I finally nuked my Twitter account completely.

There are a few main reasons for this, and I’d like to talk about them a bit today.

Firstly, Elon Musk’s idiotic changes to the terms of the Twitter API, which has priced literally everyone out of being able to use it, have made the platform next to useless as a means of automatically sharing your work to an audience that supposedly signed up to follow your updates. It’s both hilarious and tragic to see company after company sharing news posts that effectively say “lol, fuck Twitter”.

Secondly, my previous justification of keeping my Twitter account around for the sake of friends and contacts just doesn’t really feel like it’s… justification any more. The friends in question rarely bother to get in contact, and there are other means for professional contacts to get in touch.

Thirdly, I’m just fucking sick of the most likely response you get to posting literally anything on there being vitriol and hate.

On the latter point, I recently posted an article about my negative experiences trying Ubisoft’s Riders Republic via PlayStation Plus. The gist of the article, if you’re one of those Internet denizens whose attention span has been shot too much to bother clicking on a link, was that the game was designed in such a way that it is genuinely insulting to the intelligence of anyone over the age of about 12. It doesn’t let you just play; instead, you’re bombarded with hours of mandatory tutorials and obnoxious zoomer slang, and this was enough to make me not even want to bother seeing if the game “got good” later.

I think this is something worth talking about, because it’s the first time that I, as a 42 year old video game enthusiast who has been involved in the medium since the Atari days, felt completely alienated by a brand new, supposedly mainstream game. So I talked about it. Then I shared that article on Twitter.

One of the first responses I got was from someone who yelled at me, based entirely on the assumption that I’d said the exact opposite to what I’d actually written in the article. He’d obviously read the headline, made an assumption and then decided to shoot his dribbling, zit-encrusted mouth off at me, despite it taking nothing more than a single click and a minute or two of reading for anyone to see that he was talking complete horseshit. But you can bet anyone who “liked” his dumbshit comment wouldn’t go and check whether or not he was right.

I spent a few hours last night and this morning feeling stressed and anxious about this. But then it just sort of dawned on me: fuck it. Why the fuck should I care what some obnoxious cunt on the Internet thinks? Why the fuck should I let one idiot have such power over my mental wellbeing, based entirely on the fact he’s too much of a lazy shit to actually read something I wrote?

And the answer to that is that I shouldn’t care; I shouldn’t let one idiot do that. And since Twitter is the primary means of allowing idiots to do that, it needs to go. Completely. So it has.

On a related note, this news isn’t finalised or official as yet, but it’s pretty much confirmed that as of the beginning of July, I will be getting out of the professional “content creation” (ugh) game completely.

I won’t go into details for now because things are still being hammered out, but suffice to say for now that it’s nothing anyone needs to worry about — I’m simply changing my professional role in such a way that it means I can focus my attention entirely on the Evercade project, which I’m incredibly passionate about and is something where I feel genuinely valued by both my colleagues and by my “audience”, such as they are.

I’m both happy and sad about this. I’m happy because it means that I can focus my professional life on something that I love, and because it means my free time will genuinely, completely be my own again. No more will I find myself “having” to play something for the sake of timely coverage; instead, I can just enjoy things at my own pace, and I’m really looking forward to that.

I’m sad, however, because I spent so much of my early life desperately wanting to follow in my brother’s footsteps and be part of the games press — and yet by the time I actually managed to get there, it had changed irreversibly from what it used to be. And it only got worse from there.

Again, I won’t go into details for now, as that’s something to talk about in more detail once everything here has been finalised. But I’ll say again, it’s nothing to worry about — I’m proud of what I’ve worked on to date, will continue to work on things like this until the beginning of July, and this change is my decision rather than anyone else’s.

I’m just tired. So very tired of “content creation” being such a completely thankless task. The modern Internet has set up a completely adversarial relationship between writers and their audiences, exemplified by the Twitter exchange I described above, and that is emphatically not why I got into this.

I got into writing about games because I love them. I got into games writing because I think they’re culturally important. I got into games writing because I think despite that cultural importance, they’re not being written about and analysed in anywhere near the depth they deserve.

And I got into games writing because while the big, dumb, obnoxious games like the aforementioned Riders Republic get to ride the wave of commercial success regardless of how shit they are, there are myriad games released literally every day that run the risk of languishing in obscurity without people telling others about them.

The trouble is, I’ve discovered over the last decade and a half or so, is that no-one really seems to actually care. Online, “content” is piss in the wind. It’s only relevant for the day it’s posted — if you’re lucky enough to get anyone to notice it in the first place — and it’s fucking impossible to get people to give a shit about something after the fact, unless, as I’ve seen on MoeGamer, you’re literally the only person to have written something meaningful on a particular topic. (In my case, sex sim Honey Select Unlimited.)

Google is flooded by manipulative, exploitative, SEO-optimised sites posting vacuous individual “guide” articles for things they don’t care about for no other reason than it brings in the clicks. And no-one at any point in the process gives a shit; the average Internet user doesn’t have enough in the way of critical thinking skills to see the cynical way all this has been set up, and the writers at the sites themselves don’t give a toss as long as the numbers go up.

All of this is the fault of everyone who has normalised the idea of “consuming content” rather than “reading interesting articles” and the like. You, collectively, have ruined both the games press specifically, and the broader Internet in general.

It’s demoralising and infuriating, and if you’ve been around all this for as long as I have, seeing the way things have been going, it should be no surprise that I very much feel like stepping down from it all.

And so that’s what I’m doing. From hereon, my professional work will be in something that actually matters, that I care about — and that other people actually care about, too. I suspect I’ll be a lot happier as a result, but I can’t help but feel a bit bad about that dream young me once had, and how it was never really possible.

My Twitter replacement

Photo by daniyal ghanavati on Pexels.com

Those who have been following the saga of social media for a while will know that Twitter is a right old mess right now. Between Elon Musk’s incredible ego and a series of bizarre policy changes and introductions (most of which are likely related to Musk’s ego in some form or another) it’s certainly been interesting to watch the world’s most popular social media platform (for how much longer?) go through some trials and tribulations.

But those of you who have been following me for a while will know that Twitter hasn’t been much fun for a long time now. When I first joined (which must have been around 2007 or so, maybe?) it was a great place to make new friends, enjoy good conversation and just generally have a good time. But as the years have gone on — and particularly since the significant online upheavals that can be at least partly attributed to the “Gamergate” mess of 2014 — it’s become a less and less desirable hangout, for a variety of reasons.

Chief among them for me is the combative, confrontational tone the site as a whole has taken on. While it is still possible to have civil conversations there, it feels like it’s much more likely that if you post an opinion of your own someone will come along and shout it down before long. Even if your opinion is not, in the grand scheme of things, particularly important or worth getting upset over.

Anger seems to be the default state for many posters on Twitter, and this is often expressed through some seriously unpleasant behaviour. Anyone who is into Japanese games, for example, will doubtless have seen the disgusting vitriol that gets thrown the way of localisation staff (more specifically, female localisation staff) on a fairly regular basis, regardless of whether or not any “mistakes” have been made. And the same is true in all fields; the quote-tweet dunk is a universal constant, and it does not make for a friendly environment where one wants to hang out.

But alongside all this, Twitter itself has been changing in functional, mechanical terms. The rise of “The Algorithm” on all manner of social sites — with the most notorious being YouTube, of course — has meant that no longer can you count on your social media experience being your own, if indeed it ever was. Rather than showing you the things that your friends have been posting in the order that they were posted, you now get shit you didn’t sign up for pushed into your feed as “recommendations”, based on the ill-defined assumptions that Twitter makes about “quality content”.

I never signed up to Twitter for “quality content”. I signed up to chat with folks from a forum we all used to frequent that we weren’t able to use any more due to the site’s closure. That’s all I really wanted. And that’s emphatically not what the site provides these days.

So between the change in atmosphere, the change in the way the whole site works and the whole Musk fiasco, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s simply not worth wasting time pissing around on Twitter any more — if indeed it ever was. Rather, I think it’s high time that I brought this blog back, since it’s a much better means for me to express myself — plus the comments section is a much nicer way to hold a conversation in most cases. (Unless those people find their way here, but you know how it is.)

So that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll be keeping my Twitter account open because it’s still useful for things like news aggregation and PR contacts, but pretty much all I’ll be posting on there is links to stuff I’ve done, either for work or for pleasure. When I want to actually talk about something, I’ll do it here, like in the good old days.

I’m not making any grand promises about posting frequency or anything like that, this is just going to be an “as and when I feel like it” sort of thing. I’m also not going to commit to doing silly comics or anything, even though I know one particular reader (whom I hope is doing well, given that I haven’t heard from her for a while) is a big fan! This is my scratch pad, my brain dump and my place to express myself. No “algorithm” rules the roost here, and as such it’s a much better means of getting to know me than the toxic bird site.

So see you around here, I hope!

2531: Planning to Unplug

After some discussion with my friend Chris recently — partly inspired by my recent post on mobile phone apathy — I’ve made the not particularly difficult decision to try and “unplug” as much as possible from the general noise of the Internet in 2017.

And I’m talking about more than just stepping away from Twitter and Facebook like I have done a few times in the past, as positive as those experiences turned out to be for me. I’m talking about a pretty thorough purge, and a return to a simpler, quieter life with fewer external stressors.

You see, the allure of the Internet and its ability to connect people from all over the world has kind of worn off somewhat for me. The last few years have demonstrated that there are a significant number of people out there who are more interested in conflict, oneupmanship and narcissism than actual meaningful interaction. The fall from grace of the games press — and many game journalists’ pretty much unveiled hatred of their audiences — is just one of many examples of this, but the overall negativity that infuses what feels like the vast majority of online communications these days is just proving to be more trouble than it’s worth.

I don’t need that. It’s not adding anything to my life — nothing good, anyway — so, I figure, why continue to put up with it? There’s no need to.

As such, starting on New Year’s Day, I’m going to begin a process of unplugging as much as I possibly can. Twitter and Facebook are both going completely, since the annoyance both of those bring to my life far outweighs the benefits of both of them. More significantly, I’m planning on ditching the smartphone age in favour of an older, simpler phone that doesn’t bug me every five minutes with updates and notifications. At this point, I’m strongly considering picking up a second-hand N-Gage I’ve seen on Amazon, since that has the added benefit of being an underappreciated and increasingly rare gaming platform as well as a phone I very much enjoyed using when I originally had one.

I’m also going to draw my time with this blog to a close. I’m satisfied with what I’ve achieved here since I started, but the time has come to move on. I’m not going to give up regular writing, mind you; I’m still going to post weekly articles over on MoeGamer, since those have a clear focus, and I’m also intending to start a weekly TinyLetter as a more private, more personal substitute for my daily updates here. I’ll post details on how to sign up for that towards the end of the year, so those of you who want to continue to follow what I’m up to can do so.

I’ll be keeping more personal means of communication open. My email address and Google Hangouts accounts will still be active, as will my gaming accounts on Steam, Xbox Live and PSN. But the shouting into the void that is public social media will, hopefully, become a thing of the past. It’s no longer enjoyable, useful or fun, so I have no need for it.

I’m not going to put my personal email, Google Hangouts and gaming account addresses in this post for obvious reasons, but if you are interested in staying in touch via any of these means, please feel free to drop me a line via my Contact page explaining who you are and how you know me. If we’ve chatted before in the past, great, no problem; if we’ve never spoken before, however, please do include a bit about yourself in your message.

That’s the plan, then. And I anticipate that it will lead to a happier, more peaceful and less stressful 2017 for me. At least I hope it does, anyway!

2528: 30 Day Video Game Challenge All in One Day Because Otherwise I Won’t Remember to Do the Rest of It

Every so often, one of those “30-day challenges” does the rounds on Twitter, Facebook and whatever, and while I’m often tempted to participate, I know that a few days in I’ll probably forget all about it.

So to prevent that from happening, I’m going to answer all 30 prompts from the “30 Day Video Game Challenge” — which most people seem to have been doing throughout December, which is nearly over, anyway — in one post because fuck convention, I do what I want because I’m a strong independent woman who don’t need no man.

All right. Let’s begin.

1. Very first video game

Honestly hard to recall, because I grew up with gaming as part of my household. I was born in 1981 and estimate I probably started playing video games around the age of maybe 4 or 5 or so, which would mean my first video game would be one of the hundreds of pirated Atari 8-Bit games that my father and brother had acquired from the local “computer club”.

Let’s go with Star Raiders, even if it wasn’t, because Star Raiders is awesome and naming that as my first video game surely gets me some gaming hipster cred.

2. Your favourite character

I have a whole bunch of favourite characters from a variety of different franchises, so again it’s hard to pick one. If absolutely pressed to name just a single one, however, I think I’d probably have to go with Estelle from Trails in the Sky. She’s cute, sassy, tomboyish and immensely appealing to me in all manner of different ways, both in terms of her looks and her attitude.

3. A game that is underrated

The original Hyperdimension Neptunia. While its technical shortcomings are self-evident from the moment you start playing it, and it makes some baffling mechanical decisions, it’s one of the most memorable games I’ve ever played, through a combination of its absolutely charming characterisation and those aforementioned baffling mechanical decisions.

4. Your guilty pleasure game

I have no guilt in enjoying any games whatsoever, regardless of their content. I guess the only one I probably wouldn’t make a point of talking about in polite company would be Custom Maid 3D 2, and even then I have been known to talk about its interesting stat-raising gameplay as much as its explicit polygonal pornography.

5. Game character you feel you are most like (or wish you were)

I’ve encountered quite a few relatable characters over the course of my years in gaming. It’s tempting to pick someone like Noire from the Neptunia series for her somewhat solitary tendencies, though I wouldn’t describe myself as tsundere as she is. Someone like Rosangela Blackwell from the Blackwell series of adventure games from Wadjet Eye Games springs to mind; she’s a writer who attempts to make the best of a difficult situation. And okay, I don’t have a ghost partner with whom I put restless spirits to rest, but I did feel a certain degree of kinship with Rosa’s general personality and attitude.

6. Most annoying character

The dude who had the “FOLLOW” marker over his head for almost the entire duration of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, who got to do all the interesting things while I ran along behind him shooting predictable waves of bad guys. That was the last Call of Duty I ever played.

7. Favourite game couple

Gotta be someone from Grisaia here, though I’m somewhat torn between Yuuji and Amane (Amane was my own personal “best girl”) and Yuuji and Yumiko (whom I felt arguably made a “better” couple). Let’s say Yuuji and Amane.

8. Best soundtrack

Final Fantasy XIV. My enthusiasm for Square’s reborn MMO may have lapsed for the moment, but I never, ever tire of its masterful soundtrack by Masayoshi Soken.

9. Saddest game scene

The end of To The Moon. That was the first game since the first time I played Final Fantasy VII to genuinely make me sob uncontrollably.

10. Best gameplay

This is near-impossible to answer because I play so many different types of games that aren’t directly comparable. If we’re just talking games I’ve played in the last year, Dungeon Travelers 2’s beautiful mechanics and level design are definitely near the top of the pile.

11. Gaming system of choice

Again, hard to pick one, since I do a lot of gaming on a variety of different platforms. I think in terms of “platform that has the most games I want to play on it”, though, it’s between PS4 and Vita, with Vita having the slight edge by virtue of having been around a little longer as well as being backwards compatible.

12. A game everyone should play

Splatoon. It’s just such an utterly joyful experience — and totally free of the arrogant elitism that often plagues online games, thanks to Nintendo’s arguably overprotective approach to online interactions — that even the most staunch anti-multiplayer gamer can’t fail to have a good time with this one. And then it goes and has a fantastic single-player mode with one of my favourite final bosses of all time, too. Everyone should play Splatoon, and I hope it makes a comeback on Nintendo Switch.

13. A game you’ve played more than five times

I’m assuming this means “to completion”. Final Fantasy VII is the first that springs to mind (I completed this at least 10 times during the first summer I became aware of the series) but you can also throw in Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, too.

14. Current (or most recent) gaming wallpaper

15. Post a screenshot from the game you’re playing right now.

(Stock screenshot, I know, but I can’t be arsed to turn my PS4 on and go through the faff of getting a screenshot off it.)

16. Game with the best cutscenes

The big “oh shit” moment halfway through Final Fantasy Type-0 is going to take some beating this year, but Final Fantasy XV also has plenty of incredible cutscenes, too. I can’t in good conscience give this one to anything but a modern Final Fantasy game.

17. Favourite antagonist

Metal Face from the original Xenoblade Chronicles. In the English… uh, British dub, he struck an incredible balance between being comedic and terrifying. I remember I was genuinely shocked at quite how far that game went with the brutality and unpleasantness, and Metal Face was a great figure to express your anger towards.

18. Favourite protagonist

I’ve already given “favourite character” to Estelle from Trails in the Sky, so it’s only right I give this one to Nepgear. Yes, Nepgear, because she was totally the protagonist of Neptunia mk2/Re;Birth2 and I will not hear a word said against the dear girl by anyone. Also I like Nepgear because she reminds me of myself. If, you know, I was a pretty young girl with a figure to die for rather than a 30-something hairy dude.

19. Picture of a game setting you wish you lived in

20. Favourite genre

RPG, no question. Honourable mentions to point-and-click adventures, visual novels and arcade-style racing games.

21. Game with the best story

If you count visual novels, The Fruit of Grisaia, with absolutely no hesitation.

If you don’t count visual novels, which I know some people don’t, then I loved the Ys series, particularly Ys Origin. The amount of thought which had gone into the lore of that world is simply incredible, and Origin brought the legends you learn about in the first two games well and truly to life.

Damn, now I want to play Ys Origin again.

22. A game sequel that disappointed you

Mass Effect 2 is the only example that springs immediately to mind. I was one of the few people who actually rather liked the clunky RPG systems of the original, so I was disappointed when 2 felt like more of a conventional shooter, both in terms of mechanics and structure. The story was decent and I enjoyed my time with it, but not enough to want to either go back or play the sequel.

23. Game you think had the best graphics or art style

I absolutely adore the art in the Atelier series, particularly the Arland trilogy. The lovely soft lines and pastel colours project such a wonderful aura of calm about them, and that’s something that’s altogether much too rare in an era of increasing grimdark.

24. Favourite classic game

At last, a question where I can honestly put Star Raiders as my answer and know there can be no argument about it.

25. A game you plan on playing

Trails in the Sky SC, Trails of Cold Steel and Trails of Cold Steel II. I’ve only played the first Trails in the Sky, but that was enough for me to fall in love with Estelle.

26. Best voice acting

The original Corpse Party on PSP. This was the game that made me switch from dubs to Japanese voiceovers whenever I get the opportunity. Although the audio was in a different language to one I understood, the sheer amount of passion that the actors infused their lines with was incredible, and a big part of the reason that game had such a profound impact on me.

27. Most epic scene ever

Battling Bahamut in Final Coil in Final Fantasy XIV is hard to beat, if that counts as a “scene”.

28. Favourite game developer

I’m a fan of Falcom and Square Enix’s Final Fantasy team, but I’ve grown to adore Idea Factory/Compile Heart over the last few years, so I think it’s only right to give this title to them.

29. A game you thought you wouldn’t like, but ended up loving

Criminal Girls. I picked it up mostly out of curiosity — and partly because I’d heard people call it shit and wanted to judge for myself — but discovered to my surprise that it was a brilliant game with some inventive mechanics and a thought-provoking story.

30. Favourite game of all time

I haven’t played it for years now, but whenever anyone asks me this question my immediate thought is always Final Fantasy VII. So it’s probably that.

Honourable mentions to Recettear, Geometry Wars 2 and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+.

2360: A Life Without Social Media is a Life Without Pointless Outrage and Guilt

I poked my head on to Twitter earlier — not to participate or engage, because I think I’ve well and truly broken my former addiction to it, but instead simply to share the article on Ys that I spent all day writing.

Literally immediately — and yes, I do mean literally — I saw someone indulging in one of the reasons I stopped wanting to use Twitter in the first place: pointless, unnecessary handwringing and guilt over things that were nothing to do with them.

The person in question, whom I had previously thought to be a fairly level-headed, rational sort of individual, went on an 8-tweet tirade about how awful the 4th of July was and how Americans enjoying and celebrating what has become nothing more than a holiday — regardless of its history — was somehow racist.

I closed the tab straight after I shared the link to my work, because frankly I don’t have time for that shit.

One might argue that it’s a good thing the Internet has supposedly made us all more socially responsible and aware of all the terrible things in the world — and perhaps it is. However, one thing the Internet very rarely does is actually do anything about these terrible things in the world. Whether it’s people changing their Facebook avatars to “raise awareness” for a charity (I think they’d rather have your bank details, thanks), someone painting their nails in protest against the amorphous concept of “toxic masculinity” or flaccid “protests” against whatever the issue du jour is, Internet activism achieves absolutely nothing whatsoever.

Actually, no, that’s not true — it does achieve something. But it’s not anything good.

The only thing Internet activism achieves is to drive wedges between people — alienating people from one another, and drawing very, very clear battle lines that you can only ever be on one side or the other of. Us and them. The “right side of history” and its respective “wrong side”. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. That sort of thing.

The inherently divisive nature of self-proclaimed activists’ behaviour online has had an overall enormously negative impact on online discourse as a whole. As I noted in my post where I decided to set Twitter aside, people who believe strongly in things (or at least consider themselves to believe strongly in things) have a tendency to take an “I’m right, you’re wrong” approach with no middle ground. And this is true for everyone who holds strong opinions on one thing or another, whether it’s “censorship” in games, the supposed epidemic of “misogyny” that the Internet is suffering, or who they think should win the Presidential election.

The general unwillingness to take other people’s perspectives into account has ruined all sense of rational discourse on social media. Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but it’s certainly soured the experience for me; social media of all types (with the exception of this blog, if that counts, which I don’t really feel it does) had just stopped being fun, and seeing that string of tweets today the moment I opened the Twitter page drove it home for me. There was a stark contrast between this and the private conversation I was having with my friend Chris at the time, whereby we disagreed on our opinions regarding the video game Limbo — he liked it, I hated it — and somehow, magically, managed to do so without feeling the need to convince the other person that they were wrong. We simply enjoy different things, and talking about those things you don’t have in common as much as the things you do makes for some of the most interesting conversations.

You can enjoy your life, or you can spend your time getting pointlessly angry about things and people on the Internet. I’ve got games to play and things to write, so I know which one I choose.

2344: Life without Social

Well, it’s been a few days since I stepped away from Twitter, Facebook and social media in general (that includes my very, very occasional visits to Reddit) and I’m actually feeling pretty good about it. I’m not feeling especially isolated, since I 1) have other outlets through which I can talk about the things I want to talk about, and 2) have other means of talking to the people I actually want to talk to.

One experiment that I’m pleased with the progress of so far is my new Pile of Shame website. Here I’m using WordPress’ P2 theme to basically fulfil one of the things I did still enjoy using Twitter for: sharing my thoughts and reactions on games that I’m playing, perhaps in the hope of convincing other people to check out said games after having seen a screenshot that piqued their interest or a description they found intriguing.

I guess what I’m essentially doing is microblogging a “Let’s Play” of the games I’m playing, though I still far, far prefer the written/blog format for such things, even though video or streaming is probably a much more practical solution for doing it. When I think about what I’d be interested in seeing, though, should I ever find myself wanting to see what someone else’s thoughts on a game are, video is very low down the list, particularly when it comes to looking at things on mobile. I’d much rather read something — even if it’s bite-sized nuggets at irregular intervals — than watch a video and suffer through some idiot YouTuber’s attempts to be a comedy god. (This is unfair, of course; I know plenty of people who make YouTube videos and stream who aren’t immensely irritating, but sadly the ones who tend to get really popular are the ones who are immensely irritating. It’s just like TV or other forms of popular media in that regard, I guess.)

But anyway. Check out the Pile of Shame site if you’re interested in following what I’ve been playing — currently Ys Seven and VA-11 HALL-A — and feel free to leave comments.

Speaking more broadly, I’m not missing social media because it means no opportunity for me to get annoyed at all the things that are annoying on social media. These things differ from platform to platform: on Facebook it’s the sheer amount of links I don’t want to read that are shared by people I don’t want to talk to — along with people thinking that they’re suddenly God’s gift to politics/economics/racism — while on Twitter it’s the seemingly daily occurrence of one group or another getting upset, offended and/or angry about something or other. I don’t care about any of it any more. I just want to exist in my own world, surrounded by people I actually care about and enjoy the things I enjoy without people crying about, by turns, censorship, misogyny, sexism, racism, People of Colour, Nintendo, Activision, EA, Japanese games, Western games, Gamergate, Call of Duty and whatever else has got people’s respective goats this week.

The other positive feeling I have when not checking Twitter and/or Facebook every five minutes is the time and inclination to check out other sites on the Web. As any social addict will tell you, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of feeling like Twitter and Facebook (and perhaps Reddit and its ilk) are the only sites on the Internet. Cut them out of your life, and there’s a rich vein of interesting stuff you suddenly have time to explore; most notably, recently, I’ve finally been exploring the wonderful Hardcore Gaming 101, an admirably comprehensive site that covers hundreds of games in a delightful level of detail, including games from my youth that I don’t think I’ve seen written about anywhere else on the Internet. Just last night I was reading a detailed rundown of the Dunjonquest series, for example, which I knew during the Atari 8-bit era through the games Gateway to Apshai and Temple of Apshai Trilogy. Tonight I’m reading about all the Asterix games that have been released over the years, and the site has also made for some interesting reading as I have been going through the Ys series for the first time.

There’s a pleasantly wide world out there, and ditching the various virtual rooms full of people screaming at you for one reason or another makes it all the easier to see it. I’m very much enjoying the quiet.

(Note: My Twitter account is still live, sharing articles from both here and the Pile of Shame site, but it is not monitored. Please don’t try and send me messages on Twitter because I won’t see them! Instead, see this post for other ways to get hold of me. Or just leave a comment here.)

2302: By the Power of the Virtues

There’s a new-ish trend on social media. And like most new-ish trends on social media, it’s not a particularly pleasant one.

Known as “virtue signalling”, it essentially involves people making public statements that make it abundantly clear that they hold what is widely regarded to be the “correct” viewpoint on something, be this feminism, homosexuality, Donald Trump, immigration, unisex bathrooms, whether or not we should leave Europe, gun control and whether or not Uncharted 4 deserved more than an 8.8 out of 10.

It’s an offshoot of a couple of other social media behaviours that have been happening for a while, most notably Twitter’s “dot-reply” practice, which gets around Twitter’s usual behaviour of not showing people you follow replying to people you don’t follow (because why would you want to “listen in” on a conversation involving someone you don’t know?), and the related practice of people complaining at companies on Twitter without putting the company in question’s user ID in an @mention at the start of the tweet. “Hey, @amazon, your customer service today was shocking!” — you know, that sort of thing.

Both of these practices — and virtue signalling too, for that matter — are a means of amplifying one’s own voice and trying to get noticed. Typically, social media consists of lots of people on a reasonably equal footing all shouting into the void and occasionally having conversations with one another. When you bring in dot-replies, public replies and virtue signalling, however, it becomes less about your actual message and more about public perception of you. When you engage in any of these behaviours, you’re trying your very best to get your message heard and, crucially, reshared by as many people as possible. In that way, the word can spread about What A Fine Example of Humanity you are, and you can subsequently reap the social capital rewards from successfully Saying the Right Thing in Front of the Right People.

Taking a public stand on things isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But unfortunately, the very nature of social media has a habit of distorting messages beyond recognition, and when combined with such transparent attempts to spread your message as far and wide as possible as what we’ve just described, the global game of Chinese Whispers kicks into overdrive and your message — which may well have been flawed in the first place, or perhaps just misinterpreted somewhere along the line — gets taken at face value, for better or worse.

And people these days simply do not question the things that are presented to them. This is particularly bad on Facebook, where many people — particularly those less Web-literate — will happily share completely untrue stories without bothering to check the validity of them, and their friends, equally Web-illiterate, will share them further, until they’ve been around the world and back, with a significant number of people believing the load of old bollocks that some troll from 4chan probably dreamed up in an attempt to see how many idiots he could net.

It happens on Twitter, too, though, and through the media as well. A recent example came via the subreddit for Ubisoft’s multiplayer shooter The Division, where a user made up a completely false glitch-based strategy for one of the bosses, and said “cheat” was picked up by numerous high-profile gaming websites without bothering to check whether or not it was legitimate for themselves. (It would have been easy enough to do so, given that the user in question actually posted another thread on Reddit at the same time with a legitimate strategy for the same encounter, admitting that his “glitch” was a complete fabrication.)

And this lack of questioning or critical thinking is poisonous when it’s combined with virtue signalling. Opinions that someone made up become accepted as irrefutable fact simply because someone “important” shared them, or lots of people shared them. Take the Ghostbusters reboot trailer, for example — now famous for being the most disliked YouTube video in the site’s history. The story runs now that it is the most hated video in existence “because of misogyny” — and there’s simply no arguing with that, because so many people have made loud, proud statements about how they’re going to give Ghostbusters a chance because they’re not misogynist at all, no sirree, and that means that anyone who simply thinks the trailer is shit (it kinda is) gets thrown under the bus with the genuine misogynists and the trolls who enjoy stirring the pot for the hell of it.

Generally speaking, I tend to take the attitude that if you have to shout loudly about what a wonderful person you are, you probably aren’t a particularly wonderful person in the first place. So far I’m yet to be proven wrong with this theory.

2263: Fuck This Culture War; Everyone Needs to Rebuild

This is the “earliest” I’ve ever posted on here, at 12:22AM (edit: now 1:19AM, it’s taken an hour to write all this crap), and since I haven’t been to bed yet it’s technically still “yesterday” so far as the original rules of #oneaday go, but I wanted to address this subject immediately while it was fresh in my mind, so here I go breaking with convention somewhat.

Today, Alison Rapp got fired from Nintendo. If you don’t know who Alison Rapp is or why she got fired, I’d urge you not to look into it; it’s a complicated, messy situation that everyone involved could have probably handled better — but it also, after a certain point, became a bit of an inevitable outcome to just one of many shitstorms the games industry has already endured in just the first three months of this year.

The matter of Rapp is a symptom of a much larger problem that has been rumbling away for the last few years now: a so-called “culture war” between two somewhat ill-defined sides whose edges have a tendency to blur into one another somewhat. It’s a whole world of hypocrisy, kneejerk overreactions, dogpiling and public shaming, and it’s made the Internet an altogether far more unpleasant place to be than the “global village” it was once positioned as.

The culture war in question is broader than the field of games, but it’s in gaming that it’s perhaps most clear to see. Described by commentators via the gross (and erroneous) oversimplification that it is a battle between “GamerGate” and “SJWs”, the conflict is primarily between people who claim to be in favour of free speech, against censorship and against public shaming of politically incorrect viewpoints, humour or creative material, and people who claim to be in favour of increased diversity in culture, improving the representation of women, homosexual people, transgender people, people from non-white, non-English-speaking cultures and any number of other minorities you might care to mention.

Fundamentally, both “sides” have good points, and both sides actually also have a lot in common. The “free speech” side are all in favour of diversity — they just don’t want it to come at the expense of the ability for traditionally privileged groups to be able to speak their mind as well, which is perhaps a valid concern, given the number of people on the “diversity” side who will explicitly state that they reject the opinions of white men, regardless of how much merit they might have. Conversely, the “diversity” side are also in favour of free speech — that’s the core of the diversity they’re fighting for, in fact: the ability for everyone, regardless of social, cultural, sexual, gender…al background, to be able to speak their mind, make the creative works they want to make and celebrate them.

Unfortunately, something went wrong somewhere along the line. The origins of the GamerGate controversy amid the tell-all blogpost of relatively unknown indie developer Zoe Quinn’s ex-boyfriend — as well as accusations that aspects of her personal life had given her TWINE game Depression Quest rather more favourable coverage than it would have otherwise garnered — gave the “diversity” crowd a considerable amount of what they saw as ammunition to prove that “gamers” — inasmuch as that is a coherent group, which it absolutely 100% isn’t — were misogynistic harassers keen to drive women out of gaming, which was something they’d been trying to argue for a couple of years already. “Gamers”, meanwhile, hit back, quite rightly resenting the implications that they were a bunch of woman-hating fuckheads who wanted to play nothing but brown guntastic dudebro sims where people say “bitch” a lot.

No-one came out of this looking good. Quinn’s name was dragged through the mud — whether it was justifiably so or not, I can’t say for sure, though I must admit my few sightings of her on social media had always rubbed me up the wrong way — but at the same time, an entire group of people whose only common factor was a shared hobby that they all loved — and yes, that group includes men, women, straight people, gay people, cis people, trans people, black people, white people, Asian people, Latino people and any other arbitrary denominations you’d care to come up with — came under attack from people who decided that they knew better, and that they knew how the world should behave. And the conflict then proceeded to escalate, and now it’s been going on for several years — and yes, this nonsense did start before “GamerGate” ever became a thing… remember the Mass Effect 3 controversy?

There’s a lot more to it than all this, but I don’t want to get bogged down in details, largely because I’ve only really casually observed from the sidelines while all this has been going down and can’t speak with any great authority on what’s been going on in either camp.

What I can talk about, however, is the overwhelmingly negative effect that the last few years has had on gaming culture as a whole, because it fucking sucks. It really does. As someone who loves games, and has done since he was a small boy; as someone who loves talking about games, and writing about games, and telling all his friends about games they’ve never heard of… it really, really fucking sucks.

This “culture war” we’re living is not conducive to social progress, nor is it in any way making the games industry a better place for anyone. Why? Because both sides want it their way and no other way. Compromise is off the table, and opinions are firmly entrenched. GamerGate bad, progressiveness good. Unless you’re involved in GamerGate, in which case GamerGate good-but-misunderstood, SJWs bad. Proceed to yelling at one another, making unpleasant attacks on each other and, if you’re Graham Linehan, trawling through a young man’s Facebook photos to find a picture of him with his mother to ask him if “she would be proud” of how he behaves online, simply because they are on opposing “sides” of this nonsense. (Yes, this really happened.)

There’s no nuance in this discussion. No acknowledgement that both sides have good points — the progressives take things too far with their claims of “diversity” inevitably just veering into overcompensating “oppression of the privileged” territory while crying “GamerGate did it!” any time something bad happens; the free speechers are a little too resistant to things outside their comfort zone, consistently refusing to accept games like Gone Home as “real games” because they don’t conform to arbitrary guidelines of what is acceptable in the medium — and no attempts to understand one another. Battle lines are drawn. Weapons of choice are snarky comments fired from deep in the trenches of the Internet, escalating to insults and name-calling, and in some cases even to having tangible effects on aspects of people’s “real” lives, like their jobs and family.

And no-one will admit that this “culture war” is all a big steaming pile of shit that is just causing culture as a whole to stagnate. All we’re achieving is making individual subcultures within the “gamer” umbrella become more and more isolated and insular from one another, when what we should be doing is encouraging cross-pollination and exploration of games from outside your comfort zone.

And make no mistake, no-one is blameless in this. The whiny channer who bitches about “walking simulators” and how they’re bullshit is no better than the whiny Kotaku writer who bitches about how Senran Kagura’s boobies make him feel uncomfortable. The Redditor who cries “censorship!” over changes to a game’s script in localisation is no better than the forum poster who complains to Blizzard that he’s upset he has to see a lady’s bottom in tight pants. The feminist who claims everyone against her opinions is an “MRA” is no better than the actual MRAs who believe in feminist conspiracies. Get it? Fuck all of this conflict; none of it achieves anything whatsoever except making the people who just want to get on with their lives and enjoy the things they love completely and utterly fucking miserable.

Yes, I am talking about myself here. I have friends on both “sides” of this debacle, and I’m terrified of them interacting with one another, or of any of them believing me to be one “side” or the other for fear of being ostracised. I’m already a bit of a hermit; I don’t need to lose friends over something that I really don’t want to get involved in. But I am losing friends; there are people I don’t feel comfortable talking to online any more because I know that they’d believe my opinions to be “wrong” in comparison to them, and there are people I just don’t want to associate with any more because they appear to have turned into dribbling, rabid, irrational psychopaths who simply won’t listen to reason.

All I want — and I realise saying this here is just pissing in the wind, but regardless — is for people to accept one another for who they are, and what they like.

No shaming people who enjoy Japanese games for being “paedophiles”.

No shaming people who enjoy “walking simulators” for liking “not-games”.

No shaming men for enjoying attractive women in their games.

No shaming creative independent developers for using gaming as an interactive medium for creating works of art.

No shaming writers for depicting things that they don’t necessarily agree with, but want to show.

In fact, no more shaming, full-stop. No more blanket accusations. No more assumptions. Just acceptance. It doesn’t even have to be understanding — I don’t expect everyone I know to understand exactly why titles like the Neptunia series and Senran Kagura mean so much to me, so long as they respect that I feel that way, and don’t call me and the things I love “skeezy” or “gross” or whatever 12 year old girl’s words they’re using this week. I certainly don’t understand why people love, say, The Witness or Crusader Kings 2, but I’m certainly not about to start shaming the people who do, because I’m glad they have those things that they can enjoy while I have things that I can enjoy.

That’s diversity, right there: everyone having something that is “for them”. And the only way to make it better is to make more of everything for everyone — and accept that not every individual thing is aimed at every single individual person. And to accept that this is fine. And perhaps even to occasionally take a look at things you wouldn’t normally consider just out of curiosity — all in the name of understanding.

Culture becomes richer and more interesting when its smaller subdivisions are able to go off and do their own thing in peace, occasionally crossing boundaries and drawing influences from one another, or at least recognising, contrasting and celebrating the things we do similarly and differently from one another. That’s the exact opposite of what we have right now; currently, our smaller subdivisions in culture are erecting 30-foot tall barbed wire fences and firing artillery shells full of shit over the top of them.

So fuck this culture war. Fuck all the arguments I’m seeing on Twitter right now. Fuck the people who think that yelling “GamerGate did it!” or “SJWs did it!” is more important than enjoying this hobby that we all supposedly love so much. I want to go back to a time where anyone can post something about a cool new game they’ve tried out, and not have to worry about someone, somewhere getting offended or insulting them for it. I want to go back to a time when the press didn’t hate its readers, and the readers didn’t distrust the press. I want to go back to a time when Japan’s weirdness was regarded as something people wanted to explore and find out more about, rather than get skeeved out by. I want to go back to a time when weird, experimental games were cool and exciting rather than “blargh, not another pretentious indie game”.

Basically I think I probably want early ’00s-era 1up.com back.

But sadly, I’m not sure we’re ever going to get days like that back.

Oh well, all I can attempt to do, at least, is attempt to be the change I want to see in the world. Hopefully a little positivity will go a long way.

Now I’m going to bed. Please be a better place in the morning, world.

2181: Coming to a Head

I generally try and steer clear of Internet drama as much as possible, but sometimes it’s impossible not to see what’s been going on when it’s all over a website you use regularly.

Most recently, Twitter has seen some interesting happenings that make it feel like the ongoing culture war between “loudmouthed, self-professed progressives (who aren’t actually all that progressive at all)” and “people who just want to be left the fuck alone to talk to their friends about things they enjoy without being shamed for it” has been coming to a head. And it’s been kind of fascinating to watch, particularly as the most recent happenings make one wonder what role — if any — sites that provide a means of communication, such as Twitter, have in these sort of sociopolitical debates.

The most recent drama surrounds one Milo “Nero” Yiannopoulous, a writer for the conservative/right-wing news site Breitbart. Nero is, to put it mildly, something of a controversial, divisive figure: he’s brash, opinionated, flamboyantly homosexual and vehemently against the rise of “third wave” feminism — that particular ideological offshoot that we’ve seen in the last few years that seemingly concerns itself more with scoring “victim points” than actually promoting any sort of societal change for the better. At the same time, he’s also someone who stands up for what he believes in, protective of people and groups he cares for and willing to go against the grain when he believes that the “grain” is going in the wrong direction.

I find him quite amusing to read at times. I don’t follow him on Twitter, but in my occasional (non-participatory) explorations of what GamerGate subreddit KotakuInAction is up to, I tend to keep abreast of what he’s been up to, and occasionally feel inclined to read some of the things he’s posted on Breitbart. I don’t agree with everything — many things, if I’m honest — that he says, but I do agree with some others. I find his writing entertaining to read, though, and challenging to my preconceived notions about particular issues. His writing makes me think, in other words, and contemplate how I feel about something, whether or not it’s the same as what he thinks about the thing in question — and that’s something that journalists should aspire to, in my opinion, wherever they are positioned on the overall political spectrum.

Anyway. The issue is with Nero’s behaviour on Twitter, and with his subsequent treatment. He frequently comes under fire for “harassing” people himself, and for “inciting harassment” by drawing attention to things that people have said by using Twitter’s built-in “quote and comment” functionality that they added to Retweets a while back. So strong is the backlash against him that a couple of days ago, his “verified” checkmark was removed from his Twitter account, seemingly as a punishment for the way he had behaved.

Thing is, the “verified” checkmark is not supposed to be a mark of good behaviour or anything; all it’s supposed to be is an indicator that yes, this particular Twitter account is indeed the person or company that it claims to be. And Nero is Nero, no doubt about that. Taking it away for the way he has behaved on Twitter — whether or not you feel that was justified — is, frankly, insane, because it doesn’t stop him being the person he is.

Naturally, as these things tend to go, the Internet reacted immediately, with a wide variety of Twitter accounts immediately rebranding themselves as “Milo Yiannopoulous” and adopting his avatar as their profile picture, making the timeline an occasionally extremely confusing place to navigate. Alongside this, the hashtag #JeSuisMilo — a reference to the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag movement from around the time the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo were attacked in Paris last year — was launched in an attempt to show solidarity with Nero and disapproval for Twitter’s peculiar (and, as of the time of writing, unexplained) actions.

Various people, including writer and former Conservative MP Louise Mensch, did some digging and discovered the Twitter account of Michael Margolis, aka @yipe, the “engineering manager” at Twitter itself. Examining Margolis’ retweets, likes and replies to people made it look to some like there were some conflicts of interest going on, with many people alleging that Margolis was inappropriately using his position at Twitter to do favours for “progressive” types — such as reporting Nero through means other than the usual channels.

All this is hearsay and conjecture, so far as I can make out, but it raises some interesting questions, for sure. Twitter is intended to be an open, free communication platform for everyone to use. It’s not supposed to be moderated or policed — with the sheer number of users and messages that are exchanged every day, it’s simply impossible to do so. Instead, Twitter operates on the (arguably flawed) assumption that, much like society, people will naturally peel off into their own groups and interact with one another, with any cross-cultural clashes able to be resolved through use of the mute and block functions — or, in extreme cases, through Twitter’s formal reporting processes.

I have some experience with Twitter’s formal reporting procedures. Some of you may recall a couple of years back I suffered a campaign of targeted harassment from a notorious group of Internet trolls known as the GNAA. At the time, this group were targeting people who were fans of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic TV show, and since I’d recently discovered this, I had the word “Brony” (the term for an adult-age fan of the show) in my Twitter profile bio. This, it seems, was an invitation for the group in question to start accusing me of being a paedophile, even going so far as to look up the WHOIS information of websites I’d linked to from my Twitter profile or this site, then phoning up the owners of said websites (which, in this case, were the owner of Games are Evil, a site I was running at the time, and my brother) and repeating said vile accusations.

It was an extremely unpleasant, scary experience, not so much because of the torrent of abusive tweets coming my way — those were easy enough to ignore and block using Twitter’s basic tools — but because it was spilling over into the real world like this. Consequently, rather than simply shrugging the situation off, I reported it to Twitter and to my local police station. The latter were unable to do much about it — I suspected as much, but I thought it was worth doing anyway — and the former were simply useless, claiming that they were unable to intervene in this situation because it amounted to a “disagreement” rather than “harassment” by their definition.

In other words, under Twitter’s definitions, you have to be receiving some pretty damn vile harassment before their formal reporting procedures will actually do anything — or, at least, this was the case back in 2013, anyway. For everything else, you have to just deal with it, or leave the site altogether — which I did for a while, but came back after I felt worse about being alone and isolated than I did about being targeted by trolls.

In a way, I understand the way Twitter reacted the way they did to my situation. I wasn’t directly in danger or anything, and in retrospect the behaviour of the trolls was little more than the sort of casual abuse-hurling you’d get in the schoolyard. This isn’t defending it by any means, of course — I had certainly done nothing to deserve such treatment, and I was genuinely very afraid while it was all going on — but in the grand scheme of things, it perhaps was barely a blip on the radar of Bad Shit happening in the world. By acting upon it, Twitter would be setting a public precedent, and this would then have to be followed up on in future to ensure that their policies were being enforced in an even-handed and fair manner — and I got the distinct impression that Twitter support felt that the whole thing was rather more trouble than it was worth.

This little digression is an explanation of the fact that Twitter is generally very hesitant to intervene in situations where people “disagree” with one another by their definition — and their definition of “disagreeing”, at least as it stood in 2013, was rather, shall we say, lenient. So for a Twitter employee to put across the impression of giving preferential treatment towards particular individuals is not a particular fair and even-handed way to approach the situation. Moreover, Nero’s behaviour in the instances where he was accused of “inciting harassment” wasn’t anything out of the ordinary — he was simply using Twitter’s own tools (in this case, the “Quote Tweet” function) to highlight some things he wanted to discuss or bring to the attention of his audience.

Several interesting questions are raised as a result of this debacle, however. The first is whether or not popular Twitter users such as Nero should be held responsible or accountable for the actions of their followers when they do something to make a conversation or comment public. Twitter does have tools to minimise contact with people you haven’t specifically authorised to talk to you — most notably the ability to make your account private, locking it down to everyone except those who follow you — but at its core it’s designed to be a means of public discourse: the world’s biggest cocktail party, where anyone and everyone is free to wander around, listen in on what everyone is saying and contribute their own thoughts and feelings to a conversation, regardless of whether or not they know the existing participants.

In this instance, Nero was simply using Twitter as intended, so is it his fault if some followers took it upon themselves to be unpleasant little scrotes towards the person he quotes (whom, it has to be said, appears to be a fairly unpleasant little scrote herself — not that this justifies any sort of abuse)? I certainly don’t have an easy answer to that.

The second question raised by all this — particularly Margolis’ alleged involvement, which is yet to be conclusively proven — is whether or not social media companies as a whole or their employees have any sort of obligation to make decisions about users based on political or ideological viewpoints. The argument in this instance is whether or not the removal of Nero’s verified status — his “punishment” — is justified on the grounds that he disagrees (there’s that word again) with the views of third-wave feminism. Or, to take it as a broader picture, whether or not any user should be punished in any way for expressing an opinion that differs from the accepted “norm”, or which some claim to find “offensive”, or which is regarded as “unacceptable” in some way.

You get into dangerous territory with that last section. Twitter is a private company, however, so it is, of course, free to police its platform however it pleases, and if it wants to become some sort of “safe space” where third-wave feminists and their white knight “allies” can happily skip through fields of flowers (not white ones, though, because white people ruin fucking everything, apparently) then that is the company’s decision entirely. Since it has always sold itself as a means of free expression and communication for people all over the world, however, there’s an argument that we are taking a few tentative steps into a somewhat Orwellian area — though it is also worth noting that should Twitter actually decide to go down this route wholeheartedly, the market will be flung wide open for a new, alternative means of communication and expression for people who are no longer welcome under the New Tweet Order.

Personally speaking, I would rather Twitter remain completely apolitical, and continue to act as a means of free communication for groups all over the world covering a wide variety of viewpoints and ideologies, many of which would clash with one another if they came into direct contact. It’s been a valuable tool in times of crisis, such as during the massacres in Paris, the assaults in Cologne over the New Year period, and during the riots in Egypt a while back. More than that, though, it’s brought people together who may never otherwise have had the chance to talk to one another. It’s allowed friendships and even relationships to blossom, and it’s allowed differing viewpoints the chance to interact and attempt to understand one another. It’s been inestimably valuable from that perspective, and for it to start pushing one particular political viewpoint or ideology as somehow “superior” or “correct” would go against this openness that has been its most key feature ever since day one.

More than that, though, regardless of whether or not you think Nero is a twat or a genius, removing his verified status as a “punishment” is just plain stupid. What kind of message, exactly, is that supposed to send? “You said the wrong thing, so you are no longer you?” What utter nonsense.

Perhaps this is why I don’t run a huge, successful social media enterprise. Or perhaps the rest of the world really has gone completely and utterly mental.

2178: Some Love for Marvelous Europe

I received a package from Marvelous Europe today, containing five adorable chibi Senran Kagura figurines depicting Homura’s Crimson Squad at play (or, in Hikage’s case, as close to “play” as she could probably figure out). I was the lucky recipient of these figures because I retweeted or favourited something they posted on Twitter a short while ago, and I was fortunate enough to be selected as a “winner” of one of the prizes that was up for grabs at the time.

To be honest, I’d completely forgotten about it, since “RT to win!” Twitter posts are ten-a-penny, and also I very rarely win anything that involves the luck of the draw. I was delighted that Marvelous made good on their original offer, though, since I really like the figures a lot, even if they were a bit fiddly to put together. (There’s a teeny-tiny accessory for Yomi that I have no idea where to put, for example.)

This pleasant little interlude got me thinking about Marvelous Europe and how they appeared out of nowhere a little while back. Previously, games such as Senran Kagura made it over to Europe via a convoluted string of people and companies — Senran Kagura Burst, for example, was localised by XSEED and then brought to Europe by, if I remember correctly, PQube Games. Senran Kagura Burst actually got a physical release in Europe through this convoluted process, however, which made Americans super-salty because it only got a digital eShop release over there. They got their revenge with Vita follow-up Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus, though, since this was digital-only in Europe but had a special edition physical version in the states. Vita games are region-free, though, so fans such as myself simply imported.

Anyway, I recall being particularly aware of Marvelous Europe once Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson was first announced for Western release. Preorders for some ambitious-looking limited editions went up early, and I decided what the hell, I’ll jump in. After all, the limited editions put out by Idea Factory International — a very similar operation, bringing niche Japanese games to the West and giving them plenty of love and attention — had proven themselves to be rather lovely, so I had a good feeling about Marvelous Europe’s offerings.

So much so, in fact, that I also preordered both Corpse Party: Book of Shadows and Senran Kagura Estival Versus when they became available. Estival Versus is yet to be released, but both the Senran Kagura 2 and Corpse Party special editions were gorgeous, and both are releases I’m very happy to have in my collection.

The main reason I feel Marvelous Europe sets a great example for other publishers is that they clearly know their audience well. Their Twitter account is very “human”, often sharing irreverent, dry humour — particularly when the prudes of the games journalism business start whingeing about boobs, as they are so often wont to do these days — and interacting with fans rather than acting purely as a news outlet. Their positive attitude towards the games they release, their pride in their work and their total lack of shame in bringing controversial titles to an eager Western audience means that I’m more than happy to keep supporting them for as long as they keep releasing quality games for me to enjoy.

Keep it up, Marvelous Europe. You’re doing a marvellous job.