1692: The Blackout

I’ve decided to go through with a week-long social media blackout. (By “social media” I mean “Twitter and Facebook”, just to clarify; I’m not breaking my own rules by posting here.)

I was originally intending to start it off on Monday, but then yet more nonsense in the whole Zoe Quinn thing kicked off this morning and I just didn’t want anything to do with it whatsoever — either the inevitable abuse she would receive for the things she was posting, or the unbearable smugness of her supporters.

So I started it today, cold turkey. And I’m serious about it. I deleted the Facebook and Twitter apps from my phone. I logged out of the sites on all my browsers. I removed the bookmarks from Chrome, the browser I use most frequently. And I haven’t looked at either all day.

While I won’t pretend I haven’t felt a few urges to pop my head in and have a look, I haven’t acted on these urges at all. I haven’t felt the need to. I know that, going by what I saw this morning, something would just irritate and annoy me. And I don’t need that.

I’m not going to cut myself off completely, though. For the week, my online socialisation will be through email, instant messaging (Google Hangouts), comments on this site and the Squadron of Shame forums. All of these are environments where I have much greater control over my socialisation, and which are populated by far smaller groups of people. And they are all people with whom I know I get on and can enjoy conversation with.

One may argue that there’s a danger of creating an echo chamber when you simply surround yourself with people that you’re 100% comfortable with, but in reality it’s actually rather desirable to have a friendship group that understands you. It’s an admirable goal to attempt to understand and ingratiate yourself with groups that you don’t know a lot about, or whom you probably wouldn’t hang out with in “real life”, but eventually it just all starts to feel a bit high school, what with all the cliques, cool kids and groups that end up being the butt of everyone’s jokes — often without justification.

Ponder how your friendships work in real life. Chances are that over your lifespan, you’ve met a significant number of people. Some of these became friends because you had things in common or enjoyed spending time together. As time passes, the number of true friends you likely have has probably dwindled as everyone’s lives start to move in different directions. That’s a bit sad when it means you lose touch with people with whom you used to spend a lot of time, but it’s also part of the natural “filtering process” our real-life social lives go through over time.

With social media, this filtering doesn’t happen automatically, so unless you take the time to actually go through and prune your friend and follower lists every so often, over time the noise just builds and builds and builds, often with disparate groups ending up butting heads with one another in your timeline or news feed. If you stand on the periphery of a few groups that, for whatever reason, end up at each other’s throats, it can put you in a very awkward and undesirable situation, as we’ve seen with the whole “Gamergate” thing over the last week or so. To use my own personal situation, I identify with the games journalists who are undoubtedly frustrated at the constant accusations of “corruption” being levelled at them, but at the same time I also identify with the gamers who are sick of journalists talking down to them as if they’re some sort of superior moral arbiters. Both sides say and do some regrettable things, and even if you’re not directly involved — as I’ve taken care not to be — it can be anxiety-inducing to see what’s going on.

That’s not what the original promise of social media was. I recall signing up for Facebook for the first time and being amazed by the prospect of being able to easily stay in touch with people. Twitter, meanwhile helped me make a ton of new friends and discover people with common interests all over the world. Since I first signed up for both of them, though, their place in society has changed; Facebook has become little more than a link repository for endless “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!” clickbait bullshit, while Twitter has become a place where they who shout the loudest get to be “right”, and whoever is right gets to declare anyone who disagrees with them as some sort of awful deviant.

As such, then, we come to my blackout. I feel positive that it will have a good effect on my mental health. And when it comes to next weekend, I’ll make some more permanent decisions about my online existence.

I may have already made up my mind. But we’ll see.

1691: Reborn

I had one of those curious epiphanies on the way home. You know the ones. Or perhaps you don’t.

Anyway, I digress.

My epiphany was that I felt like a new person today. I felt like I was in the middle of a new beginning, like I was getting a chance to pretty much “start over” and try again.

Of course, this isn’t strictly true, what with me being 33 and thus on that ever-downward slope towards middle age, old age and eventual death rather than a fresh-faced (I’m not sure I was ever fresh-faced) youth in my early twenties looking forward to the future. But I’m glad I did get this new chance to start again, and I don’t intend to squander it.

The trigger for feeling this way is, of course, the fact that I really have made a new beginning by starting a new job and hopefully a new career. In just two weeks on the job, I feel like I’ve made some new friends, learned some new skills and made a good first impression.

And it’s put a lot of things in perspective, too. Most prominently, my feelings surrounding the echo chamber of social media.

My typical working day now looks very different to how it did when I was working from home. I no longer have Twitter perpetually open on screen or on my phone; I don’t check Facebook at all; Google+ has fallen totally by the wayside, particularly since the Squadron of Shame jumped ship to its own forum a while back; and I spend most of my time either actually doing work, interacting with people through internal emails or speaking with them face-to-face.

And it’s blissful. Blissful, I tell you. You might call it wilfully shutting out issues that need to be addressed; I call it a haven of calm, and I can already feel my mental health improving because of it.

Being constantly bombarded with the noise of social media at all hours of the day — as I voluntarily subjected myself to when I was working from home — is actively stressful, anxiety-inducing and even depressing. It shouldn’t be — it should be a positive thing — but it is.

Part of this is down to who you follow, of course — like real life, putting the people you interact with regularly through a rigorous filtering process until you’re left with the people you genuinely like is important — but with the nature of modern social media, sometimes you get things thrust in your face without you going looking for them. The clearest example is Twitter’s Retweets, which can expose you to people and opinions so far divergent from your own as to create genuine anxiety (and also people who go on to become firm friends, it must also be said), but it also happens whenever Facebook makes one of its inexplicable decisions to show you a post from someone you don’t know that one of your friends commented “lol” on forty-seven comments back from where the argument is now raging.

This is why I’m enjoying the peace and quiet of not being permanently plugged in to social media, and why I feel like a new person. I can switch off, focus on the people around me and the work I’m supposed to be doing, and I can enjoy it. It’s pleasant. Very pleasant indeed. And it makes me wonder why the hell I’ve been voluntarily putting myself through all this for the last few years.

And this doesn’t mean that I’ve lost interest in the things I previously immersed myself in. On the contrary, it means I can just enjoy them for what they are. I can enjoy games purely on the virtue of them being great games; I don’t have to give a shit about whether The Internet thinks something I enjoy is terrible and wrong, or whether I find the latest indie darling to actually be rather tedious.

In short, I feel like my rebirth has been a wonderful thing all round, really. I’m still in the honeymoon period, of course, and I’m sure my new life will bring with it a torrent of new things to be anxious about, but for now I’m enjoying it very much indeed; long may it continue.

1679: Countdown

Tomorrow is a bank holiday here in the UK — a public holiday to you Americans; I’m not entirely sure why we place so much emphasis on the “bank” part, aside from the fact that it means the banks are usually shut — and also my last day of “freedom” before I become a cog in the corporate machine.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m actually quite looking forward to starting my new job. It’s a daunting prospect, of course — it’s a new place of work, new people to work alongside, a new role and a whole new industry to be a part of — but it’s something that I’m eagerly anticipating, rather than dreading. Why? Well, partly because it’s something new to do, and something that will help me feel like I’m leading a more “normal” existence — as pleasant as the freedom of working from home can be, it’s a lonely existence that can become surprisingly stressful and trying after a while, particularly when you have no-one around you to bounce ideas off or just vent a bit of stress — and actually building a career rather than just constantly treading water.

The other reason is something that’s become readily apparent since I stepped back from the games industry. In fact, it was already becoming apparent when I was still involved with it. And that “something” is the confrontation that seems to be at the heart of the various parts of the industry’s interactions with one another on a daily basis.

Frankly I don’t want to get into a discussion of what’s been going on recently because it’s all been done to death elsewhere, and it tends to lead to frayed tempers on all sides. If you’re that curious, I’ll point out that it started here, passed through here and will hopefully end here and leave you to make your own mind up, perhaps with some of your own research filling in the blanks. If you’re shocked at what you read — if indeed you can be bothered to read all of it, since there’s a whole lot there — then good, you should be; there are plenty of things under discussion that need examining without one side complaining about “social justice warriors” and the other complaining about “neckbeards”. But unfortunately that’s never going to happen because the games industry has a collective mental age of about 14 — and yes, I count all sides of the debacle in this group in this instance — and is thus unable to discuss anything reasonably or rationally without immediately jumping to the most extreme viewpoints possible.

I’m happy to be out of it, frankly. My new job may be in a somewhat more stereotypically “boring” sector — utilities — but I can pretty much guarantee that said “boringness” (and I use that term relative to the dynamism of the games industry) will bring with it a lovely atmosphere of calm in which people don’t feel the need to aggressively state and restate their views on a daily basis; in which Internet hate mobs aren’t dispatched to harass and belittle other people; in which I can just get on with my work, come home in the evening, switch off and just enjoy some video games.

Two more days to go then. Hopefully my posts towards the end of this week will continue with a positive outlook!

1676: Cleaning Up

Following yesterday’s post, I’ve been having a social media cleanup. This started with the unfollowing of about a hundred people last night — some of which I felt a bit guilty about, as I’d previously considered them friends; in other cases, they were former colleagues that I’d thought I might stay in touch with. That already helped a great deal, but there was still some unwanted noise on my feed, largely through retweets and Twitter’s irritating new habit of adding other people’s favourites and random tweets from other people’s followers to your timeline. Those people were swiftly blocked so hopefully I will never have to encounter them ever again.

All this may seem somewhat harsh, particularly for a platform as open and public as Twitter is. But some reflection has revealed to me that it’s really the only way to handle it and stay sane. And it’s not, in fact, all that harsh at all, really, when you compare it to real life: after all, we carefully cultivate our real-life friendship groups and, over time, tend to whittle them down to groups of people that we particularly like, enjoy spending time with and have something in common with. We — well, I — don’t try to be friends with people just because I feel that I “should” be friends with this person. That’s high school stuff, trying to get “in” with the gang of cool kids; that way lies only madness, or at the very least a life where you’re unwilling to be able to just be yourself with confidence.

And so Twitter is the same for me, now, particularly now I don’t “need” it for industry networking and the like. My Following list has been whittled down to the people I actually enjoy interacting with — a healthy mix of game enthusiasts, game developers whom I have some sort of personal connection with (even if that’s just having met them and enjoyed a chat with them), anime fans, and a few people I know in “real life”. I’m no longer following people I feel “obliged” to follow — people who are often held up on a pedestal as being “important” to some cause or another — and I’m not following any celebrities. Insufferable arseholes who get retweeted into my feed are quickly blocked without mercy — no sense feeling guilty about it, since I probably wouldn’t want to follow them anyway — and those who do nothing but indulge in lame hashtag games for hours on end are also swiftly removed from my following list, at least temporarily; permanently if I haven’t actually spoken to them for a while.

It’s kind of sad that we’ve got to the stage where this level of “friendship curation” is necessary, but it’s a side-effect of the social media age and the fact that the Internet has brought us in touch with far more people than we’d ever be able to have met in reality. I’m pretty sure there’s an “optimum” number of friends or acquaintances for a person to have, and over and above that level everything just starts contributing to an overall, growing amount of white noise — noise that occasionally becomes intolerable. I’m gradually — hopefully, anyway — finding a good balance that hopefully won’t drive me mental, and which hopefully won’t necessitate me abandoning the genuine friends I have managed to make via Twitter.

In the meantime, I’m trying my best to migrate a lot of gaming discussion over to the Squadron of Shame forums, which you can find here. While the Squadron of Shame was originally a group of people who came together on the 1up forums, I know I for one would be very happy to see some new blood over there, too — particularly if you are, like me, the sort of person who’d rather have a lengthy, wordy discussion about a favourite, underappreciated game than think that “lol” or “cool story bro” is in any way a valid contribution to a debate.

Hopefully I won’t have to write about this sort of thing again for a while.

1666: You’re Never Finished

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1631: GO GAMERS

The Squadron of Shame forums are coming along nicely — they’re pretty much ready for the public to show up and start posting in now, so if you’re at all interested in computer and video games and find that places like NeoGAF and its ilk aren’t quite fitting your needs — in other words, you like to use paragraphs and write posts that include more than ten words at a time — then do feel free to come on over, sign up and start mingling with the rest of the community, who are slowly trickling over.

Forums are the spiritual home of the Squad, since it’s where we, as a group, first came together. But they’re also one of the most long-standing parts of the Internet — one aspect of the ever-changing digital world that has actually managed to remain reasonably constant over the course of the last 15-20 years or so.

I recall my first experience with forums fairly vividly. Our first Internet service provider was CompuServe, one of several providers that, at least initially, didn’t offer “true” Internet access, instead opting to provide its users with a gated set of online services exclusively for subscribers. (Full Internet access eventually came later, initially in the form of the ability to send email messages to Internet addresses instead of just CompuServe IDs, and later full-on Web access.) As part of this “gated community”, CompuServe offered a swathe of forums on a whole host of specialist subjects. Unsurprisingly, I quickly found an online home in the GAMERS forum — you clicked the “GO” button and typed “GAMERS” to get there — and had my first experience of mingling with the online community.

The term “online community” these days has a certain number of negative connotations, due in part to the perpetuation of the narrative that the majority of people who post things online are somehow “toxic”, and the fact that indeed, some people who post things online are somehow “toxic”. But back in its early days, it was a different matter. “Flaming” and “trolling” were established terms, but they tended to be seen fairly rarely. There were extensive glossaries of the then-new emoticons and acronyms that started to creep into everyday usage, and new terms like “netiquette” were coined to describe how you should interact with other people online.

I honestly can’t remember a whole lot about the sort of things I posted and discussed on the Gamers’ Forum on CompuServe, but I do remember one thing vividly: I was into Wolfenstein 3-D at the time, and had been experimenting with a variety of mod tools for it, at least partly because I’d been helping a local shareware dealer write his catalogues that included a selection of Wolfenstein add-ons and editors.

Anyway, yes; I was into Wolfenstein 3-D and had spent quite some time working on a selection of new levels — ten of them, in fact. I uploaded them to the Gamers’ Forum’s download area for others to have a go at, but didn’t think anything more of it and certainly wasn’t expecting any feedback or anything.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I was contacted by a gentleman named Carlton, who claimed to represent Apogee, the publisher of Wolfenstein, and also claimed to be interested in including my levels in an official expansion pack for the game. I’d be paid, he promised, and appropriately credited.

Frankly, I was at a loss as to what to do at this stage, but after some deliberation and discussion I took a chance and got in touch with Carlton, who took my contact details and promised to be in touch in short order.

Not a lot happened for a while, but then one day a package showed up. Inside it was a cheque for $200 and three floppy disks — one containing a full, registered version of Wolfenstein 3-D, and two containing the official expansion pack, the Super Upgrades pack. I installed the disks, browsed through the directory containing the game — and sure enough, there were my levels, credited to me. I was a professional game designer.

And all because of a forum. Pretty neat, huh?

1620: Community Matters

The Squadron of Shame, the “gaming book club” that was born on the 1up Radio message boards and has subsequently lived in several places across the Internet, has moved house again. We now have our own forum here — though if Squad co-founder “Beige” gets things sorted, we’ll have either that forum or a variation thereof on our own domain before long, which will be nice.

Forums aren’t all that fashionable these days, though they are still used somewhat, particularly for communities relating to specific software companies or even individual games. I can’t say I’ve used one for a very long time indeed now, but having gotten back into the swing of posting on one thanks to the new Squadron of Shame boards, I can honestly say I’ve missed them.

The reason? They’re completely different to the way modern social media works. While you may think that social media would be the ideal place to begin discussions and have in-depth conversations, in actuality modern social media is not at all well-suited for this task. Whereas many forums have long-life conversational threads that stick around for months or even years, the very nature of social media means that posts are transient — they’re there one moment, gone the next, replaced by a cat picture, some vapid meme or One Of Those Clickbait Headlines That Makes Poor Use Of Headline Case And You Just Won’t Believe. And while certain social media posts can attract a long string of comments and stick around for a while due to consistent interest — the reason why Facebook steadfastly refuses to organise posts in chronological order is because of this, if you were wondering — they’ll still fall away far quicker than an equivalent topic on a forum.

This is fine for the sort of vapid nonsense that people post on Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis, but less ideal for more long-form discussion on more specific topics — such as the sort of thing we like to stroke our collective chins over at the Squadron of Shame. Now I know that many existing, well-established forums in 2014 — long-standing gaming forum NeoGAF is a good example — have proportions of the community that do not like seeing “walls of text” (even when they use paragraphs and punctuation and everything), but the fact is that forums are ideally suited to long-form discussion and thoughtful discourse. They’re not instant messages, they’re not time-sensitive, they’re not places to post “fire and forget” comments that you never look at the responses to — they’re places for asynchronous communication between people of similar interests, and an excellent means of having far more detailed discussions than is possible on social media in its current form.

Social media is crowded. Social media is noisy. Social media is like stumbling into the middle of a party, slightly drunk, and shouting whatever you feel like and hoping someone hears it. And, sometimes, that’s fine, and can lead to beautiful interactions, friendships and even relationships. (I’m sitting in this house with the person I own it with because of Twitter.)

But a forum is like getting together a group of people with common interests — depending on the number of participants, it can be like a book club, a seminar or a large-scale gathering — and having a civilised, peaceful, thoughtful discussion on a particular topic. (Usually, anyway. This isn’t to say forums are drama-free, but there’s a lot less of the attention-seeking passive-aggression that’s often seen on social media for the most part in my experience.)

As I said above, I’m not sure whether the Squadron of Shame will be staying on that free forum software for now or whether we’ll be moving to our own site. But either way, the shift — or should I say shift back, since that’s where the group was born — to a forum-based means of discussion has so far proven popular, and I think it will be good for the group in the long term.

If you’re interested in joining us to talk about underappreciated and overlooked games, both new and old, drop by our new home and say hello.

1601: On Not Assuming the Worst is the Most Representative

I had an interesting conversation with my friend Calin the other day. Calin is someone I’ve known for quite a while, have shared lots of interesting and enjoyable gaming stories with over the years — mainly through the Squadron of Shame — and even managed to meet face-to-face on one occasion at PAX East in 2010, an event which, as a whole, I regard as the last great thing in my life before everything came crumbling down shortly afterwards. (I have since largely rebuilt my existence, but there’s still some work to do after that chaos.)

Anyway, the point is: Calin is, if you must put a label on such things, a “gamer”. And yet he confessed to me that he’s not entirely comfortable admitting that any more, for fear of being lumped in with what he regards as “gamers”. His definition of gamers, it transpires, are those who are the most vocal on the Internet, and often the worst examples of the gaming community. They who shout loudest get the most attention and all that.

This is, of course, a gross generalisation about the entire community of people who enjoy computer and video games, and I said as much in our conversation. The IGN and Gamespot comments sections are not representative of the entirety of humanity who enjoy computer and video games, in other words; there are plenty of other people out there who don’t rage and swear at one another, who don’t tell writers to kill themselves over reviews they disagree with, who don’t act like spoiled children when things that they, personally, aren’t interested in show up.

And yet I can understand Calin’s position somewhat. As I noted above, those who shout loudest get the most attention, and it’s entirely natural to start believing “gamers” as a whole are the scum of the Earth if the representatives of the community you seem to hear the most from are the ones who are acting like complete tools.

In vaguely related news, earlier today I observed a Twitter exchange between the members of Witch Beam, developers of the excellent upcoming arcade-style shoot ’em up for PC, PS4, Vita and Wii U, Assault Android Cactus. They were feeling disheartened by a tweet from a member of the Gamespot community who made some disparaging remarks about Sony “only” having titles like Assault Android Cactus — smaller-scale, lower-budget but no less interesting or enjoyable games — to show at E3, while Microsoft was promising that its Xbox One-centric E3 presentation would focus on games, presumably triple-A by implication. I commented to them that it’s not worth worrying about the opinion of people who believe that triple-A is all there is to video games. In a way, those people are also judging something in its entirety by a small subsection of it — in this case, that anything outside the big budget triple-A space is somehow unworthy.

The important thing in all this is to remember that not everyone agrees on everything, and not everyone behaves in the same way. For some people, trash talk and being a jackass online is just part and parcel of the way the modern Internet-connected world works. For others, they prefer to spend their time actually playing games rather than typing comments or tweets to each other online. And for others still, they prefer to engage in intelligent, lengthy discussion about things some people may not have heard of. (I kind of straddle the latter two categories.)

Of those groups, the people acting like jackasses are but a small part of the whole. They’re a problem, for sure, and it’s difficult to know what — if anything — it’s possible to do about their behaviour. (Hint: It’s not posting lengthy social justice-themed editorials on the sites they frequent; that just makes them defensive and even more inclined to be obnoxious.) But here’s the important thing: they are not everyone. They do not represent an entire medium. They do not represent the entirety of people around the world who are interested in games. Chances are, in my experience, there’s a considerable amount of crossover with those people who believe in nothing but triple-A.

Fuck those guys. If you enjoy games — however you enjoy them — enjoy them in your own way, and never, ever feel ashamed of something you enjoy because of the behaviour of people you probably have nothing to do with on a regular basis. In an extreme case, simply think back to how it all was before the Internet came along and ruined rational discourse for a lot of people; everyone could enjoy video games without feeling ashamed, guilty or disgusted then, because you never, ever came into contact with the more objectionable parts of humanity. Simply stay out of comments sections and only talk about games with your friends, just like things used to be. Works out pretty well for me, personally.

And if you’re one of the jackasses I’ve mentioned in this post? If you’ve ever told a writer to kill themselves over giving a game an 8 when you thought it deserved a 9? (For those who don’t frequent gaming sites, this actually happens on occasion, though it’s usually over more extreme differences of opinion.) If you believe there is only one “true” way to game, and that everyone else’s interests and passions in one of the most diverse creative mediums in the world is somehow invalid? Take a good, long, hard look at yourself and decide whether or not that’s the person you really want to be.

1545: Changing Communication

I’m trying to make a conscious effort to tone down the effect the Internet has had on the way I communicate over time. This may sound like a peculiar thing to say, given that the majority of the communication I engage in on a daily basis is via the Internet, but just recently a number of things have really started to bug me about the way people talk to one another online, and I simply want to make sure that I’m not a part of it and thus, perhaps, inadvertently annoying someone else.

I think the chief thing I want to make sure I avoid is excessive hyperbole. Most people who use social media have been guilty of this at some point — posting a link to a mildly amusing cat video and declaring “Shut the Internet down. We’re done.” or “This is the best thing ever!” or “There are no words.” or… I could go on, but I won’t. You get the idea.

Declaring things “the best thing ever” or along those lines is excessive hyperbole. It devalues that phrase “the best thing ever” if everything is the best thing ever, and the other examples are just putting undue pressure on something that was probably designed to be a throwaway joke to perform and be somehow amazing.

Particularly gross examples of excessive hyperbole come in the form of headlines from sites like Buzzfeed, Upworthy and their numerous imitators. Inevitably conversational in tone but capitalised excessively So They Look Like This And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next, these headlines, on an almost hourly basis, promise laughter until you evacuate your bowels, crying until your eyes shrivel up and stories so heartwarming you’ll cook yourself from the inside. And they’re rarely anything special; at best, they’re sob stories deliberately designed to emotionally manipulate the reader; at worst, they’re pointless nonsense deliberately designed in an attempt to make them “go viral”.

Excessive hyperbole can spill over into discourse, too, and it frequently does. I’ve lost count of the number of times things have been described as “toxic” over the last year or two, when in fact this is, in many cases, an exaggeration. (Well, of course it is; if it was literally toxic then it would kill anyone involved.) And once you jump onto your high horse and brand something as “toxic” there’s really nowhere to go from there; the people who disagree will disagree forcefully because you were forceful in the first place, while the people who agree will look like wet lettuces if they decide to come in with a “Well, I wouldn’t say toxic, but…”. Thus online discourse frequently descends into who can be the most hyperbolic the loudest or the most often, and the quality of discussion suffers enormously as a result.

Last time I wrote about this sort of thing I attracted commenters accusing me of something called “tone policing”, which is where you distract attention away from the core argument that someone is trying to make by focusing on the way they are making it rather than the content. And that, perhaps, is something that people including myself do do, but if it’s becoming an issue then perhaps the people who are getting “tone policed” should consider the way they are making those arguments in the first place. With less hyperbole, less use of strong, emotive language such as “toxic” and more in the way of constructive, descriptive comments, we can all get to know the way we feel about things a lot more easily, and we can move forward in debates and discussions.

As it stands, however, the second someone jumps onto their high horse with a disproportionately passionate reaction to something that is, in many cases, very simple, I simply cannot take them seriously. And I doubt that’s the effect they want to have with their arguments.

I certainly don’t. Which is why I’m making an effort to tone down my own hyperbole and try to speak like a normal human being when communicating on the Internet as much as possible. With a text-based medium of communication like the Internet, you have a moment to pause before you respond to or broadcast something to look back on what you’ve written, reflect and decide whether that’s really what you wanted to say. Things said in the heat of the moment are often regretted with hindsight; those regrets can be easily avoided with a little less hastiness and a little more consideration, both for yourself and for others.

This was a Public Service Announcement on behalf of the National Hyperbole Authority, the best thing to happen to language in three thousand years.

1541: Reclaiming the Inbox

Oh my goodness, email. What a massive pain in the arse you are. And yet you shouldn’t be; you should be a convenient, quick means of asynchronous communication, and instead you’re a cluttered, nigh-useless mess.

At least my personal account is. So I’m trying to do something about it. When unnecessary mailing list entries that I never read show up, I unsubscribe with due haste. When my inbox starts to fill up with useless crap, I highlight it all and archive it — if I haven’t read it immediately, it almost certainly isn’t important to go back to in a few days’ time.

With a little coercion, I’m confident that I can start getting my inbox back under control. The trouble I’m having is largely due to the period of time where my personal email was also my professional email — while I was working on GamePro I didn’t have my own address — and consequently got signed up to about a bajillion PR lists. Subsequently, when I worked for Inside Network, I then got signed up for a bajillion more PR lists for mobile games and apps — and there are a fuckload more mobile games and apps released every week than there are on computers and consoles. (And approximately 2 or 3 at most worth caring about, if that.)

The reason I’m doing this is because I actually want to start using email again. When I think back to the early days of having an email address, receiving new messages was exciting. Spam was rare, and it always felt like an “event” to see Outlook Express pop up its progress bar and indicate that yes, messages were incoming via the magic of dial-up Internet. (Random, no-longer-existent free ISPs for the win. I was a “Hot Toast” man, myself.) This was because it was an event to receive a message — someone had taken the time to actually write to you.

These days, the former function of email is largely covered by social media — to a point, anyway. But it’s not quite the same, particularly with how much both Facebook and Twitter have wandered off from their original incarnations when they were first introduced. Facebook these days — even with my recently pruned feed — is nothing but links with people going “OMG SO AMAZING” or some other such hyperbole, while Twitter is inherently limited thanks to its character counts, and is becoming increasingly intolerable anyway thanks to the increasing regularity with which the social justice crowd continue to peddle their opinions and refuse to listen to anyone else.

Then there’s longer-form writing such as this blog, but that’s a broadcast rather than a personal message. Sure, I could write private password-protected posts and send them to individuals or small groups of people, but if I’m going to do that, I may as well just send them an email in the first place. It feels impersonal.

Which leaves email, as one of the most long-standing means of digital communication out there, as arguably the most practical means of actually getting in touch with other people — so long as you take control of it, that is. Going forward, my “good intention” is to try and use email a lot more than I have done in the past, perhaps to keep in touch with people I don’t speak to enough on a daily basis or even to get to know people I want to know a bit better… a bit better.

This is a bold plan, I know, and I wonder if it will prove to be a fruitless endeavour if everyone else has the same saturated inbox problem as me, but it’s worth a try. Email is a brilliantly simple but amazing technology that brings people closer together, and it’s wasted by most of us on a daily basis as we take it for granted. So I’m going to try and stop doing that. Maybe. We’ll see.

No you can’t have my email address. Unless you ask really nicely.