All She Wanted Was To Do Her Best

Yesterday, a post about books about music, today a post about music about books. Or, more specifically, a book: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. 

The Bell Jar was Plath's only novel. It was published under the pen-name Victoria Lucas, partly because Sylvia didn't want her mother to read it but also because she thought it might be considered a bit of a pot-boiler and she was worried it might affect the more serious reputation she hoped to develop as a poet.

It came out in January 1963, while she was still alive, unlike most of her poetry, much of which didn't make it to hard covers until after she put her head in the oven a month later. She wrote the novel under the sponsorship of something called the Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship, whose representatives were not impressed. They called it "disappointing, juvenile and overwrought".

Hah! What did they know? 

I first read The Bell Jar at University, where I was studying for a degree in English Literature. Back then, it wasn't taught in schools, like it is now. It wasn't even on my course. 

As far as I can remember, neither was Plath, although to be fair to the Cambridge syllabus of the late seventies and early eighties, there was a great deal of choice involved. Maybe I opted to do something else the week other people were doing Plath. Or maybe she just didn't have the rep then she does now.

My introduction to the tragic icon was much more personal. I was roaming around the upper levels of the faculty library, where no-one ever seemed to go, pulling random books off shelves and trying them out for size. One of the books I pulled was Plath's Journals, which I sat and read for what might have been hours. It was certainly much of an afternoon. 

From there, I went on to read a whole lot more of her work and several of the many biographies that kept getting commissioned because Plath scholarship has been an industry for decades now. I even read her poetry and I've never been a great poetry fan. Not of reading it, anyway. Writing it, sure, when I wasn't old enough to know better, but reading it? Not so much.

All or some of that may be true. Hard to be sure. But then, truth has little to do with loving Sylvia Plath. Never did.

Either way, The Bell Jar became one of my very favorite novels and remains so, although again you have to temper such judgments with a flick of reality when you think of how long ago it was you actually read the damn books. 

For decades I maintained an extremely consistent top three favorite novels of all time: Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar and Tender is the Night. 

I've read Catcher at least half a dozen times, the most recent being in the last five years and it holds up. Is it still my #1 of all time? Maybe, maybe not. It wouldn't be far off, though. 

Tender, I've read four or five times, in both the original published version and the "as Fitzgerald intended" reprint. It gets better every time and I can't decide which structure I prefer.

The Bell Jar, though, I'm not even sure I've read twice. I think I have. But even if I'm right, it's still only twice. Which is weird. 

I certainly haven't read it for decades although I have, several times, tried to listen to the audio version read by Maggie Gyllenhaall. The problem with that is that I always listen to it in bed and the rhythm of her voice sends me to sleep. I listened to it again last night and I got as far as the part where Esther leaves the apartment as Lenny the DJ is trying to seduce Esther's friend Doreen. I think that'd be about twenty pages in, at most.

The whole audiobook is on YouTube if you fancy giving it a go. Not the most convenient platform, granted, but you can't beat the price. It's an absolutely stellar performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who sounds exactly like Esther ought to sound. She also makes no attempt to "do" any of the voices, a practice all readers of audiobooks would do well to follow. I highly recommend it although I can only speak from experience about the first half-hour or so. I'm going to have to burn the thing onto CD and play it in the car if I'm ever going to get to the end of it.

 

That's all by way of an introduction to the following selection of songs, either just called "The Bell Jar" or with some variation of the words in the title. Plus a few bonuses at the end.

I have a real thing for songs that use the names of famous people or books or movies in the title and there are a lot of them. Sometimes, when I get the notion, I pick a name and YouTube it to see if anyone's written a song. I did that a few weeks ago with Catcher in the Rye and the pickings were slim. I had it in mind to do a post like this about the Salinger classic but I couldn't find enough good examples so it occurred to me to try The Bell Jar instead.

That went a lot better, except that the phrase is in common usage outside the context of the novel so not all of the songs have anything to do with the book. In fact, I'm not sure the next one does. It's really good, though, and it has the right feel, so I'm allowing it. 

The Bell Jar - Chrissy Brennan

Isn't that just gorgeous? So many famous singers and songs. So many almost no-one ever hears. Doing my bit to spread the word. No need to thank me.

The Bell Jar - Honey Gentry

This one's definitely on message although it's using the conceit of one legend to reflect light on another. The resonances are powerful. Someone's probably written a whole PhD thesis on the similarities.

Bell Jar - Louise and the Pins

Another where the mood is unmistakably in keeping with the supposed inspiration but the lyrics don't easily reveal a specific connection. Too good to leave out, though, just because the provenance is unproven.

The Bell Jar - Nervous Young Men

The lyrics of this one make it pretty clear where they got the idea. Also, there's corroborative evidence. Nervous Young Men was an early project of Will Toledo, best known for his work in Car Seat Headrest. More from them later. Clearly, Will has read the book. Probably more times than I have.

Inside The Jar - The Silver Bayonettes

Enough with the ambiguity! "Based on the Sylvia Plath novel "The Bell Jar" and the poem "My Mother" written by her daughter Frieda Hughes". Clear enough for you? Not my favorite of the selection by a long measure but I can't fault the intent.

Bell Jar - The Bangles

By far the best-known track based on the book, I think. Written by lead guitarist Vicki Peterson, who gives it a rockin' tune and an elliptical, elusive lyric that evokes the spirit of the novel without making it obvious. Great song. 

Inside The Bell Jar - Car Seat Headrest

"I turned on the gas
And rested my head upon the racks of the oven"

I think that's all the proof we need here.

My favorite of them all. I have never paid the slightest attention to Car Seat Headrest until now, despite their name cropping up over and over again in links and articles. It's a terrible name. Why would you click on anything to hear a band called that? I imagined they'd sound like Coldplay or Muse, about the worst thing you could imagine of any band. 

Well, they clearly don't, do they? I'll have to pay more attention when their name comes up in future.  

Sylvia - The Antlers

And now, to finish, a couple of palette cleansers. There are some longer, live versions of this on YouTube (One's over thirteen minutes!) but they don't have any of the sonic backlash, which is what appeals to me. Without that it sounds a bit like what I imagined Car Seat Headrest were going to sound like and no-one wants that. Also, more lyrics about heads in ovens. She did do other things, you know...

i was all over her - salvia palth

You can't really do a whole post about Plath-related songs and leave this one out, can you? Well, I can't, anyway. Any excuse to hear it again.

Well, that was fun. I hope we all learned something. 

I do like a themed music post. Maybe I'll do another, and soon. 

Read It In Books

Even though I've been a compulsive reader almost all my life (I wasn't born knowing how to read, sadly, so I had to wait a few years before I could get started.) I have never been one of those people who keeps a record of my reading. Why would I? I don't keep records of anything I do - or not in any kind of organized fashion, anyway.

I do write this blog, of course, and before that I used to produce an apazine every two months for about a decade and a half, so there's plenty of written evidence to support my cultural experience but it's a sporadic trail at best. About the only time I ever tried to keep any kind of strict account of my reading habits was that one time in the 'eighties, when I hand-wrote a review of every book I read for a year.

Actually, I didn't even make it to the end of the year. I think I gave up in about October. That journal must be somewhere in the house. I wonder if I could find it...

The answer to that turns out to be "No", which is just as well. Otherwise, this would have derailed into a post about all the books I read in 1986 or whenever it was instead of what it's supposed to be, which is a review of Girl To City by Amy Rigby.

As I've said before, I tend not to write much about books here, even though I probably read at least forty or fifty every year. I don't know exactly how many since I'm not kwriting down the titles or using one of those websites or apps that collects and collates the details (Something even the thought of which gives me the shivers...) but it's pretty easy to tell just by looking at the discard pile. 

I tend to put each book I've read in a stack on the floor and keep adding more until the tower threatens to fall over. Then I start another one next to it. Eventually, when the whole thing becomes unstable, I'm forced to sort through them and find somewhere more permanent, generally another stack in another room. The perils of having a large house- there's always somewhere to put things, until one day there isn't...

The main reason I don't write as much about books as I do music or games or TV is that I work in a bookshop and I get a lot of my books for free, most of them as proofs which, as a training course I had to do this week reminded me, cannot be reviewed anywhere. Well, not legally.

I could review the published titles I read, many of which I also get for nothing, but I always feel a moral obligation to give my employer first refusal. It's not compulsory but it is strongly suggested that we place reviews of books we've read on our website, something I have never done. I don't want to put my reviews on any commercial website, whether or not its owned by someone who pays my bills, so the compromise is not to write any reviews at all. 

When I finally retire, I imagine I'll start reviewing books I've read here although chances are they'll be old ones. Once I stop getting my books for free, I plan to start an extensive re-reading program. 

I used to consider re-reading to be considerably more important than reading. My mantra used to be that the third time was the charm. I had a rationale all worked out, too. 

• Read One is for pleasure. You're enjoying the book so much you let it all wash over you. After you finish you're left with a strong emotional impression but it's most likely weak on detail. 

• Read Two is for comparison. As you progress through the book, things come back to you and you inevitably frame your new experience in terms of your old. You end up knowing how well the book has stood up to your memory of it and whether it meets your expectations but once again you probably haven't paid all that much attention to the technicalities.

• Read Three is for appraisal. By now, you probably know what to expect and the immediacy of your reactions should be muted. This is when all those details you never noticed before start to make themselves known and when you begin to understand the finer points of the structure and the architectonics. 

Any reads after that are either indulgence, obsession or you're an academic of some sort. God help you.

That was how I used to see it. I've loosened my views a little. There are many ways to approach a text. Still, the Three-Read Method seems pretty reliable to me.

With all that in mind, I'm happy to review Girl To City here for a couple or three reasons. 

Firstly, I paid for it myself. Granted, I only paid half price because that's a perk of my job but the training course I just did made no mention of the discount we get implying any responsibility beyond not abusing it by selling the books on EBay. 

I will not be selling Girl To City on EBay or anywhere else. I will be keeping it and one day re-reading it because it's very good. And then, no doubt, reading it a third time to discover what I really think about it. The older I get, the worse that plan begins to look.

Secondly, I have no intention of reviewing it properly. Mostly I just wanted to mention it so as to give it what little publicity I can, in the hope someone else might decide to get hold of a copy and read it, thereby giving themselves the pleasure and also putting a very small remittance into Amy's pocket.

Thirdly, in March the sequel, Girl To Country, will be published in the U.K. (It's out in the U.S. already, I believe.) I'll be getting a copy as soon as it's available and chances are I'll post about that one, too. If I was really patient, I suppose I'd wait until then and review the pair of them together but although I am quite patient I'm not a fucking stone.

Fourthly, though, and the real reason I wanted to post about it, was to embed this excellent promo video, which Amy made herself. 

You won't really know if you haven't read the book but that's truly excellent visual summary of the whole thing, coupled with a lyric that also stands as an extremely concentrated record of the core of the story. Quite brilliantly conceived, in fact. Pretty much a work of art in its own right, that video.

The only reason I know abut Amy Rigby at all is because she's been Wreckless Eric's musical and romantic partner for a good, long while now. I'm going to apologize for that right now. It's a crappy way to come to anyone's work but it can't be helped. That is what happened.

I've always been something of a Wreckless fan, although I can't claim to have kept up with his career the way I have, say, Lloyd Cole or Lana. A few years back, probably around the time of the pandemic, I thought to check what Wreckless was up to and I ended up buying a couple of CDs and subscribing to his excellent, if too-infrequently updated blog. Since he now both records and performs alongside his partner, I was introduced osmotically to Amy Rigby, who also happens to be a first-rate blogger. (I find the fact that he's on Blogger while she's on WordPress oddly amusing. I wonder if it means anything?)

It was the quality of Amy's blogging that made me want to read her memoir. Having read it, I can say she's not just a great blogger, she's a top-flight memoirist.

Memoir is a dangerous genre. There's a lot of... I guess the current buzzword would be slop. It's not like we ever needed AI for that. Ghost writers have been pumping it out by the barrel-load for decades. Good memoirs, though, are thrilling. This is a very good memoir.

It's good because it's extremely well-written. Amy Rigby has a strong and immediately recognizable prose style, lyrical, personal, warm and occasionally self-deprecating. In common with other songwriters whose books I've read, her prose has a musicality that lifts it off the page. It's a sensual pleasure similar to listening to her sing.

It's also good because she's had a ridiculously rich and interesting life, even though she barely seems to realize just how rich and interesting it's been. Some memoirs drop names on every page. Amy doesn't drop names, she scatters them like someone kicking through autumn leaves, scarcely noticing as they fly up all around. 

She lived in New York from the late '70s through to the '90s, arriving as an art student in her late teens, with a stint in London for good measure, leaving as a feted singer-songwriter with a rapturously-reviewed album. In-between, she met and hung out with just about everyone in the NY punk and no-wave scenes, sang, recorded and performed with everyone from Robert Quine to Warren Zevon and pretty much lived the fantasy life almost everyone I knew in the 'eighties would have killed to have had.

None of it made her any money. None of it made her famous enough that anyone reading this will ever have heard of her. (Prove me wrong in the comments, I dare you.) She was in  several bands, none of whose names you will recognize. I was fairly cognizant of the scenes she was a part of, or thought I was, and I'd never even seen the names so much as mentioned in passing until I read her book. 

Even her incredibly well-received and reviewed mid-nineties album, the magnificently-named Diary of a Mod Housewife, apparently famous enough to rate its own Wikipedia entry, rang absolutely no bells with me. I've listened to it online now and I can recommend it most highly. The song that backtracks the promo, Summer of My Wasted Youth, is from another album, the equally well-named Middlescence. I need to get CDs of all her albums...

Girl To Country is one of the least-glamorous music memoirs I've read, although that's a competitive field. In many cases, though, the lack of glamor is in itself glamorous, as in James Young's memoir Songs They Never Play On The Radio, about the time he spent with touring with a heroin-addicted Nico or Nina Antonia's The One and Only about heroin addict Peter Perrett. 

Unlike the subjects of those books, Amy Rigby isn't a tragic romantic with a fashionable habit. She's a girl from Pittsburgh who doesn't really know what she wants to do other than that she wants to do something. That something turns out to be music and she's good at it, which surprises her more than it surprises anyone. 

But all the time she's making music she's also holding down an endless series of temp jobs. She's so good at it they make her Temp of the Month. Playing guitar is cool and all but it don't pay the bills.

Half a century on, she's still out there, trucking her guitar and amp around small clubs in backwater towns, playing her songs to the handful of people who care. It's the rock and roll reality not the rock and roll dream and yet somehow it's the dream all the same. At least she doesn't have to temp any more.

I could go on but better I stop and let you go read the book for yourself. Or if you don't feel up to that level of commitment, at least go read her blog. 

I mean, we're all bloggers here, aren't we? You know it's the right thing to do.

AQ3D Has A New Introduction. I Thought I'd Play It. So I did. Except I Didn't.

Artix Entertainment, developer of AdventureQuest 3D, sent me an interesting email at the weekend, with a shortened version of this news item on the website. The game will be ten years old in October and in common with almost all ageing MMORPGs it's finding recruitment difficult. 

Unlike some developers, finding themselves in a similar predicament, however, Artix is perfectly happy to explain the problem in painfully honest terms. Plenty of devs for other games have given interviews over the years complaining how hard it is to get anyone even to complete a tutorial, much less carry on for a while to find out what their game is really about but few have gone on to lay out just what that failure to engage with new customers means for the future of the game as a whole.

"Low completion rates directly affect AQ3D’s ability to promote the game, grow the team, and fund updates."

I mean, it is obvious but how often does anyone come right out and say it? The full news item goes into much more detail, complete with percentages. It's an informative read.

As usual, the problem is deemed to be the Intro. It's always either the Intro or the Tutorial, often but not always one and the same thing, that gets the blame. 

Some games never stop tinkering with the way the game attempts to introduce itself to new players. Wilhelm has written about EVE doing just that and CCP is certainly one of the companies more willing to talk about the problem. Other games, like Guild Wars 2, have quite possibly never changed the introduction since the game was launched. If they changed it in the ten years I was playing, I can't remember it happening.

Most developers probably take a couple of swings and then give it up as a lost cause, which is almost certainly the sensible choice. I suspect the truly honest explanation for the problem, the one few devs will ever admit to, is that new players just don't want to start playing old games. 

It seems as if gamers love to go on playing old games they already play, to the point that getting people to try anything new at all is becoming something of a problem for the MMO genre, if not the gaming industry. They can be cajoled to go back and play games they used to play, too, and a really hot new title can bring gamers on board by the millions. 

Getting people to start playing a game that came out years ago and then keep playing it, though? Yeah, that's not going to happen. Not very often.

Still, you have to try, don't you? Or so some devs believe and Artix would appear to be one of them. Complaining voices on the Steam Discussion pages suggest, this is at least the fourth time they've remade the Intro, possibly the fifth or sixth. I'm hardly a regular player but even I can remember playing through three very different previous versions, all of which are probably reviewed somewhere on this blog, so I can confirm this has to be #4 at the lowest count.

I was curious to see what they'd changed so I played through the whole thing last night and this morning.

Or I thought I did...

I couldn't see any links to the new Intro in either the email or on the website, so I logged into Steam, opened the game and made a new character. Then I played through the Intro and Tutorial I got, which was certainly new to me. It took me just over eighty minutes, last night and this morning. When I'd finished, I came here and wrote the following post. 

I'll tell you now: this is not a review of the New Intro. 

 

The first thing I'd say about is that it's long. According to Steam it took me over 80 minutes. It didn't feel quite that long because it's all action. The email says 

"This intro focuses on less friction, more action, fewer systems at once, and a smoother onboarding experience"

It also explains the new version is

 "Designed for New Players (Not Veterans)" 

 because 

 "Longtime players may find things obvious, but new players often feel overwhelmed or confused" 

My feeling is that players new only to AQ3D, not the MMORPG genre itself, will find it about as confusing as they do any new game of its kind, no more and no less, while players new to the genre itself will be mostly baffled. I must have played through literally hundreds of similar introductions and tutorials and I found myself puzzling over what to do or where to go next at least half a dozen times.

It must be close to impossible to remove all sources of confusion from something like this. The new Intro makes an attempt to guide the player through every interaction, using on-screen pointers and arrows but I had a few minor issues where the way the arrows seemed to be leading was through a solid wall or when there didn't seem to be an obvious indication of which button to press next. 

There were also numerous messages concerning non-tutorial systems like Daily Tasks that wouldn't have made a lot of sense to a real new player and I spotted several spelling errors in the text but as the email is keen to make clear

"This intro is a fast-built concept, not a fully polished final product."

The idea is that current players will run through the new introduction and tutorial and give feedback by way of an in-game survey. I finished the whole thing but no survey popped. Maybe it's not ready yet.

There certainly needs to be some kind of formal finish to the whole thing because at the moment by far the most confusing aspect is the very end. After more than an hour of close guidance and tight hand-holding, the Introduction ends with a portal that dumps the player onto the flagstones of the game's hub city, Battleon, at which point all assistance just... stops.

I looked around for a continuation of the quest I'd been on, someone who might explain what just happened, but there was no-one. Just the regular NPCs and questgivers who always hang around, touting for custom. I checked my quest journal and there was nothing there either. Since no survey appeared, I logged out and came to write this post instead.

While there certainly needs to be a smoother transition into the game itself, I guess it's fair to assume that any new player who's made it through more than an hour of instruction and adventure to get this far is more likely then not to go and have a look around, take some of the available quests and even start playing the game in the regular fashion. 

To that extent it would already have overcome one of the biggest problems with the previous Intro, which was that

"...most newbies dropped off before reaching Battleon."

On the other hand, the gameplay of AQ3D itself is very different from the gameplay of the new Introduction. The Intro is a tightly scripted, linear adventure with lots of action and some quite striking set piece events. The game that follows is a very typical, old-school MMORPG, in which the player is expected to concentrate on gear, levels and any number of progression systems.

It's also much slower. To play through the new Intro I had to make a fresh character. By the end of it, that character was two levels higher than my regular character. When she fell out of the portal into Battleon she was already level 14. 

I get that the idea is to make the game seem exciting. Something is happening all the time in the Intro. There are pop-ups and flashes and messages telling you about your stats and how you're getting more and more powerful. You get a full set of gear, a weapon and a horse.

There's also a solid, if extremely unoriginal story. Seriously, how many games have a "Void" that's threatening to annihilate existence? Sometimes it seems like all of them. But unoriginal though it may be, the story trucks along and holds the interest well enough.

The  problem with all of that is that it could easily set up unreasonable expectations in someone unfamiliar with the genre. An hour of non-stop excitement, action and dopamine hits and then everything goes into what feels, by contrast, like extreme slow motion.

There are only a handful of comments so far on the Steam discussion forum but all of them make much the same point: another new Introduction is a waste of resources because there's little or no chance new players will come into the game no matter how good it is. Instead, efforts should be focused on getting former players to come back.

And that is indeed how many of the more successful older MMORPGs have been handling things for years. After a certain point, the pool of ex-players vastly outnumbers any realistic expectations for potential newcomers and former players really should be a lot easier to reach with marketing and promotions. After all, presumably they liked the game once. Maybe all they need is a reminder of how much.

As for the new Introduction itself, I think it's definitely the best so far, although that isn't saying all that much. The first two were pretty bad. The one this replaces was a lot better but the latest one really zips along. I enjoyed playing it even if it did just seem to come to a sudden, unsatisfying halt just when it was getting interesting.

Will it make any difference to the onboarding issue? Not a chance. I'd be willing to bet the problem is rarely that new players can't understand what to do. It's that they can understand it all too well and don't want anything more to do with it.

Instead of trying to get new players interested in their decade-old game, maybe Artix out to be working on a new one. Failing that, they probably need some kind of Classic or Retro server option, some way to milk the nostalgia market and bring back some of the players who've drifted away.

That, of course, is easier said than done, as many other developers have discovered to their cost, but it probably makes more sense than spending scarce resources on yet another Intro and Tutorial."

 

All of which turns out to be moot because I was, in fact, playing the OLD Intro. Or, rather, the old-new Intro, one I'd never played before because they did indeed make yet another Intro between the real new one and the last one I did play, which I reviewed here five years ago. 

Since I can't figure out how to access the real new Intro without making a whole, new account and since I also don't want to spend any more time on it today, that's going to have to stand as a review of the old one, which is apparently still in play. Good to get that on record I guess, even if all the inferences and conclusions I drew are wrong.

As soon as I can get a hands-on with the real New Intro, I'll be able to make a true comparison and maybe come to some different conclusions.

For today, though, that's all I'm doing!

It's The End Of New World As We Knew It

I imagine everyone reading this has already heard the news about about New World. If not, brace yourselves.

The final curtain falls on 31 January 2027. At that point the servers will be closed, never to re-open. If you own the game, you're welcome to carry on playing until then. If you never got around to buying it, well you're too late now. It went off sale yesterday.

I'm not going to do an obituary post or any kind of elegy. There's still over twelve months left to go and it's very likely I'll play some more before then. Plenty of time to for a final tour and some screenshots to remember things by.

If you want a full and accurate rundown of how things got to this sorry pass, Wilhelm has an excellent overview. I'm just going to post a few pictures for now.

I'd have liked to post some older shots. Maybe even some of the ones I took in the first closed beta and was never allowed to share. I don't imagine anyone's going to be chasing me down for breaking that NDA now. Unfortunately, everything older than a couple of months is on one of the hard drives in my old computer so that will have to wait. 

For now, here are a few pictures of Aeternum as it is and will be for the rest of this year. And the beginning of the next. And then never again.

It took three of us to kite that giant turkey. I wonder if there will even be three people left by next Thanksgiving? 

One thing I do plan on doing before the final year is out is upgrading from a wolf to a lion. Or is it a tiger? Some kind of cat, anyway...

If there's one thing I won't miss about the game it's probably the clothes. I understand the aesthetic but I never liked it. 

The environments, though, and the countryside: those I will miss.

Of course, there's always the very slim chance Amazon might relent and sell the game to someone else. Unfortunately, they don't need the small change any of the likely buyers would be able to offer. Or, for that matter, the big bucks, were anyone to come with a real proposal. 

I strongly suspect they'd prefer the game to disappear altogether, not hang around like some kind of revenant, calling into question the company's poor decision-making and inability to come up with even a single, successful game.

For the same reason, they might not be quite as amenable to an emulator as many game developers. Still, a year is a long time to leave the game running. Plenty of time for people to data-mine everything necessary to clone it after it's gone.

My guess is that we won't see a working version after the official servers go dark but I'd be very happy to see myself proved wrong. New World was and still is a pretty good MMORPG. It deserved better. 

Arcane Vs The Mighty Nein

Before Christmas, I watched two animated fantasy TV series. I've been meaning to write something about them both ever since but somehow the post kept getting pushed down the list. Now, when I've found a slot for it, I discover I can't remember enough about either of them to make the kind of detailed analysis I would have liked. 

Lucky break! 

I guess I'll just have to go with whatever impressions have stuck, which is probably a more reliable and useful way of appraising the long-term value of any experience. Some things are very much meant to be "in the moment" but that's often more to do with sensation than any kind of cultural or academic appreciation.

The two shows were Arcane and The Mighty Nein. Both were first seasons, although there's also a Season Two of Arcane. I just haven't watched it yet. 

Both are also spin-offs, Arcane from League of Legends and The Mighty Nein from The Legend of Vox Machina, which itself is a spin-off from Critical Role. I have never played LoL and never watched Critical Role, although I did watch Vox Machina. 

The LoL connection actively put me off watching Arcane, which is why it's taken me so long to get around to giving it a try. Conversely, since I liked Vox Machina, I was keen to start The Mighty Nein as soon as it turned up on Prime Video.

And I was very happy with it, too. At least until I started watching Arcana, half way through the run.

It's Prime's own fault for staggering the release of TM9 in such an irritating fashion. If they'd let me watch the whole season in one go, I'd never have been in a position to make unfavorable comparisons. Three episodes dropped at the start and then it was a drip-feed of one a week. It was while I was tired of waiting for the next one that I started looking for something to fill the gap. In came Arcane.

I knew Arcane had been very well received and reviewed. My friend had raved about it at the time, too, so I even had a personal recommendation. She also assured me it was entirely independent of the video game, which she'd never played either. And still I wasn't keen.

Well, that was my mistake. Arcane is one of the best animated shows I've ever seen. It's been out for far too long for it to be worth my reviewing it properly, so I'll just say if for any reason you've been avoiding watching it you should do yourself a favor and start. Today, preferably.

Even if you aren't interested in the magitech world-building and fantasy plotline, something that seems exceedingly unlikely given what I know about the readership of this blog, it's worth seeing just for the visuals. If I've ever seen a better-animated show I can't immediately bring it to mind. 

The whole thing looks extremely expensive, as if a very great deal of money has been spent on producing animation far, far more lush and rich than any television show should have. It would be impressive for a movie, let alone a TV series. You could freeze-frame it and explore the individual images for hours although that would lose the enthralling, mesmerizing camera-work that makes the whole thing so astonishingly and thrillingly kinetic.

All of which stands in stark contrast to The Mighty Nein. Even before I had Arcane for comparison I was surprised by how flat and static the newer show looked. The first episode made me wonder if they were intentionally aiming for the look and feel of an 'eighties Sarturday Morning Cartoon. 

After a couple episodes I attuned to the look of TM9 and began to appreciate the way the show was doing more with less but then I started watching Arcane and TM9 went back to looking stiff and unfinished. It didn't put me off carrying on watching it but it was hard not to notice how perfunctory a lot of the imagery appeared in comparison.

Looks aren't everything, of course. Substance over style can be a mantra that works. Except that in this case Arcane has orders of magnitude more substance as well. 

I wouldn't attempt to precis the plot of either show. They're both quite twisty. Arcane, though, is truly complex while TM9 is mostly just complicated. One's a pantomime romp, the other's a greek tragedy. 

Each show relies on a good deal of character work as part of the narrative, with multiple characters appearing to be one thing and then turning out to be something else instead. In Arcane that feels like genuine character development. In TM9 it can have a whiff of Plot Logic.

I found Arcane to be quite an emotional experience. The characters are introduced and presented in a way that makes them feel like people you know. When things happen to them, there's a resonance. In TM9 they're more like performers you watch. When things happen to them, you're entertained.

The two approaches both work. I enjoyed both shows. The difference is in how much it feels like anything I saw mattered. Arcane operates much more on the lines of classical drama, working towards a catharsis. TM9 is more like a blockbuster movie, albeit one that's been put together on a very limited budget.

Characterization is strong in both but again in very different ways. TM9 relies very heavily on the well-rehearsed talents of a troupe of actors very much used to working together. There can be a sense of people "doing their turn", sometimes. The voice acting in Arcane feels much more individual, with a uniformly high level of skill but an absence of too-easy familiarity.

Of the two, there's no doubt which I preferred or which I thought was better-realized. Arcane not only aims much, much higher, it also hits the target bang in the middle. TM9 rolls along very cheerily but there were multiple occasions when things didn't quite seem to fit together or follow through and the whole affair had a very slightly ramshackle feel to it, now and again.

 

But it was very entertaining. The Mighty Nein is frequently funny, occasionally exciting and almost always fun to watch. I enjoyed it a good deal and will be very happy to watch the second season, currently in production.

Arcane, on the other hand, was a lot. I was exhausted by the end. Without giving anything away, it has a fantastic ending that I actually couldn't believe was the ending. I had to google it to make sure there wasn't another episode to come.

I found it completely satisfying and absolutely enthralling. But I finished it almost a month ago and I haven't started the second season yet. 

This is the thing: the two shows are ostensibly working the same end of the market but they're serving very different purposes. You need to be aware of the commitment levels each requires, which are radically different.

I mostly watch TV shows late in the evening. Usually, I'm looking for something relaxing that will see me asleep almost as soon as it ends. I'm not really in the market for thought-provoking art that's going to keep me awake for another hour, pondering the implications.

When I start the second season of Arcane, I'll be sure to have something lighter ready to follow it each evening. A kind of decompression show that'll clear my mind for sleep. So far, I haven't come up with one but I'm sure there's something out there. 

I very much doubt it's going to be that other show I know I ought to be watching. That other video-game spin-off that also had stellar reviews when it came out and that I've also been avoiding ever since. The one that just started a new season. The one that's currently #1 on Prime in the UK. The one you're watching. Yes, that one.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject, I did finally get around to watching KPop Demon Hunters. And I loved it. Now, that would be an ideal show to wind down at the end of an evening. 

Unfortunately, it's not a show. It's a short movie. And the sequel, which will also be a short movie, won't be here until 2029.

Any suggestions what I could watch until then?  

Cool Kids Club

Anyone remember when it felt really exciting to get into a beta for an MMORPG? When you had to fill out all kinds of application forms and promise to be a good tester and then you waited and hoped you'd get picked but you knew you probably wouldn't?

I think the first one I ever signed up for must have been Anarchy Online. It was so long ago I had to apply by post. My application was accepted but there was no instant access to testing. They had to mail me the client on CD. I guess I must still have it lying around somewhere, although I haven't seen it for years. No, make that decades.

It was a thrill to make the cut but unfortunately the beta itself was all but unplayable. Then the game launched and I bought it and it was still unplayable. 

It was an infamously bad launch. For a long while, it was the benchmark for how not to launch an MMO but there have been some real stinkers since then so it's probably been forgotten now, if not forgiven.

I was thinking about all this for a couple of reasons. Ashes of Creation and Stars Reach both recently sent me questionnaires to fill out. Short ones mostly asking what I thought of the way the game was going and whether I'd recommend it to friends.

My answers to both were broadly similar, something along the lines of "I think your game is fine. It's just not for me."  The main difference between the two responses was mostly that I told Intrepid Ashes would definitely have been a game I would have played and enjoyed, had it come out seven or eight years ago, when it was supposed to, whereas I told Playable Worlds Stars Reach was most likely never going to be the kind of game I was likely to want to play, or at least not for long.

My motivations for signing up for the two testing programs were very different. I pledged AoC in the Kickstarter because I did want to play it and I picked beta as the earliest affordable entry point. It was going to be the next MMORPG Mrs Bhagpuss and I played together. 

It took so long to arrive, even in a half-finished form, that by the time they opened the doors, neither of us was interested any more. When I was given entry in Early Access, I played it a bit and quite enjoyed it but I couldn't see much point carrying on. So many other games suit my tastes better these days. I haven't really thought about it since.

For Stars Reach, on the other hand, I only applied to join the alpha because I wanted to write some blog posts about it. I got in. I wrote some posts. It was fun for a short while, as a novelty, but it quickly became repetitive to play and I ran out of things I wanted to say about it. If there was any disappointment involved, it was that I didn't find it as blogworthy as I'd expected.

In both cases I didn't - and don't - feel any motivation to keep logging in to see how things might be developing. I wasn't all that interested and neither, it seemed, were many people who follow this blog. It seemed a bit pointless to keep logging in just to write much the same posts that wouldn't be of any great interest to anybody.

Neither do I feel any obligation to keep on testing. In both cases I paid for access through a Kickstarter so there's not even a moral lien on my time. It's true that I did get into the Stars Reach alpha by application and subsequently got added to the Creator program but I did a reasonable amount of testing and reporting in the closed phase, so I feel like I've done my bit.

As for the cachet of getting into a testing phase for an MMORPG, that whole concept feels very dated now. True, there are hot new games in closed testing that a lot of people would love to have access to but anything really special always has an NDA so you can't - or shouldn't - tell anyone you're in, which makes it hard to bask in the reflected glory. 

Stars Reach had a whiff of that but only a whiff. The circle of people who cared was so small it would have been a very humble brag indeed to boast about getting in. 

The last testing program I remember getting into that felt like something genuinely special, something people would be envious of if they knew about it, was the first round of alpha testing for New World. Unfortunately there was a very strict NDA so I couldn't say anything, not even to let anyone know I was in. Technically, I probably still can't.

I found that exhilarating but also very frustrating. The game itself was like nothing I'd played before (And nothing like the game that eventually launched, for that matter.) and I would have loved to blog about it. By the time I was able to talk about it openly, everyone else was playing it too.

If the allure of testing unreleased games has faded, though, and gaining access has become almost trivial, there are exceptions. It's sod's law that when there's a test I'd really like to get into, for a game I'm very excited about, that's the one that won't have me.

I've applied to every round of testing for Neverness To Everness with no success so far. I strongly suspect the reason is my age. I've filled out each of the lengthy application forms with scrupulous accuracy but when I enter my age the form questions it. 

"You have entered your age as 67. Are you sure that's correct?"

The highest age on the drop-down menu is, if I remember correctly, forty. I am very clearly not the target market for the game and I imagine Hotta isn't all that interested in the opinions of pensioners on how their anime-influenced supernatural urban open-world RPG is coming along.

Ah, well. Never mind. They can't stop me playing it when it comes out. And I bet it'll be finished well before either Ashes of Creation or Stars Reach anyway. 

If In Doubt, Run Like Hell or How To Say No And Get Away With It

Who's up for another round of "Yesterday In Baldur's Gate"? No-one? Tough! It's all I've got.

My played time now stands at a terrifying fifty-five hours, of which I very much doubt even as much as an hour was idle time. It also appears that I'm still in "Act 1" which, if true, and if the acts were all to be of roughly equal length, would suggest a final running length of somewhere around a hundred and fifty hours.  

I'm guessing what it means is either that I'm spending a huge proportion of my time doing things I probably don't need to be doing, or that the three acts are not of equal length. Possibly both. 

How Long To Beat has a "Completionist" run coming in at 179 hours, with a brisk trot through just the main storyline taking a little less than half that long. They also show something called "Main + Extra" at 115 hours although what that means, exactly, is anyone's guess.

Is this a good thing? Should a single video game take up that much of anyone's time? It certainly isn't necessary to take that long for a game to feel like something special. I completed Disco Elysium in forty hours and that felt like a major event. Broken Sword 5 lasted sixteen hours and Cloudpunk, which I found very absorbing, took me just eleven hours. Quality over quantity, I guess, although I suppose it's a bit rich to balk at both together.

Games eat each other, though. Since I started playing BG3, I've put in far more hours than I'd been used to doing for months, if not years, but I've also played nothing else. Regular readers may remember I was quite happily trundling along in EverQuest II, with vague plans of taking several characters through the new expansion over the rest of the winter. Well, that's not happening.

Of course, EQII will still be there when I finish Baldur's Gate 3. Probably. We hope. If anything's going on there now that I ought to know about, though, I'm missing it. 

I'm not completely wrapped up in Faerun. I got an email from Artix about a giveaway in AdventureQuest 3D that was tempting enough to get me to log in, even though I really don't play that game much at the best of times. When someone offers to give you a bunch of cash shop money just for logging in, though, it's rude to ignore them. 

But that only took five minutes. Other than that, it's been BG3, all day, every day. It's compelling but also confusing, which is quite a strong combo for me. I do like not really knowing what's going on in a game.

Take that three-act structure for a start. I'm not sure it exists, formally, inside the game but it's referenced everywhere outside it and I have clearly misunderstood how it works until very recently. I was sure there was a hard transition between the "Mountain" zone and the "Wilderness" and I think there probably is but the transition evidently isn't where I thought it was.

I've spent a very great deal of time in the area in and around the Githyanki Creche and the semi-ruined temple where it's hidden. I thought that was in Act 2 but it's not. I thought it was on the other side of the mountain pass, too, but it's not that, either. And I thought it was going to be the end of my game but it turned out I was mistaken. Bloody close call, though!

As I almost always do in RPGs that let you form a party as you go along, I'm sticking with the first characters I  met. I know you're supposed to swap them in and out but I almost never do that. I stay loyal to the ones I've got, even if they're useless. I only really drop someone if I find them too offensive in some way to put up with.

My team has been Gale the Wizard, Lae'zel the Fighter and Shadowheart the Cleric from the start. I have a bunch of would-be companions in camp but they never get to come adventuring with me. I'm comfortable with the team I've got.

It's almost mutual. I like all three of my team and two of them like me. Shadowheart isn't so sure, mostly because I friend-zoned her. Twice.

That bit at the start of the game, where you can toggle off Sex and Violence, doesn't go far enough in my opinion. I was hoping it would mean no shenanigans in camp but my character has been propositioned several times, which is not my idea of an adventure.And I'm not having any of it. So to speak.

A refusal often offends, as the oh-so-witty sign in too many gift shops likes to warn us, but luckily a firm "No" doesn't seem to have offended Shadowheart enough to make her pack her hammer and leave. In a way it wouldn't be so bad if she did because she's certainly the weak link in the squad. I though clerics were supposed to be good at healing but she seems more like a trained first-aider than a battlefield medic. She also can't hit the side of a barn door with that hammer...

I like her, though. And I like Gale. But I like Lae'zel best of all, which is why, when we found ourselves unexpectedly embroiled in a long sub-plot involving her opportunity to Do The Right Thing by her Queen-Goddess, I backed her all the way. Another reason for Shadowheart to take against me, now I come to think of it.

Anyway, I cheered Lae'zel on while the crazy doctor tried to get the tadpole out with her organic crab machine and we broke it, which led to a fight that did not go well for the doctor. Then I backed Lae'zel in her obviously doomed but very proper attempt to tell the Creche Boss the doctor had been a wrong 'un and that's why we killed her. He didn't buy it so we had to kill him, too. 

Well, we were in it up to our necks by then. The others would have made a run for it but no, I stuck by Lae'zel, when she thought the Inquisitor was bound to understand. Clue is in the name, I'd have thought, but I agreed to give it a try and to give Lea'zel credit, he did listen. 

He wanted the Artefact that was keeping us all alive and which is something super-important to Shadowheart for... reasons... so I gave it to him. 

Hmm. I'm beginning to see why Shadowheart's going off me now...

He called the Queen, who made us an offer we couldn't refuse. Well, we could have but she'd have killed us. 

Of course, she was always going to kill us anyway, that was obvious, but you try to spin it out, don't you? I kept backing every play Lae'zel made, right up to the very end, when we got sent into the Planes to kill the Mysterious Presence who's been saving us every so often and instead of fighting back, she bared her neck and said we could kill her if that's what we wanted and that finally turned out to be the line I wouldn't cross, even for Lae'zel (Who also wanted to sleep with me, by the way, but who took my refusal a lot better than Shadowheart.).

We went back to the Creche and told the Queen. She was Not Happy. She told the Inquisitor and his gang to kill us and then vanished. At this point none of us had many spells left and we were all quite badly injured so, obviously, I thought that was it. 

Except it wasn't. By the simple expedient of using every speed-increasing option available and running like hell, I managed to get far enough back into the main part of the Creche for Instant Travel to start working again, then I ported back to camp. 

Just me. Everyone else was dead.

I was considering whether to load an earlier save or just recruit a whole new team, when I remembered that leather-faced ghoul who hangs around at the back of the camp. Didn't he say something about bringing my people back from the dead, for a fee?

Yes he did and it wasn't even a lot. 600 gold and he rezzed all three of them in the camp and it was like the whole thing had never happened. The script made a vague attempt at dealing with the anomaly but it wasn't convincing. It wasn't until we all went back the next day, at full health, and killed the Inquisitor like the script assumed we'd already done that the dialog started making sense again.

Then, since we were there anyway, we cleared out the entire Creche and looted everything. That took a while. Lae'zel, who seems to be an absolute mistress of self-deception, somehow squared all of that with her upbringing and religion and now she loves me more than ever. Even Shadowheart is willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, since we still have the Artefact and no-one stayed dead.

And now, as far as I can tell, we really have done everything there is to do in Act I, or at least everything any of us cares much about, so after I post this we'll be going through the Real Mountain Pass and into the Real Act 2. Probably. 

I imagine things will only get more confusing from there.

Patty And The Hag

I'm just going to keep throwing it out there that I have a lot going on right now, one way and another, so posts here may be more sporadic than usual and definitely shorter. I really don't like missing a posting day, though, so in that spirit, here's a makeshift follow-up to recent commentaries.

First, Baldur's Gate 3. I've clocked up 45 hours so far, all of it in Act I. I finally moved on to the Mountains, which I think is Act II, although they don't seem to use that term in the game, so maybe it's still Act I. 

Anyway, I went to the zone line to see if the warning about finding it "bitterly difficult" had gone, which  it had. There was just the notification that once you leave you can't come back. I didn't really have much left that I thought I ought to do. Make an Adamantine weapon, I guess, but I wasn't keen on hunting for the mithril, so I went through the one-way door.

Of course, it's only one-way if I don't reload the save I made right before I crossed. In the Mountains I've done one fight so far and had one long conversation. Nothing I couldn't do over. So maybe I'll go back to the Forge after all. I probably should go look up how important having one of those weapons is later on. 

That would be cheating but what else have I been doing since the start? Is there any limit on how many times you can save the game? I must be closing in on three figures by now.

[Edit: I must have misread that warning. It seems like it's not a one-way trip after all. I came to another transition that went to a "Goblin Camp" and it turned out to be the same one as before.]

The last thing I did before moving on from the Wilderness was deal with Auntie Ethel, the elderly eye-fancier. Getting to her was a whole hell of a lot harder than killing her, that's for sure. I was always going to kill her, obviously. I've read Prince Caspian often enough not to be fooled by a Hag.

What with that and going along that upper walkway in Grymforge earlier, most of today has been spend disarming traps. It was fun in a puzzle game sort of way but it wouldn't have been if I hadn't saved and reloaded every time the pathing made one of my characters walk over something I specifically wanted them to avoid. BG3 has really bad pathing, even when you un-group the party and move them all separately.

I was expecting the Hag fight to be tougher than it was but I imagine it was meant for a group a little lower than my lot, all closing in on Level 6. I had to do it twice to save Marinya because the first time the cursed pathing took me the wrong way to the control device and I was too late to stop her plunging to her death. The second fight was a bit tougher because I made sure to get Marinya out of the cage first but it was still pretty straightforward.

As for the extremely annoying Nere, the Dark Elf True Soul, who seemed determined to start a fight no matter what I said to him, I spent so long trying to come up with a way to get him out of his predicament without letting him start a war afterwards, he ended up dying of that poison gas before I made up my mind. It's his own damn fault.

What happened was, I camped and came back to find him dead on the floor and the entire Duergar occupation force gone, presumably back to wherever they came from. I have to say it made exploring the rest of the area a lot more fun.  I could open all the boxes without starting a fight and it was great not having to listen to the astonishingly unpleasant conversations of those vile tunnel dwarves. If I ever play this game again I'll be sure not to talk to any of them before I kill them.

So much for BG3. The other update I want to give is on the RetroTV app I was talking about a couple of days ago. I said then that I wasn't sure if it included full shows or only clips but I can now confirm there are indeed some complete episodes in the mix. 

At least, I know there's a full episode of The Patty Duke Show because I watched it last night. I was watching a channel in the 1960s section, 1964 in fact, and after a couple of tunes by Freddie and the Dreamers and The Dave Clarke Five, up it came.

Without that, I doubt there's much chance I'd ever have watched an episode of a black and white sitcom from more than sixty years ago starring someone I'd barely even heard of. Or any British Invasion Beat Groups, either for that matter. Whether that's a point in the app's favor I'm not entirely sure.

There were two reasons I watched the whole thing. The first was to see if it really was going to run to the end but the main reason was the plot, which was bizarre to to the point of absurdity.

Here's my precis from memory:

Patty, who appears to be about fourteen, comes home from school, full of talk about the American Labor Movement, which she's been studying in class. She starts her own union for children, the membership of which is her, her brother (Maybe 11 years old?) and her "identical cousin" Cathy, who inexplicably lives with them and is also played by Patty Duke. 

The rest of the show involves negotiations between the children, as unionists, and Patty's parents, who represent management. There's lots of talk about fringe benefits and rights and how being in a union is so very American. They keep name-checking someone I didn't recognize, who appears to be the founder of the Labor Movement.

There's much to-ing and fro-ing, with the children making demands and taking votes and both sides hammering out a compromise, only for neither side to feel happy with the result. The children withdraw their labor (Notably, the word "Strike" is never mentioned.), the parents form a union of their own, there's some marching  and placard-waving and eventually both sides agree the whole thing was a bad idea. They each take a vote to disband their unions, carried unanimously, and everything returns to the status quo as it was at the start of the program.

I got the distinct impression the writers - and the network - wanted to get through the whole thing without offending any unionists or managers who might be sitting at home watching. Why they thought it was a suitable topic for a sitcom about a teenage girl's home-life in the first place is the real puzzle, though.

I looked it up after and the episode, Patty The Organizer, is Episode 4, Season 2. I've embedded it above if you want to watch it for yourself. It looks like the entire run of The Patty Duke Show is on YouTube, so if you get the taste for it, there's plenty more.

I think I'll be happy with that one episode but it does stand as a great example of the way the RetroTV app can introduce you to things you would never otherwise have known about. It's like having YouTube on shuffle.

Which, come to think of it, is something Google really ought to think about doing.  

A Ghost Of A Chance - Is Sony Trying To Buck The AI Trend?

If you follow any gaming media at all, you've almost certainly heard about Sony's AI assistant, Ghost. I remember reading about something similar last year, when Microsoft was talking up its AI companions. I don't know how far along that project is now but Sony has just taken out a patent and the story's all over the gaming press. I got my heads-up from GamesIndustry but it's on Kotaku, IGN, Eurogamer, TechRadar...

It's a curious development in many ways. Any mention of AI still brings gamers out in hordes, waving their pitchforks and flaming torches, so it's relatively unusual to see any development in the field being received with anything less than complete revulsion. Reaction to this has been at least a little more nuanced.

According to Sony's press release, Ghost will provide "real-time assistance to a player that is encountering some difficulty with a specific scenario of gameplay" by "analyz(ing) a player's game state data to identify the scenario they are trying to progress through." Having figured out how to do whatever it is you weren't able to do from its intensive pre-training on Twitch streams and YouTube videos, Ghost would then "provide the player with visual illustrations of how certain game scenarios are played in order for the character controlled by the player to be able to achieve progress in the game."

This is being presented by Sony as a much more sophisticated and versatile alternative to what many players have been doing for years, namely looking stuff up on the web, reading guides, following walk-throughs, watching other players on video or livestream and then trying to copy whatever it is that works. 

Put that way, it seems eminently reasonable. I've been making the point, repeatedly, not just in my recent posts about Baldur's Gate 3, that an awful lot of games just aren't as much fun without some kind of online spoilers. Having the same information available inside the game without having to tab out or look at a second screen seems like it might be less intrusive and disruptive to gameplay.

Certainly , that's how Sony seem to be selling it. Underselling it, really. All of the linked articles use some form of Sony's formula "assistance during gameplay of a video game." Assistance is such an inoffensive word, isn't it? You'd feel like a jerk, complaining about someone else receiving assistance when they were having problems, wouldn't you? I mean, no-one wants to be the "git gud" guy in this scenario, do they?

I imagine Sony would like to avoid the kind of backlash that faces every company admitting to seeing value in AI. By presenting such an nonthreatening option, they presumably hope to get a partial pass. The gaming press seems, by and large, to be going along with the narrative.

The NME, not being a gaming journal as such, takes a somewhat more populist view. Their headline doesn't mention "assistance" at all, going instead with the much more click-worthy "PlayStation wants AI to play your video games for you." 

Which made me wonder, would that be such a bad thing?

Let's take one example: Wuthering Waves. I really like Wuthering Waves. It has a strong storyline and memorable characters. I'd like to keep up to date with it. 

And yet somehow I can't seem to manage it. I've caught up twice but in both cases it took so much out of me I immediately fell behind again and now I'm so far adrift I doubt I'll ever have the motivation to try again.

I've been thinking about just watching the story on YouTube, where I'm sure I'll be able to find both full playthroughs and cut scenes edited to make full movies. Alternatively, I could do what millions of people do and watch someone else play the game on Twitch.

If there was an AI assistant as capable as NME imagines Ghost to be, though, I could log into the game, set it running and sit back to watch my own character play the game. Of the various options - play the game myself, have an AI play it for me, watch recorded highlights or watch another player - I'd put having an AI play my character second out of the four in terms of involvement and immersion.

Playing BG3, I can also think of other ways AI might improve the experience without inducing the player to resort to online guides or videos. When I was running around the Goblin Camp for hours looking for those damn Warg Pits and getting nothing but vague, unhelpful responses from any goblin I asked, it would have made a huge difference if there had been a conversation option that would have triggered an AI-assisted search and generated an in-character response from whatever NPC I was speaking to. 

What's more, if any of those responses turned out to be hallucinatory, that in itself would just be entirely in keeping with the quality of information you'd expect to get from asking a random goblin for directions! It's a win-win for the AI and the role-playing player.

The ironic thing about the current knee-jerk opposition to the use of AI in games is that before this kind of AI existed, the accepted view for as long as I've been gaming had always been that one day we'd have this amazing technology that would let all the NPCs talk like real people, react to our characters in convincing and realistic ways and generally make games feel like they weren't games at all. Remember StoryBricks and all those unfulfilled promises? 

And now here we are, looking down the barrel of the future we all said we wanted and now we all agree it wasn't what we wanted at all. Are we quite sure about that? If a game appeared that did everything AI promises to do but managed to do it without using AI, would we object to that in the same way? Or are we just cutting off our own noses in an entirely understandable but self-defeating attempt to spite the billionaires' faces? 

 

Notes on AI used in this post

Two illustrations because what else was I going to use? Both done at NightCafe. 

The header image is by the ever-annoyingly-named HiDream |1 Fast from the prompt "PlayStation wants AI to play your video games for you." 1970s Comic book panel art. Default settings. The original has three speech bubbles, two of which were gibberish. I removed those at SnapEdit but otherwise changed nothing. 

The second image is by Google Imagen 4.0 Fast from the prompt "I was running around the Goblin Camp for hours looking for those damn Warg Pits and getting nothing but vague, unhelpful responses from any goblin I asked" 1970s Comic book panel art. 

In this case, the gibberish speech bubbles actually make sense. Well, they don't... they're gibberish... but goblin speech is traditionally rendered like that and it fits the context, so I left it in. 

It's worth noting that NightCafe calls on AI to expand on all prompts of fewer than sixty words. It's on by default but you can toggle it off, which I seldom remember to do. The full prompts, as gussied up by some AI or other, probably Gemini or ChatGPT I'm assuming, are as follows:

Image 1: A 1970s comic book panel depicting a retro-futuristic robotic avatar playing a PlayStation video game, with thought bubbles above the robot and a PlayStation console. The robot has a determined expression as it manipulates a joystick. Text reads "PlayStation wants AI to play your video games for you." Vibrant, slightly desaturated colors, bold linework, and dynamic action lines in the style of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.. 

Image 2: "A determined adventurer, clad in worn leather armor, navigates a chaotic Goblin Camp under a hazy, ochre sky. The adventurer is actively searching, with a slight frown of frustration. Vague, speech bubble-like glyphs emanate from bewildered goblins, conveying unhelpful responses. The art style is a 1970s comic book panel, with bold, thick linework, a limited, earthy color palette, and a slightly gritty texture. Inspired by the dynamic compositions and character designs of Jack Kirby and Bernie Wrightson. Dramatic lighting casts deep shadows, enhancing the sense of urgency and the grimy atmosphere." 

I really do need to remember to switch that AI assistance off, given how I go out of my way never to use named artists in the prompts. Maybe you can have too much AI assistance after all... 

Also, that second panel looks more like Wally Wood to me, although if you imagined Kirby inked by Wrightson...and the tails on the speech bubbles are all pointing the wrong way...