Just recently at the day job we’ve been having some Thoughts about using social media for marketing. I won’t go into the details for obvious reasons, and I will note that everything I say here is my own opinion and no-one else’s. But I feel like the age of social media marketing is coming to a close.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve never been on board with social media marketing from a consumer’s perspective. Facebook went from being tolerable to almost unusable once The Brandsâ„¢ arrived, and it’s only gotten worse year after year. And back when I was an active user of Twitter, I not only didn’t follow any Brandsâ„¢, I actively went out of my way to block any that ended up in my feed through “promoted” tweets or whatever.
Y’see, I’ve always had the somewhat controversial viewpoint that social media is best used for socialising. I used to actually quite enjoy using Facebook when it was a place to interact with friends. Likewise Twitter used to be a ton of fun when it was just people hanging out and shooting the breeze. But today? Both of those platforms are nigh-unusable for different reasons. And with people jumping ship from both, I struggle to see how their usefulness as marketing tools can continue.
This comes particularly to mind after the recent news that the “live service” game Concord has taken the unprecedented step of not only ceasing its online features, but actively refunding anyone who bought the game just 11 days after it hit store shelves. The writing was already on the wall for it; reports shortly after its launch suggested it had made “just” $1 million and only about 25,000 sales; these might seem like big numbers, but they really aren’t in today’s gaming industry, particularly towards the big-budget end of things, which is the space Concord occupies.
This occurrence got me thinking: how much of Concord’s disastrous launch was down to the troubled landscape of social media today? A few years back, a big game launch like this would be accompanied by a frenzied Twitter campaign in an attempt to drive “organic” (ugh) word-of-mouth promotion. To put it in non-marketing speak, the game itself would post something on social media, then other people would share it, gradually spreading word of the game through shares, replies and retweets.
Today, we live in a world where Twitter is fast becoming a dirty word, as Elon Musk’s “X”, as Twitter is now known, is increasingly becoming prone to the “Nazi Bar Problem“, since his constant bleating about “free speech” and “wokeness” has meant pretty much the only people left there now are some of the absolute worst dregs of humanity imaginable. It’s no longer fun or useful to the vast majority of people who used to hang out there, so a lot of people have jumped ship — either abandoning social media entirely, or moving to alternative platforms such as BlueSky. So one has to wonder how much value there is in marketing to what is rapidly looking like a room full of Nazis.
The same can often feel like it’s true of other platforms that are less of a “problem”. I talked recently about the issues we had attempting to enforce rules more specifically on a Discord I help manage, and it’s hard not to think about that “Nazi Bar Problem”. We don’t have a problem with “Nazis” as such (the few who have shown inclinations in that vague direction have been shown the door) but there are a few people who have become so entrenched that they’re a problem… and it’s honestly making us wonder if the time, effort and mental health expended on said server is worth it.
Can a product or Brandâ„¢ survive without social media? The assumption has always been “no”, but like I said above, I’ve found myself actively repulsed by Brandâ„¢ presences on social media for the most part, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Sure, there are some Brandâ„¢ accounts that post interesting things — and the one I’m in charge of I try and make an effort to use in such a manner — but are they really adding any value?
I’m not convinced they are. We are living in a peculiar time, and I don’t think anyone quite knows what’s going to happen next.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
And not in the way you might be thinking. Okay, there are times when someone getting popular or enjoying some success with something leads to them becoming a prick, but that is not what I’d like to talk about today. I’d like to talk about life as a small-scale creative person on the Internet, and what happens when something you produce manages to extend far outside of its usual audience.
I’m prompted to talk about this as a result of the thoroughly lovely RoseTintedSpectrum’s recent video on the first series of beloved video game TV show GamesMaster, which, to put it mildly, has been doing numbers since he released it. If you haven’t watched it yet, I highly recommend giving it a look:
What we’ve all been noticing since the video started blowing up, however, is how much more frequent comments from complete arseholes become once you cross a particular popularity threshold. Not necessarily comments that are being directly insulting to the video maker, but comments from people who are just being dickish. People who use terms like “woketard”. People who think the ’90s was a utopia where white people flourished and you never, ever had to look at those filthy Muslims. You know the sort of people. The same sort of people who cry “DEI” anyone someone with a slight tan appears on screen.
When this first started happening, we were discussing the phenomenon in a Discord server that hosts a number of UK-based retro gaming and retro tech YouTubers, and we all had similar stories to share. There comes a point, it seems, usually after you cross the 1,000 views mark, where there’s a marked uptick in comments from twats.
It makes sense when you think about it. A video blowing up and getting a lot of views means that it’s being pushed by the ever-mysterious YouTube Algorithm to people beyond your usual audience and subscriber base, which means people from circles you might not normally mix (or want to associate) with may start stopping by. And boy, do they love to hear themselves talk.
I had something similar a while back when I had my own video “blow up”. It was this one, a video I’m still pretty pleased with, but which left me feeling well and truly vindicated in just making videos about what pleases me, rather than what is guaranteed to be “popular”.
Because what no-one tells you about getting popular and suddenly attracting all these complete penii is that it’s genuinely stressful and often quite upsetting. I got to a point where I had to “pause” comments on the video above because the influx of them was stressing me out so much. And I wasn’t even getting nearly as many dickheads as Rosie is getting on his video. It was just overwhelming, and not in a good way; I did not like it at all.
The same is true for anything tangentially related to social media or online presence. Post something — be it picture, video, blog post, article, whatever — that manages to get a significant reach, and it’s seemingly inevitable that you’ll have to deal with dickheads. This is, of course, frustrating, because one would hope that it’s possible to get a significant reach on something without attracting the very dregs of Internet society, but with every “success story” like the ones I’ve described above, it seems increasingly inevitable that the dickheads? Oh they will come. They will come in droves.
I wonder how many people have been put off from a potential career of making creative things online by this sort of thing. I guess after a certain point you start to get used to it and be able to tune things out — and once you reach a certain size as an online personality, you can start hiring staff to take care of things like the comments section for you, so you can focus exclusively on actually making the videos.
But for everyone who gets to the point where they’re able to hire a staff, I’m sure there are myriad more who gave up the first time they saw mild success, because the dickheads came. And I can’t help thinking that’s a real shame. Online culture shouldn’t have come to this. But it has, and we just have to live with it, it seems, because no-one seems in a particular hurry to do anything about it.
Thank heavens for YouTube’s “Hide user from channel” setting, at least, which means the dickhead of your choice is banished to the abyss; you’ll never see them in your comments section again, and neither will the rest of your audience — but, here’s the fun bit: they’re still able to rage impotently at you, never knowing that you’ve effectively “blocked” them because YouTube doesn’t tell them that.
This is the one bit of YouTube I can honestly say is absolutely masterful. There are few things better than knowing that there are dickheads who think they’re posting amazing putdowns of your latest work, only for their comments to be silently banished to the abyss before they get anywhere near you.
Anyway, the Internet sucks, but go subscribe to Rosie ’cause he makes good vids. Ta-ra.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
There’s some nasty shit going on in the world right now. Without getting bogged down in the details, there are some vicious riots going on “Up North” in this green and pleasant land, following the horrible killing of several young girls at their dance class.
It’s hard to understand quite how outrage over the murders has escalated to what it is, but it’s fair to say that things have gotten A Bit Racist, to say the least. Last I heard of the situation, a Holiday Inn Express that was supposedly housing immigrants — immigrants completely unrelated to the murders, I might add — was besieged by exactly the sort of people you’re probably picturing when talking about people who are A Bit Racist Against Immigrants.
I won’t dwell on the situation because I haven’t read up much on it, so I’ll refrain from commenting further about specifics. But it’s brought something into focus for me which is a tad worrying: the fact that despite how we’re supposedly a lot more tolerant, progressive and understanding these days, as a society, a lot more of this horrible shit appears to be happening.
Whether it’s racist riots against people who had nothing to do with a horrible crime, transphobia at the Olympics (against someone who isn’t actually trans) or just general foul behaviour and intolerance, we seem to have hit something of a bump in the road in attempting to create a 21st century utopia.
Who am I kidding; we absolutely were not on the road to a utopia. Everything has been going to shit for a while, so it’s perhaps not altogether surprising that people are starting to act up, even if their behaviour and attitudes are completely misdirected. So I have to ask myself: was ignorance actually bliss?
I think back to my time living through the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s and I don’t remember ever feeling the sense of existential anxiety and dread over the world that I do these days. It’s entirely possible that this was entirely due to our collective ignorance of various groups of people who were downtrodden and oppressed, which of course carries its own problems, but I don’t remember encountering anywhere near the sort of outright hatred that is expressed today towards certain groups.
And it wasn’t as if we weren’t aware of the people who come in for the brunt of the abuse today. I just legitimately don’t remember the hatred being anywhere near as vicious as it is today.
At least some of that is down to social media, of course. It’s entirely possible that hatred like this was going on, but no-one saw it because not everyone had the means to plaster all their odious beliefs over every available space online. There was no “collective public space” like Twitter once was (and I don’t think it is that any more, since a significant portion of people have abandoned it completely, and the most active of those remaining tend to veer fairly hard right) and so people tended to stick to their own communities.
On the one hand, that probably allowed hate groups to thrive in private; on the other, well, you can see the result of everyone being thrown together just from a casual glance at Twitter on any given day. It’s not pretty.
Part of the existential anxiety and dread I feel over this whole situation is whether or not I “should” be doing something more, or even if that’s possible. I’ve always settled for some variation of “treat others as you would like to be treated”, and even take that as far as not commenting mean things on YouTube videos I really dislike (because I hate it when I get horrible comments). But is that really enough today? And if not, what can one do, other than simply actively not be a racist transphobic shit, and not go deliberately seeking fights?
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
I have little to no time for cynical negativity, and I’ve felt this way for quite some time. I’ve been trying to pin down exactly why I feel like I can’t participate in a conversation where one or more of the participants has switched to “cynical negativity” mode, and I think I’ve just answered my own question: it’s because it feels like those who are being negative are trying to close the conversation.
I don’t always mean literally, as in “let’s not talk about this any more”, but I tend to find that a negative opinion about something almost certainly stops people from wanting to pipe up and say “actually, I liked it”, because these days that often seems to lead to an unnecessarily heated argument. Both sides become entrenched in their respective positions, and both inevitably come out of the encounter feeling worse about the other person.
I know. I have been there on a frustrating number of occasions. There are Discord servers that I have come to feel less than welcome in because I liked something that someone with a louder voice than me didn’t. And I feel it’s genuinely quite hard to find a place where you can just go and be enthusiastic about something any more, without some killjoy jumping in and rattling off a laundry list of its “flaws”. And the negative one always seems to come off better than someone who feels positively about something — even when the positive one clearly knows a lot more about the thing in question.
Once someone has opened that initial negativity valve, one of two things tends to happen: 1) the conversation ends, with the positive person left feeling like they can no longer talk about something they like, or 2) other people, some of whom have no experience with the thing under discussion, feel emboldened to jump on board with the person being negative, leaving the positive person feeling like they’re being ganged up on.
There are responses to this, and I’ve heard them all.
“If you really love something, you criticise it.” That may be true, but “criticising it” is not the same as shitting all over it and, in some cases, casting aspersions on those who do like it.
“Stop being so defensive.” I am defensive because you are attacking something that is important to me.
“People are allowed to have different opinions.” If that is the case, why do I now feel like I cannot open my mouth and express my support for the thing that “the room” has now decided is “bad”?
“Stop playing the victim.” I’m sorry, but after probably over a decade of this at this point — of feeling like I have no place to really “belong” — I feel somewhat hard done by.
More than anything, though, it’s just boring. I know we can all have a good laugh at the creative ways in which people talk about things they dislike — it’s a lot harder to be “amusing” when you’re being positive, it seems — but when no-one seems to like anything any more, it becomes extremely tiresome.
I’m not saying no-one is allowed to dislike things. I’m not saying no-one is allowed to hate things with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns. I’m saying I wish people would just be a little more considerate of those who like things, and want nothing more than to be able to talk about the things they like with other people.
Someone liking or loving something is an opportunity to learn and grow. Even if you end up not feeling the same way about the thing in question, you can learn something about the person you were talking to, and why the thing might be important to them. Meanwhile, if you close them down by saying you hate the thing before they’ve even had a chance to express themselves fully, that’s a potential relationship that is never going to go anywhere.
I feel bad that I even have to justify this. But with every passing day, I feel more and more alienated from people who should, in theory, be my friends, based on our shared interests. But when I’m confronted with negativity, I don’t feel welcome. I don’t feel like anyone wants to understand me. And I don’t feel like anyone wants to be my friend.
That’s a really shitty way to be feeling, let me tell you. And I hope it never happens to you.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
A lot has been made about the supposed proliferation of “fake news” and, regrettably, because discussion about it started around the time of Trump’s last ascendancy (and to quite a significant degree from the Trump camp), not everyone takes the concept entirely seriously. But it’s definitely something that happens, and it’s making the Web less and less useful.
Earlier today, a member of a Discord I’m in posted a link to the following tweet:
The screenshots are of Windows Defender supposedly finding a plain text file containing nothing but the text “This content is no longer available.” to be a piece of malware — specifically a Trojan called Casdet!rfn. Obviously a plain text file is not malware, so this is ridiculous, and thus Microsoft must have made a silly mistake and we can all laugh at them, ho ho ho.
I tried it.
Windows Defender did not find it to be malware.
I Googled it and found several outlets reporting on this “story”, including some that really should know better (looking at you, Tom’s Hardware) — and not one of them had seemingly put in the minimal amount of effort required to verify that this was actually a thing. In other words, none of them had done what I did above: recreate the situation by composing a blank text file, putting the words “This content is no longer available.” in it and then scanning it with Windows Defender. A two-minute job, tops.
No, instead the most rigour anyone put in was to look at the replies to the Twitter post, which are fairly slim in number, making me wonder exactly how this misinformation had spread in the first place. The tweet in question has nearly 700,000 views, though only 800 of whatever the Muskrat is calling “Retweets” this week, suggesting the majority of its minor virality has come about through situations exactly like the one I describe above: people sharing it via means other than Twitter.
Now, I don’t blame the chap on Discord. He was just sharing something he thought was funny. I don’t even blame the original Tweeter, because it’s entirely possible that this was true once and it was quietly fixed in a Windows update. But I do blame all these people, and Google.
Not only for reporting on this without doing the absolute bare minimum of fact-checking, but for not correcting these stories if indeed it was once true and now is no longer correct.
Either way, the result is the same: a lot of misinformation gets spread very easily, often by people who have no ill intent. It’s not the fault of the people who share this stuff — although I personally would check any sort of claim like this before resharing it myself — but it absolutely is the fault of outlets authoritatively sharing this as “news” without doing any sort of research beyond looking at a few Twitter posts.
Sadly, this is what “news” is these days. Get a good hook for a story that might be the slightest bit clickable and/or shareable, then write it up (with at least 600 words for SEO purposes, of course) and just make some shit up in the middle if you need to. Doesn’t matter if the story is true or not; by the time people have clicked or shared, the article has done its job, and it doesn’t matter if anyone twigs that it’s bollocks or not.
In some respects, I’m sad that I’m no longer working the games journalism beat. But in others, I know that if I was still a newshound, I’d likely be gently encouraged into this sort of odious practice in order to get the numbers up.
I had more integrity and rigour when I was covering stuff for GamePro and USgamer. I’d find stories, research them myself and report on them only when I was good and sure that there actually was a story there. And I didn’t have to make a big deal out of doing that at the time, because that was the expectation for someone working a News Editor position.
Now? Engagement above all. Who cares if something is true? Numbers go big, suits stay happy. Fuck the actual audience who might want the publications they read to be reliable and trustworthy; they are, after all, the least important part of the whole equation these days.
If you’re looking for the Web as it once was, then I’m sorry to inform you that This content is no longer available.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
See? I told you I’d be back. And I thought I’d talk about something other than Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail. Specifically, as the title says, I want to talk about how trends have made the Internet boring. Or perhaps more accurately, why everyone all wanting to do the same thing all at once makes things deathly boring.
There are a few practical examples I’d like to give. First is a YouTube channel I was introduced to recently called Obscurest Vinyl. This channel is run by a designer and musician who found some joy in creating fake record sleeves for songs with names you definitely wouldn’t have gotten away with in the eras they’re parodying. Songs like the wonderful Pullin’ Out My Pubes (She Loves Me Not) by The Sticky Sweethearts:
You’ll notice from that video that the record label now has some music attached to it. I was initially a little perturbed to discover that the person behind the Obscurest Vinyl YouTube channel had been using AI music generation to create the tracks, though my mind was set somewhat at rest by how he had written the lyrics (which are generally far too offensive to be the product of the typically rather po-faced Large Language Model AI bots) and tinkered with the initial output to make it flow properly, incorporate all the filthy language and sound consistent with the other works from the same fictional “artists” on the channel.
Of course, what the YouTube algorithm then did was go “oh, you watched a video about a fake record with lyrics about someone gluing their balls to their butthole, HERE, HAVE A MILLION MORE OF THEM”. And it became very apparent that Obscurest Vinyl has a lot of copycats out there, none of which have anywhere near the same magic; these other channels are just trying to ride a trend.
This, of course, is symptomatic of one of the main things that is killing the Web right now: excessive Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. Have you ever searched for some information on something, only to find a billion unrelated websites all magically having articles headlined “What Time Is The Superbowl On?” or “Where Do You Unlock Pictomancer in Final Fantasy XIV?” That’s SEO at work, and that’s a problem that is only getting worse with the amount of AI sludge that is being fed into the Internet at large. Sites want quick and easy clicks, so they look at what people are searching for — the trends of the hour — then provide a hyper-specific article about the thing.
Helpful? Arguable. I hate it, because I’d rather have the information directly from the original source — in the latter case above, for example, it took me a fair bit of scrolling before I got past all the websites jockeying for SEO juice to the actual website for Final Fantasy XIV, the thing I was looking for.
More than being frustrating if you want the information straight from the horse’s mouth, it just makes the Web boring as fuck, because every site (including a lot that should really know better) are doing the exact same thing. Daily Wordle solutions. Individual articles for things that would have been much better incorporated into an FAQ. Outright copying and plagiarism of other sites. It really is a shame to see what online media has become — and frustrating to see that certain portions of the creative types on sites such as YouTube are more obsessed in chasing trends with transparently copycat material rather than, you know, being creative.
I don’t know what the endgame of all this is. I hope we’re in a “things will get worse before they get better” kind of situation, but honestly right now, it feels unlikely that the “get better” part will happen. The Web gets demonstrably worse, less useful and less fun day by day. And we’ve all let it happen. I don’t know if we can undo that.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
I’m compelled to write today by the thoroughly lovely Neil and Dave of the This Week in Retro podcast, who had a discussion about “the youth of today”, and how some parents are concerned that their children spend the vast majority of their time on an endless cycle of Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft, perhaps punctuated by social media in between times. The show and its discussion can be found below:
People who grew up pre-Internet doubtless all have their own experiences to share. The listener who wrote in with the question described how while they did spend time with their computer playing games, they also played outside, rode their BMX bike and all manner of other things, while both Neil and Dave described their own experiences as being a bit different, both from one another and from the listener’s recollection. So I thought I’d share my own experiences, with the benefit of hindsight.
I grew up in a country village that, at the time I lived there, had somewhere between 800 and 1,000 people living there. It was seven miles away from the nearest town, there was no bus service unless you went to the next village over (and even then, it was pretty much a “once a week” sort of affair) and… I guess you could look upon it as either being ideal or terrible for growing up in. Ideal because it was quiet, safe and full of places to go on childish “adventures”; terrible because, particularly once I reached adolescence, all of my friends were a car journey away.
I went back and forth on my feelings about living in that village. When I was of primary school age, I attended the village school, and as such my social circle was pretty much all people who lived nearby. I had a small group of friends, only one or two of whom I actually went to see outside of school time, but mostly kept myself to myself. In retrospect, my relative lack of socialisation compared to some of my peers was likely down to the social anxiety I felt as a result of my then-undiagnosed autistic spectrum condition.
But at the time, I didn’t really begrudge living in the village. I knew it was a nice place, that I lived in a nice house with supportive parents and a stable home life. I enjoyed when my grandparents came to visit and we’d go for a walk, inevitably to landmarks around the village that had acquired nicknames; “The Kissing Gate” (one of those awkward gates into a farmer’s field), “The Brook” (a pathetic little stream that, these days, has mostly dried up and smells awful), “The Bullocks” (the farmer’s field beyond The Kissing Gate that sometimes, but not always, had bulls in it). Looking back on it now, I have lots of fond memories.
When I entered my teens and started attending school in the aforementioned town seven miles away, my feelings changed a bit. While I was still somewhat anxious about social situations, I started to feel a bit more left out. As I grew older, I started to feel like there were lots of things that I couldn’t do because I didn’t live close enough. These feelings persisted until I turned 17, passed my driving test and suddenly had a lot more independence… so long as my Mum didn’t mind me borrowing her car of an evening.
I promise I’m getting to the video games.
Point is, I don’t remember spending a lot of time as a kid or a teen “playing outside”. I didn’t learn to ride a bike until well after many of my peers — memorably, I suffered a rather large setback on my initial efforts when I came a cropper and skidded along a rough concrete farm road, shearing a significant chunk of skin off my legs and arms, which made me a little hesitant to try again for a while — and I didn’t spend much time with many of my peers, except on rare occasions when I’d go over to a friend’s house for one reason or another.
Throughout all that time, I was fascinated with computers. Not just games, but computers in general. I knew my Dad worked for IBM, but didn’t really know what he actually did (and still to this day don’t think I could actually tell you). I knew my brother and Dad both contributed to an Atari computer magazine that we got regularly known as Page 6. And I knew all of my family, at one point or another, were keen computer users for various reasons. My Dad used it for “serious” software and subLOGIC’s Flight Simulator II (which he insisted was “not a game” and was thus still counted under the “serious software” category”); my Mum liked the occasional blast on Millipede and Space Invaders; my brother was the one who was into games, though he had a much more active social life than I did, helped at least partly by being ten years my senior.
Since I determined quite early on that I rather enjoyed — or at least felt most comfortable — in solitude, I was grateful for the company of the computers of our household: initially the Atari 8-bit and ST, then later the MS-DOS and Windows 3.1/95/98 PCs. In the early days of the Atari 8-bit, I devoured books and magazines about the computer, typing in listings and learning how to program in BASIC myself. I never really got what I’d call good at it, but I developed a basic (no pun intended) competence that was greater than that of someone who just used their computer to play games.
But I also played games. A lot of games. I learned a lot from those games, too. Text adventures helped me with my reading (and, indirectly, my writing); keyboard-based games played a significant role in developing the typing skills I still have to this day; puzzle games helped me with my general intelligence and problem-solving; action games helped me develop my imagination and my motor skills.
It’s stereotypical to say that “games help with hand-eye coordination”, but I was diagnosed dyspraxic in primary school, which basically meant I was a bit clumsy with certain things; video games helped me feel like I was competent at something, even if I was unable to hold a pencil “properly”. Playing games, and more broadly “going on the computer”, was important to me. It felt like it was something I could enjoy without compromise; I didn’t feel like I had to make any sort of adjustments, or have people “go easy on me” as I did in activities like sports. It was just something for me to enjoy. And, as I moved into my teens and broadened my circle of friends at secondary school, they proved to be a good backdrop for social interactions, too.
More often than not, if I went over to a friend’s house or had a friend over to mine, we would spend our time playing games together, or at the very least just using the computer. I have fond memories of spending time with several friends just messing around with speech synthesis programs on the Atari ST and Amiga, and even programming in STOS, a dialect of BASIC for the Atari ST, or making silly in-joke games with Clickteam’s wonderful Klik and Play and The Games Factory. I was happy that my formerly solitary activity was something I could share my enjoyment of with others.
This continued as I came to the end of my time at school and moved into university. I made new friends, at least partly through computing and video games, and many of those folks are people I still make an effort to spend time with today — even if sometimes that effort doesn’t feel like it’s reciprocated with quite the same enthusiasm. Computing and gaming remained something that was important to me, even as the Internet came into its mainstream ascendancy in the late 1990s.
I have some fond memories of those early days of the Internet. Chatting with strangers on CompuServe’s “CB Simulator”, aka just a public chatroom. Posting messages on CompuServe’s GAMERS forum, which eventually let to me earning $200 for making ten Wolfenstein 3-D levels that were included in an official expansion pack. Chatting with my friends from my course on MSN Messenger. Randomly getting into a conversation with a young woman on AOL Instant Messenger, only to discover that, completely by chance, she was the housemate of one of my existing friends.
Computing was always there as part of my life, but I think a key difference between then and now is that in my formative years, it was there as a backdrop to socialisation, rather than the means of socialisation itself. The This Week in Retro listener commented that their children feel genuine anxiety and FOMO (“Fear Of Missing Out”) if they have gaming time privileges revoked for whatever reason, because rather than Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft being the backdrop for their socialisation, those activities are the socialisation.
There’s also social media to take into account. I am genuinely glad that social media did not exist when I was a child, because I’m not sure I would have made it through my adolescence intact. Sure, there are positive aspects to it, such as being able to reconnect with people you haven’t spoken to for a long time, but there’s also the insidiously manipulative nature of all the major platforms today, and how none of them are really concerned with being a platform for communication; they are, instead, platforms for advertising.
The thing that really makes me feel like social media may well have done me in, though, is how easy it is for it to be used for bullying. I suffered a fairly significant amount of bullying throughout both my primary and secondary school life, and it was hell. It left me wary of trusting people; it made me frustrated about communicating with others; it made me feel like it was, at times, simply not worth making the effort to interact with people.
For a long time, I used to say that the Internet allowed me to “be myself” for the first time… well, ever, really. I could find like-minded people who understood me and respected me for who I was, and I felt like I was among friends. I don’t feel that way any more; nowadays, I feel the same way about online interactions as I do about interacting with real strangers: genuine anxiety and fear. I dread getting notifications in apps or on websites where I’ve posted something publicly. And yet, I still do it — here I am, after all — because I feel like it’s important to not let the bullies win, whether they’re real or imagined. I need to feel like I can still express myself the way I want to express myself; to enthuse about the things I want to enthuse about. That’s why I write here and on MoeGamer, and why I make videos over on my YouTube channel.
Even then, though, I feel a lot of frustration, because I know a significant portion of the world looks on the Internet, social media and general social interactions in a different way to me. That can often leave me feeling lonely and isolated. But the one thing I’ve always had as a constant is being able to immerse myself in a video game or other activity on the computer, and feel like I am, for once, at peace — even if, with each passing year, it feels like it’s getting harder to share that haven of peace with others.
That went a tad deeper than I perhaps thought, and I’m not sure I have an answer to the original poster’s questions or concerns. I do know, however, that spending time on the computer isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, particularly when it brings someone comfort and stability. It’s when that “safe” activity starts to get “unsafe” things encroaching on it that you need to perhaps take action — but that’s going to be something that is different for everyone. For me, it’s meant largely removing myself from the public-facing part of the Internet except in places where I can very much control and curate my experience, and continuing to enjoy those things that I always have enjoyed in peace and quiet. No video game ever betrayed me, after all.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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.
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.
