1966 Was All That...

 Bonus Post!

I started out yesterday intending to do no more than mention Star Trek in the introduction. You've seen how that went.

What I was going to do was riff on a post at Troy Press which lists all the other shows that premiered on the three big US networks in the same year as Star Trek. Here's the full rundown to save you clicking through, although I'm sure Troy Press would appreciate the page views.

ABC Stage 67

Family Affair

Felony Squad

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.

The Green Hornet

Hawk

The Hero

Hey, Landlord

The Iron Horse

It’s About Time

The Jean Arthur Show

Jericho

Love on a Rooftop

The Man Who Never Was

The Milton Berle Show

Mission: Impossible

The Monkees

The Monroes

Occasional Wife

Pistols ‘n’ Petticoats

The Pruitts of Southampton

The Rat Patrol

The Road West

The Roger Miller Show

The Rounders

Run, Buddy, Run

Shane

Star Trek

T.H.E. Cat

The Tammy Grimes Show

Tarzan

That Girl

The Time Tunnel

It's a very impressive list. It gives a good impression of how rich a feast network television was back then. It's also interesting to see to what degree Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Comic Books were already making their mark in the mainstream. I'm increasingly coming to believe that the whole "the mainstream doesn't get Sci-Fi and Fantasy" argument that I've heard trotted out ad nauseam in one form or another all my life is mostly wishful thinking from people who like to feel special.

I don't recognize all of the thirty-three shows listed below (I recognize fourteen of them, as it happens.) so without cross-checking I can't be sure the ones I don't know about weren't also SFF/Comic Book shows. Even assuming none of them were, it still leaves four certainties: The Green Hornet, Star Trek, Tarzan and The Time Tunnel plus a couple that run so close to the line, I originally put them in the first group - The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. and Mission Impossible. [Edit: Also, as I was checking on something that will become apparent later in the post, I discovered "It's About Time" from the list above is a hide-in-plain-sight title for a show about time travel. Two time travel shows launched on network TV in the same year! And yet the mainstream isn't interested in Sci-Fi...)

Of the shows I recognize, I have watched exactly half:

• The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. 
• Mission: Impossible
• The Monkees  
• Star Trek
• Tarzan  
• That Girl  
• The Time Tunnel

Here's what I remember about them:

The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. - The sister show to The Man From U.N.C.L.E. which was one of my favorite shows growing up, alongside my absolute favorite, The Champions. I used to get the Man From U.N.C.L.E annual every year for as long as they lasted. I still have them. If I think hard, I can see some of the covers and even a few of the panels from the comic strips inside. 

I watched every episode of the Man From U.N.C.L.E. that I could get to but I barely remember the Girl...  I do remember I liked it but I think it was either on at some awkward time or more likely it was an unreliable fixture in the schedule. 

In those days, you could never trust a show to be on when you thought it was going to be. We complain now about streaming services arbitrarily cancelling shows but in the good old days of broadcast television, shows would often just stop mid-season for no reason at all. Sometimes they'd start up again in a different time slot or on a different channel, sometimes they'd vanish for good. Often they were shown out of order or with episodes missing. It's no wonder my memories of most of these shows are fractured.

Here's what Gemini says in answer to the question "When was The Girl From U.N.C.L.E shown on TV in the uk?" 

UK Broadcast Details

Pilot Episode: The pilot episode, "The Moonglow Affair," was broadcast earlier on April 28, 1966.

Series Premiere: The first regular episode, "The Dog-Gone Affair," aired on October 27, 1966.

Scheduling: Episodes were often shown out of sequence by the BBC, and not every episode from the single season was broadcast.

I rest my case.

Mission: Impossible - I didn't see a lot of these but I liked it well enough when I did manage to catch one. Everyone knew the intro with the famous theme tune and the set-up with the ominous voice-over and the self-immolating cassette tape. "Your mission, should you choose to accept it...". People used to say that before asking you to wash the dishes or mow the lawn...

I'm not sure I ever felt the storylines lived up to the drama of that intro. I'm not even clear whether I watched the original or the 1980s remake.

I've never seen any of the movies.

The Monkees - Oh, boy! I loved The Monkees. It was part of the big Saturday evening line-up that was a ritual for most households in the UK while I was growing up and it was one of the best bits. I used to look forward to the time when it came on every week. Actually, given I would have been only eight or nine, it's just as well it was on at 6.15pm. 

I never missed it if I could help it. I liked Peter Tork the best. He was the goofiest. Davy Jones, I found annoying even as a child. Mike Nesmith I liked but he seemed like the quiet, sensible one so he kind of faded into the background sometimes. Mickey Dolenz was the funniest. 

The storylines were chaotic and anarchic, ideal for a kid of my age. There was a lot of slapstick and too many songs although even then I liked some of them. Who couldn't? 

I went on to re-watch the show in the 80s and 90s, when it kept coming round and round and it got better and better with age. By the time punk came along in 1976, my punky pals and I were very keen to make sure everyone knew just how much better we thought the Monkees were than the Beatles. And so much more punky, too. I'd still rather listen to the Monkees than the Beatles even now. It's a shame the two groups never made a movie together...

Star Trek: Done that one!

 

Tarzan -  One of those shows I watched quite a lot without ever really liking it. If I was going to watch something set in a jungle, I'd far rather have watched Daktari, which I loved. Still, Tarzan is always watchable. I bet it looked better in color though.

Hmm... That got me wondering when Daktari started. I just checked and it first aired on CBS in... 1966. So that list up there isn't as exhaustive as I thought it was. Let me just check the link on Troy Press's post...

FFS! Okay, I take full responsibility for not checking my (Troy's) sources. The link goes to Wikipedia's page on "1966 American television series debuts" and there are sixty-two shows listed, not counting animation. If you add those in, it comes to eighty-nine. 

Most of the shows that Troy Press left out are sports, music or game shows, so it looks like the list is supposed to be dramatic but two of the missing shows are Batman and Dark Shadows! What the hell? And why not Daktari? Or Blue Light, for that matter?

Let me just portmanteau those in right now...

Blue Light I never heard of until now so we can leave that one out. Dark Shadows I became aware of in the eighties through the comic-books but I didn't see an episode until the twenty-teens. It was... disappointing. Very slow. I might try it again some day. You really can't judge any TV series from a single episode, especially at the start of the run.

Batman -  Here's one that, as they say, needs no introduction. Adam West, Burt Ward, a gallery of guests stars from today and yesteryear. Eartha Kitt as Catwoman. Julie Newmar as Batgirl. Cesar Romero as the Joker. Frank Gorshin as the Riddler. Burgess Meredith as the Penguin... Didn't have to look any of those up. And that theme tune! [Edit - see Pallais' comment and my reply below for corrections and excuses!]

As you might imagine, as an eight year-old comics fan and specifically a DC comics fan at that, I was all over this, inasmuch as I got all the Annuals for Christmas and watched it whenever I could but it's hard to check when it was originally shown in the UK because it was picked up by ITV, which had a bizarre regional structure in those days. I know I watched it with my grandparents, who as Quakers had very definite views on what was acceptable viewing. Batman was very much okay with the Lord, apparently. My grandfather found it highly amusing, anyway. I don't think my grandmother had a clue what was going on but nobody was swearing so it got a pass from her.

Most of my memories of the show, which I remember a lot better than most of the entries in this post, probably come from the 1990s, when it was shown again on Channel 4. I certainly recall watching most of the run in color and we didn't have a color television at home in the sixties or most of the seventies.

Daktari - I have fairly clear memories of watching Daktari, too, and those definitely come from when it was first shown on BBC from 1966 onwards. It had a prime slot, after the evening news on Mondays on BBC1 and it was appointment TV for me and my grandparents (We all lived in the same house - I wasn't just always round there, visiting.)

I often talk here about how much of a comics fan I was as a child but another of my big interests was natural history. I was particularly interested in zoos and vets and collector-adventurers, all of which were big in the media of the sixties and especially the seventies. 

I read all the Gerald Durrel books, all the James Herriots and several by the much less well-known (Over here, at least.) Daniel Mannix. Even now I can remember how Mannix had a pet fruit bat that clung around his neck under his sweater and how he had a tame cheetah that behaved like a dog. I really, really wanted a big cat as a pet but I would have liked a leopard. You can't really make a pet out of a leopard, Bringing Up Baby notwithstanding, but cheetahs are very much more dog-like than any other cat and they can be trained in much the same way. Of course, you need several square miles of land to keep them in...

Daktari was a kind of comedy-adventure show with animals as the stars. My favorite, inevitably, was Clarence, the Cross-Eyed Lion although the undoubted star of the show was Judy the Chimpanzee. I have never liked monkeys or apes, though, so Judy's supposed charms were largely lost on me. 

I've never re-watched Daktari but I can't help thinking it might be... problematic in the 21st Century. I was eight, though, and it was the sixties. I'll take a pass.

That Girl - This is the outlier in the set. I had never even heard of That Girl until a few years ago. Not only did I not watch it in the '60s, I don't recall it even being in the schedule. 

And do you know what? I just asked Gemini again and it told me

"There is no official or documented record of the 1960s American sitcom That Girl, starring Marlo Thomas, ever having a mainstream network broadcast or a verified premiere date on television in the United Kingdom during its original run or subsequent decades"

Wow! Just... I mean... wow...

How is that even possible? It's widely recognized now as an iconic sitcom, historically significant in the development of the form, a huge influence on the creation of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (Which we did get...). How the hell has it never been on network TV in the UK?

In fact, I believe it was when I was reading a book about the importance to the medium of the Mary Tyler Moore Show that I first came across That Girl, which I then found out was on one of the streaming services I had access to. Netflix, I think. 

I watched a lot of episodes. I started at the beginning and I think I got about two-thirds of the way through Season 3 before I drifted away. It was getting a little samey by then. (I have to confess the same happened when I tried to work my way through the entire run of the Mary Tyler Moore Show on DVD.) 

If you don't overdo it, though, That Girl is a really excellent sitcom. Marlo Thomas is just sublime and the supporting cast are all very strong, albeit in that intensely irritating fashion so prevalent in '60s sitcoms. Her boyfriend, especially, needs a good talking-to. With a lump hammer.

The Time Tunnel - Another of my absolute childhood favorites. I remember this being on in the early evening and me being glued to it every week. I can remember the intro very clearly but what actually happened in any of the episodes I have not the slightest clue. I imagine they went back in time and got into trouble then fixed some problem and came home. I bet they almost never went into the future. Time travel in those days always went backwards, not forwards, with the notable exception of Dr. Who.

I remember thinking that Quantum Leap in the '80s was pretty much a remake of the Time Tunnel, except I don't remember the two leads in the Time Tunnel being lost in time. I think they went out and came back each week, which was why you saw them walking into what looked like the label on a Black Sabbath album every time. 

I just checked this and it's mostly wrong, which is why you should always fact-check your memories. I leave the preceding paragraphs in as a warning.

It turns out they were lost in time. The project was going to be canned for running spectacularly over-budget so the two guys volunteered to demonstrate it to prove they had a working prototype, even though it hadn't been fully tested. And it did work... only just one-way. They went out into in time and couldn't get back. None of that did I remember but it's all on Wikipedia.

And there we are. A completely pointless post but a lot of fun to write, as was the Star Trek one. I might do more like this. Consider yourself warned. 

Hard Copy

Given that I've been doing almost nothing else for the last few days, I guess it's time I posted something about the new toy I've cryptically and irritatingly referred to a couple of times in recent posts. I really wanted to get a bit further in my experiments before committing to print but it's either this or some more speculation about Stars Reach and I'm pretty sure no-one wants that.

So, first up, just what is this new toy? Didn't I say it had something to do with AI? Not that again! I thought we'd all agreed it wasn't fun any more and not to bang on about it.

Ah, yes, but that was when the LLMs and their pals had mostly gotten their act together. They'd stopped behaving like surreal toddlers or like science fiction pets who could almost talk but not quite. They'd nearly reached the competent-but-boring stage and the novelty had worn off, yet they still hadn't ascended to genuine reliability. 

Instead, they'd managed to plateau into being not much fun any more but also not quite reliable enough to be genuinely useful, while at the same time achieving a level of cultural ubiquity that made them obnoxious. It was probably time to leave them to cook a little longer in the hope they'd eventually either start working properly or go away, neither of which seemed all that likely to happen any time soon.

So that's what I did, mostly. I stopped playing around with the newer versions of the AIs I already knew about and didn't bother looking for any new ones. I kept a vague eye on developments via the Theoretically Media YouTube channel but that was about all. 

My thoughts moved on to other things, one of which was a project I've been fiddling about with for years, something much more old-school than all this new-fangled artificial intelligence nonsense. 

For around a decade, from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, I was somewhat actively involved in making music. I played guitar and sang in various bands - or would-be bands, not al of which ever left the rehearsal rooms. 

It wasn't much of a musical career. There was a lot more practicing than performing and much of the time the songs I was singing were written by other band-members, not by me. God knows why they thought I'd do a better job of it it than they could but that's how it was.

Even though I didn't get many of them onto the set-lists, I did still write quite a few songs of my own and I occasionally used to record myself singing them. I didn't have anything even as sophisticated as those old four-track Tascam machines everyone had back then, although I thought often enough about buying one. I never did, though, so I just recorded myself through the inbuilt mic of my cheap boombox or ghetto blaster or whatever we called those things before it wasn't cool to call them that any more.

You can imagine what the sound quality was like. Also I mostly got the urge to do it when I came home after a night out, so some of the results weren't even listenable the next day, let alone forty years later. I also liked to buy those big packs of very cheap blank tapes, the ones that stretch and break. It's not hard to guess how any that survive are likely to sound after four and a half decades.

There were other recordings, too. One band I was in got as far as making a demo in a professional studio and I have a copy of that. There are live tapes of at least two gigs, different bands, one recorded through the mixing desk so at least at the time, it sounded pretty good. There are quite a few rehearsals, one of which goes all the way back to the first band I was in, before we ever played a gig. I think I would have been about eighteen.

Because I'm a pack-rat and I never throw anything away, I still have almost every tape I made. Almost. One or two seem to have gone missing and of course one of those I remember being of particular interest. I persuaded my ex to sing a couple of songs on it. I always imagined most of my songs to be sung with a female voice but none of the bands I ever played in had girl singers. Probably just as well or I would have been out.

That one seems to have vanished. It's hardly surprising. They have not been carefully archived, just dumped into boxes and shoved under the bed. Some have lost their cases. It's a wonder there's as many left as there are. I also have nearly all the lyrics, handwritten originals, in a battered, yellow binder. 

At various times over the last fifteen years or so I've made half-hearted attempts to "do something" with them. I once got so far as to listen to the whole lot and scribble the odd note about what was on them but I only ever listened to the minimum necessary to add labels like "1970s" or "horrible". Nothing useful like a track list.

I would quite like to know what's on them before it's too late. I'm aware how fragile and ephemeral magnetic tape, especially the cheap stuff used in 1970s and '80s compact cassettes, can be, which is why I've had the idea of digitizing my "archive" just about since I learned it was possible. I've actually tried to do it a few times but never with much success.

For a long time there were always tape players of different sizes and qualities lying about the house. I've connected most of them up to different computers over the years but largely failed to get anything that seemed worth the considerable effort it took to get them to talk to each other. I've bought devices, cables and contraptions that were supposed to make transferring recordings from tape to digital files easy but none of them did a very good job and all of them were more trouble than it felt the output was worth.

Last year, I tried once again, only to find that none of the old tape players I had worked any more and the various devices I'd bought were no longer compatible with modern operating systems. I had several very frustrating sessions, trying to get anything to speak to anything else, entirely without success.

And then, when I was looking at something else, I just happened to come across an updated version of one of the Walkman-like devices I already owned. Even when it used to work, which it doesn't any more, my one needed to be connected to a computer to function but the new version doesn't. You stick a USB drive into it and it digitizes the tape as it plays, simple as that.

Allegedly. Sounded too good to be true. I was highly suspicious. But there were lots of reviews praising it and some of them might not even have been by bots. Plus it was only about £25. Seemed worth a try.

It was. It works. Exactly as described. 

It's not perfect. The controls are a bit fiddly, just as several people complained in the reviews. Sometimes you have to press the buttons a few times to get them to respond. The build is cheap and the sound quality, were you to want to listen to the tape through the speaker or headphones, is poor. But it works.

Play a tape, press record and a digital file is created on the USB drive supplied. Or any USB drive. Take the USB out and plug it into a PC and presto! There's the contents of the tape, all dressed up as an MP3. Granted, sometimes it's an MP3 that Audacity doesn't recognize but a quick pass through VLC's converter and it's all good.

Ah, yes. Audacity. I've installed a copy on every PC I've used for as long as I can remember but I've rarely found much use for it until now, when I'm starting to discover just how versatile and useful it is. As you might expect, some of these tapes are not in the greatest of shape after nearly half a century. They vary from tinny but clear to something that sounds like faint whisperings from a far-off star.

Audacity can fix all of that. At least, it can fix everything well enough for the purposes I require, which are twofold:

• I want to know what's on every tape
• I want to turn anything that's worth keeping into something that's also worth listening to.

The first is easy. I just have to be able to listen to them without having to actually listen to them. No-one wants to hear a drunken twenty-something caterwauling over the tuneless strumming of an out-of-tune guitar. That it's my caterwauling and strumming makes it no more appealing.

Having the files in digital form means I can skip through the running order in a few seconds instead of having to wait for the excruciatingly slow transport of a cheap cassette deck to trundle the tape back wards or forwards, while I constantly stop and start the machine to see if there's anything worth hearing. I also only have to listen to a few seconds to know if it's worth carrying on.

Once I find a take of a song I think might be worthy of further attention, I can excise it, name it and store it separately. There is a function on the device itself that supposedly separates the individual songs on the tape into discrete MP3s as it goes but, while I imagine that works perfectly well for pre-recorded tapes with definite gaps between tracks, it doesn't do much for the kind of stop-start home recordings I'm dealing with. I tried it but it turned out to be easier to just scan through the digital file visually and identify the breaks that way.

So much for finding the songs that have potential. That's the easy part. The hard part is turning them into something anyone would want to hear. 

I'll be honest. Even with the full force of nostalgia in play and even given these are my songs and it's me singing them, there's precious little I'd want to hear twice and hardly anything I'd be willing to play to anyone else. I was never a very good singer or a very good guitar player and these primitive recordings, many made when I was under the influence of something or other, do not make me sound any better than I was. 

For that, I always needed the help of others, preferably people who knew how to play. In my mid-sixties and with forty years between now and the last time I knew anyone who fancied pretending to be in a band, where am I going to find help like that?

And that, as I'm sure you've guessed, is where AI enters the story. But that's a story that will only be told when I'm good and ready. It shouldn't be too long, not with all the time I'm spending on it. 

When it comes, there will be examples.

Consider yourself warned.

There Is No Mystery Left: EverQuest

Pete from Dragonchasers posted yesterday about his preferences when playing various kinds of video games on console or PCs. Among the differences he mentioned that shiboleth of gaming, immersion:

"I find that playing on console ... There are fewer distractions and I tend to play for longer sessions which also helps with immersion...

On the PC I’m constantly distracting myself with FOMO around Twitter or Discord. I run with 2 monitors and always have social media up on monitor two and constantly scan it. Because of this I just don’t “sink in” to a game quite as much; my attention is always divided."

This triggered me. I got a flash memory of playing EverQuest in the distant past. Shivers.

For many, EQ was the very definition of "immersion", a true virtual world, where people set up home, lived their lives. That scared people.

These days we hear very little about the supposed addictive nature of the hobby but back then MMORPGs were frequently cited as potential mental health nightmares. In the early 2000s, one of EverQuest's most widely-used nicknames was EverCrack, a reference to the infamously addictive and soul-destroying cocaine variant that was by far the most demonized drug of its day.

I have no extant screenshots of EQ before about 2004. This looks likes a very early version of the moveable, windowed UI.

The mere fact that I felt I might need to gloss "crack" when mentioning it 2019 is an indication how quickly these things change. I listened to a very interesting item on BBC Radio Four last week that asked the question "why is crack cocaine rarely mentioned in the news these days?" to which the answer appeared to be "because the crack epidemic went away".

And why did the drug that the media spent so much time and energy warning us about not turn out to be the apocalyptic scourge they predicted? Luckily the program had an answer: apparently all that endless, hyperbolic publicity gave the drug such a bad name it actually did terrify people to the point that the curious wouldn't touch it, demand dropped, tastes moved on (or back, in many cases, to regular cocaine). The juicy crack stories dried up and, by and large, everyone forgot about it.

For a while. As anyone who's been around for longer than a couple of decades soon begins to realize, these things are cyclical. If you google "trends in crack cocaine news stories" you'll find that, as reported, ironically by the BBC, crack is back.

As in drugs, so in music, movies and gaming. What was old is new again. What goes around comes around and like that.

Fortnite, of course, is the new EverCrack. Or it was last year. Are people still worried about Fortnite or are we on to some new demon already? The roundabout keeps spinning faster and faster. It's hard to keep up.

And this appears to be a slightly later, cleaner version. Actually, this is better than the UI I use now...

Getting back to EverQuest, what Pete's comments made me think of wasn't so much the addictive rush of early EQ as its sheer purity. He's absolutely right about the modern approach to MMORPG gaming on PC. Compared to the original experience, what we enjoy today is adulterated, fractured, incomplete.

One of the reasons frequently cited for the decline of the genre is the contemperaneous rise of social media. It's become a truism to assert that turn-of-the-century MMORPGs were the social media of their day. For many hundreds of thousands - millions - of people, playing an online game provided their first and for a while their only experience of talking in real time to friends and strangers around the world.

This is entirely true. What's less well-reported, I think, is the focus the primitive technology of the late 20th and very early 21st centuries brought to the mix. In those increasingly difficult to remember days we tended to do one thing at a time. Well, perhaps not one. Fewer, though. Certainly fewer.

If you played EverQuest you had to concentrate on that. There were consequences if you let your attention slide. Corpse runs. Experience loss. Misery and despair.

More than that, the game itself resisted distraction. You could not tab out to look something up on Allakhazam let alone check your email. EverQuest could not be windowed. It used all your screen space and all your processing power. You played it until you'd had enough then you closed the program and did something else.

There are surprisingly few images of the original UI online and I strongly suspect that those there are come from P1999.

Unless you were bad. If you were, you might download a piece of third party software called Win-EQ which, among other things, allowed you to play EverQuest in a window. Illegally. Against the terms of the EULA. Risking a ban should you be caught.

I'd been playing EQ for several years before I even heard of Win-EQ. When I found out what it was I wanted nothing to do with it. It was cheating. No-one I knew (and at that time I knew scores of people in game) admitted to using it. It was for bad people.

We goodies sat and medded with our spellbooks open, filling the entire screen. I played for years with no distractions or media other than the official EverQuest display, a nine-inch square inside a UI that filled the rest of my 14" CRT monitor, my only contact with the outside world the chat box at the bottom center of the screen. That was immersion for you.

I did sometimes hear of people who had two PCs running at once. I occasionally grouped with someone who had Netscape upon on a second monitor so they could check things on Caster's Realm or EQ Atlas. We did in fact have two PCs in our house from early 2000, with Mrs Bhagpuss playing EverQuest in one room and me playing EverQuest in another. I don't think it ever occured to either of us that you could have two in the same place...

As for internet access via a handheld device, well that was the stuff of science fiction. Imagine it - something the size of a paperbook book or even a pack of cigarettes that you could tap with your fingertips to look up what spells a Level 27 Druid got or where to go for the Level 24 Mage pet. Fantasy!

I envy even this level of simplicity. Although why I have Group and Target on the right I cannot imagine...

What I had, in point of fact, were three ring-binders with sheafs of paper printed out from the various essential online resources. And a book to read during long med breaks. After a couple of years I also started to listen to the radio while I played, if I was soloing. An actual radio, in the room with me, not some online app.

Perhaps, looking back, the experience wasn't entirely pristine but it was undeniably less diluted by distractions and diversions than it has been these last dozen years. I never tabbed out at a loading screen and found myself twenty minutes later, watching Rilo Kiley on YouTube with no memory of how I got there.

As Pete says, consoles don't generally dicker with such dilletantism but they can't stop you from having your laptop open beside you on the couch, your phone on the armrest, your tablet on the side-table. Nothing any games designer can do can prevent you from spoiling every surprise or taking a wrecking ball to your sense of immersion if that's what you want, or if that's what you can't help yourself from doing.

Genies can't be put back in bottles even though that's a quest we've most likely all done, successfully, many times. The wave of faux-retro MMORPGs still in development hell - Pantheon, Lucimia, Camelot Unchained et al - all rely to some extent on reviving and recreating that sense of immersion and community. Holly Longdale, in the numerous interviews she's given for EQ's 20th, has been hammering home the rediscovered belief at Daybreak Games that "social dependency is who we are".

It may be who they are. But is it who we are, any more?

It'll Be Like Before You Were Gone

On Friday, ArenaNet announced a "Welcome Back" month for Guild Wars 2. More than a month, in fact; five weeks, starting Monday March 25.

It was a very low-key announcement, nothing more than a forum post. Surprise was expressed. Shouldn't there be some kind of awareness campaign? Rubi Bayer, who appears to have drawn the short straw after Gail Gray's unceremonious dumping, clarified:

"There will be livestreams, guides, and some more surprises that I won't spoil now, but there will be a full outline and schedule on our site Monday morning. Today's post is just a heads-up on various channels to get the word out a little bit in advance, so those who are interested but don't remember their login info can work with our CS team to get that taken care of. It's so frustrating when you want to participate in something that has already started and can't remember your password, so we thought a head start for those people would be less stressful."

Does that make sense? Are people who can't remember the password for a game they no longer play likely to be on the forums in the first place? Or following Twitter or Facebook or whatever those "various channels" might be?

Maybe they sent out emails as well. I get a lot of emails from MMORPGs I haven't logged into for years, telling me about their promotions and events. Of course, since I tend to use unique adresses for registering games, adresses I never visit and don't link to my main account, I only see those offers on the very rare occasions I log back in to check something. Usually years too late.

Still, it's a well-established route for marketing departments. A back channel to the past. As Holly Windstalker Longdale openly acknowledged in that recent PC Gamer interview, for an aging MMORPG, luring former players back into the fold is a higher priority than attracting people who've never played before.

It really does make sense. After all, as a six-year old game, let alone one twice or even three times that age, you'd have to assume that just about anyone who was ever going to give you a run would have gotten around to it by now.

No need to feel blue. We're still here. Waiting.

The first few years post-launch offer a handful of well-known opportunities for new account acquisition. You can bring your game to a different platform - console conversions must be expensive to produce but they do open a door to an entirely fresh market. Less spectacular but worth a shot is a Steam launch. Steam isn't really a famous breeding ground for MMOs but it's not nothing.

If you were canny enough to start off with some kind of entry barrier, a box or digital download with an up-front fee, say, or maybe even an actual, honest-to-god subscription, always assuming that decision didn't sink your entire operation, there's a major PR opportunity available when you announce your game is going Free to Play. That's a one-time deal, though, and it can smack of desperation.

Last and very definitely not least, you can run some kind of permanent free trial, allowing the curious and uncommitted to try before they buy. That became pretty much industry standard log ago.

Whatever you do, even if you eventually try all the options, in the end you run up against the same buffer: your game is old and getting older. Potential customers have either heard of it and already rejected it or they are just now discovering it only to find out it's been running for years and everyone playing is way, way ahead.

Your elderly MMORPG already starts with the major disadvantage that, from the perspective of a new player, the graphics look sub-par. Possibly stone age. For those who can get past that, the staggering amount of legacy content, all of which comes before you even get near to the part of the game everyone else is playing, is more than enough to bring the shutters down.

Did I mention we have sitting in chairs now? Tempted?

In recent years companies have tried all kinds of bootstrapping to get new players over the hump  - super-fast leveling, instant max-level characters, flat-leveling the entire gameworld. They all come with issues of their own. You can accelerate or remove the leveling process but there's no way to instantly install all the necessary knowledge of systems and mechanics your end-game players take for granted. It's not much more fun floundering at the top than at the bottom.

That's why people who used to play but don't any more are seen as a more realistic commercial prospect. There's the currently-hot nostalgia ticket to sell them for starters. Re-working your game so it looks a lot more like the one returning players remember seems to be well worth the expense, if you get it right.

Your game probably needs to have been around for quite a while before you play that card. The current Live game needs to have diverged so far from the original conception that bitter veterans hate it and all it stands for. If you alienate them just enough you can bring them back on board as advocates when you appear to bow to their conviction that things really were better back in their day.

Rift probably failed mainly on that count. Once the new server reached the first expansion, Storm Legion, there just wasn't enough difference between Prime and Live. The game never had enough periodic content to run a true Progression server. It might have done better with a straight Classic server, maybe even one with an expiry date, which would wipe and re-start every so often, allowing transfers to Live first, of course.

Starting over clean can be a big draw. Sometimes a Fresh Start server is all that's needed to re-kindle interest. You don't even have to play the nostalgia card with a retro-revamp. A level playing field is enough. Maybe a few tweaks, perks and inducements along the way. A slight variant ruleset. Some titles. A leaderboard. The big risk there is fracking your existing playerbase into smaller shards but with luck you'll give everyone a jolt of excitement and when it all settles down you'll have a few new customers on the back of that buzz.

There's no need to worry. You won't feel silly. We all feel silly.

Brand-new servers have one immense advantage when it comes to persuading former players to return. Everyone starts in the same place. It's almost the same as a new game except for one thing: when confused and lost players plaintively ask questions in general chat, instead of crickets chirping or, worse, sarcastic trolls suggesting a swift return to WoW, they'll get help and even encouragement.

I'm seeing this every day on EverQuest II's Kaladim server. The population is a good mix of current, active players on vacation from Live, lapsed members of the flock re-discovering their religion and a sprinkling of    "I wish I''d tried this game years ago". Questions don't just get answered, they spark amiable discussions and often lead to reminiscence and general bonhomie.

It's a well-trodden path by now. Any marketing department worth its red suspenders should be able to slot in several pre-fabricated options, tested and found successful in other games. At worst it's a burst of publicity for cheap. At best it's a shot in the arm for sales and retention.

For a few MMORPGs, though, there's a roadblock standing in the way of those easy wins. Classic, Progression, New Start: all those options come with a suffix. Server. What if your game evolved to the new normal of a few years back and did away with the entire concept of separate shards?

When you threw that bathwater out the possibility of farming the nostalgia market went down the drain with it. So did any chance of starting over on a clean page. You put all your eggs in one megabasket and your chickens hatched and came home to roost.

There are things you can get on top of that you never got on top of before. This isn't one of them but trust me.

All MMORPG hobbyists know what a hurdle re-starting on a Live server presents. All the new systems you don't understand. All your old assumptions that don't follow any more. The drops and rewards that mean nothing to you. The jargon in chat you can't unpick. All that stuff in your bags and banks you don't know whether to destroy or broker or sell or salvage. The understanding that you know less than everyone around you and they probably don't care, just that you stay out of their way.

If you run a campaign to get former players to log in again but all you can offer them when they do is a world that looks familiar but feels alien, what are the chances they'll hang around long enough to acclimatize?

The good news from ANet's perspective is that GW2 hasn't really changed all that much. You can still fight centaurs and Sons of Svanir until the dolyaks come home. You can do the same events on the same maps that you did in 2012. You can join the World Boss train and knock over a giant loot pinata every fifteen minutes with thirty new best friends you'll never have to talk to.

The races haven't changed, the Personal Story is the same and if you haven't bought either of the expansions there aren't even any new classes and hardly any new maps. Other than a bunch of giant gerbils and lizards running everywhere with player characters clinging to their backs it all looks - and plays - pretty much the same.

If you like it enough to pay some money and buy the expansions or the Living Story packs, well you'll be on exactly the same terms as the rest of us were two or three or four years ago. All the maps are still active for the group stuff  when you need it, although most of it was single-player content anyway and, while Anet's claim that they have the best community in MMOs may be somewhat overblown, by and large it is pretty welcoming. If you have questions you'll get answers, provided you ask nicely.

When you get right down to it, though, nothing much has changed.

So what's the point of this five week long "Welcome Back" event? Better than not having one, I suppose. And it co-incides with the annual rerun of the ever-popular Super Adventure Box, something I'm sure is no co-incidence. There will be plenty of drop-ins for that so why not see if some of them can be persuaded to hang around?

I'd be very surprised to see this result in any significant, lasting uptick in activity, all the same. GW2 has just about the lowest barrier to re-entry of any MMORPG I've ever played. People drop in and out literally all the time. I see names every day that I haven't seen for years. My friends list flickers and sparkles like witchfire and always has.

I wonder how many how many genuine ex-GW2 players there can be, anyway? People who really did stop playing a long time ago and never came back. And of that demographic, how many ever would? It can't be that they wanted to but it was too expensive or too awkward, surely? It's free and simple and always has been. It's the Hotel California of MMOs.

If anyone did leave for good, most likely it was because they never enjoyed the game much anyway or didn't like what it turned into once the short trip to the cap was done. Has any of that changed? Not really. Endless fractals. Dead dungeons. Gutted WvW. Grind, without end, for everything, everywhere, always.

Same as it ever was.

Raiding, I guess, but if you'd left because no raids wouldn't you have come back when raids? And if you left because raids, well, we still have them. Worse luck. No, it all seems much the same to me. Except I'd take a Launch State Classic server in a heartbeat so I guess I may have been boiled in my tank.

Tomorrow we'll find out if ANet have anything more up their sleeves to entice former players to give the game another shot. There's some speculation about things like rentable gliders or mounts in Core Tyria open world to tempt returners into ponying up for the expansions but they'd still have to pay for the real thing. Maybe a sale on Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire? Or the two as a bundle?

If there's no financial or in-game incentive it's hard to see the value of a promotional push that comes down to just some streamers saying how much fun the old game can be. You probably know that if you ever played. Or you disagree, in which case I don't see much to convince you otherwise.

And even if a promotion succeeds in getting players invested it's hard to keep them feeling the love. The huge boost in numbers World vs World saw as a result of the recent, super-hyped introduction of the Warclaw mount (plus a double WvW XP week) has already dissipated, leaving nothing more behind than bad feeling and disgruntlement to show it ever happened.

Still, better to try than not try, I guess. We'll find out tomorrow if there's anything to get excited about. I'm not holding my breath.

Easy Pieces

On Sunday I researched and wrote a massive post on Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and his recent investment in Daybreak Games. It took me several hours and naturally only one person commented (thanks, Mailvaltar!).

I knew that would happen. It's one of the unwritten rules of blogging: the more time and effort you put into a post, the less attention it will receive. If you want feedback, post a single paragraph, preferably one that makes some kind of off-the-cuff, smart alec point that popped into your head thirty seconds before you sat down at the keyboard. Even better if it doesn't take much longer than that to type it up.

Lenny Bruce had a routine based on the Lone Ranger. For anyone not old enough to remember either of them (actually, I don't, since they both reached the peak of their fame in the 1950s), Lenny Bruce was a vitriolic and highly controversial stand-up comedian. The Lone Ranger was a television series about a masked cowboy, famous for righting wrongs then riding into the sunset before anyone had time to thank him.

I first heard the routine on a vinyl double-album I had when I was a teenager. Those of us growing up in what Lana del Rey perceptively and evocatively called "the freedom land of the 70s" often felt surprisingly less free than we imagined teenagers of the 1960s or even the fifties must have been.

We also felt we'd been short-changed by the culture. The 1950s had the beat poets, Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs. The sixties had... well, the 60s had everything. We had Marc Bolan and The Bay City Rollers. It didn't seem quite fair.

So, I spent a good deal of time burrowing about in what then seemed to me like the deep past - ten or even twenty years before. Much the way adolescents right now are mining the nineties and beyond for what seem to them to be lost, forgotten gems.

The near past was an inexhaustible treasure-house and in those days it had the added frisson of being barely accessible, too. With no worldwide web and everything analogue you took what you could find in the bargain bins and junk stores and counted yourself lucky if you found anything at all.

I have Woolworth's tenpenny bins to thank for my cut-out copy of William Burroughs Jr's "Speed", probably the title I'd quote if asked for a book that changed my life, although it did nothing of the kind. No book ever has. It did set me up for a lifetime of vicarious self-indulgence, though, for which I'm grateful.

As the sixties' dream died, a few astute businessmen must have noticed the interest youth was showing in age. There were some re-issues. Lenny Bruce's notorious autobiography, "How to talk Dirty and Influence People" was one. The first two Velvet Underground albums were another. I bought those.

There seemed to be a trend towards repackaging once-dangerous material to make it look and feel as innocuous as possible. The VU double retrospective (known as the Coke Bottle album) collected the songs from the first two albums and replayed them in a different order, diluting some of the impact.

Still, that was almost archival reverence compared to what was done to Lenny on the heavily bowdlerized collection of some of his most famous routines, ironically titled "The Real Lenny Bruce", which came out on vinyl in 1975. To my memory there's not a single swear-word on it, which is a bit like producing postcards of the Mona Lisa with the smile tippexed out. I bought it anyway.

Getting back to the point, assuming I ever had one, the message the adolescent me took from Bruce's Lone Ranger bit was that there's no point doing anything in the hope you'll get thanked for doing it. Or appreciated. Or even noticed. You should do it for your own satisfaction or not at all.

It's an understanding that's served me very well for almost half a century, which makes it deliciously ironic to find out, as I just did when I listened to the unexpurgated routine for the first time (not having heard any version in over thirty years), that I may have misunderstood the entire thing. Hearing it now I'm not entirely sure I know what Lenny thought he was going on about. Maybe he wasn't, either.

Nevertheless, the life lesson he taught me, intentionally or otherwise, stands. It really is a very bad idea to do something in the anticipation of getting a particular and specific reaction. People are people and people aren't you. They'll take from what you say just exactly what they want to, which most likely will be nothing at all.

Blaugust is long over so I don't know why I'm here giving blogging tips, if that's even what I'm doing. I meant to post a short response to Syp's post on Feature Bloat. That didn't happen, obviously...

I particularly didn't want to write another long post that required research because not only did I do that on Sunday but this morning I spent three hours writing two thousand words and recording myself talking about one of my old characters for an academic project. That will make a post in itself one day, when the project completes, or I hope it will.

No, I just wanted to sit down and bash something out, but this is what happens when I freestyle. The result is a little like what I imagine noodling must feel like, if you can actually play a musical instrument.

If anyone thought this was going anywhere, it's not. It came, it was here and now it's gone. And so am I. Toodle-pip!

Ring Out The Old, Ring In... On Second Thoughts, Don't Bother!

Something changed this year. Okay, outside our firmly barred and bolted thick oak fantasy doors, a lot of things changed but the less said about most of that the better.

No, I'm referring to my own decreasing interest and desire for novelty in gaming. While various wise and respected commentators stroke their beards over the paucity of new MMORPGs in production and the supposed moribundity of the genre, I find myself surprisingly sanguine over the admittedly thin, not to say threadbare, coat the New Year's wearing.

In the last few months I have spent almost all of my leisure time playing just two MMORPGs: Guild Wars 2 and EverQuest 2. Not only are those games five and thirteen years old respectively but they are each sequels to older games- games that are both still up and running.

Guild Wars may be in mothball mode but it's still there and people still play it. I played it in preparation for Path of Flames and I ran into a few others while I was there. I even saw tickers scrolling across the screen announcing the results of PvP matches so I guess someone still cares.

EverQuest, a good few years GW's senior, is far from entering maintenance mode. As Wilhelm observed with satisfaction, the old game got yet another expansion this year. Moreover, as he says, "Somebody must be buying the $140 versions of those expansions if they keep offering them."

But then, "maintenance mode" is itself becoming both a viable business model and playstyle. Someone recently wondered whether Funcom has any MMOs that aren't in maintenance mode. It does seem the company fortunes have improved since they stopped even pretending to produce new content and began concentrating on simply polishing up and repackaging the old.

Case in  point. I'm pretty sure I was meant to know who he was. Maybe if I'd raided in the first PoP...

Square Enix restarted FFXIV after it failed and that seems to have worked well for them. But then, as a company, they seem to have only the vaguest understanding of the concept of "stopping": FFXIV's predecessor, FFXI, is famously more active in supposed maintenance than many triple-A MMOs were at the peak of their success.

It goes on. Until NCSoft discovered the mountain of money that is Mobile gaming, its biggest earner was the near-two-decade old Lineage. That corner was finally turned not by Lineage's successor, the inevitable Lineage2, itself still bringing in the dollars, but by yet another Lineage, or rather two of them - LineageM and Lineage Revolution.

If it's not sequels or revamps it's versions. Blizzard's biggest reveal of the year wasn't the next WoW expansion. It was the news that they'd thrown in the towel and started work on bringing back Vanilla. They were probably swayed not only by the continuing interest in illegal time-travel via the Emu scene but also by Jagex's joyous capering under the the money-hose that is Old School Runescape.

Two decades and counting since the beginning of the MMORPG revolution and the huge majority of all the MMORPGs ever made are still running. It's news when one closes because it's so unusual.

When Brad McQuaid, John Smedley et al cooked up EQ they were hoping it might last three years. Modern developers think bigger. And longer. GW2 was designed with a ten-year lifecycle in mind and ArenaNet have said they have no plans to make any other new games. That will change, eventually, but when it does, what do you think the new game might be called?

I have actually finished the PoP Signature questline, I just haven't had the time to post about it. It was a lot better than the Path of Fire Story, that's for sure.

Indeed, once you have a successful MMO up and running, the need to come up with new ideas becomes significantly less pressing. Production of The Elder Scrolls series has effectively gone on hiatus with the success of TESO, for example.

CCP, the one major development team that really relishes the maverick tag, marked the exception to the rule with their advertisement for people to work on "a new and highly ambitious MMO" but then they've said that before, haven't they. And did it happen? Did it heck as like!

Mostly, for developers and players alike, the launch (or Early Access or Open Beta or Give Us Some Money And We'll Describe It For You) of an MMORPG is the beginning of a brave new world of updates, expansions and occasional graphical overhauls. The ship keeps on sailing, the scenery passes by, we dock at the occasional port, the band keeps on playing and we all keep on dancing.

And I like it. It suits me. I'm happy here in the happy house.

Oh, it's partly the season, I'll admit. The season and the weather. Short days, dark nights, rain, snow, warm socks and a comfy jumper. A night in with a mug of hot something and the familiar sights and sounds of 2012  - or 2007 or 2004 even 1999 - all bigger, brighter and less trouble than I remember.

Come the spring I may be yearning again for something fresh and new. As the leaves green and the sun brightens I could be back here, pounding out a thousand words wondering where all the new worlds have gone. I'll deal with that when it happens.

For now I'm quite content. Let this year roll over into next. I'll stay where I am, which is pretty much the same place I was last year. And the year before that.

Happy New MMORPG Year and let's have another one just like it. Please and thank you.

Let's Go Round Again : EverQuest, EQ2

Stargrace's recent post on starting over in EverQuest for the umpteenth time very nearly lured me into doing the same. Just reading it sent waves of nostalgic desire rippling through the backwaters of my mind.

I haven't been keeping up with progress on Phinagel, the latest of EQ's many "progression" servers. As far as I can tell there are three currently up and running - Phinagel, Ragefire and Lockjaw. I think I have a character on Ragefire but an All Access subscription is required to play there so it's a moot point right now.

I definitely had characters on the first Progression server, which was called The Combine and launched all the way back in 2006, at least according to this thread on the forums. Apparently The Combine eventually merged with Druzzil Ro, which itself was later merged into Xegony so I guess I have a level ten on Xegony now. Go me!

The history of EQ server merges is fascinating - or it is if you lived through it. The list in this thread, itself from 2012 and now archived, so presumably already out of date, tells a story all by itself.

The first server I ever played on was Prexus, which I picked because it had a name I found easy to remember. Mrs Bhagpuss joined me there and, as far as I recall, stayed while I wandered, first trying Brell Serilis (supposedly the unofficial RP server) and Test (just prior to The Great Wipe) before settling down for a long spell on Luclin, where I still mostly play - when I play.

For the first four years EverQuest was in a state of continual and rapid growth - not just geographically, with the annual and bi-annual expansions, but in its ever-increasing population. Server capacity back then was a lot less than it would be later on and new servers seemed to open every few months.

There's little in the hobby to beat the first few days of a brand new server for sheer, often near-hysterical, excitement, so I developed the habit of making a character on every server as it arrived. I remember making characters on Tholuxe Paells, Maelin Starpyre, Morell-Thule, Stromm, Morden Rasp, The Seventh Hammer, and Lanys T'Vyl on the first day they appeared. Probably there are more that I've forgotten.

Some of those characters got played a lot, even if they never leveled very far. Morell-Thule was where I made my Iksar SK at the launch of EQ's first expansion, Ruins of Kunark. He was possibly the hardest and slowest EQ character to level I ever had, what with the Iksar XP penalty and the unforgiving Kunark starting zones. I spent more time getting lost in Cabilis than I did killing things. I still get him out and do a bit on him now and again. He's in South Ro these days, somewhere in the high teens, I think.

I made a female halfling Warrior on Tholuxe Paells specifically to play with someone whose name I've long forgotten. They promised to start over there and duo with me and I made a warrior specifically for that - then they promptly left after the first week, never to be seen again. Right after that happened I got into an argument with someone else, which I resolved by logging out and not coming back for six months. That was my Tholuxe Paells experience in a nutshell, although I went on logging  that warrior in, on and off, for years. Don't think she ever made double figures.

Lanys T'Vyl and Luclin started on the same day and I made characters on both - a Druid on Luclin and a Wizard on Lanys. Like the warrior, the wizard had the occasional run out, often on a weekend morning for some reason, for the best part of a decade, without ever really making any progress. It was the druid that stuck. She became my most played and highest level character, eventually making it to 60 when sixty was the cap.

Her career pretty much crashed and burned with the launch of the first European server, Antonius Bayle. For reasons that I no longer remember, Mrs Bhagpuss and I both began playing there, although not immediately. It was the first time we really played together, by which I mean in being in the same guild (and more importantly the same custom chat channel that operated as a supra-guild entity).

For the first time we were sharing the same friends list, rather than duoing or joining ad hoc groups together, which we'd done on and off all along and Ant Bayle became our home for what seems to me, only in retrospect like my first, real, core run through Norrath. It was there that I finally had characters at the cap for two or three expansion cycles and when I mainly played in groups, in dungeons, rather than solo, above ground. It was there that I learned to play the game and not just to live in the world.

A combination of Guild drama and the EQ2 beta eventually put paid to that run but we came back for an encore less than a year later, when EQ2 turned out to be a dud (until Scott Hartsman rode in on his
charger). We had moved our characters from Ant Bayle to Saryrn on a free transfer before we left. Why was there a free transfer? I  can't remember. Something must have merged with something or maybe it was when SOE and UbiSoft parted company. Anyway, we declined to pick them up again, choosing instead to go back to Stromm, where we'd both played at  server launch, made friends, joined guilds and had good memories.

We had another good run there, possibly two. I think we came back yet again after Vanguard. It gets very hard to reconstruct the sequence as time passes. The past fractures into a series of vignettes and incidents which, as I retell them, polish up like semi-precious stones into anecdotes, all the grit and edge smoothed down to a comfortable glow. It's also surprisingly hard to dig out simple facts like the launch dates of individual servers. Not impossible - it's all somewhere in the official patch notes, all of which are still available online. It's just more trouble than I feel like taking for a rambling, nostalgia-inspired blog post.

Going back to Stargrace, it's astonishing how powerful certain triggers remain despite the drift and shadow of the passing years. She talks about her troll shaman making her way to North Karana to take the Spires to The Nexus on Luclin (the moon, not the server) so as to bind in that advantageous location, only to be killed in one hit by a passing guard as she waited for the twenty minute teleportation cycle to turn.

That one tale combines a wealth of experiences for me. I walked a troll shaman to the gates of Qeynos to get him bound there out of range of the guards so as to have a better place to hunt than the swamps of Innothule. One of the scariest in-game things I ever did and one of the most satisfying when it turned out successfully.

I hung back out of range of the guards at the North Karana portal as an Ogre Shadowknight, praying I was far enough back to stay out of aggro range. Several of my characters made more or less dangerous journeys to The Nexus to bind in what was the premier travel hub of Norrath until the Plane of Knowledge rendered it redundant overnight.

When Stargrace goes on to talk about finding a heavy iron ulak in the Bazaar I can see the same icon in my mind's eye as if it had popped up on a vendor in front of me. She doesn't need to explain that the "PC" where everyone had been getting xp stands for "Paludal Caverns" - I can hear the screams and laughter echoing through that hideous place as though I'd spent all last night there - again!

In layers of irony spread thick and deep, I was pondering the feasibility of fitting in yet another return to Norrath, this time to one of my very favorite times and places, the Luclin Era, while working through a series of crafting quests in Butcherblock on Stormhold, the EQ2 Time Limited Expansion server. Living in the past while living in the past.

It's not as though I'd even planned to be on Stormhold. Playtime for EQ2 is limited already and there's a new expansion on the boil. I don't have time to stir the nostalgia pot and yet of course I do. I always do. Frostfell on Stormhold, how could I resist? I didn't even try. And then it was four hours later and I realized I hadn't even made a coffee and my legs were cramped and just one more quest...

So Luclin will have to wait. Probably. This time. We'll see. Never say never again and home is where if you have to go there they have to take you in and all that. And Norrath is home. All of it. Always was, always will be.

Why I'm Not Playing Pokemon Go (Like I Have To Have A Reason...)

Ravanel has a post up this morning about how much she wants to be playing Pokemon Go right now. At the end of the post she asks a couple of questions that started me thinking:

Did you grow up with Pokémon? And are you playing Pokémon Go?

Well, no I didn't. No, I'm not. Just like I'm neither interested in nor excited by news of yet another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Transformers movie, the mere invocation of the Pokemon brand presses none of my buttons. Well, none of the appropriate ones.

You might assume that was an age thing, what with the fairly imminent approach of my sixtieth birthday, and to some extent it is. I was, after all, nearing forty years old when the first Pokemon appeared in 1995. There's more to it than that, though.

Not only does the franchise form no part of my personal lexicon of childhood or adolescent experiences but I can honestly say I barely even noticed it at the time. Yet it's not as though I wasn't culturally exposed, open even, to such things as they were happening.

Not a Pokemon

During the 1990s I was living day-to-day alongside three children, who were aged somewhere between five and thirteen when the game first appeared. I knew who Mario was. I actually saw the movie at the cinema. There was a SNES in the living room. I bought and played FFVII. Still, I have no memory of anyone I knew ever playing, wanting to play or even mentioning Pokemon.

For a long time I had it filed away in the back of my mind as something associated with Tamagochis, which were a big thing in our house for a while. And Furbys. We had both of those and I played with them and understood them. Pokemon - nothing.

I would have pretty much forgotten Pokemon even existed if it hadn't been for Wilhelm. Over the last few years reading TAGN has told me more about about Pokemon than I ever imagined I'd know. In the same way that reading countless reports on Minecraft has left me feeling I must have played the game in some other life, I have a ghostly, vestigial pseudo-memory of catching brightly colored cartoon creatures and setting them against others in fights that come freighted with queasily uncomfortable socio-historic subtext.

Mulling this over it seems to me that, while age has something to do with the extent and the specifics of involvement, which cultural phenomenon gets to sink its hooks into which person depends a lot more on personal experience than the number of candles on a birthday cake. My childhood was mainly in the 1960s and my adolescence in the 1970s but for some reason, although many of the cultural shibboleths and touchstones of those decades resonate strongly still, in my late fifties the decade whose cultural artifacts affect me most sentimentally in recall is probably the 1980s, the time when I became an independent adult.

I say "probably" because these things drift. In the mid-90s, when Pokemon was new, my call-backs were all to the seventies. In that I was dead in tune with the zeitgeist. Pokemon arrived in the white-heat of Britpop, that final spin of the thirteen-year cycle, which sought to magpie the best from the '60s and '70s and mosaic something bright and new out of the scraps. Now, a couple of decades on, the '90s themselves are beginning to acquire a soft, rose-hued glow.

Looks a bit more like one but still not a Pokemon.

Perhaps the nodal point of nostalgia always trails a generation behind. Maybe it takes twenty years to acquire the distance needed for flaws to fade and warmth to grow. maybe it's not so much how old you were then as how many years have passed.

But to trigger a wave of nostalgia or even simple recognition you have to have been paying attention the first time round and Pokemon passed me by. Instead of warm fuzzies I have cool, hard intellectual curiosity. Pokemon Go does look like an enjoyable game. More importantly it appears to be developing into a fascinating and potentially influential cultural phenomena.

There's a chance it could mark a fork in the cultural road the way Twitter or Facebook did. In a year or two Augmented Reality gaming could be as much a part of everyday life as tweeting or updating your profile (two things that once again I know only from hearsay). Or it could be languishing wherever fads like Farmville go to die.

Obviously not the latter. The immense strength of the Pokemon brand will sustain when the fickle attention of the global horde moves on. Pokemon will be with us forever, like every other cultural phenomenon that passes a certain, hard to define, watershed. If the name of Pikachu (still the only Pokemon I can recall with certainty) isn't up there with Dracula and Sherlock Holmes quite yet, it  soon will be.

Okay, these could be Pokemon...

I probably would be playing Pokemon Go along with everyone else right now, just to be part of the buzz, if it wasn't for one other thing: I don't own a mobile phone. Not just not a smart one, like Wilhelm. I don't even own a dumb one.

I have a blind spot about phones. I am fully and happily digitized. I have a houseful of PCs. I have old gaming systems from the 1980s tucked away in cupboards. I have an iPod and half a dozen tablets and use several of them daily but I have never owned a phone. I've never even had a landline in my own name.

And even if I did have a smartphone - and sooner or later I will almost certainly have to get one  because in five or ten years it's going to be next to impossible to function as an adult without one - I would not allow it to track my whereabouts, which as far as I can tell would pretty much drop a rock on the chances of chasing down Pokemons.

I don't have a valid argument for that - it just feels completely wrong so I'm not going to do it. Not until I do, naturally. Consistency, hobgoblin, you know the drill.

So there it is. Another cultural milestone missed. Can't hit 'em all.



All images borrowed from The Internet. Any rights holders unhappy about that just let me know and they're gone.