Cost Benefit Analysis

Redbeard at Parallel Context has a thought-provoking post up, poking away at that hoary old flogging-horse, fun. Wilhelm at TAGN, meanwhile, has a weapons-grade, mad as hell and not taking it any more rant aimed squarely at everyone's least-favorite spaceman, Lord British.

At first read, the two posts don't seem to have all that much in common but I was struck by the way they both reveal a little of the darkness that lies in "giving people want they want". Or should that be what they think they want?

Looking back to the dying days of World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King era, Redbeard brings back some of the mixed emotions aroused by the fast-moving changes Blizzard brought to what has always been a slippery and ever-shifting genre. The surprise, if there was one, should have been that we didn't see it coming. 

The myth about sharks is that they'll drown if they ever stop moving forward. Mmorpgs are the same.

I was almost done playing WoW, my first time through, when Blizzard introduced the earliest iteration of the automated group-making tool. Mrs Bhagpuss and I had been playing for just over six months by then and we'd both seen about as much of the game as we cared to. She'd already stopped logging in. I think she'd gone back to EverQuest II. 

I hung on a little bit longer. I was waiting for the patch that introduced the Group Finder. I was very curious to see how it would work. I wasn't expecting it to change anything for me, personally. At that point I'd never pugged a dungeon in WoW. I'd barely even been in a dungeon in WoW and I had no plans to start. I was waiting to see how the innovation would change the game itself and by implication the genre.

In the event it took me just three runs to decide that a) the LFG tool was a clever and useful addition to the game and b) I had no interest in ever using it again. I could also see that it was a genie that would be very hard to cork.

For someone who had already just about had enough of Azeroth for the time being, far from opening up a whole new era of possibility, what it did was confirm my feeling that it was about time I found somewhere else to be. I moved on but I was very well aware that no matter how far or fast I was moving I wouldn't be able to outrun history. You can't unhave ideas. Automated group-making had been loosed upon the virtual world. Nothing would be the same ever again.

The Sparkle Pony, as Redbeard goes on to say, marked another turning point. At this remove I can't remember (Or be bothered to check.) if Blizzard was the first major player to introduce paid-for mounts into a Subscription game. I know Sony Online Entertainment did the same because I was there when it happened but whether that was before or after The Ensparkling I don't recall.

And it doesn't matter. Whoever did it first, soon everyone was doing it. And why wouldn't they? It turns out people like spending money on stuff that doesn't exist, even if they have to pay an entrance fee to get into the store. If you were making games to make money wouldn't you do the same? If people want to pay you twice, why not let them? 

Well, I guess one good reason would be if those same people ended up losing faith in your game's ability to entertain and amuse them and took their custom elsewhere. That didn't happen even though many said it would. 

Oh, I'm sure there were people who stopped playing and claimed it was because of all the shiny ponies sparkling up the streets and maybe sometimes it was even true. I mean, I left EQII's live servers for the tumbleweed emptiness of the Test server mostly because I got into a snit about the flying carpets that came with the Desert of Flames expansion. Or I said I did.

It was a factor, just like the coming of the LFG tool to WoW was a factor in my leaving that game. It just wasn't the main reason I left. It was, as these things so often are, a handy excuse to do something I'd been wanting to do anyway. 

It was also not forever. It so rarely is. Not for me, anyway. The plethora of retro and restart servers everywhere you look these days, coupled with the endless marketing drives to bring back former players to just about every mmorpg there ever was, suggests my yo-yoing loyalties are anything but unique.

Observational and anecdotal evidence suggests the membrane holding players inside or outside the current bubble of any mmorpg is becoming ever more permeable. The whole business model used to rely on locking paying customers down. Now it's increasingly about keeping the leash loose enough so they don't feel the tie until you tug.

Every barrier that comes down weakens the next, too. Those sparkle ponies seem almost quaint now. Strike the almost. Crowded places in just about every mmorpg I play (And most I don't, I imagine.) look more like carnival parades than whatever they're intended to suggest. As recreations of fantasy cities they bear about as much resemblance to even an imaginary reality as Disneyland's Main Street USA does to any American town you can actually drive through in your own car.

It's easy enough to see it all as a degradation of some kind of preternatural authenticity that existed before but is it? Was there ever anything more to the experience than what we brought to it? Aren't we just bringing different things, now? 

It's another of those "You say you want it but you don't" moments, only this time it's "You say you don't want it but you do." Money talks, as the saying goes, and what it's saying is "I want a Pony!"

Or a spaceship. In castigating erstwhile elder now turned pantomime villain, Lord British, Wilhelm brings in another rockstar dev, Chris Roberts, as a point of reference:

"I am not a fan of Star Citizen, but this announcement has made Chris Roberts palatable by comparison.  I don’t believe CR will ever be able to deliver on all, or even most, of the promises he has made, but he is selling a dream and has something tangible in alpha and has managed not to get bored and wander off mid-project.  If you were to ask me if you should buy a spaceship in Star Citizen or give money to Lord British, I’d say knock yourself out with the spaceship."

This really struck me as a crucial paragraph. A lot of people don't like Chris Roberts and his Star Citizen money press, largely on the grounds that the game he's been promising to make for years can and will never become a reality. I have always thought that misses the point.

Star Citizen isn't a game. It's a showroom for imaginary spaceships. There probably are people genuinely still waiting for a full-function mmorpg to emerge from the endless development process over at Cloud Imperium but I would hazard my best guess they aren't any kind of majority. 

Star Citizen is a toyshop. People buy shiny spaceships there and go Vroom! Vroom! in their minds. Space Sparkle Ponies if you like. And people do like. They like very much, which is why Star Citizen keeps making more money. 

In some ways, not having a real game to go with them makes the whole thing more fun. It's like me when I played Riders of Icarus. All I really wanted to do was log in, get my next amazing mount, ride it around the city for a while, take a few screenshots and log out. The fact that I knew there was an actual game there just put me under pressure to stop having fun and do some damn work. Go and do some levelling. Play the actual game. That, among other things, was what led to me drifting away.

In that sense, you might think that Lord British's titanic vagueness over what game, exactly, he intends to make "on the blockchain" shouldn't be all that much of a red flag. It is, though.

Here's the difference, as I see it, between Chris Roberts and Richard Garriott: Chris Roberts really likes spaceships; Lord British really likes money.

Which is not to say Roberts doesn't like money, too. Of course he does. We all like money. But he's pretty clear on what he's selling. If you pay him for an imaginary spaceship that's what you get. If you buy an NFT of a spaceship, as Tipa's been wondering, just what exactly does that get you that any mmorpg or cash shop can't sell you already?

I'm assuming here that NFTs are involved in Lord British's plans somewhere down the line, along with Play to Earn and all the rest of the buzzwords. 

The single, obvious advantage of selling sparkle ponies and spaceships "on the blockchain" rather through a regular cash shop is, as it seems to me, the license that gives you to charge orders of magnitude more money for them. I can see why that's attractive to some people. Mainly the people doing the selling but also those who think a thing's value lies in how much it costs. There are names for people who think that way. None of them are kind.

Given the lead time required to make a new mmorpg, there's every chance all this will be over by the game comes out, if it ever does. I guess that won't matter much. By then the last drips will have been squeezed from the low-hanging fruit and the whole caravan will have moved on to the next mirage, taking Lord British with it, likely as not.

Leaving us all to play happily with our ponies and our spaceships in the actual games that take actual money for imaginary toys. And even if some of those games are still just sketches of a promise of a dream, they'll still be more real than anything "on the blockchain".

Fun is where you find it and we already know where to look.

Saints Preserve Us

This week brought the sad news of the death of Chris Bailey, front man for the legendary Australian punk band The Saints. Or rock band if you prefer. There seems to be some mild controversy over just exactly how to label them.

I can tell you there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever among my peer group when we first heard the speaker-shredding caterwaul that was the magnificent I'm Stranded. It was one of the very first punk singles I bought, all the way back in 1976. I played the absolute hell out of it then and I still have the seven-inch downstairs somewhere, in the original picture sleeve.

The Saints' sound and Bailey's vocals in particular are in clear line of descent from Iggy and the Stooges circa Raw Power but that's something a lot of bands tried. Few, if any, succeeded as comprehensively and thrillingly.

Here's the original promo in all its burned out basement glory, preceded by a few choice compliments from some famous rockers.

I saw a good number of mid-late '70s punk bands play live but sadly never The Saints. Their stage performances were legendary, which makes their appearance on Top of the Pops below, miming to a pre-recorded version of their biggest UK hit, This Perfect Day, all the more devestating. Lots of bands derided or satirised the artificiality of the show's format but few managed to make their point while still looking as cool as this.

If you want more (And you should.) Simon Reynolds has you covered at his blissblog. He also has the same two clips I used because why wouldn't he?

As the years roll relentlessly on, my feelings and thoughts about punk, both the music and the movement, are subject to endless revision. There was a time when I could barely listen to any of it, even the stuff I knew, objectively, was good. 

After forty-five years, though, I feel I'm finally beginning to get some perspective. I'm starting to trust myself to be able to sift the good from the merely nostalgic. The Saints were one of the best, as were X-Ray Spex, another band I never got to see play, more's the pity.

FKA Twigs, who it amuses me to think of as the Good Fairy to Grimes' bad one, released a fine video this week for the International Woolmark Prize.  It starts out like Laurie Anderson before lurching, wonderfully, into X-Ray Spex' classic Identity. 

I have no way of knowing or even guessing whether the late and very much missed Poly Styrene would have appreciated what's happening in front of her tune here but I bet she'd be happy to know people who weren't even born when she recorded it are still finding it as thrilling and meaningful as we did back then.

One of these days I'll do a post or maybe even a series featuring the punk songs I most liked when they were fresh. It would be interesting, to me at least, to consider which have lasted, which have faded and which I can't really remember why I liked to begin with.

That, though, is for another day. If even then.

Over Too Soon

A few days ago I watched the final episode of Final Space. A few days before that, I watched the final episode of the live action remake of Cowboy Bebop. A week or two before that I watched the final episode of October Faction. A little while before that I watched the final episode of Wolf Like Me.

All four of those final episodes have one thing in common: they weren't supposed to be final at all.

I don't know exactly why each of them came to an end when they did. Underwhelming viewing figures, too expensive to make, poor critical response, internal politics at the studios. Any or all of the above. Whatever the explanation, one thing is absolutely clear from the outside: the people making the shows weren't expecting to stop. If they had been, they wouldn't have ended them way they did. 

Of the four, only Wolf Like Me could conceivably be taken for a completed project. It would make for an unusual piece of work but it doesn't end on a cliffhanger and it does have internal consistency and the narrative reaches a resolution of a kind.

Even so, it's plain the six episodes were intended as an introduction, a prelude, a set-up for a longer story, something I would very much have liked to see. Wolf Like Me is a solid, well-made, entertaining show. All the main characters are engaging, the setting is unusual and idiosyncratic (American actors in a suburban Australian location.) and the take on a very familiar fantasy trope is unusual, thoughtful and nuanced. There did occasionally seem to be a little confusion of tone but nothing that time wouldn't have smoothed out.

Or that's what I thought, until I read the reviews. As previously discussed, I prefer to read the reviews after I've seen the show, so as to compare my reactions with those of others and, with luck, have my feelings and interpretations reflected and confirmed. 

Not what happened. At least, not at first.

When I looked at the ratings for Wolf Like Me on IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic a few weeks ago they were terrible. I didn't take a note of the scores at the time but I'm sure all of them were well under fifty per cent. I'm pretty sure I remember one of them being in the thirties. The general opinion seemed to be well-reflected by the infelicitous title  of The Guardian's review :"Wolf Like Me - So bad it's good? No, just the former."

As I check those same sites today, though, I find my original opinion of the show has been retrospectively vindicated. The Metacritic rating is much healthier 69%. IMDB is even better at 7.3/10 (with a strongly upward trend) and while the Rotten Tomatoes critics' rating is just barely in the green at 56%, the audience score is a stratospheric 92%.

Those are the kinds of figures that, along with rising interest and appreciation from those who, like me, came to the show late, can sometimes lead to a revival or a reboot. I can't see that happening in this particular instance but it is a possibility now. 

I'd be more than happy to see it come back. I felt like things were just getting started when they had to stop. I doubt it will happen, sadly. It's much more likely the show will be forgotten, another lost opportunity along with so many others. At six episodes, Wolf Like Me just doesn't have the heft to become the cult classic it could have been, given more time.

October Faction is a show I'd very much have liked to see continue but it's easier than it is with Wolf Like Me to see why it didn't. It's one of probably too many shows that follow the path forged by the X-Files, the premise being, as in The Secret World, that all the weird and wicked hiding in the shadows are really real. 

That's a very well-trodden path now and I wouldn't make any claims for October Faction having taken it in any new directions, although it might be the most militant take on the trope I've seen for a while. I really liked it but I suspect the things I liked the most wereprecisely those that saw it received with a deal more ennui, not to say hostility, by the majority of those who watched it. 

The writers seem to have not merely a disdain but an almost aggressive disinterest in explaining how any aspect of the reality they've created works. In many respects it patently doesn't. Structural conceits are dropped on the viewer like pianos falling from a skyscraper and you're apparently meant to keep on walking and let the wreckage lie. Major elements of the premise simply make no sense at all when looked at logically. 

I not only didn't care about any of that, I was happier not to have to care. When I'm caught up in a tale, I like coming out the end of the story feeling more confused than when I went in but I realise appealing to that attitude generally doesn't pay the bills.

But October Faction has a lot more going for it than lax world-building and contempt for logic. It has wit. It has style. It has energy. It's vital, exciting and fun. It's a cartoon with real people and occasionally real emotions. It also has two very charismatic leads and a very charismatic villain (Or maybe anti-hero. We'll never know.) all of whom happen, very unusually, to be middle-aged parents.

Unfortunately, as most of the reviews were quick to point out, it also has two of the least charismatic leads of any comparable series in the teenage twins of said parents. (Yes, of all three of them. It's complicated, although apparently not too complicated to also turn up in much the same form as a plot twist in Final Space.) And if the twins are dull, their coterie of teenage friends and lovers are even less interesting, hard though that is to imagine. 

Plenty of shows I've watched have seen wooden actors turn in increasingly supple and subtle performances as they grew into their roles. There was every possibility that could have happened here. Equally, some shows run for season after season with the least charismatic actors heading the cast list (Smallville is available to give notes.) 

October Faction enjoyed good plotting and offered strong special effects to back up the impressive chemistry between the older leads. I had the sense it would have matured well. Never going to find out if I was right.

If October Faction died from lack of interest, Cowboy Bebop was killed by failing to live up to expectations. A live action reboot of a much-loved anime series, almost all the genre-specific reviews I've seen have one complaint above all others: it doesn't do justice to the legacy of the original. 

I had never seen the anime so I had neither preconceptions nor expectations. I knew about it only because the bookshop where I work has stocked the manga in the past and I've put it on the shelf. Never read it. Just shelved it.

I'm watching the anime now. I'm on episode five. I started immediately after I got to the end of the live show because I wanted more of the world and the characters. It's an interesting experiment in whether first exposure trumps actual quality. So far, the anime feels thin, weak and unstructured compared to the live action series. It's decent enough that I'd watch it anyway but it has no sense of being any kind of classic.

The live Cowboy Bebop isn't a classic either but it's a very good show. All the main characters, the main villain, the supporting cast, they're all convincing and charismatic. The stories are episodic, picaresque even, but there's a tight through-line that's resolved only partially by the final episode. It's evidently intended to carry on and I would have liked to have seen where it was going. 

As with October Faction, there's not even the barest lip-service paid to explaining how the world in which the characters operate came to be the way it is, let alone how it could possibly sustain itself. A few seconds' thought blows holes in the logic of just about every scene. None of that matters in the least. No-one expects realism from a setting like this, or no-one should. 

What viewers have a right to expect of a show based on bounty hunters, jazz and the Old West is style, rhythm, cool and great fight scenes. Cowboy Bebop has all of those and then some. Another thing it has in common with October Faction and Final Space, although not so much with Wolf Like Me, is that getting shot or stabbed a bunch of times is a minor inconvenience, something you'll recover from in a matter of hours. Maybe minutes.

It's probably because all of these shows are based on comic books of one kind or another and they carry with them some degree of comic book sensibility. Death is rarely the end and injury is barely an inconvenience. They are all live action, though, so the injuries at least look like they hurt, for a moment. 

Final Space is an animated show and it takes full advantage of that fact. Its universe makes considerably less sense than any of the others I've mentioned and it takes more to kill a significant character there than it does to destroy a planet. 

Cartoon logic operates at all times, except when the storyline is focused on the characters internal monologues, at which time things get uncomfortably serious. I can't immediately bring to mind another action-oriented, animated series that spends so much time focusing on depression, inner doubt and existential loneliness, let alone one that purports to be a comedy. It's no Bojack Horseman but it's not a barrel of laughs, either.

The ostensible reason for Final Space not being renewed was the merger between Warner Media and Discovery but it had already moved channels three times by then. Maybe it was the whiplash from those wild mood swings that did for it in the end.  

Final Space did a lot better than the other three, managing three seasons before it got cancelled but the showrunner, Olan Rogers, had plans for a story arc lasting twice as long. All the shows I've been talking about end with a whole bunch of questions unanswered, a whole lot of plot threads left hanging and, in three out of four cases, a whopping great set-up for a Next Season that will never come.

It's discouraging. Not that I expect every show to last for a decade. Things run their course, have their time, run out of road. I know that.

It's more that I don't think it's too much to ask that they be allowed to conclude rather than merely stop. It doesn't even necessarily have to be in the same format or on the same platform, especially given that most of these shows were adaptations from other media in the first place. It'd be nice to get some kind of closure, however it's delivered. 

Dropping underperforming properties cold may save networks money in the immediate moment but I wonder what damage it does in the longer term. I know I'm starting to get into the habit of checking before I start watching a new show, how long it ran, whether it was prematurely cancelled. I'm beginning to steer clear of anything that only ran one season just on general principles. Why get invested when there's never going to be a payoff?

I may be missing out on some short-run gems that way but I suspect I'm more likely to be saving myself a lot of irritation, frustration and annoyance. And then again, maybe not. For all the disappointment and disatisfaction of their untimely demise, I would heartily recommend all four shows to anyone who hasn't yet seen them. They're good enough for as long as they last to make up for what's not there and never will be.

And at least you'll know what you're getting into before you start. That's more than I did.

Beryl Vs Badger

If there's been a distinct drop-off in quality here this last week, you know who to blame. Yes, well, okay, me... but also her. Her up there, biting the badger (Not a euphemism.)

This is Beryl. She's a ten-week old Poochon puppy. A Poochon is a cross between a Bichon-Frise and a Poodle although to me she looks like the lead from "Honey, I Shrunk the Sheepdog!". (Not a real movie. As far as I know.)

I took some good footage of her playing with the giant badger muff (Also not a euphemism. You put your hands inside him to keep them warm. That's literally what he's for.) I was planning on editing it and making a decent post out of it. Certainly a better post than this one, anyway.

I spent about four hours, on and off, trying every possible trick to get the video off my phone and either onto the PC or into the Cloud but Google and/or Android and/or Microsoft and/or the whole damn lot of them together were having absolutely none of it. Google Photos, Google Drive, GMail, USB leads and MicroSD cards, none of them wanted to play.

In the end I managed to get two photos and a two-second clip to upload. Not much you can do with that. 

Mrs Bhagpuss offered to film Beryl on her iPhone so we did that. Then it turned out only half of it had recorded. Not the good half, either.

I'm not one to give up just because the universe is obviously giving me hints. Not to mention it was far too late in the evening to think of anything else to post. And here we are.

In the shot above, Beryl is in her kitchen basket, a converted whiskey barrel that made the entire house smell like a distillery for days after it arrived. She's looking deceptively calm except for the devil-dog eyes. An artifact of technology, I'm pleased to say. I'd be worried if she really looked like that.

With luck I'll get some better video of her soon because what I have to offer today is really not good. At the rate she's growing, though, it's probably best to slam up something fast. She won't be a puppy forever. 

And that, I'm embarassed to say, is all I've got. Take it or leave it. Although, if you're reading this, I guess that decision's already been made.

Featuring The Fifth Dimension

Earlier in the week I had to drive a few miles to do a thing and that's always an opportunity to listen to one of the many, many CDs I keep buying or getting people to buy for me. Usually I grab something new or at least recent but for some reason this time I picked up a Dory Previn album.

I never really paid all that much attention to Dory Previn back when I was buying all my music on vinyl or even CD. It was, probably ironically, although I don't want to get into that nest of worms again, not until I started exploring the last sixty or seventy years of popular culture by way of the internet that I discovered just how much I liked her songs; intricate, self-aware, caustic yet vulnerable.

As I was listening to Coldwater Canyon it reminded me of several other wordy, snarky, conversational singles of the approximate period. It used to be something of a sub-genre all its own. I'm not sure if it survives in the exact same form although there's certainly no shortage of similarly smart, sharp, sarcastic songs in any number of other contemporary styles.

These songs always seemed to have something of the stage about them. They weren't quite musical theater but they weren't wholly pop either. They were also never precisely cool even though they had a kind of sophistication that was impossible to deny. The dense, referential wordplay, later to become so intrinsic to so many strands of popular music, seemed at the time to call out to a different sensibility.

It was showing off, basically. You couldn't escape noticing it. Even though these were songs that got played on the radio until you frankly never wanted hear them again, even though they made the Top 40 or the Top 20 or maybe even the Top 10, they still sounded as though they'd be more at home in a college revue than a TV pop show.

I've always been moderately careful to select only certain aspects of my taste for public display. I'm not a believer in guilty pleasures - I like things or I don't and I can usually tell you why - but there's no need to go blathering to all and sundry about every last little foible. 

Since I started featuring music on the blog I've always kept a weather eye on the cumulative impression I might be constructing through the choices I offer. It means I don't always give due representation to everything I enjoy, particularly the older stuff. I mean, it's one thing to link gauche, unfashionable new discoveries but gauche, unfashionable oldies? I think not.

We all edit ourselves for public consumption or we do if we're normatively socialized but sometimes it's worth letting the ragged edges show. Of course, that's all part of the editing process too but hey, what can you do?

I'm throwing this together in a hurry, even though I've had it in the back of my mind all week, so it's just goin to be a handful of really obvious ones. I might come back another time and do a deeper dive. For now, though, here's what I've got.

You're Moving Out Today - Carole Bayer-Sager

Now that's the kind of performance you don't see every day. It looks like she's in her garage rehearsing for a pageant and her dad's filming her on his Super8. It even cuts off abruptly before the end as if he's run out of film. According to the YouTuber who posted it, that's "The original promo video." Life was simpler back then. 

Of course "back then" was the same year the Sex Pistols released Never Mind the Bollocks. I know which I'd rather listen to but forty-five years later no-one's likely to be making a Netflix series about Carole Bayer-Sager.

You're So Vain - Carly Simon

I have always loved this song. I love the melody, the lyric, the performance and above all the backing vocals. Backing vocals are so underrated, aren't they? In my brief time as a performer, the most enjoyable on stage experience I ever had was singing backup in a version of the band I co-started that carried on after I went to university. When I came back they kindly let me back in. It was a hell of a lot better than singing lead, like I ended up doing, I'll tell you that for nothing.

Coldwater Canyon - Dory Previn

I don't think this is the best version of the song you're going to hear but it's the only live performance I could find, Dory looking like uncannily like the sister Ian Hunter never had. Well, I say that. I have no idea whether Ian Hunter had a sister. Jesus did, according to Dory, though, or at least she thought he might have. Then again, she also claimed Jesus was an Androgyne. She was before her time, was Dory Previn.

Chuck E's In Love - Rickie Lee Jones

It's funny, I always thought of this as in solid line of descent from Tom Waits but listening to it now it's clear to me that if she's channeling anyone other than pure Ricky Lee it has to be Van Morrison circa Astral Weeks. Some Joni in there, too, of course, not least in that beret. Also, another video that just cuts off before the end. Does no-one know how to edit any more?

I Don't Sleep, I Drink Coffee Instead - Brenda Kahn

If Rickie Lee Jones is famous, for a given degree of fame, I really can't see why Brenda Kahn isn't. We've had this one before, a long time ago, but I really don't think it matters. Put your hand up if you remember it. Anyone? Bueller?

Tom's Diner - Suzanne Vega

We seem to have wandered so far away from the original premise we're in another country altogether. Don't pretend you haven't noticed. I only really had those first three songs in mind when I started this. I kind of hoped something else would present itself as we went along and indeed it did but not in quite the way I hoped. 

It could have been a lot worse. I toyed with some boys, Harry Chapin, Peter Sarstedt, Squeeze... I'm sure you can fill in the blanks. I was going to go with Michelle Shocked until I remembered why no-one mentions her any more. 

I'm getting more ideas for a better thought-out version of this post. Maybe I should make some notes.

For Sunday after work, though, I think this will do just fine.

We Were On A Break!

 I came home tonight to the following email from Pearl Abyss:  

I can't remember the last time any game sent me a notice like this. A year seems like a very short period to be flagged "inactive" for an mmorpg these days. Just because I'm not playing Black Desert at the moment doesn't mean I'm never going to play it again.

Most companies like to make it as hard as possible for you to delete your details. ArenaNet pretty much require a doctor's note before they'll scrub your name from their files. It's not that unusual for me to log back into games I haven't played for a decade and find the account still works just fine.

It did occur to me it might be a scam so I navigated my own way to the official Pearl Abyss website but once I got there I couldn't find any way to log in. I took another look at the provencance of the email. It looked legit enough. 

After thinking about it, I decided it wouldn't make all that much difference either way. I never re-use passwords and I have dozens of email addresses of which this is a fairly minor one. If someone did steal my Pearl Abyss login details I'm not sure what good it would do them. 

In fact, I'm not sure this is even my main BDO account. It might just be the one I made for BDO Mobile. That one I almost certainly will never play again. If anyone wants to carry on from where I left off after one session, good luck to them.

I went ahead and followed the links, logged in, changed my password. It all looked legit but I guess we'll see. Or not.

I had nothing else to post about tonight so thanks, PA, for giving me an excuse to put up some old Black Desert pictures and waffle on about nothing for a few paragraphs. Otherwise I might finally have missed a day.

It was looking bad until now!

Friday Night Free-For-All

I spent most of today puppy-sitting while Mrs Bhagpuss was at work so this is going to be a delicious Friday Grab-Bag. We all love one of those, don't we? 

First up, those London Games Festival streaming demos I was talking about the other day. I've managed to play - or try to play - three more of them now: Lab Rat, Grimoire Groves and Silt. I will not be wishlisting any of them but for entirely different reasons.

Lab Rat, described as a "Satirical adventure featuring an AI who will monitor and entertain you as you progress through 100+ genre-bending puzzles" is... pretty much exactly that, although I think "entertain" here is used ironically. Annoy, irritate, frustrate, make you want to smash it with a hammer. All of those.

The A.I. that is, not the game. The game I quite enjoyed, although I'm not a big enough fan of logic puzzles to want to play much more than I saw in the demo. The graphics are clear, clean and coherent. They look suitably futuristic and robotic. The objects you shunt around have a satisfying heft to them. It's quite a tactile game.

The puzzles themselves, the ones I saw in the hour I played (And I did go the full permitted hour, which is a strong positive.) were all moving block puzzles of one kind or another. I think I got to puzzle number twelve before the shutters came down. There's the bare minimum of explanation but all the information you need is on screen. Figuring it out is part of the fun.

The game played perfectly throughout, Not a glitch or a stumble. If this was the kind of game I liked I'd be very happy to have found it. Even as a dabbler in these things I thought it was fun, just not for much longer than the demo lasted. 

Where Lab Rat is all blue steel and industry, Grimoire Groves is candy colors and nature. As the demo begins you're offered a choice of a tutorial or jumping right in. I picked the tutorial, which was probably just as well, seeing I couldn't even finish that. 

 

Everything was going well enough for the first few tasks, even if I wasn't always a hunded per cent clear on the mechanics. I knew I had a spellbook (The titular Grimoire) and one spell, which I was starting to use to grow and harvest plants so as to have the materials I needed to make more spells. 

I knew how to change the spell I had to the right element to suit each plant. I was wandering around, trying to do that, as my mentor had told me I should, when I somehow got myself into a loop. I could only move around part of the area and none of the elements seemed to please any of the plants inside it. 

I was never sure whether it was a bug in the game or if I was doing something wrong or missing some vital piece of information. Either way, after ten minutes going round in futile circles I'd had enough. It's not like it would have been a game I'd have wanted to play anyway.

Silt, on the other hand, does look like something I might enjoy. It has the kind of hand-drawn, indie comic graphics that appeal to me and the mechanics of possessing fish and other sea-creatures to move around underwater is an unusual one.

Unfortunately I couldn't get the demo to work hardly at all. I saw the opening cut scene and the first screen and that was all. Every time I possessed the first fish and tried to move it around the screen, the demo crashed to desktop. I gave it several tries but it happened over and over and in the end I gave up.

I might try the downloadable version of the demo on Steam just in case the crashes had something to do with the remote play via Microsoft Azure but given the flawless performance of two of the four demos on that platform I suspect that wasn't the problem. 

I notice as I write this that I have cleverly left the only one of the games not to have a demo on Steam for last. The Festival finishes in two days and I'm at work for both of them. I may never know whether Paper Trail would have been the game for me but, of the four I did play, Mask of the Rose is the only one I'll be keeping tabs on.

Moving on, I noticed a couple of interesting entries in the Metaverse steeplechase today. One was the announcement widely reported both in and out of the gaming press that Epic is going to be developing "a Place for Kids to Play in the Metaverse" in partnership with Lego. 

Since Epic arguably has the current best-in-show proto-metaverse application in Fortnite and Lego is as close as you're likely to get to a "trusted brand", this is a development that bears consideration.

Considerably less convincing was the news that Improbable, the not-at-all ironically named developers of the SpatialOS platform, is working on "a network of interoperable Web3 metaverses", to which they've assigned the catchy name MSquared. (M-superscript-2, which I am not going to research how to render here, thank you Improbable.)

Given that, as MassivelyOP puts it, "Improbable making things happen in relation to its SpatialOS tech has been an exception and not the rule", I wouldn't hold your breath. I mean, it's nice they seem to get that for most of the metaverse hype to come true there's going to have to be some interoperability baked in but it seems, yes, improbable that Improbable would be the people to do it.

The two developments together made me think of something that hadn't previously occured to me. I wonder if the whole Metaverse concept isn't really just a thing old people want. It seems to be based almost entirely around the vision of a handful of science fiction writers from the eighties and nineties, which, frankly, might as well be the dark ages. 

The underlying conceit seems to be one of making the virtual world look like an analogue of the analog. It's predicated on avatars of individuals navigating digitized three-dimensional spaces as though they were in the real world. It's almost as if the metaverse is a way to pretend the last quarter-century of technological change never happened. Is that even what anyone under fifty wants?

It seems to me that Gen Z/Alpha digital natives already have the metaverse they want right in their phones. I suspect they'll be about as keen on wandering around cavernous digispaces in fancy dress as they are sitting on the sofa with their parents watching Strictly Come Dancing.

Kids, however, will probably love it. Epic and Lego may be onto a winner there. If Metaverse does turn out to be mainly for children and grandparents it's no wonder Zuckerberg renamed Faceboook "Meta". I mean, that's probably 90% of his market, right there.

And finally, since I got the CD delivered to my door this very day of release, let's have the latest video from current indie breakout sensation, Wet Leg. It's called Ur Mum, it's a mini movie and it's great. Of course it is.