Names From The Past, Names For The Future

Back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, otherwise known as the 1980s, I used to write an opinion column for the comics fanzine I co-created and that column was called "Scattershot". It's mildly unsettling that my original opening line for this post was going to start with "A few scattershot topics I've been wondering about...".  Seems like some things haven't changed as much as I like to tell myself.

The thing is, though, "Scattershot" was always a good name for a column. Maybe I should start using it again. In fact, maybe I should start thinking more in terms of columns and features with names and set topics. It would add a much-needed sense of structure. Maybe I'll do that, although now I think about it I'm not entirely sure how I'd go about it in Blogger.

Blogger is pretty inflexible when it come to layout, or or so it's always seemed to me, but then that has a lot to do with the decision I made, not long after I started, to use a custom template that isn't officially supported. I don't dare change anything now in case it breaks the whole blog, which is the main reason everything here has stayed almost exactly the same, at least visually, for more than a decade. I imagine it's only because Google has pretty much forgotten Blogger exists that I've been able to get away with it this long.

Still, at least it's not WordPress, right? They break things all the time from what I hear. Wilhelm was complaining again the other day about something else WordPress had broken. 

I made accounts with both platforms before I decided to go with Blogger. The main reason I went that way was that Blogger seemed less technical. Now I wonder if it even that's really true. Wilhelm was describing how awkward it is to add urls in WP these days. Blogger has an HTML editor as standard. I toggle between the regular word-processor screen and the HTML window all the time to fiddle around with the code. Can you do that in WP now?

I am curious, I admit. It's a constant background worry that one day Google will remember they own a blogging platform and decide they don't want one. If that happens I might have to consider WP as an alternative so, since I already have an account there, I am toying with the idea of starting a WP blog just as an experiment. Maybe I should call that one Scattershot. It's a good name.

So much for the introduction. On to the topics.

Back To Camp

I became unreasonably excited last week, when I read a post at Kay Talks Games about how Animal Crossing Pocket Camp was coming back as an offline title. The online version shut down last year and even though it had been a long time since I'd played and I hadn't been thinking of starting again, I was somewhat miffed to know I wouldn't be able to go back and play some more if I happened to get the urge.

If we're honest about it, I imagine that's how most people feel when they hear that games they once played are closing down. It's not that anyone really wants to play them again, it's just that no-one likes being told they can't. 

A suggestion (Or demand...) that often comes up at such times is for the game to be somehow converted into an offline version, so people can at least go on playing on their own, but the response from developers is almost always that it would be too expensive or that technical reasons make it impossible.

Nintendo, though, will always be Nintendo. They do what they want not what other companies do and apparently what they want is an offline version of ACPC, so now there is one. 

It's very expensive for a mobile game. The full price will be $20 but for the rest of this month you can get it for just half that. Ten dollars is still a lot for a phone game, all the same.

And yet I am almost certainly going to buy it. ACPC is the mobile game I've played the most. I have a Label for it on the blog with eleven entries, many of which are full posts. I started playing in lockdown, when everyone else was playing Animal Crossing New Horizons and I couldn't because I didn't have a Switch and then I kept playing almost every day for months, long after people stopped gosh-wowing about New Horizons.

At the time, I played the game on my Kindle Fire but as it happens I have just bought a new phone. It's a budget phone but a good one. It's a Samsung Galaxy A16 and supposedly it can play Genshin Impact, albeit at low settings, although I haven't tried it yet and won't believe it until I do. If it can run GI, though, it certainly ought to be able to manage Pocket Camp. 

As well as Kay's post, I read a long and helpful review of the offline version at Eurogamer and just reading about it made me feel nostalgic for the many hours I wasted, talking to peculiar animals about their utterly pointless obsessions. 

I could do that again. I think I will. It'll be £10 well spent, I'm sure.

Free At Last?

On a thematically-related topic, there was a news item on MassivelyOP recently about another somewhat twee game I used to play and would quite like to play again: Free Realms. FR went under in the Great SOE Purge of 2014 but ever since there's been a bubbling, roiling, mumbling demand for some kind of return for the game that apparently everyone loved but no-one wanted to spend money on, something John "Smed" Smedley blamed on the players being mostly kids, although that never seemed to hold Runescape or Roblox back much.

For most of the last decade, the only runner in the Free Realms emulator race has been FR Sunrise, a project that began almost as soon as the game shut down and which has made many promises and released several videos but has so far produced nothing whatsoever of interest to anyone outside the walled garden in which it's supposedly growing.

Now, though, there's competition in the form of an open-source project described as "a reversed engineered walking emulator", meaning that so far all you can do is wander around an empty theme park, imagining the fun you'd have if the rides were switched on. 

I'm a little unclear on the exact timing behind this new initiative, which has been up and running for a good few months now, but the apparent lack of clarity over who actually owns the Free Realms IP these days might have something to do with it. That and the inability or unwillingness of the FRSunrise crew to get a functioning build to market, I guess.

The team behind the open-source project is looking for help to try to rebuild the content so feel free to pile on if you have the skills. I'll join you when there's a working game and I'll lay odds that will happen before we see any kind of publicly playable release from FRSunrise, whose beta sign-ups opened four years ago, which was when I signed up, but whose actual testing program, as far as I can tell, has yet to begin.

Metaversion

Here's a 21st century koan for you: if a virtual popstar performs in a virtual world, do they make a sound? Well, now's your chance to find out because Hatsune Miku is currently appearing in Fortnite Festival Season 7. She'll be there, for whatever value you care to assign to "be" and "there", until 8 April.

Three or four years ago, that news would have made me very excited. I'd have patched up Fortnite to log in and check it out and I'd have taken a bunch of screenshots and written a whole post about it. I will most likely get around to taking a look by way of Amazon Luna - I should really have done that before I wrote the post - but these vague, occluded hints of our true future no longer make my blood rush the way they once did.

And that's a good thing. It means that, just as I predicted, the real metaverse is already building itself around us as we ignore it. All the lunatic, self-serving, self-aggrandizing claims of the money-is-all cult have predictably come to nothing, while the infrastructure seeds and replicates with no external plan or purpose. 

The downside, as Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness has found to her irritation, is that early adopters attracted to the quirkiness and unpredictability of the tools now find themselves bored and uninterested by the much more consistent and reliable output of their successors. I find myself, as she says, "uninterested in generative AI that's too close to the real thing", which is why you may have noticed a lot less discussion about it here of late. 

What applies to GenAI applies equally to the metaverse. Still, I do like Hatsune Miku and I do find the idea of her "performing" inside a video game attractively irreal. We are slowly getting to where I want us to go even if we don't always notice it's happening.

Get Weird On Me, Baby

Since I've mentioned AIWeirdness and video games in the same paragraph, I ought to link to Janelle's latest post, especially since I'm about to cannibalize it for my own purposes. She rarely finds anything weird enough to comment on these days but she made an exception for a "generative AI knockoff of Minecraft that fails so hard at being Minecraft that it becomes something else."

Never having played Minecraft, it's not something I feel I need to see for myself, which is just as well because it doesn't want to run on my laptop.  If you'd like to take a look, here's the link. It's called Oasis, it only runs in Chrome, and it's supposedly "the first playable, realtime, open-world AI model". 

As Janelle suggests, it's also ultimately pointless. As it stands it's a curiosity precisely because of how little it reassembles an actual, functioning game but if it ever manages to become one, "this will be simply the human-programmed Minecraft we already have, except far more expensive to run." Now, if they could get generative AI to replicate Free Realms, then we'd be getting somewhere...

And that'll do for now. There's more but when isn't there? You have to stop somewhere.

I guess we'll end with a song because that's traditional around here. So, what d'you reckon the chances are of there being a song called "Scattershot"? And if there is, of it being any good?

I'll take it.

 

Notes on AI used in this post. 

Ironically, having gone on about not bothering much with AI any more, I immediately realized AI would be ideal for the header image. It's a great example of how un-weird the apps have become and thereby how useful but also not really worth talking about any more.

I wanted a picture of Hatsune Miku in Pocket Camp so I just typed in "Hatsune Miko in Animal Crossing Pocket Camp" and that's what I got. Kinda takes all the fun out of it, doesn't it?

The model I used was Flux Schnell at NightCafe.

Are We There Yet?

Not that I want to obsess about it but the news just  keeps  coming. I know these hype trains roll around with tedious regularity, only to end up shunted off into some cultural siding, rusting reminders of promises unfulfilled, but occasionally one just keeps picking up speed and momentum until it's hard to hear anything above the singing of the rails as it speeds by on its way to the future.

While many of the claims being made may be overstated, many of the reports exaggerated, there are already so many active applications of the process in play it would take a major effort of will to deny the reality that's already upon us. The future can look after itself; this is the present talking.

Of course, just as with most of the insanely over-optimistic claims made on behalf of the metaverse, much of what's being said and written about AI is pure nonsense. Whatever merits either may have are not helped by the crazed, evangelistic language and wildly hyperbolic assertions made by their most fervent supporters.

The evidence, however, speaks for itself. For the imaginary metaverse so heavily promoted by shills for crypto and blockchain, sad, deluded failures like Decentraland do service as the very opposite of proof of concept,offering up ruined monuments to greed, hubris and self-delusion, as Dan Olson's lengthy and entertaining takedown takes almost too much pleasure in describing. Meanwhile, anguished, aggrandized pleas for recognition of AI sentience come across more as cries for help from those that make them than any remotely objective assessment of current technological capability.

It's all too easy in the current, fevered climate to make assumptions that lurch too far to the extreme, to believe it's either all a crock or a scam or a farce or the singularity or the apocalypse. It's none of these things. Then again, I'm not going to be the one to assure you there aren't crooks, scammers and farceurs at work here too. They're always with us.

Backtracking just a little, where I would take issue with Dan Olson is in his rubbishing of the notion that to believe the metaverse is already here is in some way to give in to vaguery that renders the term meaningless. Nope. It's here alright. Like AI, the metaverse is observably present. It just doesn't look like the photos in its press pack.

The metaverse is clearly the worldwide web we all use every day. It already fulfills all of the necessary criteria - instant communication anywhere at any time with anyone; immediate access to services and products; communal virtual spaces; avatars, abstracts, anonymity. The pieces are in place. The only thing that's likely or that needs to change substantively is our mode of access which, as Dan rightly explains, will not magically arrive as a world filled with people happily strapping half-bricks to their foreheads.

Virtual reality of the kind imagined by its zealots will have to wait for technical solutions several orders of magnitude more strange and rare than anything we've seen so far. My own feeling is that we're far more likely to adopt something along the lines of the augmented reality seen in The Expanse, where schematics replace flat screens via a form of projection, than anything like Star Trek's holodeck, but there's no need for either. The flat screens we have now will do just fine.

As the metaverse turns out to be nothing more than a fanciful rebranding of the digital revolution that began thirty years ago, so AI may end up being nothing more exotic than a collection of software we employ to reduce the amount of tedious busywork we've been mislabeling "creativity" for far too long. Ever since the industrial revolution, engineers have been automating processes that used to require manual labor; now the software engineers are getting in on the act.

Much of the negativity I've seen concerning the advance of generative AI into areas previously handled by low-wage, low-status workers has revolved around the inherent uselessness of the product itself. The argument seems to be that AIs are only capable of churning out reams of twaddle, which might well be used to replace the twaddle previously produced by people at a much slower and costlier rate, and that this is somehow a bad thing because it will put the twaddlers out of a job.  

At best it seems like something of a circular argument. If we don't value the output, why do we value the means of its production? And if we consider producing it a worthwhile way for someone to earn a living, why do we not value the work they produce? Is it humanitarian to want to reserve an occupation for human use so those without better prospects can keep themselves alive by producing work no-one wants or values?

Don't look at me. I did English. I think you want a philosophy grad or a sociologist or maybe even an economist. I just find it a bit unconvincing as an argument, that's all, which may well be because I don't know what I'm talking about. Wouldn't be the first time.

I also don't find it all that interesting. I'm not that bothered about who writes copy I don't read for  websites I don't visit. AIs or interns, it's all a bit too abstract for me.

A fight in which I do have more of a dog, and one which ought to be of particular interest to residents of this part of the blogosphere, might be the potential incursion of AI into gaming. There's been some talk of that of late, not least in the abrupt redirection of resources intended for the "social mmorpg" Galaxies of Eden into a business dedicated instead to "the creation of cybernetic beings and eventually infinite virtual universes."

I first read about this at MassivelyOP, where the tone of the reporting was decidedly cool. I'm used to MOP being heavily down on anything AI or metaverse adjacent, so I went directly to the source to make up my own mind. In this case I think I'd have to acknowledge the sarcasm and disdain is probably justified. I refer you to the embedded video in the linked page if you require further convincing.

It's my feeling that generative AI will come to play a substantial role in the making of video games, especially rpgs. The two seem to be made for each other. Far from feeling apprehensive about how they might interact, I'm very keen to see them strike sparks off each other. I do not, however, believe that, as claimed by the developers of Galaxies of Eden, "We are now at the precipice of attaining true AI sentience and infinite content generation". In your dreams.

They also claim to have "managed to craft a crudely sentient cybernetic being", something I more than doubt, even with the most generous definitions of "sentient" and "being". Or "crudely", for that matter. As usual, there seems to be a self-destructive desire to run at breakneck speed into the future, not just before mastering walking but at the very moment when the first, tottering steps are being taken.

A much more reasoned and objective experiment with AI integration in an mmo - or in this case a text-based MUD - was reported by New World Notes, a blog that styles itself "The world's longest-running metaverse news and culture site." I won't attempt to precis the full article; it's worth reading in full, including the transcripts of some of the ChatGPT-generated NPC conversations that took place in game. They are impressive, at least if you're the kind of person who'd normally impressed by roleplayers larking around. 

If nothing else, it demonstrates that ChatGPT can certainly improvise as well as most casual roleplayers, admittedly not the highest of bars. As Matt Mihaly of Iron Realms, the company behind Aetolia, the MUD in question, makes abundantly clear, however, any widespread integration between commercially available generative AI programs and mmos would be prohibitively expensive right now. 

What probably wouldn't be either impractical or costly, however, would be asking something like Chat GPT or Bard to write static quests. In fact, why speculate? In the immortal words of Luci from Disenchantment, as recorded on the T-shirt I'm wearing right now... Just Do It!

My prompt: 

 

"Here is an example of how quest dialog is formulated in EverQuest II:

(Which I've cut because it's far too long for the post - I used the first section of dialog here if you really want to know.)

Here is the structure of a short quest in the game:

" Speak to Gherrana Cobbleblork at the Highland Outposts to begin this quest. She asks you to "gather some feathers from the kragploom aviaks".

    Kill 10 of any type of Kragplooms.
        The closest ones are Kragploom chicks in The Highlands.
        More Kragplooms can be found on top of Kragploom Butte north-northeast of The Highlands. ( 91,223,197 )

Return to Gherrana for your reward. "

Please construct a short quest for the game in which a non-player character asks a player character to go somewhere and do something for them in similar style. Include names and some dialog to give the quest flavor.

 

And here's Bard's response:

"Sure, here is a short quest for EverQuest II:

Quest Name: The Lost Key

Quest Giver: Agnar the Smith

Location: The Commonlands

Quest Description:

Agnar the Smith has lost his key to his workshop. He asks you to find it for him.

Quest Steps:

1. Speak to Agnar the Smith in the Commonlands.
2. Go to the nearby cave and search for the key.
3. Return the key to Agnar the Smith.

Reward:

100 platinum pieces

Dialog:

• You say, "Hail, Agnar the Smith."

• Agnar the Smith says, "Greetings, traveler. What can I do for you today?"

• You say, "I've heard you lost your key."

• Agnar the Smith sighs. "Yes, I did. I was working on a new sword when I accidentally dropped it into the nearby cave. I've looked everywhere, but I can't seem to find it."

• You say, "I'll go look for it."

• Agnar the Smith smiles. "Thank you, traveler. I'll be forever in your debt."

• You go to the nearby cave and search for the key. After a few minutes, you find it on the ground near a pile of rocks.

• You return to Agnar the Smith.

• You say, "I found your key."

• Agnar the Smith is overjoyed. "Thank you so much! I don't know what I would have done without you."

• Agnar the Smith gives you 100 platinum pieces.

• Agnar the Smith says, "Please, take this as a token of my gratitude."

• You say, "You're welcome. I'm glad I could help."

That took Bard about five seconds and can anyone honestly say its substantively inferior to any run-of-the-mill mmorpg quest? If anything, it already assumes too much backstory compared to the average "Fetch" quest. 

 

I'm not suggesting the EQII team would be able to copy and paste the whole thing into the game verbatim - you probably wouldn't want to be handing out 100 platinum pieces for a Commonlands quest, for a start and I'm not sure where the cave might be - but I am saying it wouldn't require much more than a little tidying up before it could be slotted in alongside most of the existing low-level quests in that zone without anyone being any the wiser.

To my mind, it's not a matter of having AIs replace designers or writers so much as giving those people a powerful new tool that could make their work a lot easier - and quicker. If nothing else, it ought to make a big difference to those one-dev shops I keep reading about.

 

Maybe we will eventually be able to leave the AIs to it and all just sit back and consume what they produce but long before that paradisaical day arrives I suspect we'll be enjoying their human-moderated output without even realizing.

Much the way we spend much of our time in the metaverse every day of our lives right now.

It's All In The Report

I skipped posting the last couple of days partly because I had other things going on but mostly because I didn't have anything much that I wanted to post about. It goes like that, sometimes. One week I have half a dozen ideas; the next, none.

Actually, it's not strictly true to say I don't have anything I'd like to showcase here. There's plenty more I'd like to say about Noah's Heart, for example, but unless I can come up with some penetrating insight that feeds into an observation on the genre as a whole, I think it's probably best I ration myself to one or two posts a week on that one.

I can always do music posts, of course. Putting one of those together isn't much more than an excuse to play a bunch of songs I like and watch the videos on YouTube, a very acceptable way to spend an afternoon. On the other hand, I could just watch the videos and not write the post and the experience would probably be much the same - maybe even better.

There's always something about the other media - TV, movies, books and the rest - bubbling around in the back of my mind but the problem there is writing about stuff like that is quite a lot of work. It pretty much comes down to writing the kinds of essays media studies students have to do as course work, only without any prospect of getting a grade. I have to confess the bit when you got the essay back and saw what grade you'd got was always my favorite part. Without that validation the whole thing can seem a little hollow.

Then there are the posts that begin like this one; posts about the process of posting. Again, I find writing those easy and reflexively entertaining but even though I also enjoy reading other bloggers extemporizing on the topic of their process, I can't but feel it's a tad self-indulgent, a subject of limited interest to most.

Then again, I'm not here to entertain. Or educate. Or inform. Those are incidental benefits that may or may not, on occasion, attache themselves to my real purpose, which is self-expression and self-reflection. Just be glad I'm not asking you to read my poetry or hear about that one really weird dream I had the other night... 

What does any of that have to do with the picture at the top of the post? Frankly, not a lot. It's more in the way of a five finger excercise as I warm up for the post itself, another example of the process in action. What I came here to talk about today is a report published by IFPI "The voice of the recording industry worldwide"

IFPI stands for The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry although I had to go to Wikipedia to find that out; they don't explain it on their website. The organization has just released its annual report on music engagement, something I learned from a news item at NME, under the enticing tagline "Music fans are listening to more music than ever before".

That surprised me a little. I'd been under the impression engagement with music had been on the decline for many years. It had certainly been my belief, based partly on things I'd read but also on experiential evidence, that music - specifically popular music - no longer held the dominant cultural role it had enjoyed prior to - let's say - the turn of the millennium.

Of course, it would be very much in the interest of any organization representing the interests of the music industry to gainsay such a defeatist viewpoint. As you can see from the screenshot, however, this particular report does seem to be based on a good deal of well-sourced and properly weighted research. 

It's also very interesting and extremely accessibly presented. I have no intention of analysing, critiquing or paraphrasing the contents. Rather, I suggest anyone even the least bit curious clicks through and reads it for themselves. 

It'll only take a few minutes. Although the website offers the option of downloading either the Full Report or a Highlights Infographic, in fact both long and short form options are presented in the infographic format. 

They're really good infographics but I confess I was a tad disappointed not to get a traditional text report as well. There are pull-out quotes that make me wish I could find out more, like the one that reveals respondents cited more than five hundred musical genres, when describing the kinds of music they listen to. 

I was looking forward to plugging some of those unfamiliar genres into a search engine and thereby opening my musical horizons a little wider. I like hearing things I've never heard before. So, it seems, do most people. I find it heartening to learn that the number of genres people report listening to averages out to eight. That suggests a significantly more open-minded attitude than I would have expected. 

On the other hand, it's less than encouraging (and somewhat weird) to learn that "in those people most engaged with music such as people who subscribe to audio streaming and those who buy vinyl" the number of genres listed goes up just one, to "9 genres on average." It doesn't immediately stand out as a great improvement, does it?

Moving on to a subsection perhaps of more immediate interest to the readership of what at least used to be a gaming blog, we come to the section on music in video games. Or, more accurately, I probably should say the brief mention of same.

The report doesn't seem to concern itself with music made specifically for video games, although that may very well be one or more of those 500+ genres we didn't get to see listed in full. What it does want to highlight, to my own very great interest, is the use of video games as a platform for the distribution of non-video game music and/or as a venue for its performance. 

According to the report a truly astonishing 44% of "gamers" claimed to have "watched a virtual concert on a gaming platform in the last 3 months". Less astonishing is the statistic concerning the age demographic, almost half falling in the youngest bracket, 16-24.

The development of virtual performance and particularly the role of games as a platform for it, as regular readers will no doubt remember, has been an interest of mine at least since the begining of the pandemic. The only reason I have either Roblox or Fortnite installed on my hard drives is so I can visit them to watch singers, bands or movies on their in-game stages and screens.

Back when we were all banged up under viral house arrest, I predicted a bright future for these kinds of virtual shows. Given the kinds of unrelenting pressures currently threatening to crush the last remaining breath from the gasping live music industry, coupled with the relentless push of technology and the growing willingness of rights owners to join in with the fun, the road to a digital future for "live" music is looking wider and clearer than ever.

Anyway, as I said, I don't plan on picking the report to pieces or riffing on the dozens of themes it suggests. I just thought I'd mention it as something worth a few minutes of your day.

You're welcome!

The Rain, Arlo Parks and Other Things

I still have an unconscionable amount to say about Noah's Heart but I think it's probably time for a break on that front. I also have a music post brewing but I'm working Saturday and Sunday, so I think I'll save it for the weekend. Music posts are always relaxing and fun to put together after a long day at the book mines.

Since it's the end of the week, let's have a good old Friday grab-bag, why not? I'm sure I can come up with something... 

I'll even throw in a few screenshots I took last night the Olmec Rainforest, the brand-new island that got added to Noah's Heart in the most recent patch. It's very close to the mainland. I think you're supposed to arrive by boat but I was able to fly across the narrow straits on my jetpack. Did I mention we get jetpacks?

All the content there requires level 75 so I wasn't able to do anything more than ride around but it looks amazing. Shame about the never-ending rain but then, y'know, rainforest...

Ok, here we go! This is a good one. Sure to cheer you up.

Snoop Dogg and Eminem to deliver metaverse-inspired performance at 2022 MTV VMAs. 

I lifted that verbatim from a headline at the NME, where news reporting tends to be text-book neutral in tone. If you click through and read the whole thing, you'll find it's even more disturbing than it sounds.

Snoop and Eminem are inarguably two of the biggest, most recognizeable names in the most commercially successful form of popular music in the world. Granted, both of them base their fame on work done quite some years ago, but they still have A-list name recognition and immense cultural clout. 

Their impramature is significant so it shouldn't be too surprising they've given it to the best-known of the upstart NFT/Crypto tyros, Yuga Labs, the Bored Ape people. That in itself is concerning to those of us who fear the wrong metaverse is coming but there's something a lot closer to home to worry about for mmorpg fans, specifically.

The VMA performance is going to be actual not virtual, unlike the upcoming Charlie Puth gig in Fortnite. (I had to google Charlie to find out who he is. I'd heard the name but I thought he was an actor.). It will apparently be inspired by “the world of the Otherside metaverse”, which is “a gamified, interoperable metaverse” that “blends mechanics from massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) and web3-enabled virtual worlds”. It will, of course, be fully integrated with and reliant upon NFTs and Cryptocurrency, specifically ApeCoin.

Given the heft of the names here, I think it's reasonable to feel a frisson of doubt about where this all might be leading. I know we all like to handwave the future away when it doesn't suit us but change happens. None of us want this kind of multiverse but we might be getting it anyway.

Of course, as we know, making mmorpgs is a lot harder than people seem to think it is and takes a lot longer. Making mmorpgs that anyone wants to play for more than a few weeks is even harder still. 

The chances of Otherside turning out to be something other than a cultural curiosity seem slim, especially since even Mark Zuckerberg, with all his money, doesn't seem to be making much progress. On the other hand, I'm old enough to remember when mobile phones were comedy gold and the bursting of the dot-com bubble spelled the end of the internet. I wouldn't assume all this is going where we'd like it to go just yet.

It was Guild Wars 2's 10th Anniversary this week but I couldn't bring myself to care, much less log in. It's been well over a month since the last time I played. I understand there's no such thing as a cure and it's one day at a time but things are looking good.

There's certainly nothing in the current celebrations to tempt me back. If there's any company that underplays anniversaries like ArenaNet I've been fortunate enough not to play their games long enough to notice. Here's what you can get for ten years loyal service:

•   Birthday Booster (guaranteed) (2)  Teleport to Friend (guaranteed) (5)
•   Bag of Spirit Shards (guaranteed)  Birthday Card (guaranteed)
•   Black Lion Statuette (guaranteed) (2)  Proof of Legend (guaranteed)

Let's summarise that, shall we? 

• Two basic utitlity items you can get from daily login rewards. My banks are stuffed with them. 
• A bag of the kind of shards I get dozens, maybe even hundreds, of every day. 
• A "birthday card" with no picture and no greeting that can be converted into five thousand Karma, the game's legacy currency, of which I have tens of millions already.
• A couple of tokens for the cash shop. Enough to buy you some extremely basic utility items and nothing more.
• And finally, the one item original to the actual 10th anniversary itself, a measly single token to go towards the new "Decade’s armor set". It won't even buy you a single piece.

Compared to the never-ending shower of gifts anyone playing any of the latest imprted titles has come to expect, this is a joke. Those games also depend on cash shop sales but somehow they manage to give away mounts, skins, hats, weapons and every kind of boost and utility as a matter of course. Would it really bankrupt ANet to come up with some actual gifts once in a decade instead of clearing out the lint from the bottom of Evon Gnashblade's pockets? No, it bloody wouldn't. 

In other GW2 news, the game finally went live on Steam this week but only for new accounts. Existing accounts can't be linked for tedious but understandable financial reasons (Valve's 30% rolling finder's fee, basically.) I did briefly consider making a new account, as I did when the game went Free to Play, so I could do a blog post about it. I still might but as far as I can tell there isn't any substantive difference between the Steam version and the regular F2P so there's probably not much to say. Also, I really don't need a fifth GW2 account.

And in other, other GW2 news, it also arrived on GeForce Now this week. Didn't see that coming. Since one thing I've never had any cause to complain about in GW2 is any kind of frame-rate lag and my ancient PC can run the game as well now as ever, I don't think I'll be adding in the extra step but it's good to know the option exists. 

On a similar theme, I finally pulled the trigger on a VPN this week. I've toyed with the idea many times but it always seemed like too much of a bother to go through the set-up and payment process. Then, in the middle of the week, Firefox sent me yet another promo for their in-house version, at a discount.

I clicked through and read the details and it looked good but before I made a decision I looked at some reviews of the service, from which I learned that Mozilla uses a pre-existing VPN from another provider, Mullvad.  Firefox rebadges that service and charges about twice as much for it.

 

Granted, if you have a Firefox/Mozilla account it's neat and tidy to keep it all under the one roof but it turns out Mulvad is almost pathologically dedicated to avoiding any kind of paper trail, so setting up an account with them is about the simplest operation imagineable. You can literally send them cash in an envelope if you want.

I didn't do that. I paid by PayPal. It's very cheap. Five euros a month, flat rate. No discounts for longer contracts because they don't do contracts. For that they'd need to know more about you than they want you to tell them.  

It was super-easy, too, and very fast, as was the set-up process. And the service works just as advertised. I tried it for a while, logging into various U.S. media sources that usually block my I.P. All of them worked just fine. 

The problem is, anything worth watching still requires a paid account. It's all very well being able to fool HBOMax or Warner Bros into believing you're dialling in from New York but they still want to be paid. If I ever decide to subscribe to a service that doesn't operate over here, I would certainly use Mulvad to do it, always assuming I could find a way to pay that didn't trigger cross-border alarms but for now I can't see that I'm going to find much use for  a VPN.

The whole thing also has a downside that none of the reviews or discussions I read mentioned. It was all very well telling new websites that didn't want to know me before that I was now One of Them but old sites that already accepted me suddenly had no idea who I was. Using the VPN, I kept having to sign back into places that normally let me in on the nod.

Consequently I have the thing switched off most of the time, only flicking the switch if I want to visist some ring-fenced oasis of culture like the CW. It defeats about 95% of the point of having a VPN at all, which as far as I can see is to be able to creep around the World Wide Web like some kind of ghost-ninja, leaving nary a trace. 

Personally, I gave up caring who knows what I do online years ago. If anyone wants to track my progress from MassivelyOP to BBC Cricket to Pitchfork and back, good luck to them. I think it must be at least a couple of decades since I knowingly visited a website I wouldn't be happy to mention on the blog. I'm old. Nothing I do is likely to be interesting to anyone.

I doubt I'll renew the subscription to Mulvad when it expires in a month but I'd certainly pay them another five euros any time there happened to be TV show I wanted to see, if it was showing on a free service I couldn't access. It's a very low price for even one season of a good show.

And finally, out of my random sack of fun, I pull a video! It's Arlo Parks covering Julia Jacklin for Like A Version, which is one of my YouTube-subbed channels. Arlo Parks was one of my "discoveries" from this year's BBC coverage of Glastonbury. She won the Mercury Music Prize in 2021 for her album Collapsed in Sunbeams, something I failed to notice even though it was reported on all the music sites I follow. Shows how much attention I was paying.

Anyway, better late than on time, as any fashionable party-goer will tell you. 

I was even later to the Julia Jacklin party but now I'm through the doors, I'm having a great time. There's something about her voice and the arrangements she uses that have an almost ASMR-like effect on me. She has a new album out. I read a review today on Pitchfork and it sounds great. I already know some of the tracks, including the wonderful Lydia Wears a Cross and the excellent I Was Neon, both of which have already appeared here.

I'd buy the album now but this is the time of year when I have to start thinking about what to tell people when they ask me what I want for my birthday and Christmas. Yes, I do need to start building my wishlist that far in advance. I'm going to put Pre Pleasure on it. In fact, I think I'll go and do it now.

It's kind of an approrpriate title, now I come to think of it...

Sometimes It Feels Like Every Day Is Prime Day

Today is Amazon Prime Day, or as Amazon would have it "Prime Day" because obviously "Prime" is, itself, now a brand everyone recognizes equally well.  To anyone who doesn't really give a toss who's behind it and just wants the cheap stuff I guess "The Sale" covers it.

Actually, I doubt there is anyone like that. People seem to feel about certain companies the way they used to feel about religion or politics. Can't say I'm able get that emotional about it myself but then I'm old. All my receptors are worn down to nubs.

I had a quick look through some of the offers but as usual there are so fricken' many of them I soon lost the will to go on. Sometimes I wonder if companies wouldn't do better with smaller, more focused sales but the evidence seems to suggest otherwise.

As I mentioned yesterday, I might be in the market for a new phone, so I was looking to see if there was anything in that line going cheap, which led me to start thinking about the specs and whether in fact it made any difference whether a particular phone could or could not play games well, which in turn led me to muse over the whole concept of playing games on a phone and whether I would ever want to do it any more than I have up to now, which is really not very much at all, even though I first posted about doing it over a decade ago. All of that linked "Amazon" and "Games" together in my mind, which is how I came to log in to Amazon Games to see if there was anything new I should know about...

...and there was. I can't keep up any more. I mean, it's less than two weeks since I last posted about a new tranche of freebies over at AG and that was the second time that month. Should I be logging in every week just to check I'm not missing something?

Some of it was there already, I think, but I chose not to claim it then. Those Star Wars games, for example. Did I mention those last time? Let me check... nope, can't see anything so maybe they are new. The offer expires in two days so if they are they can only have been on offer for a couple of weeks. 

There's no time to dither. That's how I missed the Steam sale on Solasta. I'll almost certainly never play them but they're big titles. It seems rude to refuse. CLAIMED.

 Then there's a bunch that expire at the beginning of August. Those are definitely new since last time I looked. And guess what? There's a Lucasarts point & click adventure!  It's not Monkey Island but still! What's more, it's Manic Mansion, a game I have often thought about playing, not that I've ever done anything to make it happen. Well, now I have! CLAIMED.

Of the other three, only one drew my attention, the pretentiously and portentously named Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark. I have no idea what it is other than what it says in the description: "a tactical RPG much in the vein of great classics like Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre." I have no clear idea what those are, either, other than what I've read on Tipa's blog. She makes these sorts of games sound very interesting but then she makes everything sound very interesting so that's not much help. Worth a click, at least. CLAIMED.

The two I chose not to choose were the self-explanatory Fishing: North Atlantic, a trawler sim and Suzerain, a text-based strategy sim about running a newly-independent Scotland. No prizes for guessing why I turned either of those down. (Clue: life would still be too short even if I was fifty years younger.)

Having cleared my plate of free games I thought I'd better cast another glance towards the in-game freebies Amazon packages under their Twitch imprint. Those definitely have a faster turnaround so I thought there might be something...

I wasn't expecting more, free big name games but that's what I got. At first I was a little confused. Didn't I already claim one of them before? And turn down another because of some convoluted account-linking prereq?

No, I don't think I did. I'm probably thinking of Bio-Shock, which was free on Epic a while back and Far Cry, which was free on Prime if you linked to Ubisoft. This time around it's Mass Effect and Need For Speed: Heat, for both of which you need to link Prime to your EA account. 

Those are two games I very well might want to play at some point and as it happens I already have an EA account (For reasons long forgotten.) Amazingly, the login details still work and the process is very quick and simple. CLAIMED and CLAIMED.

Throw in yet another set of weapon skins for New World and I think we're done. I wonder how long I should leave it before I check again? A couple of weeks? I guess. They're bound to be giving away new stuff in August.

While we're on the subject, remember that Void Sheep Shoulder Pet I claimed for Roblox last time? No? Really? Well, I did. And now it looks like I'll get the chance to wear it. Throw it. Whatever you do with it.

According to a report on Pitchfork I read earlier today, from tomorrow until Friday, the excellent Soccer Mommy (aka Sophie Allison) will be hosting "a Metaverse listening party for her new album Sometimes Forever on the Roblox platform." 

Her own Roblox page doesn't invoke the dreaded "M" word, explaining "I’m hosting a Listening Party for my new album Sometimes, Forever July 13th-15th in select Roblox experiences! You’ll be able to hear the album and hang out with me in the below participating experiences. Check the dates and times to see where you can find me and be on the lookout for a private server link to be shouted out! "

All of which sounds quite complicated and daunting but I'm beginning to get the hang of how it works now, after the Pink Pantheress and Charli XCX appearances, so I think I can cope. Look forward to a report if I go and get ready to tell me just how terrible Roblox is in the comments, as usual!

Regardless of the widely-reported ethical issues, Roblox, together with Fortnite, does seem to be staking a claim to being the virtual concert hall of record for the 2020s. Maybe someone will come up with a more acceptable platform. How about... PUBG Mobile?

You what, now? PUBG? Where did that come from?

Well, from here, as it happens. The story, which I read in the NME, inevitably, since we're talking about KPop, involves legendary icons Blackpink, who "have announced they will perform a virtual concert within PUBG Mobile‘s in-game world later this month."

PUBG Mobile is not a game I currently have installed. It's not a game I've ever thought about installing and I don't believe I'm going to reconsider as a result of this news. I don't mind Blackpink. I 've heard a few of their tunes over the years and not really thought much about them one way or another. I wouldn't make the effort (and from the NME article it looks like there might be some effort involved, beyond just downloading the game.) just to watch their avatars dance while a few of their songs play.

Then again... I might. I do find this stuff fascinating and this is someone new entering the growing field. Maybe I should check it out.

What I'm really looking forward to is the day someone I really like announces a virtual gig in a game I already play. Regularly. As a game. Not just log into to watch and listen. Unfortunately, given my musical tastes and the kind of games I spend my time in, that's still a bit of a long shot.

Fortnite, Roblox and PUBG Mobile it is then! For now.

Cheap At Twice The Price?

Time for a very quick Friday Grab-Bag. It's almost becoming a thing here. Maybe I should try to think of a fancy name for it. 

Going to be slim pickings on the blog for a couple of days but I'll give notice now; it could get worse. This is my working weekend but I have dog-minding duty Fridays as well, that being one of Mrs Bhagpuss's main work days, so every other week is going to be a three-day drought. I probably should think seriously about giving up the post-a-day routine.

As I explained in yesterday's post, though, there are some unexpected benefits of having a puppy in the house. I am finally starting to get to grips with writing shorter, faster posts, something I've complained about wanting yet not being able to do for years. All I have do is work out how to make them worth reading and I'll be home free! 

On to to the meat, such as it is. (I've been a vegetarian of sorts since the late 'eighties so what would I know about meat?)

Everything So Expensive These Days, Isn't It?

I guess the big news of the day is the announcement from CCP that the basic monthly subscription for EVE Online is jumping a massive 33% from $14.99 to $19.99. Wilhelm has a post up about it, including the wide range of pricing options avaiable, depending on how long you want to commit to the game. It drops as low as $12.49 if you're willing to buy in for a couple of years.

Back when subscriptions were the norm, I almost always paid by the month. In retrospect I can't imagine why I was so unwilling to go for the six-month or annual options. I could certainly have afforded it back then and it would have saved me a significant amount of money.

These days, the only mmorpg subscription I hold is Daybreak All Access, which I pay for annually at a very considerable discount. According to DBG's website, the annual rate is currently $119.88, a weird-sounding number that actually works out at a neat $9.99 a month. 

That's a good deal for four mmorpgs, EverQuest, EverQuest II, DCUO and Planetside 2. Even more so since I actually play three of them, on and off. It would be an even better deal if Daybreak's owners, EG7, decided to turn it into EG7 All Access and threw in the rest of their games, including Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online. I'd pay a discounted annual fee based on a regular $20 monthly sub for that. 

Wilhelm speculates on which other subscription games might follow CCP's lead but there aren't really all that many left, are there? Almost every game has some kind of optional sub these days but hardly any make it mandatory. I imagine the few that do will be watching carefully to see if EVE players complain then pay or complain and leave. If the price rise is deemed a success, though, it will set a new baseline. 

Get Your Filthy NFTs Off My Nice, Clean Metaverse!

There's been some suggestion that the hike is either a passive-aggressive or a desperate response to the company having been forced to backtrack on the potential introduction of NFTs to EVE. If that's caused a potential shortfall in income, maybe it has to be made up some other way.

There was a very good opinion piece at Gamesindustry.biz about NFT's and the metaverse that I'd like to bring to the attention of anyone still capable of caring. The fundemental argument is handily summed up by the title: "Metaverse concepts should distance themselves from NFTs". They really should.

I particularly liked the author's take on NFTs: "which can most charitably be described as a solution in desperate search for a problem, and perhaps more realistically as a home-brewing kit for wannabe Ponzi scheme orchestrators". The metaverse, or more probably metaverses, is going to happen whether we like it or not, in the form of "some blend of virtual world technology with location-based augmented reality, delivered over high-speed wireless networks to a whole spectrum of access modes ranging from immersive headsets to discreet wearables" but NFTs absolutely don't have to be any part of it.

At least Raph Koster, all in on the metaverse as he seems to be, isn't showing the least interest in adding NFTs to his mix. Venturebeat has an interview with him about Playable Worlds, the "sandbox mmo" he's working on and for which he's just received $25m in outside investment, partly from Korean publisher Kakao, formerly home of Black Desert, now of Elyon and ArcheAge.

We still don't know what Raph's game actually is. As the interview rather coyly puts it, "The founders still aren’t quite ready to reveal their intellectual property and setting behind the game". We do learn that it's been "in the works for about two years, and now it is in full production", which I guess means we might get an alpha sometime around 2024.

Skim-reading the interview, it sounds about like you'd expect a Raph Koster project to sound, all economy, interdependency and socialisation. He's been banging the same drum for over thirty years now. I don't imagine metaverses are going to shake his rhythm.

I did have a couple of other things I was going to mention but certain puppy-related incidents have bitten into the time available so I'm going to leave it at that. That way, I still have a couple of items in reserve for tomorrow evening, when time's going to be even tighter still.

Also, in case anyone's trying to find any significance in the screenshots, you can stop now. There is none. I just don't like posts with no pictures and any excuse to use some of my Secret World poses.

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.