Any Color You Like, So Long As It's Pink

It's probably about time for a break from the series of First Impressions of Tarisland, although not because I've run out of things to say about it. If there's one thing you can say for new games it's that they give you plenty to write about. 

The beta still has a few days to run and as I told them in reply to the final question of the last survey they sent me, I do plan on playing right 'til the end. In fact, I'm going to miss the game when it's gone. I'll probably do a summing-up post then but I'll pre-empt it now by saying I reckon I'd have gotten a month, maybe six weeks, out of Tarisland before I got distracted by something else and wandered off. 

That's not bad for an MMORPG, these days. They can't all be Noah's Heart. (That's irony and yet somehow it's not...)

Anyway, this isn't a post about Tarisland. I'm not sure what it is, to be honest. I think it's going to be one of those grab-bags or portmanteaus or whatever you want to call them, where I cram in a bunch of topics that have nothing to do with each other. Like this one:

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

I don't usually do book reviews. It's a bit too close to my day job. Maybe that'll change when I retire in about a year and a half from now, although I kind of doubt it. Reviewing books is a lot harder work than reviewing games or TV shows.

Once in a long while, though, something comes along that seems worth mentioning, either because it's exceptional or because it's relevant in some way. In the case of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, it's both. Apparently it was a massive success in hardback so it's entirely possible everyone but me already knows about it. I only got around to reading it when the paperback came out a few weeks ago.

T&T&T, as I'm going to call it to save all that unnecessary typing, is the kind of family saga you get when the family in question is the new sort, the sort that doesn't involve blood. It covers around a quarter of a century or so, from the early-mid 'eighties to somewhere close to the present day and tells the story of two people who were often in the right place and the right time but rarely both together.

It reads like some miraculous mixtape version of Anne Tyler and Douglas Coupland, if they were both millennials and Coupland hadn't gone batshit crazy. Since those are two of my all-time favorite writers, that's the highest praise. The reason I'm writing about it here, though, isn't so much the quality of the writing, which is high, or the entertainment value, which is even higher; it's the milieu.

The two central characters and most of the supporting cast are both gamers and game designers. I have no way of knowing how accurately the latter is represented but if it's anything like the former it has to be close. There's a small degree of cultural liberty taken with the timings here and there, as Zevin acknowledges in the afterword, but by and large the whole thing feels true and real.

I'm too old to have made the exact same gaming choices but there are enough resonances to make me feel part of a shared cultural experience. The detail may be fuzzy but the import is sharp. 

T&T&T is a top-class, character-driven meditation on the complexity of human relationships in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century and I'd heartily recommend it on those qualities alone. I could make a fair old list of books that fit that bill but if you want a quality, mainstream novel that also correctly references and contextualizes EverQuest, this is the one.

Prime Gaming Day

I'm not clear when Amazon decided they deserved their own annual holiday but I guess when you have the revenue stream of a not-so-small country you can do pretty much what you damn well please. 

This year's Prime Day falls on the 11th and 12th of June so do be sure and mark your calendars (And if you don't have a calendar, Amazon can sort you out. Funnily enough, I was looking at our lovely Moomin calendar in the kitchen only yesterday and wondering why it is that people still have wall calendars. We sell a ton every year at work and Mrs. Bhagpuss wouldn't be without one.)

If you're a Prime Gamer, however, best not get too excited. Here's the underwhelming offer. 

"Prime members can claim bonus classic games each week, including Prey, Baldur’s Gate II, Shovel Knight: Showdown, and STAR WARS: The Force Unleashed™. Additionally, members can claim different in-game content and perks for several popular games over the next four weeks, including Overwatch 2, Diablo IV, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0, and Pokémon GO. T&Cs apply"

I bet they do. To be scrupulously fair, it is in addition to the regular monthly stipend, which for July comprises four games: Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! (The interrobang appears to be part of the official title.) NAIRI: Tower of Shirin, Wytchwood and Lunar Axe. 

Nairi looks interesting, although since it's also currently available through the Steam Summer Sale for the knockdown price of 99p it barely even counts as a giveaway. At least there's a free copy of Baldur's Gate II in there. I claimed that one even though it's better than odds on I'll never play it again.

Would You Pay To Read This?

No, of course you wouldn't. Neither would I. Who pays to read stuff on the internet, ffs?

Well, according to Stereogum, quite a few people. Yesterday they gave the annual fundraising pitch, which wouldn't generally merit a mention from me except that it featured a number of statements and claims that I found surprising, to say the least.

"You are no doubt aware that dozens of publications both big and small have shut down this year", they said. Well, no, as it happens, I wasn't. Have they? Is it more than usual? What were the big ones? Anything I'd have heard of?

They refer to "the dismal advertising climate", which I take to mean either a scarcity of advertisers or a reduction in advertising income, but a few paragraphs later they apologize that "our ad experience has been brutal lately", wishing they could "reduce the ad density and disable some of the more obtrusive formats" but explaining they can't because "over 90% of our revenue still comes from advertising".

I found that particularly hard to parse because I have quite literally never seen an advertisement on Stereogum. I run ad blockers that successfully block almost all formats, although of late a few new ones (Those annoying sideways ads on Massively OP, for example.) have been trying to squeeze in through the cracks.

It surprises me anyone puts up with anything other than the absolute minimum of advertising on the web. Do people really just not do anything even to try and stop it? Maybe people like it. I mean, I love magazine ads, many of which are a genuine artform. I'd never suggest ripping all the ad pages out of a magazine before reading it. But screen ads really don't meet those kind of aesthetic standards, do they?

I'm aware, before anyone points it out, that if everyone decided to block ads and advertisers stopped placing them altogether because of it, most of the currently free, commercial content on the web would either vanish or put up pay walls but I'd be fine with that. Let's be real here - most of us wouldn't be reading the stuff at all if it wasn't free and I for one wouldn't miss most of it if it was gone. I'd be happy to stick with the amateur stuff people write just for the fun of it.

As for paying to read blog posts I don't think that's a goer, especially not when all your five dollars a month gets you is access to a Discord channel and some bonus "exclusive" and archive content. You don't even get to skip the ads unless you double up to ten dollars a month for the VIP subscription. It's hardly surprising they've only managed to generate 10% of the revenue they need that way.

Perhaps the most surprising thing in the article was the suggestion that if the worst came to the worst they might have to paywall the Comments. Apparently "a lot of blogs ... have paywalled the ability to comment" Seriously? I'd have thought subscribers would pay not to see any comments, not the other way around!

I'm not ragging on Stereogum particularly. I'm sure all of the prozines I read regularly have similar problems and similar solutions in mind to deal with them. I'm just wondering out loud how long it'll be before the only free content on the web will be AI-generated. After all, AIs don't demand "competitive salaries, benefits, and vacation time".

We may be heading for the perfect, virtuous circle: the AIs can "write" the stuff, the bots can "read" it and the rest of us can go and do something more useful with our time. 

Did They Even Have Video Games In 1968?

It's all been kicking off in France again this week although, really, when isn't it?  There's been rioting and across the country and even in French-speaking regions of Belgium and Switzerland, according to the NME, following yet another in a depressingly familiar sequence of events involving armed police and young, non-white suspects. 

I wouldn't be mentioning it here if it wasn't for something staggeringly stupid that French President, Emmanuel Macron said. Apparently it's all the fault of those pesky video games. Again! Honestly, will those kids never learn?

Macron, who I'm sure is an expert on the subject, what with his background as an investment banker and all, believes video games create a "disconnect from reality", which might even conceivably be true, at least for the time someone's actually playing one. We usually call it "immersion" or "escapism" but I guess "disconnect from reality" works, too.

It's a far leap from there to his next assertion, that the rioters "are acting out the video games that have poisoned their minds". Sure they are. They wouldn't, say, be really fricken' pissed that someone who looked a lot like them got shot dead for - allegedly - speeding in a bus lane. I mean, it's a capital crime, right?

It's disheartening, to say the least, how little impact the results of years and years of well-reported academic studies have had on changing the supposedly popular belief that kids play video games and it sends them all screwy. Only kids, mind. Let's not mention the socio-economic statistics that place gaming right at the heart of global popular culture and mark the average age of a "gamer" somewhere in the mid-thirties. 

Still, never let facts get in the way of good sound-bite, eh?

I've got quite a few more topics bookmarked but time's running on and I want to play Tarisland while I still can (Got to fit a session in before the evening's rioting. My turn to bring the milk-bottles.) so I'll leave some for next time.

Let's finish with a song, like usual. I've got a few good ones saved up for the next music post but I can't wait that long to share this from Charlie XCX. It's from the Barbie soundtrack and it samples one of my favorite-ever singles, Toni Basil's Hey, Mickey! How pop can you get?! 

Play loud and enjoy!