Owning The Problem

Sony's recent decision to abandon the physical format for Playstation games kicked off a frenzy of hand-wringing and name-calling across the gaming media but, perhaps surprisingly, there didn't seem to be much of a reaction here in this neck of the blogosphere, other than this excellent post by Yeebo, to which I'll return later. 

The main concerns I've seen revolve around three quite specific issues:

• Archival
• Income
• Ownership

The first seems like a very niche problem indeed from where I'm sitting. It pre-supposes a future in which academics are sufficiently interested in the social, cultural, technical or creative history of video games to feel they need more than a broad, historical overview. It also assumes academic institutions won't have the capacity or the will to arrange storage for themselves, outside of stockpiling commercially available disks. 

We know there's already a huge problem with archiving always-online, live service and digital-only titles. It would seem Sony's opt-out from physical media just adds their future catalog to that vast, intangible pile. 

You might think the onus for preservation would fall on the preservers rather than the producers, in either case. It's not as though Sony is asking for the games to be archived. I'm sure if they wanted to keep an archive of the games they've issued, they'd be perfectly capable.

I find it hard to worry unduly about the convenience of notional professors in twenty-second or twenty-third century universities, too. If I was going to try to work up some kind of concern on their behalf, even as a life-long gamer I'd be more likely to be bothered that they were fussing about two hundred year-old video games in the first place. I'd like to imagine there'd be better things for them to spend their time and energy on by then.

The whole "Everything Must Be Preserved" attitude, which really only goes back maybe fifty or sixty years, bothers me more than the blasé "Let it all rot" attitude that preceded it. Even for the purposes of academia, representative samples and contemporary accounts usually suffice to recreate an era. Why we need to keep one of everything, in working order, like a gang of crazed, technological half-Noahs, beats me.

That may just be my lack of sympathy with the whole concept, of course. One thing that seems to have gone out of currency during my lifetime is ephemerality. We used to talk about some things being "built to last" and others being "throwaway" and pop culture was firmly in the latter category. Now it seems every last flyer and graffito must be saved for posterity.

There used to be seven day wonders and five-minute fads. There were trends that came and went. There still are, of course, but at some point we seem to have decided, collectively, to assign lasting value to them, meaning they need to be saved, cherished, preserved for future generations and studied in schools and universities. 

In a way it's a welcome recognition and celebration of the work that went into creating these things as well as the pleasure and joy that came out of them. That's nice. On the other hand, it's dead-wood strewn all over the floor of the cultural forest, getting in everyone's way and stifling new growth. 

It's pretty much a truism now that popular culture feeds on itself but the scavenging goes wider and deeper all the time. I'm always moaning that no music I hear any more fails to remind me of something I heard years ago. It's not old geezeritis or not just that. 

Musicians wear their influences not just on their sleeves but as badges of honor. Music critics are all but incapable of describing any new song or act other than in terms of who, in the great back catalog of their memories, it most reminds them. I try not to do it myself but often I just can't help it. Everything really does sound like something else, now.

As for movies, almost all the successful ones are are either sequels or adaptations of familiar IPs from other media. Originality is almost a commercial flaw.

And games are in perhaps the worst state of all, when it comes to living off their past. Most of the most-successful games now are old. We're constantly celebrating the 10th, 20th and even 25th anniversaries of MMORPGs, but mainstream gaming is chock-full of decade-old hits that won't quit. The most ironic thing about Sony's decision is that it's not impossible that, in a hundred years' time, some of those diskless games might still be in the top twenty!

I wonder, more and more, if it wouldn't be healthier and more aesthetically satisfying to let everything have it's natural run and then slip away. That way, one day, a decade or a century from now, maybe some diligent researcher would write a paper and a new generation could marvel at how the elders and ancients amused themselves. And, I hope, think themselves lucky that their own entertainment is so much better! 

So much for the archivists and their problems. On to the developers.

I was quite surprised to learn that developers, who put out games for Playstation, rely in part on sales of physical collectors' editions and the like. The last console I owned was the Atari 2600 and if there were any Special Edition cartridges for that, I never knew about them.

I do know something about online games, though. Digital online games. With no physical editions. All MMORPG players know about those. We have no choice. There used to be boxes but they went away. I have a whole row of them on the shelf of a bookcase next to me right now. I don't think there's anything there less than a decade and a half old.

I remember there being a good deal of angst about the end of physical media for online games. People liked their boxes. I liked my boxes. And honestly, if games came in boxes now, with manuals and posters and cloth maps, I might still buy them. They make nice keepsakes.

The question, though, is did MMORPG developers deny themselves the revenue that comes from being able to sell people a bunch of tat in a box, when they went all-digital? No, they did not!

I refer you to Daybreak's near-infamous Collectors' Editions of every expansion for the aging dinosaurs in their stable, EverQuest and EverQuest II. What were they asking for the top-end imaginary boxes last year? Let me see...

Two hundred and fifty fricken' dollars! That's what! Makes all that fuss about GTA6 costing $80 look a bit wet, doesn't it?

And did you get a disk for your $250? Hell, you did! 

I'd call that precedent. I'd imagine any games with an actual fanbase could make out like bandits, selling digital special editions, always assuming Sony would cut them a deal. Although maybe there are console-specific technical considerations there I'm not seeing. As I said, not a console person. 

But even if there are, there's always merch. Bands worked out years ago that's where the money is. Daybreak cottoned on late but they're all-in on it now. Want a mug with the symbol of your class? A poster? A mouse mat? A T-shirt? Any of the extras they might have bunged into the Collectors' Edition box, back when there was a box?

Anything, in fact, except a disk with the game on because you can't fit the fricken' game on a disk! How small would your game have to be now to fit on a single disk? EQ is ancient and quite small. The installation on my drive would fit on three DVDs. Neverness To Everness, though, would need a dozen. And what's actually going to be on these disks the archivists want to preserve? 

Sorry - we covered archival already. Let's move on.

And so we come to ownership, which I'm now realizing probably ought to have a post of its own. Ironically.

That was Yeebo's main concern, I think, and so it is most peoples', for very good reason. Some very, very big businesses are hell-bent on converting the capitalist system to a quasi-feudal Lords and Peasants arrangement, where at best we're all tenant farmers on the Lord's lands and most likely we're merely digital serfs.

It's not an appealing prospect although, just as it was in the middle ages, it does depend on what sort of Lord you've got lording over you. If it's the typical squeeze em 'til they bleed then feed what's left to the hounds type, you're pretty much screwed but if it's the responsible steward of the land sort you might at least hope for a quiet life with Sunday mornings off for church.

Badly thought-through metaphors aside, we are clearly slipping into a rental culture without necessarily being aware of it. When I was pondering the virtues of playing my games on someone else's servers on Tuesday, Angry Onions, the appropriately-named regular commenter (The angry part, not the onions...) popped into the thread to point out the shortcomings, namely that NVidia could switch the servers off any time they felt like it and I'd be S.O.L.

That, though, is a somewhat bad example. GeForce Now only lets me play games I already own or games I don't need to own because they're free to play anyway. It doesn't pretend to sell me games that only exist on their servers for as long as they care to keep them running. No, for that you need to go to Steam.

We all talk about our Steam libraries as games we own but ownership there is predicated on Steam a) continuing to exist and b) not morphing into something else. As everyone always says, if you want to own your games, you have to go to GOG. 

But do you want to own your games? Some of them, sure. The ones you know for certain you'll play again. The rest, though? Not just the ones you bought in a sale and never played or played for an hour and didn't much like or even the ones you finished and were glad to see the back of? 

Not all games have much replayability and not all of those that do actually get replayed. I can count the number of games I've replayed on the fingers of... hold on... yes, one hand.  

Re-experiencing entertainment is a bit of a niche hobby anyway. Most people don't do it or that's been my impression. 

I re-read a lot of books, often more than once, but when I talk about re-reading at work, in a bookshop, with people who read obsessively, nearly everyone thinks it's a downright weird thing to do. I was thinking about movies the other day. I re-watch those as well, or I used to, but I doubt there's any movie I've seen all the way through more than three times and not many of those. For most people it's once and done and then maybe once more that they didn't plan on, like when a friend drags them to see a movie they saw already.

And that's probably the right way for everyone other than the poor old professors and students who have to study this stuff. I'm in the process of clearing cruft out of my house. It's going to be a year-long job, if I'm lucky. I have a lot of comics, magazines, books, DVDs and VHS cassettes. That I own. Most of them I read or watched once, if that. 

Would I have been better off to have rented them? Then rented them again, if and when I ever wanted a second go? I'd sure as hell have a lot more space in my house now. And probably more money in the bank, too, assuming a rental culture priced itself appropriately. 

As for games, of which I also have quite a few boxes from the old days, I was delighted when I could just download the damn things so the only space they took up was hard drive space. And even that's a pain, frankly. Cf. my current enamorment with playing the things on someone else servers.

The real problem I see with the current push to get us all to rent rather than own is the blatant dishonesty behind it. I'd say a big notice you absolutely could not miss, right at the point of purchase, saying "YOU ARE RENTING THIS ITEM. YOU ARE NOT BUYING IT AND YOU WILL NOT OWN IT" would solve the problem altogether.

And I'd be happy to rent. I'd prefer it, honestly. The only hard copy media I use these days are CDs for music and physical books, the former only because I have to have something to put on wish lists for birthdays and Christmas and the latter because I work in a bookshop and I get a shit-ton for free.

I'd love to drop both and go all digital. And also I wouldn't. I'd hate it.

Because physical objects feel nice and look nice. It's not about ownership for me. I really don't care about ownership all that much. I care about access but that's a different talk. 

No, it's about tactility. Touching stuff is hard-wired into us. You can't touch your digital games which I'm guessing has as much to do with the furore over Sony's decision as anything else. How many people really go to Gamestop to sell their old disks or hand them on to their friends or descendants? I bet most of those disks sit on a shelf to be looked at and sometimes taken down and handled for the sheer pleasure of it.

That's what I do with my old PC games, anyway. The question is, do I miss not being able to do it with the new ones? 

Hmmm.... well, I didn't until you asked me but now I'm thinking wouldn't it be nice to have a box with Neverness To Everness on the front and a cloth map of Hethereau inside that I could pin up on the wall.

As I knew before I started, there's no answer to any of this. I like it and I don't like it. I think it's important and I think it's trivial. I think we should keep everything and I think we should let it all fade away. 

But what I really think is I'm glad it's not me that has to decide. Well done to Sony for pulling the plaster off. Let's just hope too much skin didn't come off with it. 

Yesterday Project: Gorgon, Today Project Genie

 

The release of Google's Project Genie has generated a certain amount of attention, almost all of it revolving around the apparent lack of concern expressed by the tech giant for the basic concepts of intellectual property rights and copyright. The news items I've seen so far all focus on how famously defensive IP owners like Nintendo and Disney are likely to react to an app that supposedly lets anyone clone and iterate on their copyrighted properties for the low, low price of $124.99 a month.

According to IGN, some investors are already marking down stocks in other game-making platforms like Unity and Roblox, presumably on the basis that their day is done and in some bright future we'll all be our own game-makers. Or something.

All of which is twaddle, obviously. As all the reports make clear, Project Genie can't make games. It can't even make frameworks for games. Neither can it make virtual worlds. 

What it can do is generate a sixty-second interactable snippet, a fuzzy glimpse into a notional, imaginary, three-dimensional environment that has neither persistence nor purpose. It's a curiosity that would probably help a few idle hours pass happily enough, a bit like making paper planes and throwing them out the window or having a tea-party with your stuffed toys. 

Personally, I wouldn't pay $124.99 a month for the privilege but if it was on Steam for less than $10 I might give it a go. I imagine it'd be quite amusing to play, with for a while.

Of course, that's ignoring the legal issues. As I said, the first thing everyone seems to have tried to do is replicate their favorite video game, mostly with very limited success. 

Even if the results are useless in any practical sense, though, it's hard to imagine the companies currently milking those IPs for every last cent feeling particularly sanguine about letting unlimited, bad versions loose into the community. There's such a thing as tainting the brand, after all.

Let's imagine the famous characters aren't up for grabs. You can't make your version of Mario or Sonic. You have to stick to an original idea of your own. Is anyone but you going to be interested?

One day it may indeed be possible for you or I to type a couple of paragraphs in plain English into an AI app and get a finished game out the other end. I'm close to the end of a book called Supremacy by Parmy Olson on the development of AI and if there's one thing that comes through very clearly it's that the software consistently outruns the expectations of the people behind it. One day you're crowing about some really not very impressive development you've just made and the next thing you know is someone else has jumped ahead a couple of orders of magnitude, leaving your seven-day wonder looking like yesterday's news.

If that does happen with the game-making AI, though, it's unlikely Project Genie will be the name on the box. Everything in AI seems to move forward in a weird, leapfrogging dance. Whoever starts something rarely gets to finish it. 

Even if it does become possible to generate fully functional virtual worlds from plain English text prompts, the history of gaming doesn't entirely suggest that would wipe out everything else. Roblox is an outlier. A very, very big outlier, true, but an outlier all the same. There's clearly a sizeable market for making your own video games and selling them to other gamers and Roblox has mostly cornered it.

 For as long as I've been gaming, which is getting on for fifty years now, there have always been game-making programs that purported to allow gamers with imagination but little or no technical skill to create and sell their own games and those have always been niche.

In the 1980s I wrote text adventures with  a utility called The Quill. Lots of people did, then saved them on cassette and sold them through the back pages of gaming magazines. In the '90s I made a full-length RPG scenario with Neverwinter Nights and uploaded it to one of the dedicated, online repositories along with many thousands of others, where it probably remains to this day.

I've dabbled with many other game-making packages, none of which required anything less than a huge amount of time and effort to create anything recognizably game-like. There have even been programs to make your own MMORPG, none of which seems to have resulted in any MMORPG I ever heard of. And of course there are the semi-pro, cut-down versions of the real thing, like Unity or Unreal, that you can buy into for an almost not unreasonable investment.

If anyone with some minimal degree of skill and a very much larger amount of time and enthusiasm wanted to make a "playable world", they have and have had for a very long time, the means to do so. The appeal of AI is that soon no-one will need any appreciable skill or time to make a really impressive video game. It'd be nice to think you'd still need the enthusiasm but honestly that's probably optional too.

Except I'm not sure all that many people really want to. Imagine for a moment a scenario where Project Genie actually works. Imagine you could type in a brief description of the sort of virtual world you'd like to see, the kind of characters and plot you'd want to engage with and the general gameplay you'd enjoy there. How about...

Setting: A High Renaissance setting in which the industrial revolution happened a couple of hundred years early. Some Steampunk trappings but not too many. The game is set in a small city-state with a coastal border and some mountains, a lot of forest. Low magic, some werewolves and vampires, grudgingly integrated in the cities, not tolerated in country areas. 

Plot: The high king is ageing. He has no obvious successor. He wants to leave a legacy so he makes covert moves to back a potential candidate who wishes to improve the status of the non-humans in the state. This is potentially popular with the urban elite but could cause rebellion in the countryside. 

Gameplay: RPG mechanics with hierarchical magic and skill development. Dropped gear. Turn-based combat.

Sounds great, doesn't it? Took me less than ten minutes, straight off the top of my head. Imagine if I could drop that into an app, go make a coffee, then come back and download a complete game.

It'd be fun once. Just like writing a game with the Quill and NWN was fun, once. I even enjoyed playing through my own games. Again, just once. 

Did I send off for anyone else's self-written Quill games, though? No, I did not. I didn't even download any of the myriad, free NWN adventures. Maybe a couple, just to have a look. But even then I never played them for more than a few minutes.

What about Second Life? All the games people made there? Did those take over the market? Not hardly.

And even the supposedly ubiquitous Roblox hasn't exactly wiped every other game off the screens, has it? Sure, a lot of people, kids mostly, play it but is it all they play and do they mostly play it because it's what they have access to and what they can afford? Like Runequest, famously the first MMORPG of so many people when they didn't have the money or the technology for anything more impressive, are these games really successful because of how good they are or how accessible and available?

It's really hard to be sure. If AI output was demonstrably not slop but really top quality, indistinguishable from very good human-made work and you could generate whatever you wanted on the fly - books, movies, games - would most people move over to it? I'm not sure they would. 

I think they'd still need to be marketed to. I think there'd need to be a buzz. People like to watch, read, play things lots of other people are playing, so they can talk about them, argue about them, share the experience. At that point, it might not matter that the product was AI-generated but it would still very much matter that it was high-profile and being talked about, out there in the media.

If it was something no-one but the person watching or playing it would ever hear about, I suspect the potential audience would be somewhat limited. I think there's certainly a demographic that'd be happy to sit at home, alone, playing reading and watching the insides of their heads acted out by imaginary characters but, like VR, I just don't see it becoming normative, mainstream behavior.

In the end, I suspect that even were AI ever to reach the point where it can produce high-quality entertainment with almost no human input, it's still going to be only a certain, very small percentage of that work that gets the attention of a human audience. And it won't be for it's AI qualities but for the human-to-human interactions it facilitates.

In other words, we may all end up playing AI-generated games but we'll still be playing the same ones or else we won't be able to talk about them. And more importantly, no-one will be able to sell them to us.

Or You Could Always, Y'know, Write Less?

All year I've been talking about not spending as much time playing video games as I used to but, coming into November, I think I might have hit a twenty-five year low. If I play more than a couple of hours a day now it's a big gaming day for me.

I'm not having one of those burnouts that used to be so common and which I always found so peculiar. I seem to hear a lot less about those lately. I guess most of the folks that were prone to them have flamed and faded now, leaving the rest of us slow-smoldering remnants slowly turning into gaming charcoal, barely glowing, giving off almost no heat at all.

No, I haven't had enough of gaming. Nor have I really chosen to take a break. It's just happening.

It's as if a lot of other things have drifted up and gently nudged me off the gaming highway I was on, leaving me to putter down the slow, meandering back roads of the hobby instead. I'm not even sorry about it, really, although it does feel odd, if I stop and think about it

I've commented before about how strange it is that the more free time I have in theory, the less free all my time feels in practice. I got a lot more gaming in when I was working full-time than I ever have since I reduced my hours and shifted down into semi-retirement, that's for sure. Also I watched a lot more movies then and read more books. 

I strongly recommend anyone who thinks they can safely defer their cultural experiences until they retire to think again. I had so many plans about what I'd use the extra time for when it came. Not a one of them feels realistic now I'm almost there. That whole "Ask a busy person" saw applies to leisure, too.

All of which might sound a little negative, which would be misleading. I'm enjoying my new routines. Well, by and large. For example, following her minor heart-attack in the summer, I have to go visit my 93-year-old mother three times a week now rather than the couple of times a month, which had been my schedule for years. It could have been a problem but it led me to acquire a car of my own for the first time in many years, which feels good and it's a very pleasant drive. I like driving anyway, so it's nice to have a reason to be doing it.

Then there's Beryl. One of the big eaters of time in recent years has been having a dog around. I spend more time almost every day taking her for walks and playing with her at home than I spend on gaming and I can't help thinking that's a good thing. 

I've always loved being outdoors, walking, in both city and country but I'd fallen a little out of the habit, particularly when my gaming time was at it's peak. Even when I made the effort, I wouldn't bother if the weather wasn't great. Now I'm out every day for at least a while, although it should be said that Beryl is not a fan of wet weather. If the rain isn't actually hammering down, though, we can usually find somewhere to go for a half-hour walk. If the weather's even halfway decent that'll often stretch to an hour and a half.

Luckily, she tends to lie fairly dormant during the day, which gives me a chance to do other things, like gaming. Except mostly I'm more likely to be doing this instead; writing a blog post about the gaming I'm not doing. Then, in the evening she wakes up and wants attention, meaning I don't often get to do much else but play with her, feed her and walk her between tea and bedtime.

When Beryl crashes out around eight or nine in the evening, I tend to go to bed, too. It's earlier than I've ever gone to bed since I was a child. I could stay up (I'm a grown-up. I can stay up as late as I want.) but since I got my (Refurbished.) laptop I've found it too tempting to lie down in comfort and use it instead of sitting up at my desk. 

For most of the year that's meant a few hours spent working on AI-assisted songwriting but very recently I've swapped back to watching TV and... playing games. Partly because I had a gap in my schedule with the music-making on hiatus but mostly because I'm still using the stand-in desktop pending Black Friday, it occurred to me it might be worth doing a little experimenting to see just what games would run on the decidedly non-gaming laptop. I tried it back at the start of the year, when I was playing several titles via an external SDD, most notably Cloudpunk, but I'd not done much about it since.

One of the things that nudged me into trying again was the news that Amazon's withdrawal from the gaming sector had led to a rebranding of Prime Gaming. They sent me an "important update" about it. 

Before I read the email, my first thought was that they were going to close the gaming offer down altogether. Then I thought maybe they were just going to stop giving away free games. Eventually, it dawned on me I could stop guessing and just read the email.

It turned out to be good news. Instead of closing the whole thing down, it looks as though Amazon has slightly expanded its Prime offer. There will still be new games to claim every month and access to all previously-claimed games continues (Although the fact they even had to mention it suggests it isn't considered a permanent right, which hadn't really occurred to me.) 

I can see how we might lose access to the games that were playable only on Amazon's own gaming service, should that be terminated at some future date, but I hadn't considered that the titles claimed via GOG or Epic might also disappear. Not, I should make it clear, that there's any suggestion of that happening just now. But the phrasing does make me wonder about the long-term prospects for those libraries.

The bonus for Prime members is that now, instead of having access to a selection of games on Luna, Amazon's remote gaming streaming service, now we have full access to everything on the "Standard" package. Also Prime Gaming has been rebranded as Luna Gaming, effectively if not officially. All claims are now made through the Luna website.

It nudged me into wondering just how many games in my Prime Gaming library would be playable on the laptop. As I've often mentioned, sometimes satirically, there's always been a tendency for Prime to hand out some very old games. My laptop may not be capable of running much that's new but some of these Prime giveaways are virtually pre-historic!

I installed Prime/Luna and also Good Old Games and started trying a few out. I began with Lake, which I'd almost finished on the desktop, but the save files would appear to be held locally. I could transfer them, I'm sure, but it seemed like too much trouble, especially since I'm most likely only a session or two from the end.

I tried The Academy, Dungeon Rushers and Dark Envoy. They all ran perfectly but none of them grabbed me. Next, I looked at the huge quantity of point&click adventures I'd claimed, all of which, I'm sure, the laptop would handle easily, but nothing caught my fancy. I really wanted something combat-oriented and turn-based, like Dungeon of Naheulbeuk. 

Surprisingly, DoN has become my benchmark for turn-based RPGs. Well, I guess that would still be Baldur's Gate but it's a long time since I played any of that series The German spoof is a lot fresher in my mind. And so far I've had very little success finding anything that feels both similar and satisfying.

It was in that frame of mind that I was going through the list of games I'd claimed, well over two hundred of them, when I spotted a familiar title. Familiarish, anyway: Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master. I'd completely forgotten about that one.

It's a standalone game set in the same dungeon as the original, featuring some of the same characters only instead of being an RPG, it's one of those management sims where you have to set up and maintain the dungeon so that NPCs can come in and do the adventuring. I've never really fancied that end of things, which seems like all the work for none of the glory or indeed the fun but I figured I might as well give it a go.

And it hooked me immediately. I've played every evening for the last few days, at least ninety minutes each time. There's a campaign storyline, which is where I chose to start, but there's also a sandbox version, which I'll very likely try after I lose the campaign.

I'm pretty sure I will lose it because I had no idea what I was doing for quite a while. The first two stories of my tower are a chaotic, muddled mess. The third, to which I've just gained access, is only any better because it's mostly empty still. I'm sure it'll be just as bad soon enough.

That I'm already considering my options for a second run through the campaign, and imagining what I might do in a sandbox setting, says everything that needs to be said about how enjoyable I'm finding the game. I'm not sure what it is about the Naheulbeuk series that works so well for me but clearly it's something.

That constitutes the main thrust of my gaming at the moment. Apart from NDM, the rest of my game-time of late has been limited to Overseer missions in EverQuest II and the occasional, short session in Blue Protocol: Star Resonance. 

I did manage to stay logged into EQII long enough during the Nights of the Dead holiday to collect the new craft books and buy my Necromancer all the petamorph wands she was missing from years past. There were a lot. I also had her buy the new, prestige house, which looks great and will be far more manageable than the vast, sprawling castle she supposedly lives in but which she barely ever visits. Now I just have to find time to move her stuff across and start decorating.

The very interesting-looking new scenario for Once Human has arrived, along with the oddly appropriate crossover event with Palworld. I'm keen to do something about both of those but there are several things stopping me and only one of them is personal inertia.

Even though I thought the stand-in computer wouldn't be able to run a big, flashy, new game like Once Human, I patched it up anyway and logged in to test the theory, which proved to be false. The game runs acceptably on the same graphic settings I've always used and better still if I turn them down just a notch. 

That means I can't use my old PC as an excuse for not playing. Another get-out clause would be that I'm holding back from trying out the new scenario because I'd need to swap characters. The one I'd been playing has finally found herself on a Permanent server and I am not about to move her after the time it's taken to get her onto one. I could either start over from scratch yet again or I guess I could move my original and best-equipped character to a server running the new scenario. Still thinking on it.

The real reason, though, is that I don't think I'll be able to find the time to progress any character very far. At most I might manage a bit of dabbling. That's about all I'm good for at the moment - dabbling.

I noticed Syp saying he was planning on focusing more on CRPGs and less on MMOs in the future. I find I'm no longer able to make that much of a distinction. Unless I stop and think about it, I'm not always even sure to what degree some of the games I'm playing are multiplayer or otherwise. What I do notice now is that the level of regular commitment required to make consistent and meaningful progress in a traditional MMORPG is often beyond me.

Of course, as this blog evidences, I've always been a dabbler and a dilettante by nature when it comes to gaming, be that on or offline, solo or multiplayer. I haven't undergone any kind of sea-change in attitude or approach. It's more that where I used to dabble at gaming for hour after hour, day after day, these days I just dabble at dabbling. 

Not that any of the above is enough to stop me adding yet more games I won't really play to the pile. Today's post was going to be about something else entirely. It was going to be a First Impressions piece about Duet Night Abyss, that not-a-gacha open-world RPG I said I probably wouldn't be playing. Except then I read a piece at MMOBomb where they said the story was quite good. They also made it sound as though there was a lot more to the game than just fighting, which made me think I ought to take a look at it after all.

I remembered DNA was on Steam, which always makes me more likely to give something a try. No wonder almost three-quarters of game developers feel Steam "has a monopoly on the PC games market." Unfortunately, when I went to the game's Store page to download it, I found a note saying "This game is not yet available on Steam". There's no release date, either.

I could download it from the game's own website but who knows if an account there will be transferable later and anyway I really do not want to be filling out another set of details. I'll wait until it comes to Steam, by which time, with a bit of luck, I'll also have a PC capable of playing it properly.

And that, I think, is likely to remain the state of play regarding my gaming for the immediate future. As soon as I do get a new machine, I intend to re-install New World and take a look at the very considerable amount of content I've missed. I'll also be playing the EQII expansion as soon as it arrives, whether or not I have a new machine to play  it on. If necessary, this one should cope well enough.

Whether any of these games, or any more I haven't thought of, will get enough play-time from me to make a lasting impression is another matter entirely. I don't see me freeing up much in the way of gaming-hours unless something quite unexpected happens. 

But then, none of us expected the pandemic, did we? So you never know. 

How Very Civilized

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd have to write.

Last night I played some Civilization IV.

Heh. After all those years of reading other people blogging about the Civ series and 4X games in general and thinking "Well, it's all very interesting to read about but I can't imagine ever playing something like that". A bit like EVE or Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress, I guess. Some games are just more fun to read about than play.

Or so I thought. And quite possibly still do. Too soon to say for sure.

Obviously, I wouldn't have tried it at all if I hadn't gotten it for free from Prime. I'm scratching around at the moment, trying to find something to play that can hold my attention but which can also be stopped at a moment's notice. I was going through the options when I noticed it and thought, well, why not?

Talking of options, boy, there are a lot of them! Everyone likes to talk about their Steam backlogs but I've always said I don't really have that much of one. Which is true, as it goes, although not as true as it used to be. My Amazon Prime Gaming backlog though...

I have 162 games on Prime, of which I have played nineteen and finished five. On GOG I have 60, with just three played and none finished. On Epic Games I have another 40 titles, of which I have played exactly two - and one of those is Fortnite. All of them, across the three platforms, bar a handful, were freebies from Prime - and I probably claim less than half of the games Prime gives away.

And yet somehow, even with almost 250 unplayed titles to choose from, I can never seem to find anything I want to play. Worse, when I do pick something and give it a go, it doesn't stick. 

Which is how I came to install and open CivIV a couple of days ago. It seemed like it might be worth a try. I mean, everyone else seems to enjoy it...

So, did I? Enjoy it, that is?

Hmm. Tough question. I'll get back to you when I have an answer. 

So far I've played for a couple of hours in two sessions and it's been... occupying. Time certainly passes. There's a lot to do. It keeps you busy.

For my first session I jumped straight in and started playing. That wasn't so much a choice as a mistake, by which I don't mean it went badly, just that I didn't mean to do it. I assumed there'd be an in-game tutorial. There is not.

There is a Tutorial, of course. I just didn't notice it was a separate option on the main menu. I'd completely forgotten that's how they used to do it in the old days.

Starting without any kind of lead-in or explanation was an odd experience. Confusing but also fairly straightforward, by which I mean the game is somehow still playable, even when you have absolutely no idea what you're doing or indeed what you ought to be doing.

That's mainly because every single UI element seems to have a mouse-over tool-tip and most actions seem to require not much more than a left click. I just moused over everything and started clicking and something approximating a game seemed to coalesce around me.

I left everything on the defaults. I built a city. I killed some bears. I explored to clear the fog of war. I built another city. I kept picking from lists of options and the years rolled by. I started at the dawn of civilization, 4000 BC, and by the time I finished an hour later it was the Renaissance.

For some reason I kept founding religions, which seemed extremely weird. I was playing as Spain and yet I still managed to found Buddhism, then Confucianism, then Taoism. I would have thought a necessary corollary of founding Confucianism, for example, would be that you'd have to be Confucius, or for a ruler to take the credit, they'd at least need to count Confucius as a subject. It seemed unlikely either he or Buddha would have been living in Barcelona or Madrid at the time but I guess they must have gotten there from China somehow...

Other leaders kept popping up to ask me to make deals with them or break deals I'd made with other nations. I always agreed with whatever they wanted and always made peace not war. I hadn't figured out how to get my army to fight anyone except bears and lions so peace seemed like the best option.

I had trouble getting any of my units to go where I wanted anyway. I lost Barcelona because someone attacked it and I couldn't figure out how to get a Warrior unit over there in time. It didn't seem to matter much because by then I had a third city and I was having more than enough trouble managing two of them. I was quite glad to see Barcelona go.

I could tell there was some kind of score being kept in the lower right-hand corner of the screen but I didn't really know what made the numbers change or what the victory condition might be. I figured bigger numbers were probably better, though, and Spain was either at the top of the list or at least in the top half most of the time. There were always other civilizations doing a lot worse than me so I was happy enough with how things were going.

All of that went on for a little over an hour before it started to get on top of me a bit. I figured out how to save the game and stopped. I could see how someone could get into that "Just one more turn" frame of mind I've read about, especially if they knew what they were doing. It is quite compulsive, pushing the button to see what happens next.

I guess I must have enjoyed myself at least a little because yesterday I felt like having another go. I thought maybe I ought to try and find out at least a little about how to play so I googled around for a while and learned... there is a Tutorial after all. I did think it was strange there wasn't one but then I thought maybe, back in the day, the game would have come in a box with a manual as thick as a novel and you were probably supposed to read that before you got started.

Last night I tried again, only this time I didn't load up my saved game. I opened the tutorial instead. 

I learned a few things, not least what Sid Meier sounds like. At least, I assume that's him, reading out the instructions, like a high school history teacher, following a familiar lesson plan on a warm afternoon in front of a drowsy classroom, just before school breaks up for summer. And the balding fellow with the fixed smile, dressed like a sales assistant at a discount warehouse? That must be Sid, too. The guy clearly doesn't have much of an ego.

The tutorial was helpful, anyway. The most important thing I learned was that you have to right-click to get anyone to go where you tell them. That explained a lot.

There was some useful information about why you might want to do certain things, too, not just how you'd make them happen. As I said, for the most part it's not too hard to figure out what things do from  the tool tips but it's much harder to see why you'd want to do any of them. I mostly just picked stuff I like, like art and literature and music and ignored all the boring agriculture and industry. I probably should have played Greece.

What became clear from the tutorial is that the game is basically a management sim. In all the thousands and thousands of words I'd read about it, I don't think that had ever really come across. People always blog about the interesting stuff, don't they? Who declared war on whom or who invented what. They never tell you how many tiny little repetitive actions it took before anything interesting happened at all.

I was about to say I've never liked management sims but then it occurred to me that's not entirely true. Right at the beginning of my gaming life, I used to play them quite enthusiastically. I remember one my ex-wife and I used to play a lot on the ZX Spectrum, a political sim where you had to manage all kinds of factors to keep yourself in power. I remember we used to sit there in our bean bags and shout at the screen. 

I think it was called Dictator. Yep! That's the one. I bet I still have the cassette somewhere.

I even wrote a management sim once. I think it might be the only game I ever coded from scratch. I wrote it one afternoon at my mother's house on my step-father's Oric computer that he'd won in some competition and never used. It had some ridiculously tiny memory measured in kilobytes and I wrote a moonbase sim for it that worked, just about. I wrote it in RAM, though, so it only existed for that afternoon and never again.

All of that was back in the eighties. The early eighties. I don't believe I've played a management sim since. 

Of course, the 4X genre is a hybrid, with other gameplay beyond resource management. There's a big map to explore and you can fight animals and people but most importantly there are all those familiar names. That's what makes it interesting.

And surreal. It's very peculiar to have Elizabeth I suddenly appear and start schmoozing you, especially when Julius Caesar just left. It reminded me a bit of that Philip Jose Farmer series, Riverworld, where everyone who ever lived has been brought back to life at the same time, in the same place. Without that, I doubt it would be half as engaging.

I stuck with the tutorial for about an hour but then it was time for Beryl's evening walk so I had to stop. I couldn't see any way to save the tutorial so I just logged out. If I have to go back to the beginning and do it over, I don't think I'll bother. I reckon I know enough to get started now.

Will I, though? Am I engaged enough with the concept for another session? Possibly. It does, as I said, occupy the mind, which is welcome at the moment, as I negotiate some changes in routine, with my 93 year-old mother suddenly needing a lot more support to stay in her home than usual and her living an hour's drive away and we only having the one car.

On the other hand, there are plenty of games that do a pretty good job of occupying the mind and I can think of plenty whose gameplay would be more to my taste than 4X offers. Just none of the ones I already own, apparently. 

Maybe this is the time to buy Baldur's Gate 3. 

Don't You Know Who I Am?

Naithin posted something the other day about his experiences with the AI music generation app Suno, which I've been using for most of this year. As I said in the comment thread to his post, it's largely replaced playing video games for me, in the way playing games once replaced watching television. I very much doubt it'll hold my attention for more than two decades, the way MMORPGs did, but for now it's still feeling quite compulsive.

There's probably a whole series of posts I could write about various aspects of making music this way - practical, philosophical, aesthetic, ethical, legal - but not right now. Today I just thought I'd share an idea I had for a parlor game, to be played using your LLM of choice, an idea that only occurred to me last night as I was asking mine, which happens to be Gemini, a question.

Mostly, when I'm working with Suno, I make up my whole prompts from scratch. I do re-use a lot of them, often with certain key phrases changed, trying to finesse the exact result I'm after, but I'm not usually trying to re-create the signature sound of a specific band or singer, more the sounds I hear in my head.

Occasionally, though, I look at something I've written and wonder what it might sound like if it had been covered by someone I like. Or, for that matter, don't like. Even more occasionally I find myself wanting to make something that sounds entirely unlike anything I'd come up with on my own, both for inspiration and variety.

To that end, now and again, I go to Gemini and ask it to give me a prompt for Suno that describes how a particular genre or band sounds. Feed those into Suno unedited and the results aren't often all that close. You can always recognize the influences but it's not like you can copy and paste from one AI to another and pump out convincing ersatz albums by your favorite acts like some kind of amateur Top of the Pops knock-off operation. Well, not yet, anyway.

It would be an amusing party game to generate a bunch of those, play them and have people try to guess who they were supposed to be. I can imagine that being a lot of fun with enough drink taken. If I thought anyone would actually take the time to click through and listen, I might have knocked out a few myself and included them here.

But that would be a lot of work and I'd be surprised if more than a handful of readers would be interested enough to listen to even a few bars. That sort of thing really requires a bunch of people together in a room to be fun. 

What would be much easier and also a better game for a blog would be if I just copied and pasted a few of Gemini's prompts to see if anyone can recognize the acts from the descriptions.

Gemini is pretty good at describing what singers and bands sound like. Disturbingly good, actually. The shorthand explanation of how "LLMs work by analysing vast banks of data to ascertain the next most likely word" seems to collapse pretty quickly when you look at the results. Self-evidently, there's more to it than that, or the output wouldn't be so convincing. When I saw the descriptions I was getting, my first thought was that Gemini had to be precising a whole bunch of reviews and picking out the most commonly-expressed opinions but even if that's all it is doing, it's weirdly accurate.

What it mostly makes me think is that well-known bands and singers have such a definitive, known, recognizable style it can quite easily be encoded in a couple of paragraphs. A test of how accurate that encoding is might be to ask someone if they could tell the band from Gemini's description of what they sound like.

And if that's not a parlor game, I don't know what is.

Oh, one other thing. When I started doing this, Suno had a two-hundred character limit on prompts. That forced Gemini to be very succinct. I think those make for a better game, although they're far less interesting in themselves than the ones it puts up for the new thousand-character limit. Those are more like entries in a musical dictionary.

Shall we try a couple? Of course, there is the slight problem that some of the bands I may have been asking about aren't as well-known to the readership of this blog as they might be but we'll see how we go. Let's start with a few short ones, all of them pretty famous.

1. "Epic rock ballad, theatrical vocals, powerful piano, soaring melodies, dramatic drums. Over the top emotion."

 2. "Clanging percussion, gravelly vocals, bluesy growl, broken piano, dark carnival vibe. Storytelling song."

3.  "Dissonant blues, fractured rhythms, raw vocals, free jazz elements, odd time signatures. Experimental rock." (Gemini apologized before offering this one, saying "It's challenging to precisely replicate the uniquely abstract and complex sound of ------ within the constraints of a short Suno prompt."

 4. "Synth-pop, melancholic lyrics, electronic beat, dramatic vocals, catchy melody. 80s/90s dance-pop."

5. "Dark, narrative song, brooding vocals, piano/organ, gothic rock feel, intense atmosphere."

Answers, in classic magazine style, at the bottom of the page. Or better yet, click through the number to see the act in question in full flight on YouTube.

I think most of those are fairly easy to guess but it's always hard to tell, if you already know the answers. 

Much more intriguing and educational are the longer prompts. Some of these really made me think about the artists in question, sometimes in a different way to how I would usually have considered their work. Unfortunately, these are really too long to include more than a handful in a blog post and, more problematic still, most of the ones I've done have been for bands I wouldn't really expect anyone to get.

This, for example:

A blend of chamber pop and indie rock with dual vocals

Create a song with a delicate, chamber-pop feel. The melody should be intricate and pastoral, driven by acoustic guitar, cello, and oboe. The vocals should be a male-female duet, singing with a gentle, melodic, and slightly ethereal quality. The rhythm should be subtle and understated, possibly featuring soft, brushed drums. The overall mood should be whimsical and melancholic, like a folk-tale set to music, with a touch of art-pop sophistication

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Okay, that's Shellyan Orphan. And I think it's pretty close, except there's not always two of them singing. But speaking of duos...

This might be easier.

Duet: Psychedelic Cowboy Lounge

Create a psychedelic, country-lounge duet with a distinct male and female vocalist. The male voice should be a deep, world-weary baritone, delivered with a cool, nonchalant swagger. The female voice should be a soft, breathy, and slightly detached soprano. The music should have a lazy, sun-drenched feel, with a loping, cinematic rhythm. Instrumentation should feature twangy, reverb-drenched electric guitars, a prominent bassline that walks slowly and deliberately, and a gentle, brushed drum beat. The atmosphere should be both sultry and melancholic, like a slow-motion scene from a western film, with a sense of fatalistic romance and hazy desert heat."

Now that is eerily accurate, I'd say. It's Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra and I specifically asked for them "as they sounded on their version of Summer Wine." 

I was curious enough about the provenance to try googling individual phrases with Lee or Nancy's names to see if I could track down a specific review or article from which they'd been taken but there was nothing. However Gemini is doing it, lifting descriptions wholesale from published texts doesn't seem to explain it.

Now three more I won't immediately reveal. At least one is blindingly obvious, I'd say, and the other two are guessable if you're familiar with the fairly-famous acts in question, although on of the two was only really well-known in the UK.

Psychedelic Chamber Pop

Create a richly orchestrated, orchestral pop song with a sense of wistful innocence and profound introspection. The soundscape should be built on a foundation of lush vocal harmonies, layered meticulously like a choir. The instrumentation should be a kaleidoscopic mix of traditional rock instruments and unconventional sounds: think harpsichord, French horn, cello, and subtle, otherworldly electronic sounds like the theremin.

The production should feel like a "pocket symphony," with a dense, "Wall of Sound" quality where every instrument and vocal part is given its own space. The arrangement should be dynamic, with unexpected melodic and rhythmic shifts, moving between serene, introspective sections and soaring, anthemic choruses. The mood should be both joyful and deeply melancholic, capturing a feeling of bittersweet wonder. The song structure should be more like a suite, with distinct musical sections seamlessly spliced together to create a unified, emotional journey.

Dramatic Orchestral Pop

Create a dramatic, operatic pop song with a grand, majestic feel. The vocals should be a deep, resonant baritone, delivered with a formal, theatrical, and deeply melancholic tone. The orchestration should be lush and sweeping, featuring soaring strings, blaring horns, and a full choir. The melody should be stately and complex, with unexpected shifts and a sense of cinematic tension. The lyrics should be poetic, dark, and enigmatic, telling a story of romantic tragedy or existential dread. The overall sound should be one of epic grandeur, blending chanson and Broadway with a noir sensibility, creating a sophisticated and deeply moving soundscape."

Ornate Art Rock

Create a theatrical and eccentric art-rock song with a baroque pop feel. The vocals should be a hyper-dramatic, trembling vibrato, delivered with a campy, highly stylized theatricality. The melody should be intricate and somewhat ornate, with a prominent, crying violin and a lush, romantic piano. The rhythm section should be understated but propulsive, providing a dynamic backdrop for the more flamboyant elements. The sound should feel both raw and refined, combining the glam-rock energy with the delicate precision of a chamber orchestra. The atmosphere should be one of decadent, melancholic glamour, full of quirky flourishes and a sense of sophisticated playfulness."

That's enough for now. Also, it's most of the ones I've done. I said I didn't do it often.

I might do it more now I've realized what a good game it makes, though. And obviously it doesn't have to be music. You could get your pet LLM to give you a short description of an artist 

("Large-scale canvases featuring soft-edged, rectangular blocks of color that seem to float and radiate, aiming to evoke profound human emotions from the viewer" - Mark Rothko.) 

or a writer 

("gritty realism, complex world-building, and moral ambiguity. He uses a multi-protagonist, limited third-person perspective to tell an intricate, sprawling narrative where beloved characters can be killed off unexpectedly, reflecting the harsh, unpredictable nature of his fantasy world". - George R.R. Martin) 

or a game's art style

("a highly recognizable and influential stylized high-fantasy look. It is characterized by exaggerated proportions, vibrant colors, and hand-painted textures that prioritize readability and a timeless, "cartoonish" aesthetic over photorealism". - World of Warcraft)

Back in the eighties, when my pals and I used to sit around into the early hours making up exactly these sorts of games, this would have been iterated on over and over. The potential for making your own entertainment with AI is huge and if you ignore the drain on the environment it seems like one of the more harmless uses of the technology I can think of. 

I might be using it for my Advent Calendar this year. I have a few ideas... 

 

 

Answers down here for those with an aversion to hypertext.

 

 

 

 

A bit further

 

 

 

 

Here we go

 

 

 

 

 

1. Meatloaf

2. Tom Waits

3. Captain Beefheart

4. Pet Shop Boys

5. Nick Cave

 

Psychedelic Chamber Pop - The Beach Boys (Specifically God Only Knows and Good Vibrations.) 

Dramatic Orchestral Pop - Scott Walker

 Ornate Art Rock - Cockney Rebel.

Blurring The Boundaries

Friday. Traditional day of the Grab Bag. I have a few ideas. Mostly game-related, too. Let's see what's in there...

First up, a couple of news stories about the positive influence of gaming. I know, right? We ought to be past that by now. But are we? 

Video Games Are Bad Good For You 

The new trend seems to be people who are already famous for something, testifying about how gaming in general, or a specific game in particular, helped them to do what they do and/or become who they are, by which, of course, I mean who we know them as. Who they actually are is and will always remain a mystery.

The two celebrities, if I may use that catch-all, are Bella Ramsey and Taylor Fritz. I vaguely knew Bella Ramsey's name but I couldn't have told you where from. Taylor Fritz I'd never heard of, although I bet my 92 year-old mother has. 

In case you're as clueless as me, Ramsey is an actor who's appeared in Game of Thrones and The Last of Us, among other things. Two shows I probably should have watched but haven't and most likely never will. Fritz is a tennis player, good enough to have made the semi-finals at Wimbledon this summer, hence my mother's undoubted knowledge of his existence. In fact, according to the article, he's ranked #5 in the world.

Pirate Penguins. Possibly.

Their gaming-related... I nearly said "confessions" there, which would have been telling, but I guess they're more like affirmations.... their gaming-related stories - let's go with that - involve exploring gender identity in Bella's case and... erm... being about as good at League of Legends as he is at tennis in Taylor's.

Honestly, neither of those revelations should be remotely surprising and they really aren't presented that way, either. We do seem to be past the time when famous people playing video games was, in itself, worthy of comment. At least now it has to be relevant in some way to what we hear about them in other contexts, to provide supporting evidence of their journey in some way.

The interesting parts of both stories for me were the specifics not the generalities. I thought it felt quite significant that Bella Ramsey explored her gender identity while playing Club Penguin. Not so much because she had one that she felt needed exploring but because of the venue she chose for her explorations. 

I'm fairly confident that wasn't what Disney had in mind when they bought the game for $350m in 2007. They also owned Toon Town, another child-focused MMORPG at that time and I'm almost certain I've read another account of someone famous exploring their gender identity there, although I can't remember who that might have been. Please append notes and sources in the comments if you do.

It does make a very good case for the anonymity and fluidity of these games for children and young teens. Free Realms is another one where stories like this come up quite not infrequently. Maybe John "Smed" Smedley should have thought a bit more about the social and cultural benefits before shuttering the much-loved MMORPG, rather than complaining how hard it was to wring money out of kids.

The part of Taylor Fritz's tale that caught my attention wasn't that he was really, really good at LoL. He's a world-class sportsman. You could predict that. No, it was that he made a point of explaining he didn't, as you might imagine, play League of Legends to relax or wind down or get away from the challenges and tensions of international tennis. 

On the contrary, he pointed out that playing LoL at the level he does (Emerald.) is "very mentally taxing and mentally draining" and requires his full attention and engagement. It makes a convincing case for eSports being taken seriously, when one of the world's top sportspeople says playing a video game requires as much from him as his real-world sport. Okay, as much mentally. But still...

I Am, But What Am I?

Following on from Bella Ramsey's gender explorations in Club Penguin, I thought I'd link to one of last year's Blaugust newcomers, Cynni of Cynni's Blog. We had a lot of new bloggers join last year and I put most of them either in my Feedly or on the blog roll but over the months since then I gradually unsubscribed from nearly all of them. I already spend altogether too long every day reading blog posts. It just wasn't feasible to keep up with all of them.

The ones on the blog roll, though, I didn't remove and I still actively keep up with a few, even if I don't read every post. Cynni, in common with a disturbing number of bloggers I follow, seems to have been having a pretty bad time of things lately but she always has a good perspective on life and I found her post on gender identity very informative and thought-provoking. 

I also just finished a very good book by Griffin Hansbury that made me think even more. The book is called Some Strange Music Draws Me In, a lyric from Patti Smith's Dancing Barefoot, and it's a coming-of-age novel about a trans man. Er... boy... er... well, it's complicated, isn't it? Language, I mean. And gender. 

Read the book, that's all I'm saying. I learned some things.

I find myself thinking about this stuff a lot nowadays. Partly that's because it's in the culture in a big way now but mostly it's because I keep wondering what it would have been like to have grown up in a culture where those concepts were more fluid than they were when I was doing it. 

Tenses are complicated, too, aren't they? Yes, I do wonder what it's like for people who are growing up in that social and cultural environment today but mostly I find myself idly transposing the times, imagining how things would have been, had it been that way then, when I was in school and college, not how it would be for me if I was in school or college now. There is a difference.

I am old and I'm not about to change who I've always been or perhaps more accurately who I've always thought I've always been, although the sheer range of descriptive genders I encountered, many for the first time (Well, the first time in print. I'm sure I've met many inhabiters of said genders in life without realizing.) both the post and the book do offer plenty of options, smoe of which do resonate with me, at least to some degree. For now, though, my pronouns remain he/him and I don't foresee making a shift from the gender identity I've always accepted. 

But of course it's a lot more complicated than that. Again. Isn't it always? As I think about it, there have been  so many times I haven't conformed all that closely to the labels I've been wearing, so many behaviors I've exhibited and choices I've made that don't exactly fit the shape those labels describe. It's very apparent that we're not all just one thing even if some of us definitely are.

And it's not like I didn't recognize and talk about it back then, either. What we now call gender identity was a fairly common topic of discussion in some of my social groups in the eighties and nineties. We just didn't have the language to express the shades and nuances that are all up in the culture now. Mostly we used to get drunk and speculate about our friends, who speculated about us, when we weren't around. Pretty sure that's not well-thought of these days.

I wish we had talked more about our own identities rather than trying to figure out other peoples'. I'm not saying it would have led to different choices but it might have. It would almost certainly have affected my understanding of who I was and who I could be. Probably, I would have ended up much the same but I wouldn't claim it as a certainty. 

It would have been better to have had the language to talk about it, anyway. In the end, it's always about the language, isn't it? Everything is.

I have a few more solid discussion topics along these lines stashed away but I'm saving them for Blaugust so instead I'll just slide into a couple of snippets that kinda-sorta relate to things I've mentioned earlier in the post.

Now That's A Weird Name

Reaper Actual, I mean. It is, though, isn't it?  Is it a quote? A reference? A pun? Does it mean something or is just supposed to sound cool? And if so, does it?

Whatever it's doing, it's the latest attempt by the aforementioned John Smed Smedly to get back into the gaming industry. As a player, that is. 

No, wait, that's not helping... I don't mean he wants to play some video games. I'm sure he does that in the evenings and on weekends already. I wonder what his League of Legends rank is?

No, I meant get into it as a player like in the Robert Altman movie, The Player, by which I don't mean to suggest Smed's going to start producing movies or ending up killing anyone... well, not anyone real. He's certainly going to end up killing a lot of virtual people because he's all about the PvP and his new project is... 

... well, I'm not sure what it is, other than it's called Reaper Actual, which not only tells you nothing but doesn't even really suggest anything, other than perhaps some kind of homicidal accountant. No, hang on... I'm thinking of an actuary there, aren't I?

MassivelyOP, the only place I've seen it reported so far, don't seem to know what sort of game it is, either. They stop short of labeling it an extraction shooter, merely noting it has "extraction shooter gameplay".  They aren't really all that interested in speculating about what other sort of gameplay it might have because they're far too busy boiling the tar and plucking the chickens. 

Reaper Actual is going to be on the blockchain. Wave the red flags. I must say I thought we were over the blockhain now. And Web 3.0. And Crypto (Although not Krypto. We're definitely all over Krypto, not over him. See? Language again...) I thought AI had eaten all of their lunches and now we were consolidating all our techno-fears in one, handy package.

Anyway, I'd say I'll be interested to see what Smed comes up with this time but I'd just be lying. I'm not interested in anything he does except out of habit. Blockchain or not, I won't be playing it. I just wish he'd retire, really, although as I'm finding out, that's not aways the choice you make, even when it's an option.

And finally...

Google Blinks, Meta Casts Shade

Ye gods, that's a convoluted sub-heading. Let me unpack it. 

Remember Google Glass? It was a long time ago, wasn't it? Just as a quick refresh, it was a project Google was big on for five minutes that involved a pair of glasses with built-in video cameras and internet connectivity. 

It got the same treatment every other new tech gets these days, namely scorn, derision, fear and hatred and Google limply caved to popular pressure (Or internet bullying, to give it its other name.) almost immediately, dropping plans to develop it for the mass market in 2015 and pretending it had never happened. 

They didn't actually stop development, though. They re-marketed it as a specialist product and it was quietly adopted for certain market sectors. There were still versions available commercially as recently as two years ago, although the project is now officially and finally dead.

Since then, other companies have produced similar devices and no-one seems to have noticed or cared. Privacy doesn't seem to be quite the buzzword it was back in the twenty-teens, does it? And now Mark Zuckerberg is getting in on the act. 

I found out about this in a very odd way. My mother is officially registered as partially-sighted, meaning gets information sent to her from various sources, telling her about services and prodcts that may be helpful. She got a flyer in the mail from one of the government-sponsored organizations that handles visual impairment, inviting her to go to the local library for a hands-on with some new glasses you could get that would read things like bus timetable or bottle labels out loud for you when you looked at them.

We've had stuff about these things before but they usually run to several thousand pounds a pair and you can't just walk in and try them on anywhere, so it seemed like a good opportunity to see if they'd justify that kind of investment. 

My mother went to the library, gave them a go, didn't think she'd get on with them, and that would have been the end of it, except she brought back the leaflet she's been given and it had the actual name of the device, which hadn't been on the original flyer, so I googled it. Ironically, as it turned out. 

The Meta Wayfarer Sunglasses are made, as the name suggests, by Meta in co-operation with RayBan, (Hence "shade" in the sub-heading. I know. Painful, isn't it?). The concept looks a lot like Google Glass to me. 

It has a built-in video camera and uses AI for instant translation, among other things. You can livestream from your glasses to Facebook and Instagram. It uses your smartphone for the internet connectivity but apart from that it seems to do everything everyone said would mean the end of civilization if Google Glass caught on. It's also about a tenth of the price I was expecting so I imagine take-up could be high. 

Of course, they have the advantage of looking exactly like RayBans, which means instead of throwing rocks at you in the street if they see you wearing them, they're more likely to be calling out "Cool shades, bro!". By comparison, Google Glass made you look about as obvious as if you'd hung a sign around your neck saying "Caution: Filming In Progress". 

Ten years too early and wearing the wrong clothes. Poor old Google, eh? Probably should get out of the lab more. Still, maybe it's time Zuckerberg caught a break. That VR thing didn't go so well, did it? 

And that's all I have today although not all I have. More when there's a free slot.

Final thought... just imagine how much better this post would have looked if I'd used AI illustrations. Didn't even think of it until I was about to hit publish. That tells a story all its own...