Out Chasing Crows

Beryl. No crows.

 I'm not really following along with Blaugust as closely as usual this year. I may or may not get into the reasons for that when we hit Lessons Learned week at the end of the month. I would like to chip in on this week's topic, Creator Appreciation Week, though.

Before it got rolled into Blaugust, it used to be a separate event known as Developer Appreciation Week, often abbreviated to DAW. I haven't noticed anyone calling the new version CAW, which is a shame. I love crows.

Mrs Bhagpuss loves crows even more than I do. She has an imitation stuffed crow somewhere in the house and she's taken to feeding the large flocks of the big, black birds that hang around on the recreation field where we often take Beryl for a run. 

While Beryl was in her puppyhood she was a very picky eater, a phase that's left us with a cupboard full of experiments that didn't meet her strict culinary standards. Since most of them were either baked or dried foods, they've just been sitting there, inert and safely out of sight, waiting for their expiry dates to elapse or for one of us to think of something better to do with them. 

We've already donated the unopened packs to the local dog food bank but that still leaves plenty of bags and tubs and packs that were opened and presented to Beryl for the approval she never gave. No charity accepts opened packs of food for very good reason so they'll either have to go into the recycling or we'll have to find someone - or something - willing to eat them.

Crows are more than willing. Crows will eat anything. They're like the goats of the air, crows are. 

Flux's Beryl. With crows.

Jackdaws, oddly, are far more fussy. We've tried giving several types of dog treats to the gangs of jackdaws that swagger around the playing fields but they aren't remotely interested. The much larger corvids that keep clear of the jackdaw packs - carrion crows, I think they must be - have no such misgivings. They can't get their beaks on the stuff fast enough.

They recognize us now and come over to see what we might have for them. They come within about fifteen or twenty feet of us, hopping about, daring each other to come closer. We throw the food towards them and the braver ones crab-walk up and grab it or flurry into the air and drop on it from above.

Beryl chases them about, usually at a gentle trot. She likes to make them fly up and away although since none of the crows take her at all seriously as a threat, just an annoyance, they merely flutter a few yards and come down again. It works very nicely as a way of entertaining her and giving her some exercise while also getting rid of some of our excess, unwanted dog supplies and supplementing the food supply of the local wildlife all at once.

It's at this point that, if I was a genuine Content Creator, I'd either embed a video I'd taken or direct you to my YouTube channel so you could watch it there. No creator worth the name would miss either the opportunity to record the events I've just described nor to publicize themselves off the back of it. 

Mrs Bhagpuss and I, unfortunately, haven't even thought to take a single photograph of Beryl and the Crows (Decent name for a band, that...) let alone shoot any video. That's why I've had to resort to describing the whole thing in long-form prose, which obviously no-one is ever going to read.

It's also why blogging is dead as people keep saying. I mean, who reads nowadays? 

Luckily, there are people with a lot more creativity about them than me and that's what we're here to celebrate this week. I'm going to express my appreciation for a couple of creators whose work on YouTube I very much enjoy and also sometimes find useful.

The first is Sitting With Dogs, the YouTube channel of Rocky Kanaka, a man who sits with dogs.

Seriously, that's what he does. And millions of people watch him doing it. 

Mrs Bhagpuss is one of them and now I am too. How I started was I'd come into the room and there'd be this guy, talking in a pleasant, resonant voice and sitting on the floor next to him would be a dog. Sometimes it would be a big dog. Sometimes it would be a small dog. Sometimes the dog would be still, sometimes it would be jumping about. 

Whatever the dog, whatever the situation, Rocky would be talking. His channel could just as easily be called Talking At Dogs. Not really to them, most of the time, at least not until he gets to the affirmations. He talks to the camera, to himself, to the shelter staff, to the air... 

Most of his videos last an hour or more and he literally never stops talking for a second. That's partly because he's a consummately professional performer but also because it's his method. Dogs find the constant stream of chatter reassuring. That's the theory.

It seems to work because the dogs almost always come around. And in the meantime we learn something about their history and their possible future. It's educational as well as socially constructive.

Rocky works with animal shelters to raise awareness of the problems they face and to assist in the never-ending process of re-homing abandoned animals, specifically dogs, although he likes cats too and some feline or other occasionally makes a guest appearance. He fund-raises and he also has his own business producing dog supplies of various kinds but for our purposes during CAW he's an entertainer.

I can say that with confidence because he entertains me and I had absolutely no intention of watching him at all. I just happened to walk into in the room one day, when he was talking, and somehow I was still there half an hour later because Rocky is a natural story-teller. He's adept at setting up a scenario that almost immediately creates a desire for resolution. I find it very hard to stop watching and listening until Rocky gives me closure and he's excellent at not letting it come too quickly.

Of course, it helps that he has a canine supporting cast but it has to be said that not every dog he sits with is cute or cuddly or telegenic. A lot of them are the dogs you'd walk straight past if you were at the shelter, looking to adopt. 

Nearly all of them have issues, some behavioral, mostly involving fear, lack of trust in humans or poor mental health, some more physical, like blindness or extreme old age. Rocky sits with them all, sometimes facing them, sometimes with his back to them, always talking, occasionally singing. He flicks treats that he makes himself in their general direction, working towards having them take the treats from his hand and eventually, if all goes well, to the inevitable "scoop", when he gets the dog, however large, onto his lap.

Obviously, this does not always go as well as he'd hope, but in all the videos I've seen the dogs do eventually come around. I can't say if there are times when they don't that just don't make it onto the channel of course, but I like to think his success rate is pretty high. It should be. He's doing everything right.

I'd recommend the channel to anyone who likes animals, not just dog people. It's entertaining, informative and despite the very concerning backdrop and inevitable emotional triggering, Rocky's relentless optimism is always uplifting. If we lived anywhere near wherever it is that he makes his videos I'm pretty sure we'd have more than one dog by now. As it is, if and when we ever do get another, we'll be getting a rescue. That'll be in big part thanks to Rocky.

My second Appreciation couldn't be much more different and yet in some ways it's really just the same. Theoretically Media is another YouTube channel, this time focused on the entirely inanimate world of AI. 

It's all the work of one man, Tim, who I am just now realizing doesn't appear to have a second name. He does have a Patreon, which has 179 members at time of writing. I am not one of them because I'm a mean bastard, like the rest of his hundred thousand YouTube subscribers, I guess. It's amazing anyone makes a living doing this stuff, isn't it? I'm sure being thanked for your service on a no-name blog you'll never read makes up for it, though.

Tim is like Rocky for several reasons: he's a fit-looking, fairly young, white male with a confident, easy-to-hear voice and a light, somewhat generic American accent, who never, ever stops talking. He doesn't say "You're a good girl" in an excessively imitable tone the way Rocky does so maybe Tim could work on a catch-phrase or two but otherwise they could be creative cousins.

What Tim does is keep me up to date on the latest developments in what he and we are calling AI, particularly in the field of the arts. Or "Media" as he has it. He covers image generators, video generators and audio generators, mostly, and it saves me a whole heck of a lot of reading to have him in the background while I'm playing a game.

That said, I mostly sit and watch the channel. His videos are commendably short and to the point. Most of them run around ten minutes or so and he handily includes content breakdowns and links so you can skip to the part that interests you if you want.

I mostly don't because I like to listen to him talk. I like the sound of his voice and he has a dry sense of humor that amuses me, once in a while. Mostly, though, I follow his channel because he tells me things I want to know.

A while ago I might have said "things I need to know" but the whole AI scene has moved on since then. What was quirky and weird and cultish a couple of years ago and cutting-edge and exciting this time last year is now just more of the same, a background drone we're all having to learn to ignore. I got an email from Google last night, telling me all about how "Gemini is becoming a truly helpful personal AI assistant" and how it's going to be unavoidable in Google products and services from now on and instead of getting all excited I just found myself thinking "Well, that's not going to end well..."

Tim's channel is great both for keeping me informed of all the latest developments and keeping it all in perspective. Like Rocky, Tim is always optimistic, always enthusiastic but also always pragmatic. He's seen enough of this stuff not to be swept away by the makers' claims and yet he retains enough faith in the future to be able to imagine the use to which artists and writers and musicians will be able to put all this new technology, when it truly is able to do all the things people imagine it can do already.

Most importantly, watching Tim test and demonstrate the capabilities of the services and apps and models he highlights has heavily reduced my own desire to experiment with them myself. I've come to realize, in some part from watching his channel, that I'm wasting my time messing about with AI. 

When I started, I was hoping for something that would let me press a couple of buttons and type a sentence or two for a complete novel or album or movie to be delivered to my hard drive. In minutes, if not in seconds. I'm fairly convinced that the day will come. As it was in Carole and Tuesday, much popular entertainment, maybe most of it, will be created by AI one day.  I just no longer imagine I'll live to see it.

Whether that makes me lucky or unlucky I'll leave you to decide. In the meanwhile, I'll just send Rocky and Tim and all the others like them my thanks. So long as they keep doing the work, all I have to do is sit here and watch. 

I mean, that's the dream, after all. Isn't it?

Notes on the AI used in this post.

Since I chose a video that goes on about Flux, I thought I ought to use it for the illustration. I had five free credits for Pro services on NightCafe and I blew one of them on Flux and the other on Google's newish Imagen 3.0. The prompt was "Black and white Poochon dog chasing crows on a flat, green field." All settings were at whatever the NightCafe defaults are for the two services.

Other than that it's clearly a border collie or collie cross in the picture, the Flux image follows the prompt exactly. I give it a pass on the breed issues because no image generator ever really recognizes "Poochon" as a specific type of dog. I think that's fair enough since it's not an actual breed, just a portmanteau for Poodle-Bichon Frise, which isn't a very well-known hybrid. I get better results if I just say "small fluffy black and white dog".

The image I got from Google Imagen, however, was completely unusable. The dog is chasing crows but not only is the dog not a poochon, it isn't black and white and it barely looks like a real dog. It looks like a bear-cub made out of marshmallows. The field being covered in thick fog really doesn't help, either... I've included it for the sake of curiosity and because it ties in rather well with my feelings on the prospects for Google's love affair with AI, as mentioned in passing in the post itself.

New York Groove

Since we're doing Creative Appreciation for Blaugust this week and we've broadened the definition from games to pretty much anything, I thought I'd give a call to someone I've mentioned previously only in passing: Jarret Wolfson. 

I have no idea who Jarret Wolfson is, although I have to say if that's their given name then wow! Lucky! 

All it says in the About section of their YouTube channel is "Just a fan of live music." Okay, that's not all it says. There are a couple of paragraphs about methodology ("All videos taken with the phone that I own at the time.") and intent (If there's a video of your band up and you'd rather it wasn't, just say and it'll be taken down but don't be a dick and start issuing takedown requests because the rest of the bands on the channel would like their videos to stay up, thanks very much.) 

I paraphrased that last part, obviously.

Couch Prints - Horsepower

What Jarret does, as far as I can tell, is go to a hell of a lot of gigs in and around New York City. Instead of just getting drunk or fucked up on molly like everyone else, he meticulously films the performance on his phone, then comes home and puts a selection of the highlights on YouTube, probably the same evening.

 Groupie - Poor You

Some of the bands are national or international acts on tour but plenty are famous only locally, if at all. Jarret's channel might be the only place anyone outside their neighborhood is ever going to see them. Nearly every bloody one of them sounds like they could be from nowhere on earth other than NYC.

The Lovenauts - Title Unknown

It's an amazing public service. Loads of people upload shaky, mobile footage of gigs they've been to but most of them are either unwatchable, unlistenable or both. Sometimes you find a club or a venue that publishes a video record of the bands that play there but mostly what you find is random and unconnected. 

Foyer Red - Slander

Jarret's uploads are coherent and contextual. Okay, sometimes you can't hear the vocals too well or the bass is too far forward in the mix but that's as likely to be the sound engineer. It probably sounded like that on the night.

 JessX - MFL

Jarret's channel offers an amazing insight into the independent music scene in one of the biggest, most innovative and influential cities in the world. Or it might. How would I know? I don't get out a map and mark the locations of the venues so I can check there's representative coverage of all five boroughs. Jarret may never travel more than ten blocks from the appartment for all I know.

Daisy Grenade - Are You Scared Of Me Yet?

I don't care. I'm not Simon Reynolds. I'm not working this up for three thousand words in the Quietus ffs. (By the way, since this is for Blaugust, the festival of blogging, guess how many active blogs Simon Reynolds has going right now, according to his bio? Forty! Forty separate blogs. That he writes. Himself. Imagine if he joined Blaugust...)

Razor Braids - Megachurch

No, all I care about is that Jarret Wolfson lets me feel like I'm there, in New York, on the scene, going to cool gigs in trendy clubs, seeing great bands and living that life. Plus I get to discover music I really enjoy that otherwise I'd almost certainly never have heard. Or even heard of.

Nation Of Language - This Fractured Mind

I wish I knew of a whole network of people like Jarret, putting the world in touch with the invisible world of musical micro-scenes all across the globe. I could name at least fifty cities whose scenes I'd love to explore. There probably is such a network. If I find it I'll be sure to let everyone know.

Ecce Shnak - Internet

For now, I'll have to content myself with New York, which, frankly, ought to be enough for anyone. Thanks Jarret. I know you'll never read this but you're doing good work and I'm grateful for it.

 SUSU - Title Unknown

And if you're taking requests, could we please have some more Mary Shelley? 

 Mary Shelley - The  Nursing Home Jig (feat. Laura Galindo)

Mary Shelley - Democracy Is Alive

Thanks!

Worlds Upon Worlds

In one of those confluences that happens surprisingly often, this morning I read three unrelated posts that all seemed to point roughly to the same thing. UltrViolet at Endgame Viable asked what happened to all "Those New MMOs", Redbeard at Parallel Context framed "A State of the Game Request", wondering how many people play our games and what they do while they're there. Finally, Bree at MassivelyOP questioned the supposedly popular belief that the mmorpg genre is in the middle of a damaging creative drought, asking "Is the MMO Genre Thriving in Scarcity?". 

I dropped a comment on that last one which, to save myself some typing, I'll repost in part here:

"I agree that the whole idea of mmo scarcity is flawed to begin with. There are more good, new mmos released than anyone is ever likely to have time to play. Most of them barely get reported beyond the initial launch publicity but they also don’t go away and plenty of people play them. In 2021 I’ve played two of the better new mmos I’ve played in years in Chimeraland and Noah’s Heart and just this week MOP has reported favorably on a third, Tower of Fantasy. Looking back a few years, how often does anyone talk about the excellent Blade and Soul, now looking at a sequel, or the highly entertaining AdventureQuest 3D?"

In saying as much, I was following up my comment to UltrViolet, an experienced mmo player and blogger whose posts I always enjoy but with whom I frequently find myself in considerable disagreement. I'd repost that comment too but although I could see it displayed in the thread after I posted it, when I look now there's no sign I said anything at all. (Just in case you're reading this, UV, which you may well be since you linked Inventory Full in the article, the link to the private server where comments are hosted returns a "404 page not found" error.)

Luckily, I can remember the gist of what I said, which is that we in this part of the blogosphere have a pronounced tendency to behave as though the only mmorpgs that matter are a couple of dozen titles (At most!), mainly Western, almost all over a decade old. Everything else is either invisible, ignored or dismissed for a variety of reasons, most of which could probably be summed up as "Not our kind of thing".

And that's more than fair enough. These are personal blogs not commercial gaming websites. There's no reason for anyone to waste a moment posting about any game that doesn't interest them. As Redbeard very rightly points out, we don't even have any objective way of finding out how popular any of these titles are, let alone which elements of their vastly varied gameplay people enjoy.

The best we can do is try to piece together a patchwork of detail by way of quarterly reports, Google Trends, Steam charts and if we're really desparate, sites like this. It's all very ramashackle and not very convincing.

I've ragged on the likes of MMOPopulation.com before but at least they have a list. A list of one hundred and thirty mmos, all of which I've heard of and most of which I've played. Okay, some of them have closed down and some are still in development so I'm not suggesting it's a good list, but it does give an indication of the depth of the field. There are a hundred or so MMOs on there that wouldn't be a waste of anyone's time to try.

I'm beginning to wonder if the whole idea of "scarcity", coupled with the belief that "they don't make 'em like they used to", might not be some kind of unconscious response, designed to make us feel more comfortable with the disturbing fact that there are actually more mmos than most of us will ever play and that many of those are really (Whisper it...) quite good.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that two of the new titles I've tried this year, Chimeraland and Noah's Heart, are among the better examples of the genre as I know it. I think it's pretty much self-evident that, in any era of genuine scarcity, either of them would have been seized upon as imaginative, entertaining games, stuffed with enough content to last most players months if not years. 

The same could be said, even more forcibly, about New World, currently being written off by almost everyone as a commercial and artistic disaster. Only in a genre with such redundancy could titles as deep and complex as these be consigned to the Five Minute Wonder file.

It's always been the same, though. I wax nostalgic occasionally about the days when every new mmorpg release was a major occasion and fans of the form made sure not to miss anything new but honestly? It was never like that. Even twenty years ago there were more mmorpgs than I was able to play and believe me, I tried. 

Even leaving out genre giants like Lineage, Fantasy Westward Journey or Dungeon Fighter Online, hugely popuar but not often played in the West, there are too many significant titles, like Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa or Club Penguin I never even got to try before they were gone. More tellingly, there are some very well-known titles still active that I haven't played, either: Age of Conan, for example, or Albion Online.

Naturally, all of us, who knock out these posts for our own amusement and the entertainment of our peers, tend to focus either on the games that interest us or those we think might interest our readers, if we're lucky enough to have any. (Trigger warning: Self-deprecation. Also Irony.) We also tend to re-frame the arguments in ways that seem obvious to us, even though our assumptions are frequently based on little more than direct experience and anecdote, rather than any kind of objective, analytical research. 

When I say "we", of course, I really mean "I". Making sweeping statements about how things are and what people do, when what I really mean is how they are for me and what I do, is a tendency I've tried to curb over the years but old habits always seem to have a rez on hand. I was going to hammer out a quick reply to Redbeard about how most people in mmorpgs don't raid and never have and how what most people really do is bumble around amusing themselves with a bit of this, a bit of that, but although I do still believe that's generally likely to be the case in most games, I can't stand the argument up with anything other than a few, increasingly dated anecdotes, so in the end I decided it was better not to say anything.

What I can say, though, is that far from feeling there aren't enough good mmorpgs to go round, I feel exactly the opposite. There are so many there's no chance I'll ever get to see more than a sample. And that's fine. I don't expect to read every good novel or see every good movie, either. I'll take what I can get and make the most of it.

All of which is a very roundabout way to say welcome to Blaugust's Creative Appreciation Week. I might come back around later to big up someone specific or I might not but I just wanted to put in a generic "Well Done and Keep Up The Good Work!" to everyone working in the genre: in both quality and quantity you all go well beyond expectations.

Thanks!

It's Back! They're All Back! : Blaugust, NBI, DAW

Just a short post today to thank Belghast for once again stepping up to host the traditional posting bonanza that is Blaugust. Even better, this year he's had the brilliant idea to combine Blaugust with two other staples of the blogging calendar that I think we missed last year - the New Blogger Initiative (aka NBI) and Developer Appreciation Week.

Bel has all the details in his opening post over at Tales of the Aggronaut. There's a sign-up form there so he can estimate numbers and also a link to the Blaugust Discord.

Going off on a tangent, I have to confess Discord weirds me out a little. Nothing to do with what it's used for but more the disturbingly conversational way the app itself goes about updating. I get the feeling it's talking to me as though it thinks of me as someone it knows personally but doesn't much like. I also get the impression Discord thinks I'm not very bright because it tends to jolly me along as though I was a small child.

It's probably my age but I'm not keen on software that personalizes itself. I don't allow Cortana to speak or indeed do anything for me and I don't like to address Google out loud as "Google" as my phone asked me to do yesterday. I'm all for AI that works like AI in movies and books but this kind of pretend personality is all a bit uncanny valley as yet.

I'm going to have to get used to it, I guess. Variety (Variety!?) reports SuperData as claiming Discord poses a major threat to Steam.

“Previously, Steam was invaluable not only because of its storefront but because it facilitated social connections between players,” said SuperData research manager Carter Rogers... Now, Discord is where gamers’ main friends lists live, not Steam.”

Valve has noticed the competition and taken steps to do something about it. The new Steam chat UI looks oddly familiar...

So, Discord it is. I imagine I'll get used to it.

I also volunteered as a Mentor. When Syp ran the first NBI he invited me to take that role, which was exceptionally flattering seeing as how I'd been blogging for less than a year at the time. Of course I did have a decade and a half of apazine experience behind me and apazines are just offline blogs, but I don't think Syp knew that...

Anyway, I'm mentoring for Blaugust, not that I have much of an idea what that entails. Looking back at my previous posts on "How to Blog" I suspect it will mostly mean giving out advice that I don't follow myself. When was the last time I backed this blog up, eh? EH??

The official start of the festivities is July 25th when the Prep Week starts so I'm a getting a bit ahead of myself but the main reason I'm posting this is for the NBI side of the house, to give anyone who might be thinking of dipping a toe in the blogging waters a bit of a head start. Each previous NBI has turned up a number of new (or new to me) blogs that went on to be some of my most enjoyed and most read and I'm hoping 2018's event will bring out a few more, or bring back a few that have lapsed.

The original NBI was focused on MMO blogging but this time around anything goes. I've been thinking for a long time about starting a second blog, somewhere I could link the huge number of odd and seldom-seen music videos/live clips I find when I'm trawling YouTube. Maybe I'll start that up - it could be quite low maintenance.

If you've ever thought of starting a blog now's the time! And even if you haven't, maybe now's the time anyway!

Small Is Beautiful : Developer Appreciation Week

It's Developer Appreciation Week, hosted once again by Ravalation, who explains the history and purpose of the event here.

Rav makes the very pertinent point that DAW is all about being positive so I'll resist making the very obvious comment about which MMO developer probably won't be feeling the love right now. If you can't say something nice best not to say anything at all.

I'd like to take this opportunity to extend my heartfelt appreciation, admiration and thanks to the Daybreak Team. Being a fan of Sony Online Entertainment all these long years has been difficult enough but saying you think things have actually improved under the new management is tantamount to seeking your own committal hearing.

Nevertheless, that is what I do think. The SOE team under John "Smed" Smedly either made or was very heavily involved in nearly all my very top favorite MMORPGs - EverQuest, EQ2 and Vanguard foremost among them.

In latter years, particularly once overall reporting passed from Sony Pictures to the Playstation Division, choices and decisions were made that even the most rabidly loyal fan would have had difficulty endorsing. Not to mention all the out-and-out crazy projects that flared and fizzled and vanished.

Since the transition to DBG under Columbus Nova the ship has steadied. When the Daybreak PR department offers up something new I no longer feel equal portions of dread and awe at the scale and hubris of what's being planned. Mostly I find myself thinking "oh, that sounds like a good idea".

The mysterious overlords of Columbus Nova keep their commercial cards close to their chests. What their long-term plans are, who can say? Information that came out following the axing of EQNext revealed it to be at best a self-indulgent vanity project. If it was, as was once rumored, the reason CN bought the company in the first place then the decision to stop throwing money on the fire was brave as well as sensible.

Fortunately for the future of the newly-minted DBG, against all reason and good sense H1Z1 continues to prosper. I've still never played H1Z1. I must get around to that some time this millennium.

Meanwhile the ever-shrinking Team Norrath continue to plump up the cushions on the comfortable old sofas that are EverQuest One and Two. Both games are regularly updated with entertaining content and despite limited resources the two teams somehow manage to pump out an expansion every year, the way they always have.

Moreover, EQ2 in particular looks better than it ever did. The updating of in-house development tools a few years back has paid dividends and every new zone and dungeon seems more gorgeous than the last. Whoever's doing the music is on the absolute top of their game, too.

It's very sad to see a developer of Domino's caliber lost to Norrath by dint of factors utterly outside the control of Daybreak or Columbus Nova but as she herself said "Daybreak is very lucky to have so many long-term veterans who are so passionate about the games they work on that they can't imagine wanting to work anywhere else".

A big thanks to all of those "veterans". Long may they stay and deep may be their influence on those who come to join them.

Of course, in typical Inventory Full fashion, this wasn't supposed to be a post about Daybreak Games at all. I spent an hour before I began, taking screenshots and a video, so I could write a piece in appreciation of a much smaller and less controversial team of devs: SmokymonkeyS.

The oddly capitalized SmokyMonkeyS are two Japanese guys. That's it. That's the team. Their biog on the website sets new standards for self-effacement:

SmokymonkeyS is a team consisting of two Japanese guys, one a programmer and the other a graphic designer, formed for the purpose of creating games. We are not professional game creators. We don't belong to any business company and have nothing to back us up. This game is created by only using tools available to everyone.

Well, geez Louise! If it's that easy, let's all go out and do it, why don't we?

Seriously, this is perhaps the most visually delicious, aurally sumptuous, subtle, delicate, enigmatic video game I have ever played. If it even is a game, because the game part is the least of it.

Ninelives is a work of art. That's all. You don't need to play it you just need to experience it. Perhaps it should have been an installation in a gallery somewhere not a free download on a gaming page but the art world's loss is very much gaming's gain.

A few months ago it looked as though time was up for Ninelives. In an ominously downbeat, almost depressive post on the game's website, SmokymonkeyS announced they were suspending development of their project because "the game couldn't gain enough support from players, we don't have enough funds to continue operating and developing the game and we couldn't maintain the motivation to continue the development."

When you think of all the games that do gain support it makes you want to weep. The one glimmer of hope in the darkness is that development has only been "suspended", not cancelled. The game is still up and running. You can download it here and you should.

What's more, there are still flickers of life showing. There's a new version of the client (I just updated this morning) and someone has finished translating the whole game into French!

The reduced teams at one-time major DBG and the tiny indie duo at SmokymonkeyS demonstrate that you really don't have to have a roster of three hundred to create and maintain something very special. You just need to want to do it enough. And have someone pay the bills that keep the lights on, of course.

When the time for Developer Appreciation Week comes around again next year it's entirely possible neither of these developers will still be around. I'd take a bet on Daybreak surviving but nothing's certain. SmokymonkeyS might run out of road tomorrow.

So don't sit back and let the days roll by, while you mean to take a look at this or go and try that or come back to the other for a visit, while never quite getting around to doing any of it. And don't wait a whole year to speak out about what you like about these games we play and these worlds we travel.

They may not be there tomorrow and neither may the people who made them. There are too many games to play them all but by golly we can play the ones we care about and let the people who work on them know their efforts are appreciated.

After all, you never know when the opportunity might end or if the chance will ever come again.

You've All Done Very Well! : DAW

Rowan at I Have Touched The Sky was musing recently on a perceived trend towards "meanness" among those who write about games, whether professionally or out of a supposed love for the medium. He bounced off a very good piece by Bhelgast , who was in turn reacting to a fascinating and thought-provoking interview with an anonymous "game developer in his forties".

There are some great quotes in that interview:

"Why do so many of the people who consume the things you make seem to hate the things they consume?"

I wonder that every day as listen to people in map or global or general chat complaining they're bored, that the game they're playing sucks or that some other game does everything so much better. I'm aware of the psychological pressures that mean some people really do feel trapped and without agency in the games they can't stop playing, while others crave attention and will do and say whatever they have to just to get it, but still...

"Most game journalists are lefties and a big percentage of the audience is right-libertarian."

Now, I have no way of knowing if that's statistically accurate but it certainly feels true. I wonder if it also applies to game devs and players? You might like to think that a huge, mass-market entertainment genre like gaming would attract a representative spread of aficionados from across the culture but:

"...look what our games are about. Killing each other. This is not a coincidence. We have the audience we deserve..."

Killing each other in the case of PvP games; killing AI-controlled semblances of each other, in industrial slaughterhouse quantities, if it's PvE. Either way it's surely going to have a significant effect on who's likely to want to play. Eldariel at StarShadow praises ESO, as others have before, for the way its quests can "...make you think about your choices and look past the obvious". Games that encourage or mandate that kind of "moral choice" always garner positive attention for doing so but the decision nearly always comes down to the same thing: "who do I kill?".

"The loudest, least reasonable voice dominates, and it seems distressingly possible that the loudest, least reasonable voice basically is our audience, writ large".

The squeakiest wheel gets the most grease, too. When you combine the above fear with the anonymous dev's earlier contention that "Most of the people I know in the industry, the higher up people, do not engage with videogame commentary at all" you begin to get a picture of a bunker mentality, through whose psychic walls only the loudest, most insistent cries have any chance of penetrating. Is it any wonder the quiet majority often ends up feeling unheard and, quietly, moves on?

The parts of the interview that revolve around presentation and perception mostly confirm things I already thought I knew or had heard about from other sources. Some of the detail is new, though, and disturbing. I hadn't realized that game devs had to be 'handled' by PR people during public interactions, much like screen actors or members of a boy band. I certainly had no idea, for example, that a games journalist doing a phone interview with a games dev could expect to have "a PR person on the line during [the] entire conversation", who would then call back later and request elisions and alterations.

As for the involvement, or even the existence of "videogame consultancies", well that was a completely new concept to me.

"Consultancies are mostly staffed with former game journalists, and so these men and women are being asked to come in and offer their expertise on what they think isn't working"

They appear to be something like flying squads of critics-for-hire, brought in to critique games in progress on the fly, submit a report to upper management and then vanish. It's not as if video games aren't hard enough to make already, just from a technical standpoint, without having the extra pressure of critical hired guns peering over your shoulder. I'm sure everyone does their best work that way...

There was another recent interview, much more lighthearted but also quite fascinating in some of the things it revealed about the process, in which three Daybreak longtimers looked back on mistakes they and others had made while working on the Everquest franchise. One idea they came up with, involving a zone with a timer that would be affected by player actions that would cause the zone to change dynamically, has been nine years in development and still hasn't made it to the Live game because, as Alan VanCouvering says, “It’s a lot of effort and we still haven’t figured out how to script all that”.

Something we probably all know but rarely acknowledge is that getting these things to run at all is a major achievement. Take an apparently simple concept like storytelling, for example. Many of us in this part of the blogging community, which is almost certainly one of the more thoughtful and positively-oriented corners of the wider gaming media web, have frequently criticized MMOs for their inadequate and unconvincing attempts to tell stories. I know I have.

The anonymous dev once worked on a proposed multi-player co-op game, something not even close to the scale of complexity of interactions between players that would be taken for granted in an MMO. It never got out of the studio. They couldn't even solve the problem of quest-sharing:

"It was all very dissatisfying, and illustrated to me and a lot of other people on the team how difficult it is even to pull off the simplest little thing in a multiplayer game that tries to include story".

He goes on to conclude that

"Games are impossibly complicated. I wish more gamers understood that".

It's a sentiment with which I can do nothing more than agree completely. I also think he's on the money with this final, philosophical apercu:

"Everything games are going through right now... is about this false struggle for authenticity and legitimacy....nobody wants innovation and creativity. Look at the sales of games that are genuinely interesting and innovative. Very few people buy them. Certainly not enough to fund an industry...Someone's not telling the truth about what they really like or what they really want".

Amen to that. 

Rowan's reaction to Bhelgast's piece and the original interview that provoked it was to announce the return of Developer's Appreciation Week. Several bloggers have picked up that ball and run with it, including Healing The Masses, The Mystical Mesmer, Harbinger Zero, GamingSF, Casual Agro and MMOQuests.

I've never been entirely comfortable with treating game developers as though they were analogous to rock or movie stars. The entire enterprise is far too collaborative to support that kind of adulation and idolatry and anyway I'm of an age when it just feels weird.

That's no reason to hold back from showing genuine and heartfelt appreciation for the countless hours of hard work, dedication, determination, imagination and creativity that just has to happen, day after day, year after year, simply to bring to life these amazing, magical, imaginary worlds in which we all spend so much of our time.

So, to all the developers, designers, artists, producers, coders, creators, technicians, managers and communicators of every kind, thank you! Keep on doing that thing you do and don't take it to heart when we take it apart. In this little corner of the blogosphere, at least, we only do it because we care.

I'll leave you with this. I think it sums up how I feel rather appropriately:

 









.

It's Good To Have A Project On The Go...

There are two projects running at the moment among some of the MMO blogs I read. I don't usually follow Scarybooster but his annual "Developer Appreciation Week" has been picked up by, among others, Rowan, J3w3l and Stargrace who I do.

As an only partially-reformed old punk I have problems with the underlying concept of DAW. I reached adolescence at the height of the Prog Rock boom, when being in a band was seen as an almost unimaginable fantasy and rock musicians and lyricists were taken quite seriously as members of some quasi-mystical High Priesthood.  When punk arrived with its radical ethos of "anyone can do it" most of that meretricious nonsense was briefly swept aside and it was wonderful.

A place for everyone and everyone in his place

By and large I still believe in the punk credo "It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it".
Creativity isn't the exclusive province of the magically gifted and creators aren't a class apart. We may choose to adopt roles - customer/supplier, audience/performer, player/developer - but roles are all they are and we can switch those roles at any time. I believe that when it comes to the Arts, the fundamental difference between any category of "Us" and "Them" lies in some combination of opportunity and ambition, not in some mysterious destiny.

Nevertheless, I also place a very high value on politeness and good manners and when someone does something nice for you I believe it's only right to express appropriate appreciation, so to all the many developers who've worked long and hard to bring the many worlds we visit to life..  

Thank You. 

Now get back to work!

The other theme, started by Syp and picked up by Jeromai revolves around playing ten unfamiliar MMOs over ten (non-consecutive) days. Leaving aside the rather obvious problem that playing an MMO for a single session is probably the best way to misunderstand it entirely, this does sound like fun. I'd very much like to join in but it would be ridiculously self-indulgent - I can't do justice to more than a tiny fraction of the MMOs I'm nominally playing already.

If I did, though I'd struggle to come up with ten new MMOs I haven't already tried. The obvious ones would be

Age of Conan
Wizardry Online
Planetside2
SW:ToR

(And I would have added Aion but Syp successfully put me off!)

Rusty Hearts is one of the few I've thought about and not tried, so that's a possibility. Beyond that most of what's left are MMOs I've considered and rejected in the past and I don't see revisiting those decisions as a likely path to a good evening's entertainment.

Maybe I'll do it and just call it The 5/5 Project...

I do have a couple of projects of my own in mind, both relating to GW2. The first, which I've already begun, is to level a character to 80 by completing each Map in consecutive order by level range and geographical propinquity. It's going both well and not so well.

My Asuran Ranger is level 18 and he's completed Metrica Province and Rata Sum. With only a few dailies and enough crafting to make his own leathers and bows thrown in, he finished  the supposedly 1-15 map Metrica around level 12. He spent almost the entire time fighting things three or more levels above him, which was almost exactly right in terms of challenge solo. The fact that almost all the Heart vendors he opened this way sold stuff too high for him to use, however, suggested that this isn't how it meant to be done.

Do you have puppies too?

Currently he's done about 20% of Brisban Wildlands and he's already well above the level of the content he's doing there, too. The game downlevels him, of course, but keeping at-level even through a single set of level-appropriate maps looks to be impossible. He'd have to forego any dailies, not gather or craft anything, never go to WvW, skip the whole of the Living Story...even jumping onto random events would be too much. it seems as clear as day to me that linear progression was never intended, indeed is actively engineered out of this game. No wonder some players who insisted on playing it that way from launch burned out so fast.

The gigantic upside to doing it this way is getting to see the incredible detail of this amazing world. There's more going on in just one GW2 Map than in some entire MMOs. I've been taking the time to speak to every NPC and to wait and watch while they speak to each other and it's a mesmerizing experience.

So many delicate, whimsical, subtle interactions, most of which don't appear to go anywhere at all. So many beautifully designed structures and buildings to explore, so many caves and lairs to find. It's a world of vignettes and wonders and only a few are marked on that Achiever-focused map.

Go everywhere. See everything. It's worth all the time you can give it. Whether I can ever give it enough time to see it all in this detail I don't know, but I plan to give it my best shot. Even if it takes a few years.

Subtlety's beyond some people

My other project hasn't even begun and yet I've already kind of painted myself into a corner with it by rolling that ranger for the Map Completion project. I only have one more character slot available and it's reserved for a Charr Engineer. Unfortunately, Engineer would be about the worst possible class for what I have in mind, which is to level up a character with the UI switched off.

Well, switched off while exploring and fighting. Going to need it on

Of course I'd miss all the jokes...

to buy and sell, allocate traits and skills, bank and all that good stuff. But out there in the big world I think it should be possible to survive and thrive without it. A ranger, with some very simple bow skills and a pet would have been ideal. I didn't think it through...

That project is on the back burner for now. I may need to buy another character slot. And think of another class that would be fun to play blind. I really don't need three rangers. Then again...