It's Friday. Grab Yer Bag!

A Friday Grab-Bag post on a Friday? What the.. ?! Who's driving this thing?

No intro. Straight to the verse.

Palia Closed/Open Beta

Everyone seems to have been a bit taken aback by the sudden announcement that much-hyped "cosy" MMORPG Palia is going into Closed Beta in just over two weeks. Even more surprising (Astonishing, gob-smacking, dumbfounding, flat-out nuts...) is the news the Closed Beta will only last a week before they throw the doors open and let everyone in.

What's more, the Closed Beta will have no wipes. All progress will carry over to Open Beta and then to whatever they decide qualifies as "Live", making the CB effectively a soft launch. 

I'm still struggling to process this. I can't remember the last MMORPG of any stature that went from small scale, invite only, behind closed doors alpha (Which is where Palia has been for the last two years) to effective release in a week.

It's so peculiar I had to read the announcement several times beforeI understood it. At first I thought the "No Wipes" part referred to Open Beta, which made the idea that anyone would bother to do anything much at all in the one-week Closed test look highly fanciful. 

On closer reading, I realized there wern't going to be any wipes from the start of Closed Beta onwards, effectively making that the soft launch. About the only logical explanation I can come up with is that Singularity 6, the developer, is so confident in the state of the game as it leaves alpha that all they feel they have left to do is test the robustness of the infrastructure at scale. Letting in increasing numbers during the short, Closed Beta gives them the last remaining info they need before they throw the doors wide to anyone.

That analysis would be strengthened by the decision to do away with any kind of NDA for the Closed Beta, were it not for the fact that the damn thing's going to be over so fast it makes no practical difference whether people talk about it or not. It's going to be too late to change anything, anyway. 

Unless it's a disaster, obviously. Then I guess they'd have to pull back.

Given the timescales involved, I hadn't planned to bother applying for the Closed Beta at all but it turns out I already did: twice. I received two emails from different email addresses, inviting me to fill in a few more details on applications I'd already made. I have no memory of doing it but they didn't just randomly pick my email and send me the info so I must have.

I've filled out one of the new applications so we'll see if I get in before Open Beta begins on 10 August. I don't really know anything about the game, other than it doesn't feature combat, and I'm not remotely hyped about it like some, but I am curious to take a look. If nothing else, it's perfectly timed to give me something game-related to blog about during Blaugust.

Dead Gaem

I read a news item at NME this week headlined "Study shows 87 percent of classic video games are unavailable to play right now". Given the popularity of such platforms as Good Old Games, websites offering "abandonware" and the prevalence of emulators, I found that a little surprising.

The detail behind the headline clarifies the situation somewhat. The figure comes from a study commissioned by The Video Game History Foundation, in partnership with the Software Preservation Network, two organisations hitherto unknown to me. The research was carried out by Zendo.org (Ditto.) and can be read in full here.

It's over fifty pages long. I have skimmed it but I haven't read it in full. I can tell you the criteria it used, though:

Well, that explains it. We're talking about console or home computer games that largely predate the era of digital download; the dark ages, in software terms.

The report makes much of comparisons with other "at-risk" media such as "pre-World War II audio recordings" or "American silent-era films" but it might as well bring in medieval ballads or eighteenth century broadsheets. 

Popular culture is, by nature and definition, ephemeral. It's not designed to endure and in most cases durability would not be desirable. The culture moves constantly forward, often leaving little or no trace. Try looking up the top twenty best-selling paperback novels for every year in the 20th Century some day and see how many you've ever heard of. Then check how many are still in print.

The argument seems to be that everything that can be preserved should be preserved, something that's certainly happening with many written and recorded artefacts, and there's no real reason not to support the presevation of every cultural artefact in theory. Anything might be of use or interest to someone, someday.

For all practical purposes, though, this stuff is unavailable for a reason. People got what they wanted from it and moved on. For academic purposes it's enough that records are kept and representative samples retained, preferably including as much as possible of the best along with samples of the ordinary and the sub-par. To try to keep it all is both unrealistic and self-indulgent. 

Let's be honest here; the main market for this stuff is the nostalgia market. Once everyone who played these games as a kid has died off, who's going to want to look at any of it?

Compared to other media, video games do suffer from a particular problem in that there has never been a single, universally-adopted platform on which to play them. The situation has improved somewhat, with a much smaller number of manufacturers making hardware or operating systems than was the case in the 1980s and 90s, but there are still numerous, discrete iterations. The likelihood of even libraries or museums being able to maintain all of these in good working order is slim and the possibility of such hardware being widely accessible to the general public or even academia all but impossible.

Then again, just how real is the problem, anyway? If you want to play Commodore 64 games, there are seven thousand of them waiting for you here. Almost every extinct "ecosystem" has multiple emulation projects offering more games than anyone is likely to play in a lifetime. 

I'm not convinced the situation is as "grim" as the report claims. Or that it would matter as much as they seem to think, even if it was.

Wait! Are We The Bad Guys?

The Classic Games report mentions "piracy" as one way of accessing old games. I suspect it's referring to those emulators I was talking about. I'm theoretically opposed to piracy but I confess that I'm not always entirely sure what it is and I'm not particularly scrupulous in finding out.

This week I decided I wanted to watch a TV show called The Owl House. I first heard of it when I was looking for clips of Dead End: Paranormal Park on YouTube to use in a post a while back and The Owl House kept cropping up in the recommendations. 

I figured the two shows might have creators in common but actually it appears they just share a number of thematic and socio-political features: adolescence, LGBTQ+ rights, demons.... that kind of thing.  

Dead End: Paranormal Park was cancelled after the second season. I'd been meaning to try The Owl House as an alternative but before I'd gotten around to doing anything about it, I came across this article at Vanity Fair. It made me even more interested to see the show for myself so I started googling to find out where I could watch it.

My preference would have been on one of the streaming services I already subscribe to but neither was carrying it. It's on Disney+, which I don't currently have. I keep meaning to sub to it because there's plenty there I'd watch but I don't want to add a third channel and I haven't found a sensible point at which to drop one of the two I already have.

I was very willing to buy a box set of the three seasons of the show on DVD but there doesn't appear to be one. The closest I could get would be a digital download from Google Play but although the show originally ran as three seasons, for some reason it's been split into five, all of which have to be purchased separately. The total cost comes to almost $70, which seems outrageously inflated.

I watched the first episode, available free and legally on Disney's own YouTube channel as a tempter, and while I liked it, I didn't like it enough to pay seventy dollars to see the rest. Even if I'd been willing to spend the money, I can't find the show on the UK version of Play so I'm guessing it's not even available to buy in this region.

I was about to give up and forget about it when I noticed a link in the search results to the Internet Archive. Curious, I clicked on it and it took me to this. Seasons One and Two are available in full under "Community Video", a section of the archive to which "thousands of videos were contributed by Archive users and community members." 

It hadn't previously occured to me to look for currently-available material in the Internet Archive. I use it now and then to find stuff that seems to have vanished from the web. I thought that was what it was for. That you can use it to watch material that's already out there on commercial platforms is news to me.

Maybe something about the way the Archive operates makes it okay or maybe no-one who would care has noticed. If so, does that make it "piracy"? I dunno. I'm watching a couple of episodes a day, anyway. It's a good show. I'll review it when I've seen them all. Well, the first two seasons, anyway. Still don't have a source for the third. Maybe someone will have "contributed" it to the archive by the time I get there...

Not Very Rock and Roll

I keep reading stories about bands and artists cancelling performances and abandoning tours for reasons related to their physical and mental wellbeing. Some of the cancellations are wholly understandable - Celine Dion has a neurological disorder called Stiff Person Syndrome; Lewis Capaldi is still adjusting to the impact of Tourette's Syndrome. 

Some, however, don't seem very... how shall I put it... rock and roll. 100 Gecs have cancelled the whole of their European tour because "we're physically and mentally worn out". It's true  the tour was a relatively lengthy one by modern standards: fourteen dates in twenty days in cities as far apart as Dublin and Milan. There would have been a far amount of travelling. A bit like one of those old "fifteen cities in fifteen days" European Vacations.

The decision contrasts spectacularly with something I read this morning in a book about the year 1982, from which I learned that Iron Maiden, having swapped out their original singer for Bruce Dickinson the previous year and just having charted in the UK with Run To The Hills, were about to set out on a 184 date world tour that would take them from February to December.

The book in question isn't particularly well-written but it's extremely well-researched and stuffed with both hard facts and fascinating anecdotes. The image it paints is of a music scene fueled by drugs, alcohol and a general determination to do anything the hell necessary to become famous, successful, respected or popular - preferably all of them at once. 

It's very clear that absolutely no-one was taking responsibility for their own health back then, either mental or physical. You just plowed through and hoped you didn't die before you finished the tour. I am absolutely not suggesting "it was better in the old days". I'm very pleased that musicians and performers are both willing and able to take the necessary steps back from a punishing lifestyle to look after their short and long term wellbeing. Maybe it'll lead to me reading fewer obituaries of drummers dying in their forties and fifties

I'm just saying it's a very different world, that's all. No wonder Lana's so nostalgic about the 1970s.

And finally...

You Need Jesus - Yung Gravy, bbno$ (BABY GRAVY)

I dunno. I thought it was funny...

Peace Out!