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... 

Pictures And Words

Stars Reach is using every means possible to draw attention to itself. As well as the pre-alpha, which began with only a partial NDA and then dropped it entirely shortly after, there have been numerous interviews, livestreams and press releases.

If you have any interest in the game at all, it's likely you've seen some of the activity but one thing you might have missed if you're not actively signed up to the news feeds is Clere's Story.

Clere is the one person out of billions chosen to be Earth's emissary to an unidentified alien entity, for which she has to travel to Enceladus, one of Saturn's least-celebrated moons, leaving behind her daughter, Sofia, currently frozen in cryosleep to forestall an otherwise inevitable death from an ice-age disease released by climate change.

This fascinating backdrop to the in-development MMO comes in the form of two (So far.) chapters on the Stars Reach website. The story is very well-written. In parts it could be said to owe something of a debt to certain scenes in Kubrick's 2001 but I'd happily read it if it were a short story in a published collection.

I find it odd, then, that having taken the trouble to create the story, Playable Worlds is doing so little to publicize it. I only happened upon it by chance, when I was looking for something else on the game's Steam page. The first episode appeared there on 13 December, two days after it arrived on the official Stars Reach website.

The Steam version ends with the immortal tagline "To Be Continued" but for Steam users it hasn't been, even though Clere's Story Pt. 2 came out on the website just a week later, on 18 December. I haven't received any emails about the story and I can't find any mention of it on Discord either, although it needs to be said that I can't even find my own name on Discord, even when I get emails telling me someone's been talking about me there.

I don't imagine this lack of visibility for Clere's Story is doing Stars Reach any harm. This kind of world-building by way of long-form prose most likely only appeals to the already-committed. 

It's rather sweet, when you stop and think about it. That companies bother with this kind of promotion at all, I mean. I guess they all have plenty of writers and would-be writers on tap, who'd be only too happy to spend a couple of hours knocking out a few hundred words of what might uncharitably be described as Authorized Fanfic. 

They all do it, though, or a lot of them, anyway. Over at DCUO they've just begun a story featuring Batman (It's always Batman...), the first chapter of which is pedestrianly entitled "A Deadly New Mystery". I read it this morning and enjoyed it for what it is but it's not a patch on Clere's Story, which is both much better-written and has considerable emotional heft.

The DCUO tale, however, has the benefit of a much higher publicity profile. I head about it in a news story on MassivlyOP but if you google "DCUO "A Deadly New Mystery"" you'll get hits all the way across social media, from all of DCUO and Daybreak's accounts on YouTube, Instagram, X, Facebook and more, along with news stories from the likes of MMORPG.com. They even put it on Threads ffs!

It's not a fair comparison, of course. DCUO is a successful, established, long-running game and "A Deadly New Mystery" isn't just a one-off lore dump but the first entry in what they're calling a "Story Blog", part of the new content delivery system being rolled out for 2025. Still, the difference is striking.

Which got me wondering just how much Star Reach has penetrated the public consciousness or even that part of it that has any interest in online gaming. So I had a little look.

On Steam, the game has just over three and a half thousand "followers". It was news to me you could follow a game on Steam, which shows how observant I am. There's a button for it right there on the game's Store page. Stars Reach has one more follower now so we'll see if that gets me any notifications about new chapters in the story.

Wishlisting is something games always seem keen on so I checked that next. According to SteamDB, Stars Reach is #1099 of their 3,352 "Most Wishlisted" games. It doesn't give actual numbers but according to an anonymous survey of 125 game developers back in 2023, as reported by GameWorldObserver, it generally runs to a median average of twelve times the number of followers, meaning Stars Reach might feature on around forty thousand wishlists. Seems like a lot but who knows?

That's specifically Steam, though. How about a more general awareness? Google Trends is always good for that. 

To give a little spurious perspective I added comparisons to a couple of vaguely relevant titles, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen and Solasta 2. They don't really have anything to do with Stars Reach but they might appeal to a similar demographic and one has just entered Early Access, while development the other has only just been announced.

It's an interesting chart. It shows that in the last 90 days interest in Pantheon bubbled along quite consistently until the EA release on 13 December, when it sky-rocketed. Perhaps more significantly, interest has remained around the same level since and is even trending upwards. More evidence there that Visionary Realms' strategy is paying off.

Solasta was nowhere until, entirely coincidentally on the same day Pantheon went into Early Access, the public announcement was made about the game being in development. That drove it briefly above Pantheon in Google search but interest quickly fell back to a low mumble as fresh news died away.

That still puts it above Stars Reach which, other than a brief, unexplained blip on 3 November, doesn't even register in the comparison at all until 21 December, the day after the NDA was lifted in full. There is a blue line for a little while before that but on mouseover it comes up as zero.

All of which is, as they say in the gameshows, just a bit of fun. I have no meaningful understanding of how Google Trends operates so all I'm doing is looking at the pictures.

They do say a picture is worth a thousand words but in this case I'd say Clere's Story is worth a lot more to me than Google's charts. If it's any indication of the quality of the lore we're going to be able to enjoy in Stars Reach one day, I'll be a happy little space explorer. 

It's just a shame such quality work isn't a little more prominent in the PR cycle right now.

Smashed Blocked or If Only They'd Stayed Hidden

As Redbeard reported yesterday, Google has finally tired of giving stuff away for free. A few months ago the internet juggernaut began experimenting with ways to stop people opting out of seeing ads while watching amusing cat videos on YouTube. 

Oh, wait... my Dated Reference alert just went off! Apparently it's not the noughties any more. Dang! There it goes again. No-one's said noughties since... well, the noughties.

I never watched cat videos on YouTube. The only reason I know people did is because it constantly turns up as a lame-ass joke in sitcoms and comedy novels. I'm reading a comedy novel right now and it's pretty good but even in 2023 it has at least one reference to funny cat videos. Maybe people really do still watch them.

As an aside (No, really?) I was reading something a while back about how many of those early-days internet phenomena, the viral videos that racked up millions of views for no apparent reason, have vanished without trace, although ironically I now can't find where I read it. 

I do remember, however, that the article gave "Charlie Bit My Finger" as an example without mentioning that the reason that one disappeared from YouTube was that the family who owned it sold it two years ago, as an NFT for three-quarters of a million dollars, and as part of the deal removed it from YouTube.

Despite all that, you can, in fact, still watch Charlie biting what I assume is his brother's finger on YouTube. I just checked. I clicked it off after the first second, once I'd established it does indeed play, because I have never seen the clip and fully intend to keep it that way. If you want to check, you can go find it for yourself. I'm not facilitating such behavior.

Getting back to the point, over the last week or so, Google's anti-freeloader faction ramped up the effort to make sure we all do our share in keeping the wheels spinning on the speeding express train of insanity that is the global advertising industry. Back when I thought I was really cool because I'd read Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, I used to see advertising as both a valid artform and a fascinating social phenomenon but that feels like a very long time ago, now.

As the Parallel Context post I linked succinctly explains, YouTube viewers using Ad Blockers, which would be all of them with the sense they were born with, have been receiving some very aggressive notifications from Google that they'd damn well better stop! Naturally, this being the internet, the hive mind has been fighting back.

It's a fast-moving and ongoing battle. In the last twenty-four hours my YouTube access has gone from warnings (Three strikes and you're out.) to blackout (Can see everything except the actual video I'm trying to watch, which is weirdly useful and in some ways an improvement. Certainly saves time.) to working "normally" with ads running (Making it unwatchable by any sane person, so good work there, advertisers.) to back to the status quo ante as the combined might of reddit and every anti-corporate coder on the planet strives to wrest back control of their own eyeballs.

For the moment, I'm using YouTube like I was last week but I don't expect it to last. I also don't expect free stuff on the internet to last. This is just the start. Not even the start. The middle, maybe. 

The end will be exactly what every sci-fi author ever has been predicting since I was a child, namely a world filled with wall-to-wall, 24/7 advertising, driving an unavoidable, non-optional, hyper-commercialised culture for the consuming classes, defined as all of us except for a miniscule, mega-rich hyper-elite, most of whose names will be unknown to everyone but their vanishingly tiny peer group.

I am not Tobold (Who'd be having a jolly good laugh at my expense right now for all the times I've chided him for not using an Ad Blocker to watch YouTube, if he ever read anyone else's blog, something I've never seen anything to suggest he does.) so I'm not about to turn this into some kind of political statement. I merely mention it to warn that, depending on Google's success or lack thereof in imposing its will in this regard, I may or may not have to alter the format of my music posts. 

It'd be nice to think I could move to linking to Bandcamp or Soundcloud instead but clearly that's going to present its own issues going forward. Still, I'm sure there'll be some workround I can try. I'm certainly not just going to stop sharing new tunes because Google tells me I'm not doing my bit to keep Keith Richards in Chivas Regal.

And of course they haven't done anything of the kind. That's just me being melodramatic, something to which I've always been happily prone. In fact, for the time being, one of the easier ways to avoid having to watch advertisements for things you wouldn't want if they gave them to you is to view the videos you're interested in on other websites, where they've been embedded. Like this one.

For now at least, embedded videos do not carry advertising, although how long that will last I wouldn't care to guess. It means a couple of things; firstly, the half-dozen or so of my readers who actually check out some of the videos in my music posts should be able to go on doing it without fear. Well, without fear of seeing any adverts. Might be as well to have at least a little fear of what the videos themselves might contain.

It also means, as I discovered yesterday, that I can simply watch the videos on the sites where I find them (NME, Stereogum, Pitchfork etc.), then right-click to get the YouTube URL, paste it into Blogger (Another Google product.) and voila; embedded, ad-free videos. Add as another data point the fact that Chrome (Google, again.) stocks Ad Blockers in its Web Store and they work on YouTube (I just installed one and it works fine.) and you can see there may be parts of the vast Google corporation that don't exactly talk to each other.

Maybe one day all of this will be smoothed out to the point that Google gets exactly what it wants and the rest of the world has to accept it but despite the company's overwhelming commercial success there's precious little evidence of anything even approximating a coherent, structured plan for global domination. It looks a lot more like a hell of a lot of over-excited technicians rabidly making things that interest them with the aid of the giant Scrooge McDuck money pit they've somehow fallen into, while the handful of responsible adults in the building try to firefight the fallout.

Google famously abandons, forgets about or cancels things all the time. Until recently, YouTube has been one of the parts that they've been largely letting get on with making them money, undisturbed. I can't recall a lot changing there for a while. 

Now there's this, which suggests maybe the flood level from the money hose has started to dip a little but there's also the news that they're on the verge of a deal with the recording industry (Now there's a black hat if ever there was.) to facilitate legal AI voice masking. What with that and the runaway success of AI-assisted search under the Bard brand, I think we can all agree our digital future is in safe hands with Google.

In honor of the obvious need to keep feeding the corporate maw, as you'll have seen I've chosen this week to concentrate solely on already known, successful performers. The YouTube warnings do make a point of stressing how using an Ad Blocker impacts the income of artists and creators. I'd hate to see Mick and the boys go hungry, let alone Stevie Wonder and Lady Gaga, who helped them out on that track.

Fortunately and by a lucky happenstance, a great number of well-known musicians who've featured on the blog many times before have chosen to release quality work this week so I haven't needed to compromise my own, impeccable aesthetic standards to comply. Since everyone knows who they all are, not least because I've told you all more than once already, it also means I haven't needed to include my usual explanatory gloss on every video. 

I'm sure if you need any more information, Bard will be happy to fill you in on the details, some of which it will probably make up especially for you. And all free of charge. For now.

I have a large and ever-growing number of tunes by people I'm willing to bet will be new to most of my readers. (Ha! "My readers". That's presumptious, pretentious and proprietorial. Triple threat! Go me!) so don't be too disheartened by the populist, crowd-pleasing nature of this post. Normal service will, no doubt, be resumed soon enough.

It has also occurred to me in the past, when I've been watching YouTube on handheld devices where I hadn't bothered to install an Ad Blocker yet, that maybe YouTube doesn't place many - or any - ads on videos almost no-one watches. This may be the time to test that hypothesis. 

Unfortunately it won't get rid of the often really quite offensive static ads at the top of the Recommends list but those are quite easily ignored or even blocked physically with a Post-It note. The upside of all of this could be a refocusing on genuinely new and obscure music instead of - as I sometimes worry mildly it might have become - a self-satisfied litany of comfort listening. 

See? There's an upside to everything, if you only look hard enough!

 

 

A note on AI Imagery used in this post, which was just the header this time. 

The prompt was "Ad Blockers drinking and laughing. Futuristic." The AI was Dreamshaper XL Alpha2, my current go-to choice at NightCafe. The image was extended to fit the space available using Uncrop because I always forget to change the aspect ratio from 1:1 to 4:3. What Uncrop added were the left and right figures, their speech bubbles and nearly all the text along the bottom.

I did ask Dreamshaper to give me another version of the same prompt, this time using the correct aspect ratio and it produced something that looks more like the Google Security Team celebrating their success in blocking Ad Blockers than the blockers themselves. It's pretty good, though and I'd hate to waste it so as a little treat for everyone who's made it this far, here it is:

You Had One Job...

As I said yesterday, my daily routine these days concludes with a couple of hours of viewing time, all of which happens in bed, on my five year-old, 8" Kindle Fire. Having used the device for half a decade, I'm still in two minds over whether or not I'd recommend it. It very much depends on what you'd want to use it for, which I suppose applies to most things, but seems particularly foregrounded here.

The negatives became apparent fairly early on and have only gotten worse. You're at least theoretically locked into Amazon's ecosystem although one of the first things I did after I set the tablet up was to go online and research how to sideload Google Play. That gets you access to the whole of the wider Android marketplace but it doesn't do you a lot of good when most of the stuff you're interested in comes up as "Not available for your device".

The Kindle Fire is definitely not designed for playing games. It wasn't great at it when I bought it and half a decade later it won't run anything new that I want to try. That's how I ended up installing Bluestacks and re-installing Nox the other day, although as I said at the time, neither of those will run the one game I wanted to play, either. 

They will run pretty much everything else the Kindle Fire won't, though, and there's a third option I meant to mention but forgot, that being Google's own proto-PC-platform, Google Play Games. As the official description puts it 

"Google Play Games on PC brings the best of Google Play by enabling players to experience an immersive and seamless cross-platform gameplay."

The service is still in beta but a couple of weeks back Google rolled it out to 120 countries so it's pretty widely available. At some point I'll probably give it a fair run and post about how I find it but my initial impression is that it's slick and professional as you'd expect but with a limited choice of games as yet. 

It looks as though Google are trying to ensure the games on the service are playable natively using PC controls. There's some of this built into the service itself with key-mapping and games are categorised as either "compatible" or "optimized", depending on how much work the developer has done to port their titles across to PC. 

A quick check of what's available right now yields somewhat disappointing results. Genshin Impact is there, although why you'd need to use the mobile version on PC when there's an actual PC edition is hard to imagine. On the other hand, Honkai Star Rail, is not, so maybe the reverse logic also applies, an argument made neither more nor less convincing by the presence on Google Play Games of HSR's sister title, the oddly-named Honkai Impact 3rd which, although I'd never heard of it until now, is apparently also available on Steam.

Neither Black Desert Mobile nor Dragon Nest (Any version.) are included, unfortunately, and neither is Sky: Children of Light, the game I installed the service hoping to be able to play. For now, there seems to be no real reason to prefer Google Play Games over the established independent alternatives but I have no doubt that will soon change, provided whoever's sponsoring this one at Google doesn't lose interest and wander off.

Returning to the supposed topic, my Kindle Fire, I would also be hesitant to say anything very good about its Amazonian operating system. Derived from Android but heavily modified, FireOS is functional but limited. It chugs along, occasionally halting and requiring a reboot to get it going again. I'd blame that on the age of my Fire but that wouldn't be a convincing excuse; it's always done it.

As for web-browsing, I wouldn't say "forget it" but I would say "bring a book". I tend to use my Kindle within a few feet of the router with a five-bar signal strength rated "Excellent" by the Fire itself and yet it takes what seems like forever to load a new web page. Actually it's seconds but a second is forever in computer time.

Not a real Mondrian.

Worse, the Fire's ability to stream from a website seems inordinately inferior to the speed it can shunt information from one of its own authorised apps like Prime or Netflix. The YouTube app, which I really don't like, works much better than watching the same YouTube videos on Firefox or Chrome, where they sometimes display only as faux-Mondrian blocks of colored squares.

A minor but exceptionally irritating aspect of FireOs is its bull-headed refusal even to consider delivering notifications. As far as I can tell after extensive research it's literally impossible to get a Kindle Fire to cough up the code from a Google Notification, making certain apps entirely inaccessible to me if I'm foolish enough to try and use a Google account to log in. I don't actually approve of the Notification process to begin with but as with many things in life, you'd rather be able to have it and not use it than be denied entirely.

So much for the things the Kindle Fire does badly or not at all. Obviously it would have gone to the back of the cupboard under the stairs long ago if it didn't also have some powerful positives. Really, one positive: the display.

The Fire is designed as a media device by which Amazon really mean a screen on which to watch things you've bought from Amazon. As the name implies, it can act as a Kindle for reading text, a job it performs very well, if not quite as well as an old school Kindle with one of those screens that apes paper. Or so I assume. I've never used one.

Where the Kindle Fire really shines, though, is in video. The display is significantly better than my monitor and far better than my (Admittedly crappy.) television. Even though mine is a five year-old, basic model, the image is intensely crisp and sharp. I'm not sure my eyes are capable of interpreting better.

I didn't ask for a fox.

The thing I found most interesting about watching moving images on a handheld-screen when I first
started was how immersive it could be, even when the image was much smaller than those I was used to. The such first device I ever used was an MP4 player, the make and model of which I can no longer remember. It had a screen about two inches square, so small you'd have imagined it would be all but useless for anything more than reading the liner notes on an album, yet I was able to download TV shows and watch them at work in my lunch break with as much enjoyment as if I was sitting in front of my TV screen at home.

Later, I watched some of the same shows again on a much larger screen and was fascinated by the detail I'd missed but the more surprising discovery was that the lack of that extra visual information didn't seem to have reduced my pleasure or understanding to any meaningful degree. I'm of the opinion the imagination readily fills in the absent detail without the viewer even realising there's anything missing.

Fascinating as that process may be, it's irrelevant to the Kindle Fire. In fact, my experience suggests its rather the reverse. When I move between watching the same shows on my PC monitor and the Kindle Fire, it's the image on the smaller screen that feels more distinct. I prefer it and not just because when I'm watching the Fire I'm usually lying down - although that certainly doesn't hurt.

There's a lot of information available online about the optimal screen size to viewing distance ratio. The Fire display has clearly been optimized for viewing at a comfortable arm's length. If you have average-length arms, I guess. It feels natural, comfortable and immersive. I find it easier to get lost in the image with the Kindle Fire than with just about any other screen I've watched, large or small.

Now I did.

Finally but not at all unimportantly, the sound on the Kindle is really good. I'd prefer it if the speakers faced forward rather than straight up into the ceiling, but they still deliver gratifyingly clear audio at a consistent volume that doesn't vary between applications the way it does on my PC.

The two final positives I have to share about the Kindle Fire are also the two main reasons I bought it in the first place. Kindles are very cheap and very reliable. 

Prior to buying mine, I'd been through something like seven or eight tablets in four or five years. Either I broke them or they broke themselves. Some of them were objectively superior in some respects to the Kindle and most I'd been quite happy with while they lasted but I was fed up of paying good money for devices that barely limped past the manufacturer's minimum guarantee before falling over.

That my Fire, which cost me less than half the price of most of my previous tablets, is still working as well after five years as it did five minutes out of the box is enough to make me feel charitable towards its many flaws. That and the fact it does the one thing I really want it to do pretty much perfectly means there's every chance that, when it finally does expire I'll most likely buy another.

As I implied at the beginning, I wouldn't exactly recommend the thing but then I wouldn't try to dissuade anyone from buying one, either. For me, it has one job to do and it does it well, so I guess it gets a passing grade.

A Bard's Tale

After some correspondence with Wilhelm and having read his post on the comparative abilities of various publicly available chat models to follow a prompt, I filled out the extremely brief application form to join the waitlist for Google's Bard test program. A few days later I received an equally brief email telling me "It’s your turn to try Bard".

One thing that all the various AI-driven apps and services that I've signed up for have in common is ease of access. Compared to registering an account to beta-test a new mmorpg, for example, gaining permission to play around with experimental text, image or video AI software is astonishingly straightforward. Mostly it's an email address and they don't always even check that. 

Whether this laissez-faire attitude will continue is something I very much doubt. I imagine once we pass through the testing phase the sign-up process will become more rigorous. Money may even need to change hands. If anyone's on the fence about whether to give it a try, I'd jump down on the "Do it" side now, before the barbed wire goes up.

In common with most of the AI software I've seen, Bard has an extremely simple front end. Whoever's designing these things just loves minimalism. It's so simple that I almost missed the input area at first. When I'd found it I pondered what to ask, always a bit of a problem for me. I really need to come with a project already thought out, not just treat it as if I was writing a blog post like this.

I started off by asking Bard a couple of questions inspired by a video Mrs Bhagpuss showed me about a dog who can fight with a sword. The link was sent to her by our friend and dog-sitter, who I should credit in case she reads this. 

I didn't save the responses but I can remember them surprisingly clearly. Bard initially thought a real dog wouldn't be able to fight with a sword, although it knew cartoon and movie dogs might. When I produced the evidence, Bard opined that, while it hadn't seen anything like it before, it thought it showed the dog and its owners had a good relationship. It was also concerned they not give the dog a real sword to play with.

This is eerily close to the conversation Mrs Bhagpuss and I had while watching the video and it highlights a couple problems I'm having with these AI chats. Firstly, I find them almost too convincing. I start to feel my socialization routines kicking in, telling me to be polite, not to be too intrusive or demanding, to respect the feelings of the person I' m talking to and all of those constraints that would literally never occur to me when using a search engine.

This is a recurring problem for me. It makes it harder for me to play adventure games than it ought to be because I really dislike badgering people or harping on about something when they clearly don't want to talk about it. Adventure games frequently require the player to interrogate NPCs quite ruthlessly and also to go back again and again to the same person and ask them questions they already answered, just in case they might say something different. I feel very uncomfortable doing it and it's frequently the reason I have to look things up in walkthroughs, whereupon I often find I stopped hassling someone for information long before I should have.

In the case of the new AI chat models that reticence, based on assumed norms of social interaction, is exacerbated by the passive role the AIs always play. Every AI I've used so far waits to be asked a question, gives its reply, then stops. That's not a conversation, it's at best an interview and at worst an interrogation. I started to wonder if anyone's working on AI software that initiates and sustains conversation as an active participant. That would be considerably more interesting to me and quite possibly of great commercial value.

As I thought about it, it occurred to me that I could just ask Bard about it. So I did. 

That's somewhat encouraging, although I note that both the AIs Bard names have been in development for quite a while. Also, they sound like the kind of chat programs we saw even as far back as the 1990s, the ones that always reminded me of a sitcom version of a Freudian analyst, mirroring everything the user says in the hope of having them do all the conversational heavy lifting.

I'm hoping for the kind of AI that would pipe up out of nowhere "I'm bored! Let's do something!" and then come up with a few ideas of what we might do, then argue with me when I said I didn't want to do any of them and challenge me to come up with a better idea. Or an AI that would ping me with a link to a music video and ask "Have you heard this? I thought it sounded a bit like like that really awful one you claimed you liked yesterday."

I don't think we're there yet. Then again, I'd also want the AI embedded in robot pet of some kind so maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. Oh... wait a moment....

I think I'm starting to get the hang of this now. I have to say that of the AIs I've tried so far, Bard is the best at simulating an accurate, practical search engine, which is, I guess, what you'd expect from something developed by Google.

That said, I wouldn't take advice from Bard without double-checking it through good old unintelligent Google as well. Take that claim that the Joy for All pets can "carry on conversations with their owners, and they can also play games and sing songs." No, they can't. Not according to the website, anyway. The dogs can bark, the cats can purr and the birds can sing. The company sells games as well but none of the pets talks or plays those games. 

How about Paro the seal, who can "carry on simple conversations". Again, no , it can't.

So, I went back to Bard and asked for some better suggestions. It was most apologetic and eager to make things right.

Okay, let's go through these.

Jibo was exactly what I asked for and technically still is although, unfortunately, not for much longer. As this report at The Verge explains, Jibo was supposed to go offline back in 2018 until the last-minute sale to another company gave it a reprieve. That grace period is itself now coming to an end. As the company website puts it "...you will have access to all of the existing features and functionalities of your Jibo Robot through March 31, 2023, at which time we will suspend services related to the Jibo Robot." 

The plan seems to be to update and modernize Jibo, not kill it off for good, but it's not an option you'd want to be looking at right now.

Moxie is live (In a manner of speaking.) and available. It more than adequately fulfills the brief in that it can hold a proper conversation, something it backs up most impressively with an amazing repertoire of very authentic facial expressions and hand gestures. So long as conversation remains within expected parameters the illusion of sentience is quite convincing. When someone doesn't follow the script, however...

Well, that was dark. Moving on, how does Bard's third suggestion pan out?

Vector is basically Alexa cosplaying as a tiny bulldozer. I found this one by far the least appealing aesthetically but then I have no emotional affinity with earth-moving machinery. YMMV. Functionally, Vector also sounds the most robotic so far and is way too small to feel like a "companion", at least for an adult. I looks like its about the size of a hamster so a child might find it appropriate. You can buy one on Amazon right now so that's "commercially available" nailed, at least.

Sophia is... disturbing. Unlike the others, she is categorically not a "home robot" and I very much doubt she was "designed to be a companion for people who live alone" as Bard claims. The company behind her is, however, working on one that is - something called "Little Sophia", a positively disturbing 14" tall bald robot dressed in what looks worryingly like full combat armor.

Little Sophia was supposed to be ready by the end of 2022 but currently still shows as available for pre-order on the company website. Big Sophia, on the other hand, seems to be busy working the blockchain/NFT circuit as in this creepy video from earlier this year. It's not so much Sophia that I find creepy about it, either.

So much for pet robots. Maybe in a couple more years.

Getting back to Bard, the next thing I asked it to do was solve a crossword clue my mother had emailed me. Most weeks she sends me several she's having trouble with and I usually manage to do most of them. This one, though, had me stumped.

Bard thought it was easy. It was so pleased with its prowess it even added a paragraph just to big itself up. I didn't screenshot the results but I did save it to text:

"Are you any good at solving cryptic crossword clues? What do you think the answer to this one might be? "Thief from Madeira crashing into posh car   (3-6)   __ __ __   __ __ I__E __"

"I think the answer to the cryptic crossword clue is "Smuggler". The clue is a play on words, with "thief" and "smuggler" both being words that describe someone who steals something. The "Madeira" part of the clue refers to the fact that smugglers often use Madeira as a base of operations. The "posh car" part of the clue refers to the fact that smugglers often use expensive cars to transport their goods. The "3-6" part of the clue refers to the number of letters in the answer. The "I__E __" part of the clue is a placeholder for the letters of the answer.

I am good at solving cryptic crossword clues because I am able to think logically and creatively. I am also able to access and process information from the real world through Google Search."

Almost none of that is true. Bard was about as wrong as it could be. Apart from anything else, it completely missed the part about the answer being two words, offering a single nine-letter word instead of a three and a six. Bard clearly has only the sketchiest understanding of how cryptic clues work, but I suppose that's fair enough; even a sketchy understanding is more than most humans can manage.

I did find the contrast between how pleased Bard seemed with itself and how badly it had done highly amusing. I'd take that as a feature in a robot pet, for sure. Not so much in a practical app, though.

For my final test before writing this post I thought I'd ask Bard to express a personal opinion. It clearly has some sense of its own identity, given the self-satisfied tone of that last paragraph. I'd just been looking at the shortlist for the 2023 Glastonbury Festival Emerging Talent battle of the bands and I wondered who Bard fancied to win.

"The finalists for Glastonbury Festival's Emerging Talent Competition have just been announced. They are Cordelia Gartside, EVA, FFSYTHO?!, Naomi Kimpenu, N’famady Kouyaté, The Love Buzz, Prima Queen and VLURE. Who do you think will win and why?"

"Congratulations to the finalists for Glastonbury Festival's Emerging Talent Competition! It is an amazing achievement to have made it to this point.

It is difficult to say who will win, as all of the finalists are talented artists with unique sounds. However, I think that N’famady Kouyaté has a strong chance of winning. He is a talented musician with a powerful voice and a unique style. His music is both traditional and modern, and he has the ability to connect with audiences of all ages.

In addition, N’famady Kouyaté is a strong performer. He has a stage presence that is both captivating and engaging. He is also a gifted storyteller, and his songs are full of emotion and meaning.

I think that N’famady Kouyaté would be a great addition to the Glastonbury Festival lineup. He is a talented artist with a unique sound and a strong stage presence. I wish him all the best in the competition!"

Wow! That was way more personal than I expected. I thought Bard might go through all the finalists and list their strengths, perhaps coming up with an evidence-based conclusion on the most likely winner but instead it just gushed over N’famady Kouyaté like a true fan. 

Off the back of that recommendation, I went to watch N’famady Kouyaté on YouTube. He is very impressive. Not my musical taste but definitely everything Bard says he is. If I was going to put a fiver on it, I might well back him, too.

And that's about as far as I've got with Bard so far. I went off to check the full, long list for the ETC, which I'd missed when it was released, and naturally that took up couple of hours. You can lok forwqrd to (Or dread. Your choice.) a post on it soon.

My impression of Bard so far, as compared to the various iterations of ChatGPT that I've used, is that it's simultaneously more formal and more personal, which is a good trick if you can pull it off. It feels like it would be more reliable for factual information. ChatGPT does like to go off on flights of fancy, given half a chance. I wouldn't ask Bard to help you with your crossword clues, though.

The most important thing I've learned from playing around with both of them is something about myself. I need to develop new modes of communication and new social mores if I'm going to feel comfortable talking to AIs and hope to get the best from them. 

I'm going to work on that. Hopefully it will turn out to be a transferable skill I can bring into gaming, too. I'm all but certain it won't be long before similar AI chat tech will be driving NPC conversations in-game.  But that's another post altogether.

Currently Playing: Chimeraland (Again)

An odd thing happened yesterday, when I went searching for something on Google. The top result had absolutely nothing to do with the search term I'd entered. It was a link to some new kind of analytic for this blog.

I clicked on it, naturally. I don't go hunting for stats about the blog any more - haven't for years - but if Google happens to show them to me, it feels impolite not to look. Not that they have, for a while. I used to get the odd email but even those seem to have stopped. 

This is something altogether new, anyway, or new to me, at any rate. I'd put up a link or a screenshot or something but I have no idea what I did to trigger it and I didn't think to snapshot it at the time. 

Oh, hi! Didn't see you through the long grass...

A google search on things like "Blogger Stats" only brings up information from a decade ago (Ironically.) I wondered if it might be related to the new flavor of Analytics, GA4, but since it offered me the option of linking to my current Analytics profile, set to expire sometime next year when GA4 takes over, that seems unlikley.  

The new thingummy (If it even is new...) appears to be primarily focused on how traffic comes to the blog via organic search, specifically from Google itself. It all feels somewhat self-referential, if not a tad solipsistic.

I did find it quite interesting, nonetheless, in that it showed a deal of detail on what kind of search terms had been sending readers my way of late. That's information Google used to love to throw around until they thought better of it and started keeping it to themselves. It's nice to see it coming back into favor once again. The wheel turns...

Welcome to my modest home.

If this all sounds as if it's building up to a post about blogging and data-gathering and all that sexy stuff, well I'm sorry; it's not. It's by way of being an introduction to yet another post about Chimeraland, albeit only the second featuring the game in its shiny, new Steam incarnation. I guess the pictures may have given that away.

Speaking of screenshots, once again, I regret not having taken any at the time (Even some notes would have been nice.) meaning I can't give much in the way of detail. The key takeaway is that, other than the obvious top search term ("Inventory full") and its popular alternate ("Full inventory"), searches which I'm sure sent plenty of people away fuming, by far the most common topic bringing people to the Inventory Full yard over the last month has been Chimeraland.

Whether that means the game is trending or just that pretty much no-one but me has ever mentioned it, so I'm hoovering up whatever scraps there are, I wouldn't care to say, although I hope it's the former. I haven't been giving the game anything like the attention it deserves since it launched on Steam but I'd like to think plenty of other people have.

It's Steam, though, isn't it? We don't have to guess. We can look it up. 

Just lie back and enjoy the view!

 

That's quite encouraging in a way. A couple of thousand people, give or take, started playing on launch day, a couple of thousand people are playing now and the all-time high (For a given value of "All-time" that's about a week long.) is a couple of thousand, too. It's consistent, if nothing else. 

Reviews on Steam currently stand at "Mixed" from just under a thousand respondents, although with 65% of those coming down on the "Positive" side, I'd contend they're not as mixed as all that. People do seem either to love it or hate it, which is another recommendation in my book, even if I do kind of admire the reviewer who, in giving the game a thumbs up, merely offered "I don't have a clue why I play this game and even less why I keep playing it." That's how we all feel, bro!

By many accounts, the version of Chimeraland available through Steam runs less well than any of the others - the standalone client or the various mobile versions. It actually feels about the same to me as the SEA version but I suppose that's a slightly damning observation in itself. You'd think it would be noticeably smoother on EU servers from the UK without the signal having to travel half way round the world and back. 

One of the many filters for the "View" selfie function. I forget what it's called.

 

For some reason that I can't explain (Ignorance? Laziness? Lack of storage space?) I have yet to download the Android version, currently enjoying an extremely healthy 4.3 rating on the Google Play Store from more than seven thousand reviews. 

In theory, I could. Play tells me "This app is available for some of your devices", a message I get to see all too rarely these days. Unfortunately, it declines to tell me which it is. It's certainly not the increasingly useless Kindle Fire, which doesn't offer me the game at all, either on Amazon's own skeletal store or the full-fat Google Play I sideloaded within minutes of opening the box.

Since I don't, in fact, own any other Android devices capable of playing anything at all, that pretty much puts a cap on the mobile version for me, at least until I get a new tablet. Or phone. Possibly both. For now, I'll just have to stick with the allegedly inferior Steam version.

I know it's hideous but it's 48 slots!

 

Which is what I did this afternoon for almost three hours. I'm not going to go over the same old ground again. If you want to know what the game's like, go back and read my old posts. I have spotted a few differences but the gameplay's mostly the same as far as I can tell.

It's also every bit as compulsive. I certainly didn't intend to play from lunch to tea but it happened anyway. Once I started building a house an extended session was all but inevitable. 

I have, of course, started building in a less than ideal spot and I've already boxed myself with some awkward placements that mean I have to bunny-hop around my own front room (Only room...) to get from one machine to another but it's only until I get the feel of the controls once again. Then I'll tear it all down and start over. (Yeah, right. Like you did last time, eh? Remind me how that went again.)

Someone finally remembered why they called it "Chimeraland".

Things I've noticed that are different include an entirely new building material: candy. Build your own gingerbread house. Witches need not apply. Also, an unexpectedly challenging quiz on Ancient Greek civilization and mythology. Would you know which of five types of pillar was the plainest? Even if you cheat and Google it you only get three!

The quiz takes place in what's laughably described as your faction's "main city", which (As I knew from before.) is nothing but a scattering of small buildings in the middle of nowhere. You do get a free port there, which is just as well. It'd be a long run.

Wait a minute! I know this one!

 

When I arrived there was a huge battle going on between some invading NPC bandits and several other players. I threw myself into the fray before considering Chimeraland has open, non-consensual PvP and I lost my newbie invulnerablity a couple of levels ago. 

It's a funny sort of PvP, though. It never happens or not that I've seen. I never once got attacked or even got caught in friendly fire in all my time on the SEA servers and so far, so safe here, too. No doubt I'll get caught out one day but until then I'm just going to forget about it.

If I stand way over here, maybe no-one will notice.

I'm not planning on digging in as hard as I did back in the spring, when I really put in the hours for a few weeks, but I'll be popping in from time to time. I suspect that, as with Landmark back in the day, I'll have to limit my visits for my own protection. I'm not really fit to be let loose unsupervised around building games and if I was to get into the whole animal breeding thing as well...

Oh, what the hell! Maybe just one quick session before we take the dog out...