#oneaday Day 853: Friend Collecting

I didn't understand it back in the MySpace days, and I still don't understand it now.

Friend collecting. Why? Just… why?

I am, of course, referring to the phenomenon seen in the comments thread of this Facebook post here:

(with apologies to Kalam, who is nothing to do with this.)

"Who wants 2,000+ friend requests?" asks Ahmed Hamoui, only with poorer use of punctuation and a seeming inability to use the number keys on his keyboard.

To his question, I answer "Not me. Fuck off."

Facebook is noisy enough at the best of times. Can you imagine how chaotic and useless it would be if you 1) got 2,000 friend requests and 2) accepted all of them? It would completely negate the core concept of Facebook (or what it used to be, at least) which is to be a "social tool" that helps you to connect with family and friends. The very nature of the way Facebook works pretty much encourages you to limit the friends you add to being people you actually know, otherwise there's that horrid risk of people seeing photos they shouldn't. Because despite the fact that everyone knows you shouldn't post embarrassing photos online, everyone still does. (Not to mention the fact that you have no control over what other people post.)

This sort of thing happens on Twitter, too, with the whole "#TeamFollowBack" thing, whereby certain tweeters promise to follow back if you follow them. At heart, this sounds like a relatively admirable thing to do, promoting mutual, equal discussions and– oh wait, most of them are just collecting followers for no apparent reason then filling their entire timeline alternating between bragging about how many followers they have and bleating about how close to the next "milestone" they are. (Please RT.)

I trimmed my Twitter list massively a month or two back because it was just getting too much to deal with. I flip-flopped between two equally annoying problems: things moving too fast for me to be able to keep up with, and everyone posting the exact same thing at the exact same time either due to press embargoes or the death of a celebrity. So rather than complain about it, I cut the people who were irritating me or whom I hadn't "spoken" to for a while, and now enjoy a much more pleasurable life online. Sure, my timeline still gets flooded every time a celebrity (usually one I've never heard of) dies, but at least I can keep up with the conversations for the most part.

Which makes me wonder why on Earth you would want to put yourself in a position on Facebook or Twitter where it is literally impossible to follow and engage with that many people. Surely at that point social media ceases being at all "social" and simply becomes white noise?

Or perhaps I'm just getting old. It seems to be mostly young kids (particularly Justin Bieber fans for some reason) engaging in this behaviour. Perhaps they have a much greater tolerance for being bombarded with crap than I do. Perhaps they're numb to it. Perhaps they don't really want to "socialise" at all online, simply grow a bigger e-peen than their friends and/or strangers they don't know.

Whatever. I don't really care. I have cultivated a relatively small but close-knit circle of friends online, much as in "real life", and I'm happy with it that way. It's nice to have occasional new people trickle into the mix through, say, this blog or Twitter or what have you, but I certainly don't feel any need to bellow at the top of my lungs about how close I am to 1,500 Twitter followers, and I have no idea how many friends I have on Facebook — nor do I care.

If you'd like 2,000 friend requests on Facebook, simply "Like" this post then go fuck yourself.

#oneaday Day 823: Information Diet

Know what I hate? Chavs. Know what else? Teaching. Know what else? We could be here a while. I'll tell you. Press embargoes.

I get why they happen, obviously — publishers and their PR people want to ensure that coverage of something is coordinated nicely so that everyone gets suitably whipped up into a frenzy all at the same time. But there's an unfortunate side-effect if you happen to, say, follow a bunch of different video games outlets at the time a major announcement happens: everyone bellows the same fucking thing at the exact same fucking time.

It's happening more and more nowadays, too. The most notable examples that stick in my head in recent memory are Assassin's Creed III and Borderlands 2, both titles that I have a passing interest in but find myself becoming curiously resistant to the more and more I get battered in the face with the same information from slightly different angles.

I think, on the whole, this is the "problem" I have been having with mainstream gaming overall. There's too much information out there — too much coverage, too many "behind the scenes" videos, too many "exclusive" interviews, too many press releases announcing a single screenshot (yes, that is a real thing I received today and I have no shame in naming Square Enix as the perpetrator). After a while, you become completely saturated with information about a product and subsequently have absolutely no inclination to want to touch it, ever. This was a big part of why I didn't want to play Mass Effect 3, for example — EA's appalling behaviour was just the straw that broke the camel's back, really.

I feel for my friends who work in games PR for "B-tier" games, too. It's hard enough to get a title like, say, Risen 2 noticed at the best of times but when you're competing with everyone beating themselves into an orgasmic and/or angry frenzy over Mass Effect 3, there's little hope for your title outside of groups of people like me who have forsaken the mainstream in favour of enjoying less heavily marketed titles.

Conversely, the games I have been playing and enjoying are the ones where information has been trickling out slowly, usually straight from the developers mouths without dribbling through the PR sieve. Take the "Operation Rainfall" RPGs Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story and Pandora's Tower (which I'm currently playing), for example — these received very little in the way of press attention despite being fantastic games. The aforementioned Operation Rainfall, a grassroots campaign to get these three excellent games localised and released in Europe and the US, received plenty of press, but information on the games themselves was conspicuously absent. As a result, I was able to go into all three of them pretty much blind and have a fantastic experience in the process — a big part of what made all of them great is the sense of discovery inherent in all of them. That just doesn't happen if you've been smothered in information for the six months leading up to the game's release.

As a result of all this, I've come to a decision, and if you're feeling the same way as me, I recommend you follow it too.

Cut back. Cut out the crap. If you follow a buttload of games journalists and outlets on Twitter, unfollow them. If you want some gaming news, pick one outlet and keep it on your follow list, but chances are if you follow lots of gaming fans, someone will retweet the news as it happens anyway. Otherwise, go seek out the news when it's convenient for you. Check the sites when you feel like it. Subscribe to their RSS feeds. Use Google Currents or Flipboard to receive information in an easily-digestible format. Receive information on your terms, not that of a carefully-crafted PR campaign.

This doesn't have to apply just to games — it can apply to pretty much anything that suffers from the problems described above. Film, TV, celebrity news, business, tech… anything, really.

I'm going to give this a try. It will doubtless initially feel somewhat weird to not see some familiar faces and logos in my Twitter timeline, but I have a strange feeling that I'll be a lot happier, less frustrated and less cynical as a result. Check back with me in a week or two and we'll see.

(If you're one of the people I do happen to unfollow, it's nothing personal. You just might want to consider getting separate professional and personal accounts!)

#oneaday Day 821: There are Bigger Problems in the World, Like Your Face

Second only to the patented "Everyone Is So Entitled These Days And Should Just Shut Up" argument-defuser is the ever-faithful "Everyone Should Realise That There Are Bigger Problems In The World And Should Just Shut Up" conversation-closer.

I shan't get into the former here — everyone has talked it to death and should just shut up — but I feel I should address the latter, since I saw it come up on Twitter earlier today. (And, if you're reading this and you know that you used it, fear not — this isn't a personal attack on you by any means, just my own thoughts on that particular argument.)

The trouble with the "Everyone Should Realise That There Are Bigger Problems In The World And Should Just Shut Up" argument (hereafter referred to as ESRTTABPITWASJSU) is that it assumes that people who are commenting on or complaining about something are equating their personal reaction to something that is "close" or "important" to them with something that is unquestionably a Big Problem For The World.

This is not the case at all. Recent examples where the ESRTTABPITWASJSU argument has been applied include independent game developer Phil Fish's ill-advised admonishment of the entire Japanese game development community in a very public place (and subsequent beratement of those who criticised him on Twitter, culminating with him leaving the social network altogether); and public reaction to the Mass Effect 3 ending. I have no desire to beat those particular drums in any great detail for now, so let's put the specifics aside for a moment.

Yes. There are bigger problems in the world than both of those things. There are people losing their homes and livelihoods to the economic crisis. There are people in the world with not enough food or water. There are places in the world where diseases go unchecked. There are countries that are ruled by people with only their own interests at heart, not those of their people. There are wars being fought in the name of… what? And there are people who get so passionate about their religious beliefs that they blow themselves up in the name of their god, usually killing many other people in the process.

These are big problems. They are fucked up, massive, humongous problems that we, as individuals, can do very little about. Sure, we can throw our money at charities and, if we're feeling particularly activist-y, attempt to take some sort of action against. But realistically (or pessimistically, if you prefer) there is very little that Josephine McAveragepants can do about these things since she does not run a government and/or army and/or bank. The problems become so massive that they take on an unreal quality — they often feel like they take place in a parallel reality distant from our own.

This is why people prefer to turn their attentions to problems they feel they can solve, or that they feel they can at least have an impact on. They have every right to do that. They may often have selfish interests at heart, but recent examples of organised action aimed at these relatively minor issues have proven that it's far from being isolated individuals shouting and screaming about Games for Windows Live in Dark Souls or whether the Mass Effect 3 ending constituted false advertising (apparently, according to one Better Business Bureau blogger anyway, it does, believe it or not) — these are groups of people who are prepared to stand up and be counted in order to tackle problems they feel like they can face.

It's an idealistic, utopian vision to believe that people (read: the Internet) will rise up together and do something about the bigger problems in the world than the ones they have successfully tackled to date. Maybe it will happen one day. Maybe these small "victories" will give some people the confidence to try something bigger, a little piece at a time. Protesting, say, a war is a bigger deal than signing a petition against the ending for a video game. Some people may be scared to jump in at the deep end, particularly with the apparent risk to life and limb frequently presented by the media, so they take the "safe option". They feel like their voice is being heard, but relating to an issue which is smaller, closer, more relatable.

The key thing, though, is that none of these people who are sweating the small stuff are saying that the issues they feel strongly about are more important than the Bad Shit Happening Everywhere Else In The World.

No-one is equating those things except, ironically, in many cases, those people making use of the ESRTTABPITWASJSU argument.

#oneaday Day 820: Disagreement

I hate arguing. In fact, I'd go further than that. I hate disagreeing. I have absolutely no doubt that this particular aspect of my personality is a side-effect of the social anxiety that I suffer from, but it sometimes makes discussions hard to participate in.

I'm fine with expressing my opinion and feel I can argue my viewpoint pretty convincingly in most instances — this blog is filled with numerous examples of that, as longtime readers will doubtless know. It's in the things that happen after my opinion has been stated that things get a little trickier — namely, if someone comes along with a diametrically-opposed viewpoint and the willingness (and/or ability) to argue until they're blue in the face about how much I'm wrong and how they're absolutely right.

Most of the time, these disagreements don't descend into "you're an idiot", but my discomfort with disagreeing makes me sometimes feel like it's implied. I like to think that I go through life as a fairly likeable sort of chap and take great pains to try not to offend anyone (swearing and masturbating stickmen aside, obviously — I'm referring specifically to personal attacks here) so having someone disagree with me and argue their case in an impassioned manner is a frustrating, disquieting experience that often makes me wish I had kept my mouth shut in the first place.

Part of this is due to the fact that I tend to cycle negative experiences around and around inside my head involuntarily. Even a seemingly innocuous, irrelevant discussion that might have gotten a little bit heated somewhere along the way is enough to keep me awake at night sometimes — and those rare situations where someone is actually genuinely upset by something which has occurred? I can pretty much forget about remaining calm, instead preferring to stare into space, replaying the incident in my mind and wondering what could have happened if things went a little differently.

It can happen before time, too. If I know there's some form of difficult conversation coming up, I'll find myself role-playing it in my head, imagining what might happen. Inevitably my mental conversation has the worst possible outcome, usually descending into someone getting yelled at or thumped. This does at least make having the actual conversation pleasantly surprising almost without exception, since no-one ever gets thumped and hardly anyone ever gets yelled at.

I guess part of the frustration over all this is to do with power, or more specifically, a feeling of powerlessness. If you know (or at least believe) that your opinion on something is inherently sensible and others seem to think that you're speaking gibberish, it's disheartening — particularly if said opponents of your viewpoint are aggressive and stubborn in their dismissal of what you have to say. It's particularly disappointing and upsetting when people whom you like and respect fall into this category, too.

Nine times out of ten, the argument just wasn't worth having in the first place, too. So what I have taken to doing most of the time these days is just stepping back before jumping in to a debate, thinking "will this get heated? Is it worth potentially getting upset over?" and then — only then — making a decision on whether or not to proceed. In some cases, said decision leads to launching a discussion and dealing with the consequences. In others, it leads to walking away — deleting the unsent tweet, closing the comments section, biting my tongue. And in extreme cases, it leads to me feeling like the correct course of action is simply to remove myself from the situation in question and ensure it doesn't arise again — online, that means unfriending, unfollowing and/or blocking people; offline… well, you just walk away and don't look back.

Some people are built for arguing. I don't think I'm one of them.

#oneaday Day 818: "So Fed Up With SOMEBODY..."

Passive aggression. It's an ugly business, for sure, but never has it been easier to participate in than in this age of social media. While the phenomenon has been around for many years in the form of bickering couples saying things like "SOMEBODY didn't do the washing up" or making other such pointed remarks either directly at each other or to other people within earshot of their partner, it wasn't until people gained the ability to broadcast their every waking thought to the entire world that it became the worldwide craze that it is today.

I'm not sure exactly what it achieves. I've indulged in it in the past — in my defence, there were extenuating circumstances at the time — and it didn't really make me feel any better, though it did have the effect I desired at the time: to get some validation and reassurance from friends, and to piss off, upset or otherwise get the attention of a specific person. I wasn't particularly proud of the result. I ended up feeling worse about the thing I was trying to get out of my system than before the passive-aggressive incident. So I try and avoid it in most cases these days. (Note: most. No-one is infallible. And I'm aware that not sharing the details of said incident above could be construed as a form of passive aggressiveness. But, well, shut up.)

Why has social media been a catalyst for the growth of passive-aggressiveness, though? Quite simply, it's because it gives people the ability to feel like they're being heard even when no-one is really listening. Post something along the lines of "SO PISSED OFF WITH SOMEONE RIGHT NOW!!!" on Facebook and within a matter of minutes you'll have at least one "Like" and one comment saying something along the lines of "u ok hun?". Since you're being passive-aggressive, though, you couldn't possibly say exactly what's up with you at the time, and as such you drop vague hints as to what is bothering you without actually saying it. Or, worse, you leave a comment to the "u ok hun?" commenter saying "I texted you", letting everyone else reading the comment thread know that you're telling someone all about what/who has pissed you off this week, encouraging a flurry of private messages and texts to said person asking "Do you know what's up with so-and-so?"

Eventually, of course, the whole sordid saga comes out because statistically, someone in your group of friends is likely to have loose lips. We know this from sitcoms where one member of a group of friends is forced to keep someone's secret but finds themselves increasingly tempted to reveal everything to someone else, whom it transpires actually knew it anyway. Or, to base ourselves back in reality, some people like telling others secrets because it gives them a feeling of power — "I know something you don't, but I'll tell you if you buy me a drink/buy me a pony/sleep with me" — and thus said secret gradually spreads and spreads until, inevitably, it gets back to the person it originated from, who traces it back to the person who they told in confidence and then posts another passive-aggressive status update about how they're, like, totally so pissed off with people who can't keep secrets.

You get the idea, anyway.

As human beings, we have a variety of means of communication at our disposal, and it's pretty clear to most of us that being upfront and honest about things often makes life a lot easier in the long run, even if it might be a bit like tearing off a plaster in the short term. But in the heat of the moment, it's all too easy to focus on that "short term" bit and take the easy option, which is to bottle up the things we're really feeling and simply spout vague bullshit into the ether in the hopes that someone — anyone — will reach out to us and give us someone to talk to.

We never learn our lesson, though — at least not if my Facebook news feed and Twitter timeline are anything to go by.

#oneaday Day 796: Social Unplugged

I unplugged myself from a bunch of social networks yesterday. I haven't deleted my accounts as yet and probably won't do so unless said sites start spamming me excessively, but I have stopped using a number of services which were proving to be fairly unnecessary in my day to day life. All told, I said goodbye to Foursquare, Gowalla, Path, Quora, GetGlue and possibly some others that have slipped my mind. Cold turkey, too — I simply deleted the apps from my phone and didn't tend to use their websites anyway. It was a pleasingly liberating feeling to have released myself from some of these self-imposed shackles.

So what have I chosen to keep around? Facebook and Twitter, for starters, since those are the nearest we have to "industry standard" social networking tools. Twitter's integration into iOS 5, for example, proves that Apple is certainly willing to show its support for the microblogging site, and it's rare these days to see a TV show that doesn't prominently display an "official" hashtag for online discussion alongside the broadcast. Facebook, meanwhile, I largely keep around for two reasons: firstly, my job, which involves playing a large number of Facebook games; and secondly, I have a number of friends and family who don't really "get" Twitter (or have no real desire to do so) and thus Facebook is a reliable means of communication with them.

Alongside this I have a Google+ account and am still a fan of Google's clean, clear service. Despite superficial similarities to Facebook, it actually provides a rather distinct user experience, combining the ease of discovering new people of Twitter with the possibility for conversations of more than 140 characters at once of Facebook. A lot of people feel they don't "need" it and indeed many of my friends who also use Twitter and Facebook have kind of relaxed their use of the service somewhat, but this has left me with a variety of unique and fascinating people with whom to engage with. Despite the hoohah over Google's changed privacy policy a few weeks back, the Google+ integration across the Web (particularly noticeable on YouTube) is a great example of how to do the "sharing" thing right.

I also still have the Formspring app on my phone. I haven't used it for a while, but occasionally it's a lot of fun to ask for some bizarre questions, see what nonsensical queries people can come out with and then attempt to retort with some appropriately witty (or brutally honest) responses. It's utterly pointless for the most part, but it's actually a good means for flexing the writing muscles in a slightly different way to what this blog offers — rather than having to come up with a topic myself, a Formspring answer is a short piece of writing based on a stimulus provided by someone else. I enjoy doing this.

Besides those (and the WordPress app, of course, for maintaining this 'ere site), though, I've come to the conclusion I have no need for anything else. I have no real need to "check in" to places I'm at, things I'm watching or books I'm reading, because it's just as straightforward to just post on Facebook, Twitter or G+ that I'm doing those things. They were fun for a while (and GetGlue sends you actual real physical stickers if you earn enough badges on the site!) but ultimately they're meaningless noise in an already chaotic world. So away they go. And thus my life becomes approximately 27% more peaceful.

If you'd like to follow me on Twitter, you can do so here. If you'd like to circle me on G+, you can do so here. And if you'd like to ask me silly questions on Formspring, you can do so here. That's your lot!

#oneaday Day 779: Snark Pit

I've kind of had it with snark. The whole "let's piss on everything" parade that shows up any time something vaguely interesting or cool happens is getting really rather tiresome, and over the last few weeks and months I've actually been taking steps to minimise my exposure to it by simply unfollowing people on Twitter who prove to be irritants in this fashion. (British game journos, you don't come off well in this poll, by the way, naming no specific names.)

Unfortunately, on a day like today, which held among other things the promise of a hotly-anticipated iPad-related announcement from Apple (which turned out to be "The New iPad" with its shiny retina display and quad-core processor… yum) it's difficult to avoid said snark. It seems that for a lot of people nowadays that if something isn't to your own personal preference, then no-one should enjoy it.

At this point I'll say that I'm well aware I've been guilty of this in the past, and for that I apologise. (The X-Factor is still unquestionably shit, though. There is no valid argument in favour of a show that gave the world Jedward. I'm just not going to rant at length about the subject any more.) I am trying my best these days to see arguments from both sides, but unless you're some sort of level 99 mediator, you're always going to come down on one side or another. So long as you don't force your views on others and expect everyone to agree with you, everyone should be free to do that. (Unless it's about something dickish. I think we can pretty much universally agree that those who judge people based on skin colour or sexual orientation can all pretty much just bugger off and sit on a spike.)

I digress. I was talking about snark, and specifically relating to today's Apple announcements. The new iPad is, by all accounts, a lovely-looking device, and the Retina display is sure to raise some eyebrows. As per usual for an Apple event, the company came out with its usual stuff about how it believed we were entering a "post-PC" era and about how people supposedly "preferred gaming on their iPad" to consoles and computers.

Contentious comments, for sure, but firstly, they're marketing hyperbole — Apple announcements are press events, after all, and a company as big as Apple is never going to be humble about its achievements or lofty ambitions — and secondly, it might not be quite so unreasonable as you think. Already many households are making use of iPads for simple tasks such as browsing the Web, checking email, watching TV and movies, playing games, keeping themselves organised and all manner of other things. And the sheer number of people who have downloaded Angry Birds, whatever you may think of it (I hate it) should give you pause when considering the gaming-related comments.

But instead of thinking these points through rationally and considering the perspective that Apple might have been coming from, in it was with the snark about how wrong Apple was and how much bullshit they were talking. Up went the defensive walls, and a veritable barrage of snark was fired over the parapets towards anyone who dared to say "hmm, hang on, that's actually quite interesting, and possibly plausible". (I'm not saying their comments were true, rather that they deserved greater consideration than immediate outright dismissal.)

It only continued when, as usually happens in Apple announcement events, software started to be shown. The new versions of iMovie and GarageBand for iOS drew particular ire, with various Twitter users making acidic comments about how awful the music people makes with GarageBand supposedly is, and how terrible the "movie trailers" facility of iMovie is.

Once again, no consideration was given to the audiences that these features might be directed at. As a former employee of the Apple Store, let me assure you there is absolutely no love lost between me and the tech giant of Cupertino, so I have no "need" or contractual obligation to defend them — and also, a company the size of Apple certainly doesn't need my defence either. But as a former employee, I know that Apple customers aren't just high-falutin' creative types, gadget freaks, tech snobs and people with more money than sense. I know that people who walk through the front door of that store range from very young to very old; from experienced computer user to complete beginner. I know that there's a considerable proportion of that audience who came to Apple because of its products' reputation of ease of use. I've even taught plenty of those people how to achieve simple tasks in products such as iMovie and GarageBand, and to see the looks on their faces when they realised that yes, they could be creative with their computers despite their lack of technological knowhow was, to use a word Apple itself is very fond of, magical.

As such, I feel it's grossly unfair and downright blinkered for people (including professional commentators in some situations) to completely dismiss a considerable proportion of Apple's audience and declare a feature to be "awful" or "crap" simply on the grounds that they don't see the appeal, or think that its results are cheesy. (They are, but imagine if you had no idea how to edit a video and suddenly discovered you could put together a slick-looking movie trailer from your holiday footage and upload it to the Internet. You'd be pretty stoked, and you wouldn't care that it was a bit cheesy. If you were inspired by this ease of use, you might even look into the subject further to find out how to take more control over the stuff you were creating.)

I'm using Apple as an example today since the announcement is still pretty fresh in everyone's mind. But the presence of snark can be found pretty much any time something interesting is announced or discussed, especially in the tech or gaming industries. You can count on there being an unfunny hashtag pun game mocking the story within a matter of minutes; endlessly-retweeted "jokes" trying to look clever; and, of course, protracted slanging matches any time someone calls these people out on it.

And, you know, I've had enough. If you have a valid criticism of something, by all means share it and back up your point. But if you have nothing to say other than "I think this is crap, therefore everyone else should too" then kindly keep it to yourself. Because, frankly, your opinion isn't anywhere near as important as you think it is.

#oneaday Day 765: Social Overload

It may be simply my "over 30s" grumpiness starting to show, but I'm starting to find "brands'" use of social media to be immensely irritating. And even more irritating is the fact that their techniques seem to work — which, of course, perpetuates the whole hideous cycle until someone snaps and goes on a mad katana rampage.

I'm talking primarily about that faux cheerfulness that pretty much every brand page out there shows when addressing its audience. "Hey [insert collective noun here that is tangentially related to being a fan of the product in question]! [exclamation mark is important to show enthusiasm] We thought it'd be a great idea to [adopt some out of date Internet meme/take goofy photos of our office/make a cringeworthy video] so we did! And here's the proof! [insert link to photo/video/blog post]".

Getting your audience to engage with you is one thing. Getting them to engage with you on a meaningful level is an altogether different thing. I genuinely once saw the The Sims 3 Facebook page ask the community what their favourite colour was. Nearly a thousand people replied. I "Unliked" them shortly after that.

As I'm writing this, I'm trying to pin down exactly what it is that riles me so about this sort of thing. After all, the very fact that nearly a thousand people wanted to tell the faceless Sims 3 page that their favourite colour was, in fact, blue shows that it's a system that seems to work. But does it have any value whatsoever? Does feeling like a brand is someone you can "talk to" help you feel any more fondness towards the product in question, or is it simply a novelty and a means of building community?

It depends on how you handle it, of course. If a question posed by a brand page is the start of a larger discussion which representatives of the brand then participate in, then it's a good thing, in my opinion. However, for the most part in my experience, these sort of posts tend to just be "post something that lots of people won't be able to resist replying to or Liking, light the blue touch paper and stand back". After the initial question is posted, the brand steps back and doesn't participate in the discussion any further, leaving the community to fight each other over whether or not the man who said pink was his favourite colour is gay or not.

The side-effect of all this relentless posturing by brands is that it leads to a feeling of saturation. By way of example, I've been so bombarded with teaser videos, images, exhortations to "celebrate FemShep Friday" and numerous other pieces of detritus that I've, ironically, lost any enthusiasm I may have had for Mass Effect 3 and probably won't be buying it.

"Ignore it," you may say. "Unlike it. Unfollow it."

Believe me, I have. But sometimes you need to venture on to those pages to find out useful pieces of information — like, say, release dates — and end up having to mine your way through pages and pages of completely, utterly worthless nonsense in order to find anything relevant. That, surely, isn't how it's supposed to work. Or perhaps it is, and that's why I don't work as a "social media guru" or whatever.

On the flipside to all this, companies seem to be a lot better at using Twitter in a manner which doesn't infuriate me. The very way in which Twitter works — you don't see replies from people/brands you are following that are directed to people you aren't following yourself — means that a lot of this unnecessary noise is filtered out. And the fact that tweets are, by their very nature, somewhat transient means that there's no means for a 1,000-post comment thread discussion on favourite colours to take place. This is a Good Thing.

The best brands on Twitter do one of two things: post relevant information at a steady pace for you to check out at your leisure (see: feeds from websites or companies that have regularly-updating news) or use Twitter for one of its primary functions — as a means of communication.

In the former case, what you essentially get is a bit like an RSS feed relating to the product or company you're interested in. In the latter case, you get some of the most helpful customer support I've ever had the pleasure to experience.

Take the poor souls over on the XboxSupport Twitter account, for example. These absolute saints have to deal with bombardments of questions every day, and somehow they still manage to remain polite, professional and — most importantly — get straight to the point. Ask them a question and they'll do their best to answer you in a single tweet, and often very quickly, too. What you don't get from them is vapid crowd-baiting questions or upselling suggestions to check out/buy additional products.

A lot of other companies have cottoned on to this in the last couple of years. I was particularly impressed with Orange's support Twitter account, which helpfully resolved an issue I had tried (and failed) on several occasions to sort out over the phone. Xbox Support, too, have been great, and I'm sure there's plenty of other examples out there.

I suppose there's a lesson in all this somewhere. I should probably resist that inviting-looking Like button at the top of Facebook pages I can see are filled with vapid nonsense, and stick to only following things that actually provide useful information. Otherwise all that ends up happening is you feel completely burned out by the multisensory marketing bombardment you experience on a daily basis — and you end up hating things that you formerly liked. (Sorry, Mass Effect. It's not you, it's me.)

#oneaday Day 646: The Industry that Won't Grow Up

Here in the UK, it's the Games Media Awards this evening, an event run by trade publication MCV — arguably one of the biggest and most reliable sources of industry news in the business. The awards ceremony should be a great honour for those nominated — national recognition for the work you do is something which should be celebrated, and the tireless hours of work that those who work for various publications and websites put in should be rewarded with something like this.

Unfortunately, for me at least, there's something of a problem: the way these awards are being marketed, particularly on Twitter. Doubtless someone somewhere along the way has been looking at the eternally-bizarre Betfair Poker account and decided that they'd try to do their own "self aware Twitter account" thing for the GMAs. There's crude humour, promises of "industry boobs" (which — ha ha — turn out to be images of male nipples from a feature on the UFC personal trainer game that came out a while back) and generally very little discussion of the reason the awards actually exist — the games media and the good work they do.

In the last 24 hours, the GMAs Twitter account has encouraged everyone to turn up to the awards ceremony nude, noted that "if by this time tomorrow we're not unprofessionally drunk, we're doing something wrong" and publicly ridiculed anyone who decided to speak out against the attitude on display. For me, that doesn't instil me with a particularly large degree of confidence in the credibility of the awards, however big the sponsors are — and they're pretty big.

I'm not saying the awards and the way they're promoted should be po-faced and boring — far from it. But I'd much rather see the industry's achievements being celebrated than puerile jokes better suited to the playground — great stuff gets written every day, yet in 24 hours of tweets leading up to the announcement of the award winners, precisely one tweet (itself a retweet from a reputable journalist on MCV) called attention to a good piece of work published online. The rest promised boobs, nudity and drunkenness. And while I don't doubt there will be plenty of drinking at the GMAs ceremony tonight, to revel in it quite so much on the official account seems… I don't know, inappropriate.

The problem is partly that gaming itself is stuck in a curious cultural position somewhere betwixt "creative medium", "kids' toys" and "big business". The disparate elements aren't always entirely compatible with one another, and it can often lead to accusations of the industry being "immature" — an argument lent weight by the number of games that fulfil childish (and usually stereotypically male) fantasies such as playing soldiers, flying spaceships and killing monsters.

But the thing is, the industry as a whole does seem very much to want to grow up. The very existence of ceremonies like the BAFTAs for games and even the GMAs themselves suggest that the industry and those who work in it do so desperately want to be taken seriously, to be seen as a worthwhile part of society rather than being regarded in the Daily Mail light of "destroying childhood" and the like. Unfortunately for those people who think talking about boobs and drunkenness on the official account for an awards ceremony is the right thing to do, that means knowing when to turn off the smut and turn on the professionalism — because if you don't, it simply undermines everything you're trying to do for the industry and destroys your credibility.

Sadly, though, from what I have seen, I appear to be in a minority in feeling this way — worse, by posting this, it's entirely possible I'm opening myself up to public ridicule by the account in question itself. Still, if that does happen I think it will prove my point rather aptly.

#oneaday Day 555: Social Smarts

This story in the New York Times tells of a year-old startup company called Social Intelligence, whose remit consists of assembling a dossier of information on job applicants based on their online activity over the past seven years.

Now, you may argue that employers are perfectly within their rights to carry out background checks on prospective employees, and you'd be absolutely right — it's why schools and other positions which place people in positions where they will be dealing with "vulnerable" individuals require a disclosure check to make sure the applicant doesn't have a checkered criminal past. Evidence of professional honours and charitable work also helps make an employer feel that not everything listed on a CV is a fabrication.

The concerning part is what else Social Intelligence looks for — according to the NYT article, "online evidence of racist remarks; references to drugs; sexually explicit photos, text messages or videos; flagrant displays of weapons or bombs and clearly identifiable violent activity." The concerning part is not the type of content that the company is looking for — it's how it might be stumbled across in a typical Internet search. That is, completely lacking in context. I'm not for a moment condoning violent activity, racism or anything else dodgy. But, frankly, everyone makes jokes, and sometimes those jokes are off-colour. Everyone has embarrassing Facebook photos, many of which are not what they seem. And if someone's had a puff of weed of a weekend and had a good giggle about it with their friends, that doesn't make them an inherently bad person, either.

"We are not detectives," said Max Drucker, CEO of the company. "All we assemble is what is publicly available on the Internet today."

Fair enough; but where does it stop? Once employers get the message that it's okay for companies like Social Intelligence to start trawling through your online background, what's to stop them from rejecting you based simply on something you said to your friends, or who you associate with online. This is particularly relevant given the "amusing" practice of friends "facejacking" or "fraping" each other's accounts given the opportunity — perhaps they left their account logged in, perhaps they left their phone on the table to go for a piss. Regardless of how or why it happened, a good-natured facejacking with all its usual excesses could well lead to someone's job prospects being dashed on the rocks — through no fault of the candidate.

Then there's the privacy question. Not necessarily the "what you share" question — that's a different matter entirely, and one which every individual must decide upon: what are you willing to tell people online? No, the privacy question I'm concerned about here is the divide between the personal and the professional. We're all different people at work — we behave in one way when we're on the clock, expected to be that person listed in the Person Specification and deal with customers and clients in the way we're supposed to, but as soon as 5pm rolls around we're off down the pub, swearing like a sailor, giving each other light-hearted ribbings and possibly making fools of ourselves. This latter part of the day doesn't affect our capability to do the job effectively. This latter part of the day is completely irrelevant to an employer — and, given most social networks' focus on the "personal" rather than the "professional", most social networks save the interminably boring LinkedIn are also completely irrelevant to an employer.

As someone who suffered workplace bullying from management partly as a result of some extremely vague negative comments on Twitter (which didn't mention the company in question at all, I hasten to add) — and witnessed several colleagues get fired over a Facebook prank that went awry — I feel particularly strongly about this. The things I said online were vague, not directed at my employer but at my life situation in general, and designed to let my friends who cared about me know how I was feeling — which wasn't great at the time. My professional life had no place intruding on my personal life — my personal life was not affecting my job performance, which had never been better. There were facts and figures and customer satisfaction surveys to prove it. Ironically, all the poor treatment I received at the hands of this shockingly bad management did was make me more likely to badmouth them now that I've left the company. But specifics of that are for another day.

The best analogy I can think of for Social Intelligence's work would be if as part of your job interview you had someone from the company follow you to the pub in the evening, follow you home, watch you go about your daily business, watch you have a shit, shower, shave, and then go through your bins just for good measure. In the days before social networking sites employers didn't do this, so just because there is the possibility for unprecedented invasions of privacy doesn't mean that it should happen.

Sadly, however, in the modern world, a lot of people seem to think that the words can and should are, in fact, interchangeable. And as such we end up with companies such as Social Intelligence rifling through candidates' virtual dirty laundry in an attempt to come up with the one tragic flaw that means Mr Perfect is not, in fact, quite so perfect for this position after all.

To me, the concept of "watch what you say" goes against everything social media — which should, in essence, be the ultimate form of free speech — stands for. But while this sort of thing is going on, you'd better just double-check those privacy settings, and cancel that account on that swinging site you signed up for "just to take a look."