There Must Be Something You Like...

And so, Blaugust moves into Creator Appreciation Week. That sounds like a nice, easy post. I like stuff. I can name people that make stuff I like. I can say "Thank you, person who makes stuff I like. I appreciate it."

Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you? How hard could it be? But I'm having a bit of an existential problem with the concept. 

Creator Appreciation Week used to be Developer Appreciation Week, which was a lot more specific. I also found it very easy to ignore. I'd been playing games for decades before I really came round to the idea that anyone "created" them and even when I did, I thought the idea of thanking them for doing it was weird. 

Actually, when I break it down, it's not quite that simple. There's a progression that makes some sense of my shifting attitude. Here's a rough timeline of my engagement with video games:

Late 1970s - Very Early 1980s - Arcade Games. Played almost exclusively in pubs. Mostly made by companies whose names I didn't know or, if I did, meant nothing to me.

Early 1980s  - Atari 2600 Console on which I mostly played games I rented by the weekend. Either Atari's own or with brand names that again meant nothing to me.

Early- Mid 1980s - ZX Spectrum - Bought on cassette or rented for the weekend. Games made by teenagers, hippies, visionaries and rip-off artists, many of whom were treated like rock stars by the media, especially in the gaming magazines that suddenly filled the newsagents racks.

Late 1980s - Early 1990s - Amiga 512 - Mostly games by larger, more faceless companies or, increasingly, not games at all.

Mid 1990s to Late 1990s - PC games from what seemed like fairly large companies although who knows? They were in high street stores so that was my assumption.

Early 2000s to Present Day - Digital purchases, usually direct from the developers or publishers or from the storefronts of  various aggregators like Steam.

There's plenty of bleed-through in those porous date divisions. The final one incorporates a whole raft of attitude changes that directly affect my reaction to the idea of appreciating the work that goes into making a game. I'll come to that later. perhaps, but for now I can say, with a degree of accuracy I think, and with not too much benefit of hindsight, that of the first five divisions, the only one for which it would have made sense to me, at the time, to think of in terms of "appreciation" would have been the ZX Spectrum era.

Spectrum game developers were like indie bands. They either put out weird games that weren't like anything else or they put out bad copies of whatever the others were doing. Sometimes they blew up, mostly they sank. By no means all the games really worked, either. I never had one that literally wouldn't play at all but some of them were, shall we say, unoptimised...

There were a lot of one-hit wonders and a handful of developers who managed a couple of successful sequels. A lot of not very good games were sold on the strength of a single decent title somewhere in the past. I can still remember the names of a few of them and not because I liked them, either. 

There was Melbourne House, who did the Hobbit, one of the most boring takes on Tolkein it's been my misfortune to suffer through. The sentence "Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold" is still stuck in my head to this day. Then there was Llamasoft, the home of the obnoxious, post-hippie surrealism of Jeff Minter, none of whose games I ever played but all of which were unaccountably loved by the gaming press, most of whom must have been Gong fans. Or, even more likely, bong fans...

The one and only Spectrum developer for whom I did, in fact, feel a modicum of brand loyalty was Ultimate Play The Game. Ultimate, for short, was the software house behind Attic Attack, Sabre Wulf, Cookie and the rest. The very fact that I can remember their name and three of their games without resorting to Google search just shows how into them I was. If I was ever a fan of a game developer it was Ultimate Play The Game. 

And then they put out something I didn't much like and that was the end of that.

No, that's not fair. What really happened was that they outlived the useful lifetime of the platform they were developing for. The ZX Spectrum had a good run but ever-developing technology and Clive Sinclair's bizarre obsession with unconventional personal transport did for it in the end.

I never knew what happened to Ultimate after that. Or cared, frankly. I was onto a new machine and more interested in playing dungeon crawlers like Eye of the Beholder or sampling Twin Peaks to make Dale Cooper hip-hop pastiches. Looking it up, I see now that Ultimate morphed into Rare, before being purchased first by Nintendo and then Microsoft. 

Had I wished to express my appreciation for those great games, it wouldn't have been easy to know how to assign it. As a fervent reader of (And very occasional contributor to.) the gaming press in the '80s, I did know the names of the Stamper brothers, Tim and Chris, who together were the driving force behind Ultimate, although I can't pretend I remembered them until I read the Wikipedia page just now. 

What either of them actually did, though, I haven't a clue. As it says in the entry, Ultimate was a very secretive organisation and no-one outside the company really had a clear idea who did what. Even in those golden days, when gaming was a new frontier and mavericks roamed the lands, it still came down to brand names over individuals in the end.

And that's one reason I have never really felt comfortable offering appreciation to game developers. Unless it really is one of those (Increasingly common and successful, I'm feeling...) solo developers, it's never really clear who deserves the praise. Worse, the field is cluttered with Big Names From The Past, all still trading on successes that came decades ago, if they even were successes at all. Is that something we want to encourage? Do we want to stoke up more Chris Roberts for the future?

By the mid-90s, after that brief but thrilling moment of chaos, when you might easily switch on the news and hear about some 17 year-old who'd just made a million from a game he wrote over half-term, it became a lot harder to pick the relevant names out of the inordinately lengthy credits at the end of the manual. Have you seen the credit list for the original EverQuest? I'd show you, if I could find my original boxed copy which, somewhat unsettlingly I can't right now. I'm sure it will turn up. 

I do have the credits from the second expansion, Scars of Velious, to hand though, and they're bad enough.

By the time I started playing online RPGs and then MMORPGs, it had all started to feel much more like going to see a blockbuster movie at the multiplex than buying indie singles in a grimy record store up a dark backstreet. Everything was a huge production with a vast team, almost all of whose names appeared in tiny print at the end, where almost everyone could be guaranteed to ignore them.

 I suppose the likes of Brad McQuaid or Mark Jacobs could have been seen as the equivalent of directors, particularly if you bought into auteur theory, which was going out of fashion around the same time, but the suspicion was always that maybe they were more like film producers than directors. And who appreciates a producer?

When I learned that there were conventions where fans gathered to listen to these people speak I was dumbfounded. I used to compare it to going to meet the people who'd made your refrigerator. I mean, yes, sure, they were necessary to the process but why would you need to know their names, let alone go gawk at them?

As I got more deeply embedded in the culture, the idea of celebrating individuals involved in the making of games got to seem less completely crazy than it had done but even now I struggle with it a little. When you go to a gaming convention, what do you actually get from the developers who attend? At a comic convention, an artist can draw you a picture of your favorite character. A writer can at least sign a comic they've written. What's a digital artist going to do? Draw on your iPad?

All of that was a roundabout way of saying I've always had issues with the concept of Developer Appreciation Week. You'd think it would be a lot easier now the remit has stretched to include just about any medium you care to throw into the mix. But that comes with issues of its own, mostly that I feel I'm doing plenty of appreciating already.

I do plenty of music posts. By implication, I'm celebrating the creativity of anyone whose work I share. Embedding a video is a very practical way to express appreciation, I'd say. 

I've done posts about authors I like and once I retire from bookselling I plan on posting a lot more about books and the people who write them. I do TV and movie reviews whenever I've watched something I like. If I like something, chances are I'll have used this blog to soapbox about it. It feels a bit invidious to pick anyone out for special treatment in a designated "Appreciation Week". 

In fact, I don't very often post about things I don't like. If I'm writing about anything there's a good chance I'll be appreciating it at least to some degree, even if I'm being critical, too. I'm only saying it because I love you! 

What I would like to do for Creator Appreciation Week is take the name in its very specific, 21st century context and thank some "content creators" who run YouTube channels I watch or podcasts I listen to. Those almost never get a post to themselves and not very often even a passing mention in someone else's. 

 Only I'm not listening to any podcasts at the moment and I haven't added a new channel to my YouTube subs,or not one that wasn't a band or a musician anyway, for at least a year. There are only two non-music YouTube channels I watch regularly and one of them is entirely dedicated to AI, so that's not going to go down well... 

The other is so unhinged and open to misinterpretation that the couple of times I've mentioned it, I've kept it pretty low key. I really would love to express my profound appreciation of astryuuna and encourage people to watch her channel. I do think she's a genius or at least an inspiration but whether she ought to be encouraged, let alone promoted, is another question entirely. And as Roger was saying, there are some things you just don't write about...

Looking back at last year, I can see I was an awful lot more positive abut the whole thing. I focused on appreciating Blaugustinians and I'm happy to say that I'm still reading some of the blogs I mentioned and using the utilities they put me on to. So thanks again for that.

All in all, this hasn't been much of an appreciation at all, has it? I do apologise for that. But hey, it's a whole week! Maybe I'll take another run at it in a few days, see if I can't do better.

There must be someone I can say something nice about...