Television, Internet

One of the reasons I started playing MMORPGs was because there was nothing to watch on tv. Until the mid 1990s I'd always been a serious consumer of broadcast television and when I say "serious" I don't just mean I watched a lot of it, I mean I took television seriously.

I didn't just watch it. I talked about it, thought about it, wrote about it, collected it. When home video became a thing in the 1980s I began to build up a library of tv shows, filling my shelves with VHS cassettes the same way I filled the house with books, comics, vinyl and CDs.

And television seemed important, then. Watching was a social act. A bonding ritual. Along with music it was the glue that held society together. Or it was until that all fell apart.

By the time I got around to installing EverQuest in November 1999 I'd already lost faith in the God in the Corner. By then, for a couple of years Mrs Bhagpuss and I had been playing more video games than we watched tv. I'd already all but stopped watching altogether when I stepped onto the wooden platforms of Kelethin for the first time. And fell off.

Falling to my death and losing my corpse on my first evening did not deter me. I stuck with EQ and that was that for television for more than a decade. I almost literally did not look at a screen, other than my CRT monitor, for wel over ten years.

I remember vividly how far removed I became from the televisual experience. It wasn't just that I didn't know the shows any more, it was that my brain ceased to be able to interpret the images. On the very rare occasions when I visited someone and saw a tv playing I felt like Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell To Earth, only instead of being fascinated I was repelled.

With deep irony, I timed my withdrawal to co-incide almost exactly with the explosive growth of of non-broadcast television and the concomittant, meteoric rise in both the quantity and the quality of available content. Television entered a new and radically transformed golden age and I missed it all.

Luckily, along with the new direction came new technology. Television joined books and music in the long afterlife of the culture. You no longer had to be there. You could wander up later. You'd miss the zeitgeist, sure, but we all missed Dickens' moment yet we still read him. Okay, I don't read him but the point stands. I could, if I wanted.

I still don't watch broadcast TV. As best I can tell it remains, for the most part, abominable. Also inconvenient. What brought me back to the wider form was the discovery I could download television to a pocket device and watch it on a tiny screen in my hand. A very, very tiny screen. Less than two inches square.

I don't think I have that MP4 player any more but it gatewayed me back into television. Over the years I've stared at any number of small screens, from my trusty iPod Touch up to an ironically "gigantic" ten inch Windows tablet and back down to my current platform, Amazon's reliable-if-annoying Kindle Fire.

These days I'm in the habit of watching whole runs. Not in the now-traditional box-set binge over a lost weekend but in hearty bites over a few weeks. I watch in the late evening, in bed, for a couple of hours. It began as thirty minutes right before I went to sleep but the habit has grown. Now I often go to bed early just so I can watch more stuff for longer.

At first I ran through some old favorites, sitcoms mostly. I found them on YouTube, where the quality varied wildly. I learned a lot, both about the history of the medium and the way that long-form, episodic narrative works. It's far easier to see the structure when you watch in a week what would have originally taken a year.

I worked my way through television's comedic back pages, all the way from sixties classics like The Dick Van Dyke show to 90s obscurities like Boston Common, trying to give myself an education in what I'd missed but eventually the poor quality of the recordings on YouTube began to wear at my resolve. I'm no graphics nazi but I do like to be able to see peoples' faces. Like everyone else I turned to box sets, which I watched on the seven-inch portable DVD player I bought to take on holiday.

And then I got Amazon Prime. Jeff Bezos kept offering three months for free and I kept resisting but one day I had some stuff to buy and there was postage and I thought, "Why not? I can cancel it later". Only, I didn't cancel it. I started watching stuff. Often, ironically, shows I already owned on DVD but hadn't gotten around to taking the shrink-wrap off yet because it had only been five years, well maybe ten, and who has time to unwrap stuff?

Streaming was just so much more convenient and the HD picture was so much better. Over the last couple of years I've run through most of what appeals to me on Prime. It's a good selection but it's quite surprising how fast you get through it.

I always like to have the next thing lined up when I near the end of a series because coming to a dead stop can be jarring. Right now, though, there's not an awful lot left that's calling out to me, which is how I let myself be talked, once again, into a subscription, this time to one of Amazon's extra channels. 99p a month for three months, that was the deal, and there was one show on there I really wanted to watch - Doom Patrol. I'd pay a lot more than 99p to watch that.

Only, now I have watched it. It was great - even better than I hoped it would be, let alone than I expected. But it's over now until they make some more and with things as they are, who knows when that might be?

I have a complete box set of Veronica Mars waiting so I have my supply lines secured but that means getting the little DVD player out and I don't want to. To avoid having to do that I was even wondering whether to subscribe to a second streaming service. I'd really like to finish watching Umbrella Academy on Netflix. I started last year but I can only watch it on Mrs Bhagpuss's PC (for a very uninteresting reason I won't bother to explain), which makes it too awkward to bother.

As I was dithering over that decision I was also scrolling through the shows Prime was trying to foist on me. The recommendation algorithm there is... not good. And then I noticed something called AFK. It seemed like a very odd choice for title. Out of idle curiosity I clicked on it and read

Well, that sounds... embarassing. Still, I don't know, maybe it might not be completely terrible? It had four stars from customer recommendations, for what that's worth (not much). I read some of the reviews:

"If you've ever played an MMORPG then you can relate to this series. It is low budget, but don't let that run you off. This little gem is very well written and some of the actors are amazingly good."

"This is one of those low budget finds you sometimes discover on Amazon, very short episodes but its a real winner of a show"

"Honestly, at first, it was kinda bad. It's clearly low budget and I just had it on in the background 'cause was a cool concept. Gamers getting stuck in the game. Nothing groundbreaking, but around halfway through the first season the quality improved massively. And by the end of the second season, I was hooked. "

And I have to agree. It is low budget. Some of the actors seem to have more enthusiasm than experience. The script can be a little on the nose. But the characters are very well conceived, much of the acting is convincing, there's a surprising amount of nuance, the narrative arc is sound and a good percentage of the jokes land.

All in all it's a lot better than I expected. It also raises a lot of very interesting questions about the nature of the hobby itself. Nothing we haven't all thought and talked about plenty of times, but framed in a context that casts new light on some old topics. It made me think, which is above and beyond the call for something like this, I'd say.

The AFK project began as a web series, a whole other part of the tv forest I have yet to explore. In truth, I've been keeping well clear of it until now for fear of what I might find. As a lifelong advocate of the DIY ethic in music, comics and writing, I have no idea why I would do that, other than that I can be an idiot sometimes.

Anyway, I consider this a lesson learned. I need to cast my net wider and keep my mind more open. There seem to be a few more of these shows floating around. I'll see if I can't make some space in my extremely busy schedule and give them a try. 

Recommendations welcome.