Futureproof Your Mind

It's just as well we didn't have the kind of technology we have now when I was in my teens and twenties. I'd never have left the house. Then again, think of the effect it would have had on my creativity.

As I've mentioned many times, I devoted a goodly proportion of my time in my twenties and thirties to what I consider to be the analog ancestor of blogging - Amateur Press Associations aka APAs. I was thinking about it only last week, when a few people were writing about the decline of blogging and the way their numbers have fallen over the years.

It seems to be widely agreed that fifty readers isn't a whole lot. Even a hundred. I guess it's not, when you stack it against a few hundred followers on Twitter or a few thousand on YouTube, let alone a million on Twitch. 

I don't know how many regular readers I get at Inventory Full. I just know it has to be more than I got when I was a long-standing member of the British Amateur Press Association aka BAPA. 

Membership throughout my time there was pegged at thirty. Occasionally there was a waitlist. 

Publication was bi-monthly and required a minimum of two sides of A4 but most people produced far more than that. There was, oddly, no limit on how many zines a member submitted per mailing and several people, including myself, had more than one title running simultaneously, just as some people these days have multiple blogs.

Designing, writing, laying out and pasting up my zines took me days. They were as heavily illustrated as my blog posts are now. 

A lot of BAPAns were artists, it being primarily a comics apa by the time I joined. Some of them were professionals. I can't draw and in that company I wasn't going to pretend I could. I worked almost entirely with found material, mainly movie stills cut from magazines and illustrations photocopied from odd books I came across here and there. 

Sometimes I'd use photographs I'd taken. As time went on I became more adventurous, experimenting with collage and cut-ups or distorting and distressing the images I used.

As for the writing, I used a mix of handwritten pieces and stuff I typed up at home on my Amiga or an
old portable typewriter. Later I used to write and print a lot of my copy at work. I had a job then where I could do that. It looked like I was busy and no-one ever asked with what. 

Before I had that job, I'd paste it all up at home then take it to a copy shop and pay for thirty copies. It was expensive. I looked into buying a photocopier of my own. It would have paid for itself in a couple of years but i wasn't confident it would last that long. They go wrong a lot in my experience.

As soon as I realised I could, I started taking my layouts into work and used the copier there. My zines got a lot longer once I didn't have to pay for them.

It was all as much work as it sounds. More, really. I'm underselling just how much time and effort it took. I was consistent, too. I don't think I ever missed a mailing. I kept it up for years, every other month, with an annual trip to London for the General Meeting. All of that for an audience of twenty-nine people.

Tell that to kids today and they wouldn't believe you. Bloggers? Don't know they're born!

With that perspective,the kind of readership figures people throw around now seem pretty decent to me. I'm comfortably certain I have at least twice as many regular readers now as I had then, plus an unknown number of casual visitors. It's a huge upgrade.

What's more, it's so much easier. No scissors, no SprayMount, no cameras or clip-files. No photocopiers, no staplers! All I have to do is sit at my desk and wiggle my mouse and I get more done every week than I did in those two months.

I have a huge nostalgia for the grainy, black and white aesthetic of the photocopy era but would I ever have chosen it over the full-color, sound and motion, content-rich creative platforms we have now. I doubt it.

Imagine me, writing one of my many lists back in the eighties. My thirty favorite film stars, say. I'd be going through all my Empire magazines, trying to bring myself to to cut them up before deciding I couldn't make myself do it. I'd be dropping into the Watershed Arts Center and the Arnolfini Gallery to pocket handfuls of their monthly guides so I could cut those up instead. I'd have glue on my fingers and bits of paper all over the floor.

These days I wouldn't even have to leave my chair. I wouldn't be limited to stills. I'd embed clips from the movies, trailers, scenes with dialog that I was quoting. Links to the whole goddam movie, even. It would be better. Who'd say it wasn't?

And what about music? I used to write a lot about music but imagine if I'd been able to play my readers the songs instead of just describing how they sounded, show live footage of the bands instead of just talking about the gigs I'd been to.

That's blogging. Is it better? I think so, although it's just as ephemeral. Maybe more so. Still, I can tell you what I would have thought back then. I'd have thought it was The Future. And I'd have been right.

Only now that future's already in the past. Blogging's dead. The new future is vlogging or livestreaming. Definitely podcasting. We're all on TikTok now, although for how long, who can say?

 As Ferris said, life moves pretty fast but not so fast that people won't still quote Ferris Bueller's Day Off to make the point, even though the movie's thirty-six years old. Somehow it's still zeitgeisty enough for a spin-off to get greenlit in 2022. The past is eating the future just like the future eats the past.

Oh but it's fine. The singularity will save us. It's already here, some say.

Now we have it. Artificial intelligence. That's what this post is about. I just don't ever get to the point until at least ten paragraphs in. I imagine you can program an AI textbot to do the same. 

Well, not me. I couldn't. I bet Tipa could, though. Chasing Dings is my go-to now for how this stuff
works. That and AI Weirdness. They're both in my blog roll. Don't miss out.

I won't. I can't get enough of this stuff. I have four AI image generators bookmarked (All the images in this post were made using Midjourney.), I'm registered with a couple of open AI projects and today I started looking into AI music generators. My dream is to get to the point where all I have to do is input some prompts and out comes a finished, illustrated blog post with video and sound. All I'll need to do is edit. If that.

Oh, relax! We're a good ways off, I think. Not so far you can't see it coming over the horizon but far enough to make the mental adjustment before it arrives. 

I'm doing that now. To me it doesn't look like an autofac, spitting out replicants set to destroy human creativity forever. It looks like another opportunity to say what I want to say and have it look how I want it to look. A new, improved version. Again.

The future is coming. Don't get in its way.

Hang On...Haven't We Been Here Before?

 Yesterday, Massively reported on conversations with two unnamed designers from ArenaNet and with SOE's Dave "Smokejumper" Georgeson. Each emphasized the importance of giving all kinds of players plenty to do at all times. Smokejumper rather chillingly predicted a future where MMO companies who "push the sociological stuff will make really big things that will last for years and years because no one will want to leave them".

Possibly in response to this growing zeitgeist, today Green Armadillo and Keen both have relevant observations. I don't doubt more commentators will weigh in in due course. To me about the only surprise in the idea that MMOs should offer a smorgasbord in place of a set menu is how long it's taken the developers to come right out and say it. From my perspective it's no more than what they've been doing in practice for years.

Is there a gift shop?

Most MMOs I've played for any length of time have had deep, well-constructed, intricately- detailed worlds. A huge amount of time and trouble has clearly been taken over everything from set design and lighting to incidental NPC dialog response. You can (and I frequently do) spend hour after hour just exploring buildings, villages and towns, learning how these imaginary people live.

Large, well-funded MMOs habitually offer a wide, sometimes overwhelming variety of ways to spend your time. In addition to the main course of fighting (solo, duo, group instance, raid, battleground, arena, you name it...) most MMOs offer a good selection of side-dishes, from gathering, crafting, collecting, stories, pets, wardrobes, building, decorating and designing all the way through to embedded collectible card-games and gambling dens.

Never enough, it's never enough...

I would contend that even back in the 1990s, MMOs like Ultima Online and Everquest offered a considerably wider range of possible activities than just leveling up your character and defeating tougher and tougher monsters. Over the last five or six years many MMOs have expanded their catalog of things to do to such an extent that few if any players would ever attempt to consume everything. You'd explode!

The idea that there is insufficient content is ridiculous but it's certainly the case that despite this cornucopia there are still players who feel hungry for more. For them there's always nothing to do. Whether those players are satisfiable, or rather whether attempting to satisfy them is a sound commercial strategy is another matter entirely.

What must be a problem for developers is that the kind of content that takes the longest and costs the most to produce - all those amazingly detailed zones, all that meticulously-written, painstakingly voice-acted dialog - are the very things players skip over, rush past and generally ignore. I suspect relatively few players go around every zone talking to every NPC or spend whole evenings looking at how the furniture has been arranged.

There's always a better party

The Catch-22, though, is that for an MMO to be accorded true AAA status in the eyes of the very same customers who won't really "use" this kind of content, said content still has to be there and be top quality. An expectation of standards has been built up over many years and must be adhered to lest players deem the game lacking or, worse, cheap. Players come to each game with a shopping list of features from all the MMOs they've played before and they had darned well better find all of them, even the ones they never actually use, or by golly they'll be off to someone that knows how to do it properly.

So yes, the future for MMOs is "be everything to everybody all the time". It's a future that's already here and I suspect it's already working about as well as it's ever likely to work. Well, it's working for me, anyway.

Sunlit Uplands

I wasn't going to comment on SynCaine's recent piece on the future for niche MMOs, or on Keen's very similar take on the same topic because, well, its all been said so many times already. But then I happened to read Massively's short piece this morning on the Pathfinder Kickstarter campaign.

This is the summary of what Pathfinder is supposed to be:

"a grindless, classless system that allows for limitless character progression, large-scale battles, player-built structures, player-driven content, and useful trade and crafting."

And to build this wonder they reckon to need just $1m.

This begs so many questions, not the least of which is why, if an MMO fulfilling all those criteria can be made for $1m, we don't we have a slew of them already. What's the variable that might allow this team to produce a such a God Game for 1% or less than what it would cost a big-name studio?

The main cost everyone seems to want to cut is the cost of making it look good. Is that really where that 99% cost saving comes from, though? Mightn't it really come down to how much the people making it are being paid? That, and the cost of the environment in which they work while they are making it.

How much of the $100 million in "development costs" of an AAA MMO goes on making the game look (and sound) beautiful rather than on salaries and infrastructure costs?  Is making something that looks beautiful intrinsically more costly than making something that, well, doesn't?

Is it shallow to want this level of detail?

If you could work for a big company offering all the perks and paying you the big money, why would you choose instead to work for a fraction of that somewhere far less comfortable? Won't indie studios always rely on new up-and-comers who'll be out of there as soon as a better offer comes up, on-the-slide devs just glad to get the work and mavericks who think they can do it better than anyone, regardless of the evidence to the contrary?


Or am I misunderstanding the way the industry operates? Does someone coding or 3D Modelling an indie MMO get the same industry-standard wage-and-benefits package he or she would get for doing the same thing for Blizzard or ANet?

I grew up with the punk ethic. "It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it" as The Desperate Bicycles declaimed at the end of their 1977 non-hit "Handlebars". And yes, it was easy and cheap to make a punk 45. Whether you can make a sustainable, satisfying  MMO as cheaply and easily, that I'm not so sure. And, really, $1m dollars isn't all that cheap and two years in development isn't all that easy.

Or to look at a screen as though through a window?

Hugely commercial video games can be produced by small teams. In the 80s that was the norm. In the 21st century Minecraft hammers the point home beyond argument. We've had MMOs for more than fifteen years, though, and if there's been a large-scale, commercial success from a tiny team operating on a shoestring budget I must have missed it. How many people work for CCP? How much did EVE cost?

Like SynCaine and Keen, I hope we are at that watershed. I hope the next few years will see a stream of well-designed, well-executed, stable, commercially and aesthetically successful MMOs emerging from a plethora of independent developers. I hope we have choice coming out of our ears. I'm more than willing to live with the problem of having too many good MMOs to choose from to be able even to try them all.

For the moment, though, this brave New Wave isn't much more than a ripple far out at sea.