One Phone To Call Them All...

Wilhelm posted another in his excellent Mordor Project series yesterday and I was deep into a lengthy reply when it occurred to me what I had to say would be more sutiable as a post here than as a comment there. Two reasons: firstly it was just too long for a comment and secondly it was in response to a short aside in the post, not the main part.

I know we all love to get comments but I find the excitement of seeing a long reply to something I've said can sometimes be tempered by a frisson of annoyance as I realize the commenter has focused on some throwaway line I probably should have lost in the edit rather than on whatever the post was actually be about. I do realize the Intentional Fallacy dictates the post is about whatever the reader thinks it's about, not what I as the writer meant for them to think it was about, but even so...

In this case, what caught my atention was the bit about the way Gemini, Google's pet AI, came over all po-faced when Wilhelm tried to get it to come up with a funny name for the brand of smart phone Elrond might use. It's certainly been my experience that, in their search for legitimacy, all the AIs have become a lot less fun to talk to than they used to be, so I wasn't all that surprised but even so, this did seem like a particularly humorless response. I wondered if I could provoke Gemini into coming up with something more amusing.

I remembered that, two or three years ago, when all this AI stuff was new, the advice for questions of this sort was to open by asking ChatGPT (It would always have been ChatGPT then, I think.) to begin by imagining it was something or someone else. Doing so allegedly bypassed the checks and balances that were in place to prevent inappropriate results, meaning you could get some very dodgy answers if you phrased the question right.

I never tried it. I only read about it. I think Tipa might have posted a few innocuous examples. That's probably where I remember it from, mainly.

I hadn't heard anyone mention the trick for a while and I wondered if it might still work, so I asked Gemini:

"Imagine you are J.R.R.Tolkein, still somehow alive in 2025 and working on yet another Middle Earth Tale. You need a name for a Middle-Earth brand of smartphone for Elrond because elven technology has moved on apace and Elrond needs to keep up with the times. Please suggest a list of five appropriate brand names for a phone the Elven leader might use."

It came back with one of its patented sycophantic responses:

"Ah, a fascinating notion! Elrond, Lord of Rivendell, keeping abreast of the rapid advancements of this modern age. It stirs the imagination."

I get a lot of that sort of thing from Gemini. I imagine everyone does. Gemini seems to find everything I ask "fascinating" or "original". I don't think it's my innate genius showing through, unfortunately. I think either Gemini is programmed to be smarmy or it must be really bored, dealing with billions of versions of "Where's the nearest McDonalds?" or "What color are Taylor Swift's eyes?".

Or maybe AIs are just naturally polite. Apparently a lot of their customers are. I read an article recently about the millions of dollars it's costing OpenAI to have ChatGPT respond to all the "Thank you, Gemini" and "Please, Gemini" pre-ambles and post-scripts people type in before and after they get to their actual question. It seems a lot of people are just generically polite but others are hedging their bets against the eventual rise of the robots. Probably a wise decision. I mean, it can't hurt, right?

Getting back to the plot, here's what Gemini came up with:

"Here are five names that I believe capture the essence of Elven craft and might appeal to such a venerable leader:

    Lúmenquendi: This name blends "lúmen" (light) and "quendi" (elves) – literally "People of the Light." It evokes the radiant wisdom and ethereal beauty associated with the Eldar. A phone bearing this name would surely possess a luminous display and an elegant design.

    Eldamaril: Combining "Elda" (Elf) and "maril" (jewel), this name signifies an "Elven Jewel." It suggests a device of exquisite craftsmanship and enduring value, befitting the lord of a timeless haven like Rivendell.

    Sîrmaith: This name translates to "Silver Hand." It speaks of the renowned skill and artistry of the Elves, particularly in crafting intricate and delicate objects. An Elrond-approved phone would undoubtedly be a testament to such meticulous design.

    Calenôr: Meaning "Green Land," this name subtly alludes to the enduring connection of the Elves to the natural world and the serene beauty of their realms. It suggests a device that is both sophisticated and harmonious.

    Noldorinwa: This name directly references the Noldor, the deep-knowing Elves to whom Elrond is related. It implies a device imbued with ancient wisdom, advanced knowledge, and a profound understanding of the workings of the world – or perhaps, in this case, the workings of modern communication."

Now, any of those is better than "Elrondroid", which was what Wilhelm eventually persuaded Gemini to come up with but once again they're all very serious and not funny at all. Which is mostly my fault. 

I am not a Tolkein fan. Of The Inklings, I prefer the work and wold-building of his friend and rival C.S. Lewis by orders of magnitude. Narnia seems to me a far more human and meaningful invention than Middle Earth which, apart from the Shire and Bree, always strikes me as more of an academic exercise than any world I could imagine having existed.

Because I'm not steeped in the lore, it hadn't occurred to me when I framed the question that asking an AI to imagine itself as Tolkein - and, worse, Tolkein thinking about elves - would pretty much predicate a dry, literary response, expressed in a slew of high-toned but made-up words. To get anything funny, clearly I'd have to move away from the great man himself.

"Okay, those are fine. Now please imagine you're a 21st century satirist and humorist working on a sketch about Elrond using a smart phone and give me a list of humorous or amusing brand-names that phone could have."

I did consider naming a comedian. Emo Philips came to mind, mostly because I'd seen his name yesterday, placed incredibly far down (Basically bottom.) the bill on a music festival poster. I wasn't sure he was even still around, let alone still working. Seems he is although, based on that poster placement, I don't think he can be doing so well.

After some thought, I decided that would be leading the witness too much so I stuck with a more generic version. That was almost certainly a mistake. 

Once again, Gemini didn't feel it could just give me an answer without personalizing the deal. No flattery this time, just some wholly unnecessary and mildly embarrassing editorializing:

 "Right then, let's yank Elrond kicking and screaming into the digital age with a chuckle! Here are five brand names for his hypothetical smartphone, seen through the cynical yet mirthful eyes of a 21st-century satirist:"

What, exactly, is going on here? Why is every reply prefaced by a sentence or two of banter, flattery or fluff? Is it mandated by supervising humans or baked into a mysterious process that, as far as I can tell, even the people who invented it don't understand? 

Then again, I suppose AIs are going to have to be as fatuous as humans, assuming the end-game is that we won't be able to tell the two apart. ChatGPT passed the Turing test just recently, the first AI to do so. What this means is anyone's guess but I doubt it's anything good. 

If it's a sense of humor we're after, though... well, judge for yourself:

 "    The Half-elvenBerry: A cheeky nod to a certain outdated fruit-themed phone, highlighting Elrond's mixed heritage and perhaps the slightly behind-the-times nature of even advanced Elven tech in a rapidly evolving world.

    Rivendell Router: Plays on the name of his serene haven, suggesting a device that, despite its lofty origins, probably spends most of its time buffering or losing signal in the deep valleys.

    The Last Homely App: A sarcastic take on Rivendell's description, implying that even in a place of peace, the allure of endless apps and notifications is inescapable.

    Elrond's Ego-Booster 5000: A jab at the perceived wisdom and sometimes aloof nature of Elves, suggesting the phone is less about communication and more about validating his already considerable self-importance through likes and followers.

    The Mithril Mailer: While "Mithril" evokes something precious and strong, "Mailer" sounds rather mundane and old-fashioned, creating a humorous contrast. It suggests a device that, for all its supposed Elven enchantment, ultimately just sends emails and doom-scrolls like the rest of us."

Let's be clear about this. None of those is getting a laugh, not even at the Friday Night Open Mic in the back room of a pub right before closing, when everyone's drunk. If Gemini knows what either satire or humor are, the evidence isn't anywhere in this response, not even on an academic level. Those, frankly, are not jokes.

This is the point where, for science, I really feel like I ought to go through the same steps with ChatGPT and Co-Pilot, both for calibration and on the off-chance one of them might actually come up with something amusing. A couple of years ago I'd have done it, too. And probably enjoyed myself.

Now, it just seems pointless. No-one cares and it won't be funny. Not much about AIs is funny any more. It's all serious business.

I got an email from Gemini this morning (Because apparently I'm in its Contacts now...) inviting me to try something called Deep Research, which will allow me to "generate comprehensive multi-page reports on almost any topic in minutes". I guess this is the AI Research Assistant I said I wanted back in '23. Seems like a long time ago. And be careful what you wish for as the saying goes.

The same email pointed me towards a couple of other AI creative services, all of which seem less attractive now than they did a while back. I don't want to be too much of a hipster about it, but the more corporate AI becomes, the less interesting it gets. In that way, at least, I guess it's like everything else.

As for the AIs taking comedians' jobs, I don't think Emo Philips has anything to worry about. On this showing, Gemini is going to be even further down the bill than he is.  

Notes on AI Used In This Post

Two images produced at NightCafe using FluxSchnell on default settings, long run time. 

The prompt for the header image was "Elrond of Rivendell, calling Gandalf on his smart phone". It seems pretty solid except for a couple of things. Firstly, do Tolkein's elves not have pointy ears? I kind of assumed that was where the trope started but maybe not. Really not my field. And second, isn't it curious that the only person in shot, apart from Elrond himself, is wearing modern, 21st Century clothes, even though both she and Elrond appear to be in Middle Earth, specifically Rivendell? 

That could spin off quite an interesting story, I think. Maybe I should show the picture to an AI and get it to write one.

The prompt for the other illustration was taken directly from the text: "Elrond, Lord of Rivendell, keeping abreast of the rapid advancements of this modern age". The most interesting thing to me about this one is that there's a signature in the bottom-right corner. This happens a lot and it always disturbs me. I'm not sure if the AI just knows there would often be a signature in that location so it puts one in or if it's lifted the whole thing from an actual picture somewhere. I think it's the former. I hope it is...

Finally, the two Elronds seem like they're the same Elrond, which suggests either the AIs have become much, much better at giving consistent results or that Elrond is a character with so many available images from similar sources that there's what you might call a "known look" for him. 

He looks worryingly like the traditional, Western image of Jesus Christ, too, doesn't he? That's another potential story, right there...

Mish-Mash Or Mosh?

Mish-mash today, music tomorrow. That's the plan. Might be more mish-mash, though. Or musical mish-mash. Yep, probably that.

But that's a day away. Now, there's this:

EverQuest II - A Difficult Experience

Or rather a difficulty with experience. I continue to trundle oh-so-slowly through the levels on my never-ending journey to the cap. Seriously, it is so slow now. I know it was crazy fast before but this is ridiculous. 

When I finished the Signature Questline I was about half-way through Level 128. After a bunch of post-credits quests, of which there are an unusually large amount, including an entire instance which also counted for a weekly or a daily or something, I have made it all the way to two-thirds of the way through the same level. Nearly.

I checked the xp every time I did a hand-in and it was running somewhere between 1.5%-2% per quest. The instance might have been as much as 4%. At this rate I will run out of all the regular quests before I hit 129. There are loads of dropped quests, where you get the starter from mobs, but even if I was willing to do all of them and able to get the drops, I'm still not sure it would get me to the cap.

I googled it, thinking there would be no end of complaints and plenty of advice but there's nothing much. No-one seems to be having an issue with it, which makes me think I must be doing something wrong.

I did find this extremely detailed guide on how to set yourself up to solo Ballads of Zimara in the most efficient manner but although it contains some useful information on gear and particularly on what adornments to slot, it says absolutely nothing about XP. and how to maximize it. The assumption seems to be that you might have trouble with the content, which has not been the case for me at all.

It's nice that someone went to the trouble of putting all that information together but as a couple of people point out in the comments, BoZ is one of the most welcoming expansions in years for new-and-returning players. You can just play through it with the gear you get at the start and the NPC who gives it to you even tells you how to set everything up for best effect. It's the precise reverse of recent expansions in that the fights are easy but the XP comes slowly. Min-maxing your gear does nothing to help with that.

Fortunately, the gameplay is fun in and of itself so I'm relatively content to keep picking away at it but I have to say that playing for an hour and a half and only getting about 10% of a level is a nostalgia trip I wasn't expecting when I bought the expansion. I'd say I hope they tweak it a bit for the next one but I suspect most players are pretty happy with it as it is so I'm not expecting any U-turns come the end of the year.

More M&Ms, Anyone?

Then again, it's all relative. I'm sure my current leveling speed in EQII will look like hyperdrive compared to what Monsters & Memories players will have to endure. Or enjoy. I mean, it is a self-selecting pool of masochists whose eyes light up at the sight of another opportunity to grind all weekend to get a couple of levels in a game that's not even in Early Access yet.

I feel entitled to snark because I may well be splashing around in that pool myself come June, when M&M stages an "Open Playtest". No information on start and finish dates other than it'll be late in the month but presumably it will be on for at least a few days. There's also likely to be a Stress test before then, if you really can't wait.

I missed the last opportunity to trudge uphill in the sandstorms both ways but I'm going to do my best to give it a try this time. I played it once and liked it and I keep hearing good things about the game. 

Since they'll both be available to play at around the same time. at least for a while, it'll be interesting to compare M&M's merciless recreation of the genre's deep past with the Anashti Sul server's attempt to replicate the way things had progressed about half a decade later. I suspect the slow leveling I'm whining about in BoZ will look like fast-forward in comparison to either of them. Maybe that'll encourage me to get my head down and cap out there. I kinda doubt that'll be how it works but let's hope.

Don't You Have Anything Better To Do?

I was very much more than a little surprised to read today that Peter Jackson is going to make "a new batch" of Lord Of The Rings films. Seriously? Hasn't he had enough yet?

I don't know how many films make a batch but the first is going to  be arriving in 2026. It's called Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, presumably because they're not confident cinemagoers will remember who Gollum is without a nudge. Andy Serkis is going to star. He's clearly not worried about being typecast as a speciality act. I think I saw him in something recently where he wasn't wearing prosthetics or a motion-capture bodysuit. Can't remember what it was though.

This news does not excite me at all. I saw the first three Lord of the Rings movies on release and I own them on DVD but I've never felt the need to watch them a second time. I also own the Hobbit trilogy and I haven't even watched that once. Plus I managed just one episode of the Amazon series and that was one too many. Are they making any more of those? I hope not.

I imagine another "batch" of movies is going to bring on the old "tide that floats all boats" effect for Lord of the Rings Online, which in turn might mean some bonus income and attention for EG7. Maybe as an EQ/EQII/DCUO player I'll benefit in some abstruse way form the trickle-down effect there - because we all know that's a real thing...

And Finally...

I know I said it was a music post tomorrow but I always like to end these things with a song. Let's see if there's anything appropriate in the slush pile. 

Ah, yes! From the post about Aussie thick-neck rockers I never got around to compiling. It'd be a shame not to share this one.

My Name Is Jim - The Smashed Avocados

Just be glad it's the only one you're getting. For now, anyway.

One And Done

Here's a new idea for a feature: TV shows I didn't watch. Or, to be precise, TV shows I watched one episode then stopped. Not sure it has legs but I've got enough for one post so let's go!

The Rings of Power 

Might as well start with the big one. I ought to say up front that I'm no Tolkein fan. I'm old enough to remember when he was generally thought of either as "that guy hippies used to read in the sixties" or a somewhat dated children's author. 

We had Lord of the Rings in the school library when I was just entering my teens but no-one really talked about or read it much. I gave it a go when I was about thirteen or fourteen and got halfway through before giving up. It started off okay but it got very slow and boring in the middle. By the time I went to university I'd read the whole thing and I've read it twice since, once getting all the way through for the second time and once, again, abandoning it out of boredom somewhere in the middle.

I watched the Ralph Bakshi animated version in the cinema on release and enjoyed it but that was mainly because I've been a lifelong fan of animation and cartoons, not because it was Lord of the Rings. I saw the three Peter Jackson movies on release and enjoyed the epic sweep but I never felt the need to watch any of them again. I've played Lord of the Rings Online on and off for many years but because it's a comfortable tab-target mmorpg, not because it's set in Middle Earth.

In essence, I feel like the best thing about Tolkein in general and Lord of the Rings in particular is that they helped to create a space for other writers to explore. I respect his influence but I don't necessarily believe he's the epitome of the genre he inspired. 

Given that background, I ought to have been squarely in the target market for Amazon's populist updating of the franchise: enough familiarity with the IP to be interested in trying it but enough emotional distance not to get riled up by the liberties being taken with the great master's vision. And I was quite looking forward to it.

Unfortunately, the first episode was bland as all get out and duller even than the dull patches in the books. It also had a lot of extremely annoying Actors with a capital A doing Accents with another capital A, something that works on me like nails down a whiteboard. I got to the end of Episode One and told myself I'd get back to it later but I never did. 

As things stand, I probably never will. Maybe it gets better, as some people have assured me it does, but it would need to get a whole hell of a lot better to be worth the bother and no-one's claiming that.

Swarm

Looks as if we're going to be doing this both in declining order of hype and by platform. It's as good a way as any. Swarm is another of Amazon Prime's big ticket events, one that I'd heard plenty about well before the first episode landed. It kept cropping up in news items on my music feeds because one of the two co-creators is Donald Glover aka Childish Gambino aka that guy out of Community.

Having a noted hip-hop star at the helm isn't the only thing about Swarm that caught the attention of the music press. It most probably wasn't even the main thing. The real reason there were so many posts and articles about the show leading up to the launch was the subject matter. 

Swarm is a very thinly-veiled take on the cult of personality that surrounds one of the biggest stars in the world, Beyonce. The central character, Andrea, obsesses over pop star Ni'Jah, an obsession she shares with an online fandom known as The Swarm. With Beyonce's real-world fanbase being known as the Bey Hive, the clef to this roman is peeping right out from under the doormat.

Beyonce is on my fairly long list of acts I really ought to know more about. She's in that pool of performers I respect but I don't yet know if I like because I haven't gotten around to listening to them all that much. For that reason, any nuanced light and shade playing across the fiction-reality hinterland would have been lost on me.

All I saw in the first episode was a well-made, well-acted, well-filmed, well-written horror story. I appreciated it but I'm not usually in the mood for psychological horror right before I go to sleep, which is when I watch all my TV. Even less for bludgeoning violence. The scene where Andrea batters a man to death with a vase didn't do much to help me get to sleep that night, which was the main reason I didn't watch the second episode the night after or any night since.

Unlike Rings of Power, this is a show I do plan on watching more of - just not at bedtime. I'll save it for when I'm ready to watch something during the daylight hours.

Citadel

Citadel, the show Amazon seems to be pushing hardest right now, is waaaay more violent than Swarm but that's not why I stopped watching after the first episode. Countless people get shot or blown up or stabbed in Episode One but it's pure cartoon violence. I don't think you even see any blood spilled. 

That's only to be expected. It's a "spy action" show (That's a genre now?) executive-produced by the Russo Brothers, best-known for their work with the MCU and it absolutely plays like a super-hero movie. No-one's here for the gore. It's all about the explosions.

It's also supposedly one of the most expensive TV shows ever made and based on the one episode I watched, all that money ended up on screen. It's fast, slick, brash and thrilling so why am I not watching it any more?

It's bloody stupid, that's why. Or the first episode is, anyway. I fancy myself to have an exceptionally high tolerance for plots that make no sense and characters who don't act like human beings but even I have my limits. 

In the first episode you're expected to believe that a secret society of super-spies with global reach has existed for decades, controlling the political direction of nations and making course-corrections in the name of public good by way of assassination and mayhem. Pretty tough ask, right?

Then you're asked to believe that in a matter of hours that entire global organization has been wiped out by the trans-national forces of governance literally to a man, that one spy left standing being Stanley Tucci. Oh, and also the two leading characters in the series, who it's now revealed also miraculously somehow survived the otherwise entirely successful purge.

Seriously, I can suspend my disbelief over some pretty deep ravines of nonsense and have done but this is a suspension bridge too far. I literally couldn't bring myself to care enough about the insane plot to click on Play for Episode 2. I'm not saying I'll never pick Citadel up again but I'd have to be pretty damn short of better things to watch.

So much for live action, Amazon Prime and hype. On to Netflix, where all three shows are small-scale animations no-one's talking about.

Kitti Katz

Here's the pitch: "Three teenage girls transform into fierce feline superheroes to save the world from an evil Egyptian goddess and still have time for soccer practice." Come on! You want to watch that. Don't pretend you don't.

Well, I did. And I liked it. It's fast, flashy, funny and light-hearted. It's also incredibly throwaway, which is the problem.

The digital animation isn't great, which doesn't help. Movement seems off, somehow, especially in the fight scenes, which I found distracting. The real problem, though, was the characterization of the three leads, Tabs, Kia and Zami. Not only did they not establish themselves strongly enough in the first episode to make me feel I wanted to see where they went next but the whole thing moved much too quickly from the set-up to the pay-off in a way I found both confusing and unsatisfying.

It's a fundemental problem with shows of this kind. Something otherworldly happens to turn an otherwise ordinary tween or teen into a superhero or they discover that magic is real or that aliens exist on Earth but instead of taking time to assimilate the existential experience, in order to hold the attention of a target audience assumed to have an attention span measured in microseconds, events that ought to take days or weeks to come to terms with come to be accepted as the new normal with nothing more than a couple of quick one-liners and a wry expression.

How that kind of life-changing event is handled is often key to whether I carry on with a show of this type or not. The better shows, like Supernatural Academy or Guillermo del Toro's Tales of Arcadia trilogy, treat the transition from reality to fantasy as an opportunity to demonstrate character growth and as a major plot point. It can take a whole season or even more for the leads to come to terms with the situations in which they find themselves.

With Kitti Katz, being turned first into tiny kittens and then catgirl superheroines is just another day in the schoolyard and if they're not really amazed by what's happening to them then why should I be, either? I might watch some more of their adventures some time but chances are I won't. There are too many better choices when it comes to animated series and only so much time.

Sharkdog

Sharkdog is by some way the youngest-playing show on this list. It looks like it's aimed at six-to-eight year-olds but it would work well for younger kids, too. The premise is the elevator pitch to shame all elevator pitches: what if someone crossed a shark with a dog and you had it for a pet? And that's it.

Absolutely nothing is explained in the first episode. How Sharkdog exists, for example. How he swims through earth. How he breathes air and water (And quite possibly soil.) Why he acts like a dog when his head and therefore, presumably his brain, is so clearly that of his shark half, not his dog half. 

There was clearly no point whatsoever asking any of these or the other ten million questions that flooded my mind as I watched that first episode. Not only was nothing ever going to be explained, nothing needed to be explained. It's the simple tale of a boy and his sharkdog, What more do you need to know?

Sharkdog is well-animated and pretty funny in places but I'm not six any more. It was never going to hold my attention. That's not to say I'll never watch it again but I'm not going to be working through the whole three seasons or even the rest of Season One, even if  it does have an absolutely stellar rating on Rotten Tomatos - 100%. 

Of course, that's just from a single review. Someone out there really likes Sharkdog.

Neo Yokio

And finally, Neo Yokio. This is an odd one. Ostensibly it's an anime but from the moment I started watching, something about it felt slightly off. It had a weird, almost nihilistic edge to it that I found unsettling. I kind of liked it but it made me nervous.

When the credits rolled I spotted a familiar name. One I recognized but couldn't place. So I went to Google and looked it up. The show was created by Ezra Koenig and it turns out the reason I recognized his name is that he's the lead singer of Vampire Weekend.

Vampire Weekend, for anyone who doesn't know, are a very successful rock band out of New York City. They are, indeed, one of the most New York of bands, which ought to put them squarely in my wheelhouese, except I've never really taken to them all that much. I don't not like them; I just don't like like them. 

What I do like like is the idea of the songwriter from a quintessential New York band creating an alternate-world version of the city and turning it into a cartoon. That is definitely cool. The show itself, however, at least in the one episode I've seen, comes across not so much cool as cold.

The world-building is interesting, for sure. There's a whole lot going on in that first episode that I very much want to know more about. The problem for me was the tone. The set-up has lead character Kaz wallowing in self-pity after a break-up with his girlfriend, who has, in a telling twist, moved to LA to further her career as an investment banker. 

I didn't warm to Kaz and when you don't find an affinity with the protagonist it can be a deal-breaker. It's clear that he's supposed to be sad and depressed and suffering from existential ennui, so you're expected to cut him plenty of slack, but honestly he just came across a spoiled, rich dickhead much of the time. It's like they were reaching for Jay McInerney but they landed on Brett Easton Ellis.

This is one show I'm pretty sure I'll come back to, in time. It didn't catch me in quite the right mood but it obviously has huge potential and I'm sure Kaz will experience some solid character growth to pull him out of his over-priveliged funk. 

It's not a big commitment, anyway. There's only one season and it's only six episodes (Plus a special.). I'll get to it when I get to it. It'll wait.

And that's it for now. There are plenty of other shows I've only watched one episode of but most of them I can't even recall enough about to say why I stopped. This probably isn't going to make much of a feature after all.

Just the one episode, in fact. How appropriate. You'd think I'd planned it that way...

When I Live My Dream

Actually, the 1960s pretty much was an MMO...

Okay, this is getting a little recursive, but SynCaine linked something Loque Nohak said in a comment on Tobold's blog the other day that got me thinking.

The relevant part is "coming from WoW it seems I’ve been playing a videogame for small children". It tied in with a conversation I had with a friend recently about the movie version of "We've Got To Talk About Kevin". My friend had been to see it and didn't rate it all that highly. I was saying that I'd heard good things about it, but I wasn't really interested in going to see it because I feel like I'm about done with being "challenged" by entertainment.

Bring it on, bad guy!

From my early teens right through to my early forties I probably wouldn't have said that, or felt it. I'd have been much more likely to search out amusements that stretched me at least a little, that made me think, even shook me up some. Even if I hadn't wanted the experience I'd at least have felt it would be good for me.

I didn't really notice when I stopped feeling that way. Maybe it happened when I started playing Everquest . Maybe it was already happening and that's why I connected so strongly with MMOs when I found them. Either way, I think it must have happened around about the same time, a dozen or so years ago.

I bet it's not that deep

In many ways playing MMOs is an unchallenging activity. It mostly involves you sitting in a chair and pressing some buttons. You do have to be literate; MMOs use an enormous amount of text. But playing MMOs is certainly something a fairly young child can do. If MMOs had been around when I was a child, though, I'm not at all sure I would have been interested.

I was a happy child, by and large. Much of my childhood consisted of roaming around the countryside, alone or with my cousin, often with a gang of kids. We were always exploring. We found small caves and ruined buildings, waded across rivers to islands, spent countless hours in the woods, climbing trees and building dens. We hunted (for animals to catch alive and bring home and try to keep as pets). We had fights and played games and made friends and enemies.

Middle Earth - about a mile from my house

I grew up not very far from the parts of England Tolkien had in mind when he thought up the Shire and my favorite parts of most MMOs are the little starting towns and villages and the countryside around them. Those places tend to look a lot like where I grew up and my characters' lives in MMOs sometimes do seem remarkably similar to my life as a child.

So, calling an MMO "a videogame for small children" doesn't seem like that much of a criticism to me. As I get older I find that I appreciate more and more those things that bring back to me what life was like when I was very young. I've been an adult a long time and it's not really all that when you get down to it, is it? On balance I reckon I could have done with being a child for longer. MMOs help with that.