — particularly in busy, public places such as YouTube and what is left of the burning garbage fire that is Twitter — than ever before.
Just last week I watched an episode of the Game Grumps’ spinoff show Ten Minute Power Hour, in which Arin and Dan got gussied up as drag queens with the assistance of a professional. While there were plenty of comments in support of the episode — particularly as it aired during Pride Month, which is ongoing as I type this — there was some serious ugliness further down in the comments below where the moderators had been doing the majority of their work.
I’d say I was kind of shocked, but I’ve seen this intolerance and outright hatred rising over the last few years, and it’s not pretty at all. It was particularly shocking to see it in the comments of a Game Grumps video, though; while the Grumps have toned down some of the more colourful elements of their humour over the last 10+ years — no more “Sad Hoshi” in an exaggerated faux Japanese accent, for example — they certainly have not, in any way, abandoned who they are or the overall vibe their humour creates. What has changed, however, is how vocal the intolerant and hateful have become.
Browsing Twitter as I was earlier, I stumbled across an absolutely enormous thread by one fan of the website that started this whole discussion, collecting “evidence” of the supposed conspiracy — actually just screenshots of games journalists saying that maybe this website shouldn’t report on stupid rumours without even attempting to verify them, or commenting in support of progressive talking points. As I scrolled through page after page of this guy collecting these tweets, all I could think of was the old wisdom that if more and more people seem to be against you, perhaps you are the one who actually has the problem.
Look, I have absolutely no time for the militant end of the left wing. I find them insufferable, tedious and just plain annoying. But I feel like I’m seeing a lot less of them these days; the problem we have right now is coming from the opposite end of the spectrum. And it is a problem. When people like me, who have long made a specific effort to try and steer as clear as possible of anything even vaguely politically charged or controversial, are noticing an uptick in intolerance and hatred, there’s definitely an intolerance and hatred problem.
It may be a cliché to say, but it sure would be nice if we could just all get along. We’re talking about video games, 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.
People love to complain. This is a trait traditionally and historically associated with the British, but it’s most definitely not an exclusively British thing. Perhaps it once was, but it most certainly isn’t any more. And as with so many things, we can probably blame the way in which the Internet has brought people together — something which should, inherently, be a good thing, but which has somehow become corrupted along the way.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, I’m not spending a ton of time on Twitter any more due to a combination of the horrible atmosphere that seeps from every pore of that website and the constant ridiculous changes Elon Musk keeps making on a seemingly daily basis. But occasionally, I can’t help myself from clicking on one of the Trends out of sheer curiosity.
The other day, I happened to see that Evri was trending. Evri, if you’re unfamiliar, is the new name that the courier company formerly known as Hermes decided to adopt for themselves a while back. I don’t know the reasons for the rebrand and honestly I really don’t care, because they’re inevitably absolute bullshit and everyone knows that Evri is “really” Hermes anyway, so it’s largely irrelevant.
However, what I found when looking at the Evri trend was that everyone was complaining about Evri. Everyone had the same stories to tell of parcels being lobbed over their fence, of packages arriving broken or tampered with, or generally some tale of misfortune and woe related to getting their package delivered from this one specific carrier.
Here’s the thing: I’ve never had a problem with Evri or Hermes. I spent a brief period working for them while I was looking for a proper job and I know what it’s like “from the inside” also. While it was a time-consuming, underpaid and largely thankless task for the couriers, it was a reasonably well-run operation in general, and there were various ways in which said couriers were encouraged to do a good job, up to and including being “watched” through the scanny things they’re supposed to carry around with them.
As fortune would have it, for some reason during my brief time with the company I never actually got a scanny thing, so I never had to worry about such things — not that I had anything to particularly worry about anyway. But I digress.
I’m not saying no-one has ever had a problem with Evri or Hermes. But if you were to look at that trend on Twitter, the conclusion it would be easy to come to would be that they were a company that should be absolutely, completely and without doubt avoided at all cost, because literally every delivery they do is the absolute worst possible thing that has ever happened to someone, and they have ruined too many Christmases and children’s birthdays to count.
This is nonsense. While it’s foolish to assume that they’re completely without fault — in any sort of “gig economy” sort of situation, you have a risk of bad apples, but this is also true for more formally structured corporations — it’s also ridiculous to put across the impression that they’re a complete failure that should never be trusted.
It’s just one of many examples of the Internet painting the worst possible picture of something. And I could provide plenty of other examples at this point, but I’ll refrain from doing so for the sake of time.
What I will urge you to do, however, is that if you see any sort of seemingly universally negative reaction towards something — particularly on any sort of standards-free platform such as social media or user reviews — then be cautious. Chances are the thing that is being ranted and raved about is nowhere near as bad as people are trying to put across — because let’s face it, people are a whole lot more likely to complain about something than post about how they had no problems whatsoever with a company or service.
Perhaps we should change our outlook on such things. Perhaps we should start posting positive comments when a company does the right thing and does what is expected of them. Or perhaps that’s ridiculous — after all, a service that is being provided to you conforming to your exact expectations should not be particularly worthy of comment at all, because, well, it’s what you expected.
But then that means the negativity will always win, because the complainers will always speak up, while the satisfied customers will just quietly get on with their day, thinking nothing more of the company they’ve interacted with or the service they’ve received.
Perhaps the answer is just not to listen to anyone and make your own mind up.
Those who have been following the saga of social media for a while will know that Twitter is a right old mess right now. Between Elon Musk’s incredible ego and a series of bizarre policy changes and introductions (most of which are likely related to Musk’s ego in some form or another) it’s certainly been interesting to watch the world’s most popular social media platform (for how much longer?) go through some trials and tribulations.
But those of you who have been following me for a while will know that Twitter hasn’t been much fun for a long time now. When I first joined (which must have been around 2007 or so, maybe?) it was a great place to make new friends, enjoy good conversation and just generally have a good time. But as the years have gone on — and particularly since the significant online upheavals that can be at least partly attributed to the “Gamergate” mess of 2014 — it’s become a less and less desirable hangout, for a variety of reasons.
Chief among them for me is the combative, confrontational tone the site as a whole has taken on. While it is still possible to have civil conversations there, it feels like it’s much more likely that if you post an opinion of your own someone will come along and shout it down before long. Even if your opinion is not, in the grand scheme of things, particularly important or worth getting upset over.
Anger seems to be the default state for many posters on Twitter, and this is often expressed through some seriously unpleasant behaviour. Anyone who is into Japanese games, for example, will doubtless have seen the disgusting vitriol that gets thrown the way of localisation staff (more specifically, female localisation staff) on a fairly regular basis, regardless of whether or not any “mistakes” have been made. And the same is true in all fields; the quote-tweet dunk is a universal constant, and it does not make for a friendly environment where one wants to hang out.
But alongside all this, Twitter itself has been changing in functional, mechanical terms. The rise of “The Algorithm” on all manner of social sites — with the most notorious being YouTube, of course — has meant that no longer can you count on your social media experience being your own, if indeed it ever was. Rather than showing you the things that your friends have been posting in the order that they were posted, you now get shit you didn’t sign up for pushed into your feed as “recommendations”, based on the ill-defined assumptions that Twitter makes about “quality content”.
I never signed up to Twitter for “quality content”. I signed up to chat with folks from a forum we all used to frequent that we weren’t able to use any more due to the site’s closure. That’s all I really wanted. And that’s emphatically not what the site provides these days.
So between the change in atmosphere, the change in the way the whole site works and the whole Musk fiasco, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s simply not worth wasting time pissing around on Twitter any more — if indeed it ever was. Rather, I think it’s high time that I brought this blog back, since it’s a much better means for me to express myself — plus the comments section is a much nicer way to hold a conversation in most cases. (Unless those people find their way here, but you know how it is.)
So that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll be keeping my Twitter account open because it’s still useful for things like news aggregation and PR contacts, but pretty much all I’ll be posting on there is links to stuff I’ve done, either for work or for pleasure. When I want to actually talk about something, I’ll do it here, like in the good old days.
I’m not making any grand promises about posting frequency or anything like that, this is just going to be an “as and when I feel like it” sort of thing. I’m also not going to commit to doing silly comics or anything, even though I know one particular reader (whom I hope is doing well, given that I haven’t heard from her for a while) is a big fan! This is my scratch pad, my brain dump and my place to express myself. No “algorithm” rules the roost here, and as such it’s a much better means of getting to know me than the toxic bird site.
This is my last daily post on this blog, to coincide with the last hour of the last day of 2016. I’m not going to rule out posting on here again when I feel like it, but this is the last of my daily entries. I feel that the exercise has run its course, and I’m definitely satisfied with what I’ve accomplished over the last 2,541 days.
Why am I stopping now? Well, it’s part of a broader plan I outlined a few days ago. I want to unplug and get away from the constant noise of online culture in 2016. It stopped being fun a good while ago — roughly coinciding with the rise of the outrage brigade who love nothing more than using their social media clout to shame people for enjoying “problematic” material — but it’s also been becoming increasingly apparent that the reasons I’ve been keeping my social media accounts active for as long as I have simply don’t seem to be the reasons other people keep them active.
On previous occasions when I’ve considered deactivating my Facebook and Twitter accounts — Facebook in particular — the thing that has always stopped me is the thought that “oh, people won’t be able to get hold of me easily, since everyone uses Facebook nowadays rather than anything else.” But over time it’s become apparent that while everyone does indeed use Facebook, pretty much the last thing they use it for is keeping in touch with other people. Rather, the inherent encouragement of narcissism in modern social media encourages people to post everything about their lives — or rather, everything in a heavily edited, idealised version of their lives — in an attempt to make other people feel like they should be having more fun/sex/babies/delicious meals/strong opinions about Donald Trump. And while that occasionally leads to heated debates in comment sections, it very rarely seems to lead to good conversations.
Twitter comes at it from a different angle. I’ve heard Twitter described as being like going to a party where everyone is shouting things at the room in general hoping other people will come and join the conversation, and that’s a fairly apt description. The particular trouble with Twitter is that its original selling point — its 140-character limit, intended to encourage people to “microblog” rather than post walls of text — isn’t conducive to nuanced discussion and debate, which leads to particularly obnoxious behaviour when people of differing ideologies and/or opinions about which anime girl is hottest come into contact with one another.
In short, I’ve been finding social media to be more trouble than it’s worth, so I’m unplugging from the noise in the hope that those people who do value my friendship will make use of other, more private and personal means of contacting me rather than everything being aired in public. And this blog comes under that header, too.
This blog has been valuable “therapy” for me over the course of the last few years, which have been, to say the least, rather challenging and difficult for a variety of reasons. I’ve faced many obstacles — some of my own creation, some by other people being colossal jackasses and my not really having any power to do anything about that — and, while I wouldn’t say my life is where I want it to be in the slightest, I feel that I’ve grown stronger as a person as a result.
But I feel like I need to start a new chapter. Leave behind the past, and look forward to a hopefully brighter future. It’s not easy to shed emotional baggage — not to mention the physical baggage that mental stress can leave you with — but severing my ties with the past, be they social media accounts or indeed this blog, feels like the right thing to do right now.
I’m not disappearing entirely, mind you; as I mentioned in my previous post, I still intend to keep writing weekly on MoeGamer, which will become my main place to write about games I’ve found particularly interesting or exciting, so I encourage you to subscribe over there if you like what I’m doing. And for more general writing, I’m starting up a weekly TinyLetter — effectively a small-scale mailing list — for personal notes to those of you who have been kind enough to show me friendship and support over the last few years. If you’re interested, you can sign up for that here. (Those of you for whom I have email addresses already, I’ll be taking the liberty of signing you up automatically at some point on New Year’s Day; I hope you don’t mind, and if you do, please rest assured that if you decide you don’t want to receive my notes, you can unsubscribe easily.)
Aside from that, though, at this point in my life I feel like broader Internet culture just doesn’t hold the value it once did for me, so out the window the unnecessary crap goes for 2017. I’m not encouraging any of you to follow my lead and I’m certainly not casting any judgement on those of you who still find value in social media and Internet culture at large; I’m simply saying it’s not for me, and explaining where I’ll be going if you do want to find me.
If you’d like to stay in touch more privately, please either subscribe to my TinyLetter — which you can reply to just like a normal email — or drop me a message via my Get In Touch page with your email address and/or any other contact details you’d care to share.
For those who have supported this blog for any period of time — be you lurker or regular commenter — thank you, good night, and I wish you a happy, healthy and hearty New Year. Here’s to 2017 being a better year for everyone.
After some discussion with my friend Chris recently — partly inspired by my recent post on mobile phone apathy — I’ve made the not particularly difficult decision to try and “unplug” as much as possible from the general noise of the Internet in 2017.
And I’m talking about more than just stepping away from Twitter and Facebook like I have done a few times in the past, as positive as those experiences turned out to be for me. I’m talking about a pretty thorough purge, and a return to a simpler, quieter life with fewer external stressors.
You see, the allure of the Internet and its ability to connect people from all over the world has kind of worn off somewhat for me. The last few years have demonstrated that there are a significant number of people out there who are more interested in conflict, oneupmanship and narcissism than actual meaningful interaction. The fall from grace of the games press — and many game journalists’ pretty much unveiled hatred of their audiences — is just one of many examples of this, but the overall negativity that infuses what feels like the vast majority of online communications these days is just proving to be more trouble than it’s worth.
I don’t need that. It’s not adding anything to my life — nothing good, anyway — so, I figure, why continue to put up with it? There’s no need to.
As such, starting on New Year’s Day, I’m going to begin a process of unplugging as much as I possibly can. Twitter and Facebook are both going completely, since the annoyance both of those bring to my life far outweighs the benefits of both of them. More significantly, I’m planning on ditching the smartphone age in favour of an older, simpler phone that doesn’t bug me every five minutes with updates and notifications. At this point, I’m strongly considering picking up a second-hand N-Gage I’ve seen on Amazon, since that has the added benefit of being an underappreciated and increasingly rare gaming platform as well as a phone I very much enjoyed using when I originally had one.
I’m also going to draw my time with this blog to a close. I’m satisfied with what I’ve achieved here since I started, but the time has come to move on. I’m not going to give up regular writing, mind you; I’m still going to post weekly articles over on MoeGamer, since those have a clear focus, and I’m also intending to start a weekly TinyLetter as a more private, more personal substitute for my daily updates here. I’ll post details on how to sign up for that towards the end of the year, so those of you who want to continue to follow what I’m up to can do so.
I’ll be keeping more personal means of communication open. My email address and Google Hangouts accounts will still be active, as will my gaming accounts on Steam, Xbox Live and PSN. But the shouting into the void that is public social media will, hopefully, become a thing of the past. It’s no longer enjoyable, useful or fun, so I have no need for it.
I’m not going to put my personal email, Google Hangouts and gaming account addresses in this post for obvious reasons, but if you are interested in staying in touch via any of these means, please feel free to drop me a line via my Contact page explaining who you are and how you know me. If we’ve chatted before in the past, great, no problem; if we’ve never spoken before, however, please do include a bit about yourself in your message.
That’s the plan, then. And I anticipate that it will lead to a happier, more peaceful and less stressful 2017 for me. At least I hope it does, anyway!
