Cover Story

Back in the '90s, after I finally got my voluntary redundancy from the very large company I was working for at the time, I took a year off . Didn't do very much with it, other than rest, relax and have a pleasant time until the money ran and I had to find another job. Hey, it was the nineties, okay? You've all seen Slacker, right? If not, you should. Someone put it up on YouTube in 2017 and it's still there so if you want to go watch it now, I can wait.

Anyway... way to derail my own post, right?  So, the point is I had all this time off and one of the things I was going to do with it was write a novel. Only it turns out I don't have a novel in me. How about that? Everyone but me, huh?

What I did have in me, it turned out, was a whole freakin' mess of characters, their never-ending soap-opera-drama, and some kind of ramshackle, rambling narrative that wasn't going anywhere or at least not anywhere I could follow. I just used to sit down at the PC I'd bought specially to write the thing and go into what I can only describe as some kind of trance and come out of it two or three hours later with a few thousand words that, when I read them back, seemed to be nothing to do with me. I had no idea how I'd done it. I still don't.

I'm not saying it was like automatic writing in the days of Conan Doyle but it was freaky as hell and it really took it out of me. It took me about a week to recover so the whole thing moved quite slowly. Still, after a year I had something tens of  thousands words in two unconnected "stories". There was some kind of shape to both of them but if either had an actual plot, I couldn't have told you what it was.

And then I had to get another job and I started to use the PC to play video games, discovered EverQuest, and that was that for a quarter of a century. All of which I believe I've covered here before, not that I fool myself anyone is likely to remember.

While I was writing them, though, those stories, if that's what we're going to call them, didn't just sit on a floppy disk on a shelf. They did do that but they also came out in bimonthly installments in the apazine to which I belonged, meaning they were nominally public, with a theoretical readership of thirty people, assuming everyone bothered to read them. Again, something I've written about before and not the point of this post so let's move on.

What is the point of this post? You may well ask. It's this: I still have all that stuff, both the writing and its physical manifestation in photocopied zines. Of course I do. I still have freakin' everything I've ever done, going back to my exercise books from primary school (They're in the loft.). I never throw anything away.

I mentioned in a recent post that I'd been mining a couple of fragments I wrote around the same time for lyrics to turn into songs to feed into the all-devouring AI maw. That turned out really well. I mean really well. I spun those two short pieces up into a seven song cycle and I'm about as happy with it as I could be, which, since tend I love my own stuff to a positively nauseating degree to begin with, is irritatingly predictable. 

If you want to judge for yourself, I made a playlist. I think they're all pretty good. Your opinion may differ. I'd still like to hear it though.

After the seventh song, even I could tell the well was pretty much dry. Which was when I had my next big idea. Basically, the same big idea but who's telling this? If I'd been able to get seven songs out of a couple of short fragments, how many could I get out of two short novels?

I don't know yet but I've done four so far and once again I'm very pleased with what I've got. Given I'm finding the process addictive as hell and the results astonishingly satisfying, there could be a lot more. There will be a lot more. 

And we're still not at the final point of this post, the lede of which I've buried all the way down here as a reward for the patient, the stubborn and the determined. Here it is: blogging is great and all and I love it but I'm not sure it's as aesthetically satisfying as what came before.

Here's why. 

And that's just the covers. All nine issues of The Final Line, as they originally appeared. Or rather, bleached-out scans that don't do any kind of justice to the grain and texture of the originals, let alone their tactility and feel. Even so, though...

 

I put a good deal of work into making this blog look as good as I think I can get it and I'm mostly happy with the results but I very much doubt any of the images I've used is going to have the lasting impact on me of any of those covers and I'm not even talking about their ability to trigger memories. (Except the last one. That's not good. I think I knew I was done by then and was already moving on.)

 

My point, getting to it at last, is that I'm not quite sure why blogs in general are so much less visually and aesthetically satisfying than those old photocopied zines. They are, though. It's a topic I might return to for Blaugust, an event which the observant reader will notice has been on my mind for months now. 

 

I'll tell you how all those covers were made. I spent hours going through photographs I'd taken, flyers I'd picked up, cinema programs, magazines, bits of paper I picked up in the street... anything. Then I blew them up on a photocopier, cut them up with scissors and knives, pasted them with glue and generally hacked them about until I had something that looked good to me.

 

Is there anything stopping me doing that now? Of course not. I could follow the exact same process or a version of it and at the end, when I'd finished, I could either take a photo of it with my phone or scan it and use it on the blog. But I don't. And why? Because it's easier to take a screenshot and use that. Or, worse, get an AI to fake something up for me. Digitization has made everything orders of magnitude more convenient but at a cost.

The closest I get to that old creativity here, I think, are all the degraded, fucked-about-with images I use at the top of music posts. Making those engages much the same parts of my imagination as those covers did. I'm more likely to look back at those with satisfaction than any other visual images on the blog and yet I pretty much only do it for music posts. Until now, I've never asked myself why. Why not do the same to screenshots or found images or generative AI?

 

I'll have to go away and think about that. What I also wanted to say is that the whole AI music thing seems to have fired up a creative part of my mind that's been dormant for a long time. I have more creative projects going on now than I can handle, which is unusual for me. Mostly I start something and keep to it until I'm done before I move on to something else, although being "done" should not be mistaken for being finished. 

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that there's likely to more of this sort of thing here for a while, since that's what I'm spending most of my free time on just now. Fair warning. Also, I guess, there's a chance some of the usual stuff might start to look a bit different, although honestly I'd be surprised if that happens. Inertia's a bitch.

 

Also if anyone knows why it's now impossible to center images in Blogger, I'd love to hear about it.

Hold That Pose : Black Desert

It probably won't come as much of a surprise to anyone reading this to hear that in the first month of playing Black Desert I've taken almost seven hundred and fifty screenshots. The problem with BDO isn't finding something to snap - it's knowing when to stop.

Much has been said about the beauty and quality of the game's graphics but it's the strength of the world-making that cannot be overstated. Rarely, probably never, have I traveled the roads and footpaths of an imaginary world that so meticulously, painstakingly replicates an authentic managed environment.

I've mentioned before how every village, town and city uses street plans that are logical, workable and convincing. No compromise whatsoever appears to have been made for player convenience. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the designers used the layout of real-world towns as templates.

The road networks are similarly naturalistic all the way down to the dirt tracks leading to isolated farmsteads and mountain hermitages. The countryside looks and feels wild at the borders and tenanted where civilization encroaches.

There's much more than good geography to why Black Desert feels so immersive to explore, though. The level of detail throughout the built environment is exemplary. The set design and placement of props would do a BBC historical drama proud.

What takes the whole thing to another level is the extensive use of tableaux vivants. Everywhere you go small dramas play out around you. Not a roadside camp or farmstead goes without its own staged set piece and once you enter a city the feeling of being surrounded by stories is overwhelming.

It's a fascinating approach to world-making. I'm not convinced it has the edge over GW2's enormously complex, nested scripted NPC narratives, where entire storylines with thousands of lines of dialog, all voiced, unfurl across whole maps, but it has a deep charm all the same.

In Metrica Province, to take my favorite Tyrian example, it is entirely possible to spend a whole afternoon trailing NPCs and eavesdropping on their quotidian lives. Just by watching and listening that way you feel it might be possible to come to a rich, nuanced understanding of life among the Asura.

Wandering through the bustling streets of Altinova or Heidel the impression is more one of walking through a gallery. Screenshots taken at random look, almost literally, like paintings in the style of the great Renaissance masters. Where GW2 is a watercolor dreamscape, Black Desert is naturalism done in oils.

It's those tableaux that hold the eye, though. The eye and the mind and the imagination. Black Desert's designers have dared to be lavish, not just in the size of the cast or the scale of the production but in the detailing.

When dressing sets with NPCs, almost all MMOs re-use animations primarily intended for other purposes; emotes, combat, idling. I can't be certain but it seems to me that the Pearl Abyss team has gone to the trouble of creating specific animations for certain tableaux just to make them more convincing.

Take, for example, the soldier pictured above fixing something - a mirror? a shield? a sign? - to a wall in Altinova. That animation seems bespoke. Or his colleague, painting a symbol on a wall a few doors away. That action has to be handcrafted just for that scene, doesn't it?

That symbol, too. Found in many places in the
area, it has a significance I don't understand. Wherever it appears it looms, darkly. The sight of that soldier, marking the clay while a hulking guard and a lackey look on, is chilling.

Whatever it means it can't be anything good. The tableau of cowering refugees - or are they citizens? - surrounded and menaced by more armed and armored soldiers just a few doors up the hill make it plain this is a city in turmoil.

And yet, meanwhile, business must go on. Black Desert's is a world of trade and commerce as well as violence and magic. As you watch the heated bargaining between a gesticulating Shai and cold-eyed goblin dealer in art and artifacts you have to wonder about the provenance of the goods. Were those gilded frames looted by the militia or are they the family heirlooms of some wealthy Altinovan, liquidating his assets before he flees to Heidel or Calpheon?

It's entirely possible to stand for hours looking at this world and wondering. For all I've supposedly "played" Black Desert for a month now, what I've mostly done is watch. In some ways the "game" part just gets in the way.

The players certainly do, with their hundreds of wagons parked on top of each other, their lines of horses lined up like so many black cabs on the rank, their garish dyes and Las Vegas showgirl glitz. So, too, the odd clusters of milling wildlife placed down conveniently at the edge of town, just waiting to be killed. Without the need to provide a game there'd be none of that.

Black Desert makes a good case for the old-school vision of the Virtual World but, once again, a huge question mark hangs over the compatibility of virtual world-building with the making and playing of video games. Perhaps VR will finally drive a wedge between the two. If I could "walk" through Altinova in three dimensions and 360 degrees I'm not sure I'd need anything more by way of  "gameplay".

Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure I do, even now.

You Got The Look: Villagers and Heroes

Villagers and Heroes is turning out to be one of those off-the-beaten-track MMOs that just clicks with me. In that respect it follows in a great tradition that goes all the way back to The Realm, which I used to play for some light relief between sessions back in Everquest's  Ruins of Kunark era.

Thinking back on other amuse-bouche MMOs that I ended up developing a taste for, there was Ferentus, one of the earlier Eastern imports, which never got out of beta, Endless Ages, Crowns of Power, NeoSteam, Argo and probably quite a few more I've forgotten. The king of them all was the very much-missed Rubies of Eventide, which closed down when one of the owners took umbrage with some of the players, powered down the server and locked the source code in a cupboard. Literally.

After they die many MMOs seem to slip into a ghostly half-life. Of the games listed above, Endless Ages had a couple of attempts at revival and still has people tinkering with the code trying to get something working, NeoSteam has now closed in all territories but appears to have an established "Private Server" scene and Argo was supposed to be returning under new management but now seems to have gone for good. Crowns of Power still has a website where you can download the game and even a "Server Status" page that suggests it's running but the forums tell another story.

I'm on a cart. I SAID I'M ON A CART!

The Realm, of course, just keeps on trucking. Next year will see the 20th anniversary of this venerable genre institution. That's twenty years as a subscription mmo, by the way; a 2D subscription MMO. Who said the sub model was dead?

Villagers and Heroes itself is, as I mentioned in the previous post, on its third iteration although it has continued to operate continuously through the various makeovers. This version really seems to have nailed it for me. It always seemed like a game I ought to enjoy more than I did and now I do.

Yesterday, while I was playing GW2 rather desultorily, as many people seem to be right now, what with the giant iceberg of Tuesday's update looming on the horizon, I found myself thinking, not about the new builds I'd have to be choosing, nor even about jumping ship to play my Necro on Ragefire or do my weeklies in EQ2. No, I was thinking about the plot in V&H and wondering what might happen next. And also about how nice it would be to do a bit of crafting and gathering in those bright, cartoon fields and orchards of that mystical land.

It's not always bright and colorful. Sometimes the world goes all watercolor pastel.

In the end I spent about five hours in V&H yesterday, following the plot, training up my Woodcrafting and my Bug Hunting, backtracking to complete and hand in some of the plethora of quests I seem to have acquired (and inevitably acquiring more in the process). It was a relaxing, involving and thoroughly enjoyable way to spend a Sunday.

I only stopped because I ran into an annoying bug where each NPC I approached would only reply to me with the dialog of the last person I spoke to. I'm hoping that will have fixed itself by  the next time I log in. If not I guess I'll find out how efficient the petition system is.

At low levels there seems to be an enormous amount to do and the pace of leveling is just about exactly as I like it. My new Wizard dinged level 8 last night. It took about eight hours to get there from character creation. Of course, she's also level 10 or more in almost all of the crafting and gathering disciplines, of which there are quite a few. I think she only has Cooking and Fishing left before she completes the introductory "get all these to ten and come back and see me quest" someone gave her right at the beginning.

I believethe level cap is 65 so there would seem to be a lot of mileage just in leveling up. What the end game is I have no idea and nor do I care very much. I'll think about that if I get there, which I don't imagine for a moment I will. A look at the map suggests a large and inviting world to explore, though, and if it's all as interesting and accessible as it has been so far, who knows?

Why do some MMOs feel inviting and fun to play while others can be such a struggle or feel so bland? There must be a whole raft of reasons but the look and feel is crucial. If that isn't right then whatever glories lie hidden beneath the surface are likely to stay there.

I knew an Eamon at university. He was studying architecture and talking to him taught me a lot about the relationship between form and function. If that's him he's really let himself go.

Appearances may be shallow but they have a big effect on whether I want to start playing something - if it looks delicious in screenshots it makes me want to dive in. Aesthetics aren't enough to hold the attention long-term though unless they come with  great sense of design to back them up.

Form follows function as the modernists used to say and the new UI is exemplary in that regard. Everything looks both crisp and modular and explains itself immediately by use. There's no fiddling about wondering what to press or where to click. It looks great and it works first time. Given that we spend so much of our "play" time operating the interface, to have doing so feel like a sensual pleasure in itself goes a long way towards encouraging a preference for one game over another.

Concretizing the sense of discovery.

Villagers and Heroes may not look spectacular but it's crisp and clear and charmingly stylized. When Mrs Bhagpuss peered over my shoulder and saw it for the first time she said "You're in a cartoon" and yes, it does have that look of a quality animation from the mid-late 80s about it. The typography reminds me of Wizard 101, another game whose style strongly enhanced and supported its gameplay. I really like that pseudo-brushstroke font.

The game also has solid sound direction and a really striking musical score. Unlike, say, Syp, I'm not a huge fan of video music in its own right. There are plenty of pieces and melodies that have a strong emotional effect on me but it's usually because of the memories they invoke rather than any intrinsic musicality of their own.

The music in fantasy MMOs tends to be of a type; sweeping synthesized orchestral pomp, blaring, brassy martial bombast, would-be wistful pastoral warbling and the like. Villagers and Heroes, at least in the few starting zones I've seen, is a little more sonically adventurous. It has, for example, some off-kilter, edgy, piano improvisations that nag uncomfortably in the background. Unsettling, particularly in a starting zone.

I stumble upon The Vinton Village Festival. Prancing Pony eat your heart out.

At one point I even stopped playing to listen, which is a very odd thing to find yourself doing. I'm not sure whether it's a good decision commercially but I certainly prefer it to the usual fantasy elevator music. I guess that jazz feel is all of a piece with the general maturity and sophistication of the aesthetic.

For a game that has a cartoonish look that would appear on the surface to be aimed at a younger audience Villagers and Heroes has an oddly adult feel. The main storyline is mostly the usual fantasy nonsense but there's a strong undertone of sexual jealousy and infidelity running through it. I seem to remember that the original launch of the game as A Mystical Land made reference to fairy tales and there's definitely some of that Germanic fairy tale darkness around the edges.

Let my light banish your darkness!

What with a very busy week at work and the fallout from tomorrow's giant patch bomb Villagers and Heroes probably won't get much play for a while now but it's done enough already to establish a firm position in the hierarchy of "MMOs I Might Play Quite Often", something the previous two versions never really achieved.

I was even looking at the cash shop, which looks very reasonably priced, especially to someone coming from ANet's outrageously expensive Gem Store, and there's a better than even chance I'll spend some money there if I carry on playing. I fancy a house and some sheep and the bags are really cheap. As Maldwiz pointed out to Tobold, we all have the same 24 hours in our days so what we do with them is our choice but the choice is far too hard.