Af Wubbas Do (Or: Evil in the world of The Sims)

So I bought The Sims 3. So I like The Sims, and have done since the first one. So I usually buy most, if not all of the expansion packs. What of it? Huh?

If I sound defensive, it is of course because The Sims is seen by many as one of the banes of the hardcore gamer. I’ve found it fascinating over the years, though. Ever since first playing Sim City, then being able to fly around a Sim City 2000 save game in Sim Copter, I wondered for the longest time how cool it would be to get right down to the “personal” level… and the original iteration of The Sims delivered bigtime. It became a social event, too – I was living in halls at university at the time, so inevitably I made all of the people in our flat as best I could. Everyone came by regularly to see what was going on and laugh at who had pissed themselves or passed out from exhaustion that day (hey, managing six people is tricky!) and it is a source of many fond memories.

Fast forward to today, and we have The Sims 3. Some things haven’t changed much (the basic gameplay still involves bossing your Sims around and making sure they don’t shit themselves, though this has been played down a little in favour of “Moodlets” – mood “buffs” and “debuffs” – this time around), and others have changed a great deal. The biggest change is the much-vaunted “open world” design of the game. In practice, this means that Sims can walk out of their front door, walk down the street and go and visit someone else. The difference this makes is enormous – no longer are you confined to your own house or specific “community lots” – now you can actually explore the world, and there’s a bunch of gameplay elements to reflect that. You can go fishing, collect things, find “treasure” – in many ways, the design of the game is getting closer and closer to something along the lines of an MMORPG.

Anyway, this time around, as usual, I made myself and my wife and am playing them “straight” – that is, attempting to be as successful as possible and maintain the family bloodline. As such, as Sim Pete and Sim Jane enter their twilight years, their two kids are growing up nicely and developing into fine young men. I just hope they don’t die before the kids reach adulthood, which is, of course, a possibility!

Having read some articles online, the Prima official guide (which is a good, fun read if you’re interested in the game and its mechanics) and, most notably, this touching and heartbreaking blog about two homeless Sims, I was intrigued to try out a completely different kind of Sim, using some of the more… shall we say “unpleasant” Traits on offer at character creation. Here were the results:

This is Lars. As you can probably see, he’s a miserable git. Maybe people laugh at his Sephiroth hair and overuse of man-makeup. Whatever the reasons, he’s become a bitter and twisted individual. He’s Grumpy pretty much all the time, which makes it difficult to keep him happy. He’s also Evil, which means he delights in the misfortune of others.

Naturally, he has an evil-looking house surrounding by a grungy-looking moat/swamp combo. He deliberately designed it to annoy his neighbours, who have a very pleasant-looking house.

Lars wanders over to pay his new neighbours a visit and is confronted with Roxy, a young woman whom he takes an immediate dislike to due to her looking “a bit hippie”.

The conversation turns sour quickly. Roxy recoils in horror as Lars starts yelling at her for no other reason than he felt like it. He insults her appearance and her house. (Most of this was without any intervention from me.)

Lars decides enough is enough and spontaneously decides to attempt to punch out Roxy. He fails once. Humiliated, he tries again and is victorious. Both sims are left feeling faintly ashamed, but Lars is pleased that he’s caused some misery.

Dusting himself off, Lars turns to Roxy’s roommate, who has been watching in horror at the sideshow unfolding in front of her. Lars is sweetness and politeness, though, and uneasily (and some may say foolishly) she allows him into her house. Roxy is not happy.

“What a nice house,” thinks Lars, his Kleptomaniac Trait itching. He restrains himself for the moment, as people are watching and he’s already made a… memorable first impression.

In an attempt to ingratiate himself with his hostess (and perhaps build up some misplaced trust which could come in handy later…) Lars decides to tell the one about the broccoli, the tomato, the carrot and the pepper. Roxy’s housemate isn’t sure what to make of Lars’ aimless ramblings. But then there’s a clattering thump behind them.

Roxy has passed out on the floor. Evidently the exertions of meeting Lars for the first time were too much for her. Lars, Roxy’s housemate and Madame Dungarees all have their own thoughts on Roxy at this point.

At this point, the household gets another visitor. Lars doesn’t even bother to find out her name before he starts spreading gossip about how unlucky Roxy is. “She sure was unlucky to meet me today,” he cackles.

The visitor is unimpressed. Lars sneers, knowing that the poison has been dripped. Roxy blushes as she listens to him carry on.

Lars starts on Roxy again, who looks close to tears. Roxy’s housemate, getting rather fed up of this, starts thinking about going to bed and just leaving them to it.

Roxy decides to stand up to Lars and squares up to him. Her housemate stares into space behind the quarreling pair.

Finally, as Lars goes to give Roxy a good slap around the kisser, Roxy’s housemate finally decides enough is enough and politely asks Lars to leave on account of his “misbehaviour”.

He graciously leaves, bidding his hostess farewell. Then he tips their trashcan over…

…and steals one of their porch lights, not because he needs one, but because he can.

Tired and hungry, Lars heads home to contemplate the evil he has committed that day. Preparing himself a piece of toast, he suddenly realises that his house doesn’t have any chairs in it, so, unprompted by me, he decides to settle down on the toilet to enjoy his toast.

I was laughing hard by this point. This was such a different experience to anything else I’d done in The Sims before. Sure, you could play an evil God and kill them off by rebuilding their houses in ways that, shall we say, weren’t to their advantage, but the “negative” social interactions were always seemingly discouraged. By playing an Evil Sim, you’re actively encouraged to be mean and nasty to as many people as you can. The Sim’s Wishes reflect that, showing their heartfelt desires to go out and steal candy from a baby, or slap a special someone.

The expressiveness on the faces of the Sims has developed a lot over the years. Check out the faces that Roxy pulls as Lars is mean to her. I also found it pretty funny that Lars did a lot of the unpleasant things to Roxy completely of his own volition thanks to the “free will” option. He obviously felt an uncontrollable urge to make his presence known to his new neighbours, so I just kind of went along with it. It was fun, in an ever-so-slightly wrong way.

Give it a try. Playing an unconventional, flawed character presents some interesting challenges that you’d never come across if you were playing relatively “straight-laced”.

TWANG! Waggle! Kick! Punch! It’s all in the mind!

Those of you following me on Twitter may be familiar with my Jedi Health Kick blog. Perhaps you’re reading it already, in which case you’ll know I recently picked up a copy of EA Sports Active in my latest attempt to hammer and chisel my woeful body into a shape vaguely resembling human. It’s good stuff, and for anyone doubting the value of Wii Fit as an exercise programme, you can rest assured that EA Sports Active gives you much more of a battering than Wii Fit ever did thanks to the fact it actually takes you through set programmes (although, of course, you can create your own also) rather than leaving you to your own devices and relying on your own self-discipline which – let’s face it – your lack of is probably the reason you came to titles like Wii Fit in the first place!

The thing I like about it is how “videogamey” it makes the whole experience. Being a supergeek as I am, I like anything that rewards achievement in a noticeable way. I’m a sucker for slidey bars, percentage markers and trophies. Ironic, really, that I never got into sports, since sports are also filled with slidey bars, percentage markers and trophies. Anyway, the fact is that EASA is full of these things. You get trophies not only for successfully completing workouts, but for smaller things like doing a certain number of laps around the virtual track across all your workouts, doing a certain number of squats, burning a certain number of calories and the like. These are all goals that you would probably set yourself if you were one of those people who are “into fitness” and can motivate themselves, but for the gamers (or the lazy) amongst us, it helps to have something to remind us that even smaller achievements are worth celebrating.

Anyway, to cut to the tenuous link: there’s been a lot of discussion surrounding motion control and full-body control recently, particularly after E3. Some seem to think that it’s “the way that games are going”, with the idea of us standing up to play games and running the risk of hurricane-kicking our TV a very real possibility. Others are very much a fan of the traditional controller, believing that it is something fundamentally “gamey”. I’m inclined to fall into this latter camp, but the motion control thing has some obvious health benefits which are clearly demonstrated by titles like EASA.

The question is, of course, do you want something that is primarily an entertainment device to provide health benefits all the time? Look at other media. TV and books offer health benefits sometimes – you can watch a yoga DVD or read a lifestyle book – but for however many of these there are, there are an equal if not greater number of “junk” items to enjoy – pure, unadulterated enjoyment with no pretense of “doing it for your own good”. In this sense, while motion controls are cool and groovy, I’d like to hope that the controller isn’t dead just yet.

A key part of the experience is tactile feedback. While motion controls allow you to feel your own body moving, when it comes to actually touching or hitting something, you don’t feel anything. This is also a problem with touchscreen controls – a joypad on a touchscreen will never match a real joypad until a technology is developed where you can “feel” it. I also question how some genres would work with motion controls – take an FPS, for example. How do you look up? If you REALLY look up, then you can’t see the TV any more, so unless Halo Natal comes with some sort of 360-degree “vision ball” that you have to stand inside to play (which would be awesome, incidentally) then you’re resorting to flailing your arms around in some arbitrary gesture or pointing something at the top of the screen.

I think there’s work to do – and I just hope that people aren’t going to embrace these new technologies too completely. I very much like them and think they’re going to be a lot of interesting fun to play with – plus I think all of them provide plenty of scope for further titles like EASA and Wii Fit to improve gamer lifestyle, which can only be a good thing – but let’s hope the controller isn’t dead just yet, hmm?

Microsoft at E3

Just finished watching the Microsoft E3 presentation. As most people could have predicted even before seeing what was on offer, reception was somewhat mixed.

Predictably, everyone creamed themselves over the Modern Warfare 2 trailer and gameplay footage which I, ever the rebel, remain relatively indifferent about, though it is remarkably pretty. Halo fanboys spooged copiously over ODST and the “secret” Halo title, Reach. This I am completely indifferent about. When Bungie said they had a “top secret” project to announce, I was hoping they were going to show a new Myth game or something like that… but no. Bungie make Halo and nothing else now, it seems. Fair play, it’s made them an awful lot of money but seriously guys, something new once in a while really wouldn’t go amiss.

Other notable mentions went to Crackdown 2, sequel to the underrated open-world funfest from a while back – and for my money, one of the best implementations of co-op (or perhaps it should be more accurately called “concurrent play”, since you can both happily charge off in opposite directions if you want to) I’ve ever seen.

Then there was Splinter Cell: Conviction, which does look like it’s trying some revolutionary new tricks with presentation. Rather than having mission objectives and cutscenes taking players out of the action, many things appear “projected” on the walls, be these instructions or even flashback cutscenes. It was a really interesting approach, and the game looks to be supremely cinematic because of it. It’s certainly enough to get me interested in Splinter Cell again, a series I haven’t touched for quite some time.

Then there was Alan Wake, a game which many were worrying had fallen into the abyss of vaporware. But no – we saw it, including some gameplay footage. It looks to be something of a cross between Max Payne and Silent Hill, with, like Splinter Cell, some interesting presentational features. Wake’s narration of the action hearkens back to Max Payne’s overblown drawl from his games, and the use of light and dark is reminiscent of some scenes in the Silent Hill series. It certainly looks incredible, too, and could well be the thing that makes 360 owners feel a bit better about not having Heavy Rain to play.

Kojima also snuck onto stage and dropped the fact that a new MGS game starring Raiden would be hitting 360, and Square showed off some FFXIII footage. Both will likely be great, but there was nothing there we hadn’t expected.

The main part of the keynote revolved around the Project Natal technology, which allows real-time motion capture and voice recognition, allowing players to interact with games without needing a controller. It was made very clear at the outset of the presentation that this was primarily intended to be a means by which non-gamers could be attracted to interactive entertainment – but of course, this hasn’t stopped hardcore gamers bitching and moaning as they always do.

We saw a number of demos, including some questionable real-time avatar motion capture and animation and a fun-looking tech demo called Ricochet (essentially body-controlled Breakout). We also saw how Natal will allow users to interact with the Dashboard in a distinctly Minority Report manner by swishing their hands around and, much to the disgust of Atheistium over at viera.nu, allow their avatars to try on girly clothes while having a video chat. (To be fair, this was pretty cringeworthy, but I don’t see it being a huge part of most gamers’ lives.)

It was Peter Molyneux’s work with Natal that provoked the most interest and curiosity, however. Presenting a virtual human called Milo, he demonstrated the capabilities of Natal along with software by showing someone interacting with Milo by speaking naturally and using realistic gestures to interact with the virtual world. At one point, Milo invites the player to look into the water and a real reflection of the player appears on-screen, with the ripples in the water responding to their “touch”. It was a pretty incredible sight, and a glimpse of what the future might hold, especially for games like Oblivion. (Thanks to Ajguy for suggesting this.) Imagine being able to hold a naturalistic conversation with an NPC rather than tediously clicking through a list of topics.

As I mentioned earlier, reception has been mixed. Natal is undoubtedly amazing technology (assuming it works) but the self-professes “hardcore gamers” of the world are already up in arms about “dumbing down”. But the fact is, just like the Wii is not a system for these people, Natal and its features are not designed for this audience. What Natal will allow Microsoft to do is broaden their audience from the core of gamers to families and other non-gamers. With the introduction of other services on the Dashboard such as last.fm, instant-on 1080p movies (I remain cynical about this, given the general crapness of my connection) and live TV from Sky, the aim is very much to turn the Xbox from a simple games system to an all-purpose multimedia box that sits under the television as the centrepiece of your digital life.

I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. No-one suggested once that hardcore gamers would be left out in the cold – quite the contrary, in fact, with the announcement of big titles like Modern Warfare 2, Crackdown 2, Left 4 Dead 2 (yayz!) and numerous others. What Natal will do is simply open up the field of interactive entertainment to more people. If all they want to do is prance around like a pillock in front of their TV, then let them. But there’s always the possibility that they’ll get interested enough in the hobby to join the growing number of gamers out there and enjoy this rapidly-changing medium.

I think that’s quite a pleasant image of the future, in fact. Let’s see what happens.

What is Your Alternate Reality?

I’ve been banging on about ancient 8-bit RPG Alternate Reality since the last SquadCast now and am finding the process of revisiting it with an adult’s mind (i.e. one that understands what an RPG is) equal parts addictive and frustrating. The reason for this is that Alternate Reality itself is an incredibly ambitious game with very grand designs… yet its difficulty level at the outset is absolutely maddening… and yet (again) this difficulty level makes it incredibly addictive. You start think that if you could just get a little further… or if you hadn’t tried to punch that knight in the face while not wearing any armour… things would be better.

At this point, let’s pause for a typical playthrough from beginning to inevitable early death. Strap yourself in, we’re going to another world.

It’s a typical day in the city. Perhaps I’m on the way to work, or on my way to meet a friend. But disaster is waiting just around the corner, because…

Holy shit! Aliens! AAAAHHH!!

And now they’re abducting people! Interestingly, I’m not the only one abducted… it looks like the ship picks up three others. (I’m not sure if these other three people are ever mentioned… or perhaps it’s a reference to the fact you have four “save slots” on your character disk)

Uh-oh… we’re leaving. But where are we going…?

Ah, yes, space. Of course. They are aliens, after all. Wait a minute, I know how we can lift our spirits…

A little sing-song! Maybe this won’t be so bad…

As the song ends, two sets of big scary doors slam shut and I’m locked in a green room where I am invited to “become a new person”.

When the doors slide open again, I’m in front of a gate with a force field over it. Numbers rotate over the gate. As soon as I step through the force field, the numbers freeze in place, defining who I am to be in this new world.

There’s a flash of… lightning? Static? Something, and then…

Apparently I am “joined”, and ready to enter an alternate reality.

(In the subsequent loading break, you have to swap disks twice unless you have more than one drive. You thought you had it rough with JRPGs.)

And here I am at the Floating Gate, ready to begin my adventure. You’ll notice my statistics are distinctly average. From left to right, we have Stamina, Charisma/Charm, Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom and Skill/Dexterity. These have a potential initial maximum of 21, so Stamina, Charisma and Skill are pretty good, but Strength, Intelligence and Wisdom are pretty feeble. Fortunately, Skill is probably one of the most helpful stats early in the game, as it allows you sufficient mobility to avoid attacks from early enemies.

So, first job? Find a weapon. You begin your adventure in the city of Xebec’s Demise with only the money given to you by the strange portal at the beginning, no equipment and only some basic clothing. Fortunately, your starting area is the City Square, with the Floating Gate in the middle and shops all around. So, let’s take a look.

A smithy, huh? This sounds promising. I know he’s in at the moment, too, because I can hear him hammering away inside. (And yes, you actually can. This is just one of the cool “environmental effects” that you hear throughout your travels). So, let’s pay him a visit.

(Single-drive users can expect a disk swap at this point.)

The Best Armorers, huh? Sounds expensive. However, as the smith seems quite happy to stand there singing while I browse his wares, I take my time and consider my options carefully.

7,424 coppers? I was right, this place is expensive. In fact, there’s nothing I can even nearly afford in here. I tell him to forget it rather than risk offending him by making him a paltry offer (which might make the smith reluctant to deal with you in the future, when you could potentially afford his wares – one of the many things that AR keeps track of in the background). I step back onto the windy streets, still distinctly lacking in equipment. Time to explore.

As I leave the Best Armorers, it starts raining, which makes it difficult to see where I’m going and slows me down. Thunder crashes and lightning flashes. But at least I haven’t run into any ne’er-do-wells as yet.

Spoke too soon. A wandering zombie notices me but doesn’t have time to act. I don’t fancy taking it on in my current state, so I run for it. Fortunately, I managed to get away before it was able to do anything unpleasant to me.

A little further down the road, I surprised a rabid-looking Giant Rat. I elect to leave it alone as I don’t fancy adding a disease to the list of my woes. It’s still early days in this strange place.

After a little exploring (and a Hobbit surprising me, then running away without saying a word) I hear the sound of a smithy again… but there’s no doors in this building. Curious. I press against a wall and find myself slipping straight through it. A secret door!

Sure enough, it’s another smithy. Occums Weaponsmiths, to be precise. It’s cheaper… but still way out of my price range. Curses.

Outside, it’s still raining, and worse, I run into a Goblin. Desperate, I try and sweet-talk it into stepping down and maybe giving me some of its treasure and equipment. The conversation doesn’t go well, with the Goblin responding to my polite request by trying to stab me. This place is just like Southampton. Maybe I haven’t gone anywhere at all.

I respond in kind to the Goblin by punching it in the face. It’s a feeble attack, but at least it connects, which is more than can be said for the Goblin’s attacks. With my high Skill, I nimbly avoid and parry all of his blows and manage to knock the foe to the ground without sustaining any injuries myself. Unfortunately, the Goblin doesn’t seem to be carrying anything of value. I do, however, gain a total of 59 experience points from the whole encounter.

Night falls, and it’s still raining. I surprise a Fighter in the street, but he looks tough so I decide to avoid him while he’s still surprised. I begin to think it might be an idea to try and find somewhere to spend the night. It’s clear the City is an inhospitable place, but I imagine this becomes even more apparent in the night-time.

In search of an inn, I get mugged by a Skeleton. What a bastard. Fortunately, I manage to get away before he can attack properly. But how much did he steal…?

I check my pockets. Fortunately, I don’t seem to have lost anything irreplaceable, and I still have a few copper coins to my name. Enough to spend the night somewhere, hopefully.

I encounter a Dwarf a little further down the road. I’m not sure if he’s friendly or unfriendly, so I decide to turn on the Charm and see what he has to say about that. Bizarrely, he dies. I think this is AR’s way of telling me that this was a successful encounter, not that my tongue was so silver he simply collapsed and died in wonderment at my words. Possibly. Whatever actually happened (and I guess we’ll never know), I now have 205 experience points. Not yet enough to reach level 1 (You have to earn level 1! The indignity!) but a step closer, nonetheless.

A Troll shows its face next. It looks scary, so I try and disengage from it and escape. I do so, but not before it steals some of my water and food. This isn’t going well.

For a worrying moment, despite working with a map (an absolute necessity, as this was, of course, the days long before automapping) I think I’m lost, and I haven’t bought a compass yet. Fortunately, I get my bearings shortly afterwards and manage to stumble my way to the doorway of Mom’s Bar, where the giant rat I ran away from earlier (possibly) is waiting for me. The rat tries to steal some more of my food and water then tries to bite me, but I dodge it and duck into the bar to get out of the rain.

The bartender informs me that the band are on a break, but invites me to watch a dwarf dancing. Since I’m hungry and thirsty, I decide to take him up on his offer and sit at the bar watching the dwarf and listening to his quirky music.

I order some water and a food packet to take with me. This only costs me a few coppers, fortunately, and should give me enough sustenance to get through the night… I hope. I step back out of the door. I wonder if it’s stopped raining yet…

It has. But it’s still dark and I need a place to sleep. I stumble through the city streets some more, pausing only for another giant rat (the same one again?) to steal the food packet I just bought.

Eventually I come across a welcome sight – a door marked “Inn”. Unfortunately, as I reach for the handle, I’m attacked by a Gremlin. I ask it very politely if it wouldn’t mind awfully stepping aside if it would be so kind, and it dies at my words, finally giving me enough experience to reach level 1. Not only that…

TREASURE! The Gremlin drops a potion. I can’t work out what it is, but it tastes dry and is red in colour. I decide not to quaff it right now just in case it is deadly poison, which is entirely possible in this harsh world. The Gremlin also drops a shield, which looks “mundane”, apparently. I pick it up and wield it on my off-hand, not caring that I look ridiculous wielding a shield but not a sword. Cutting a rain-drenched yet distinctly self-satisfied figure, I barge into the Green Boar Inn.

I elect to spend the night on the common room floor as despite having my first taste of acquiring treasure, I’m not exactly flush with cash. I hand over 10 coppers and spend the night on the floor, asking to be woken at 9am the next day.

(Aside: This is, I think, the longest I’ve ever survived. It figures that the one time I decide to show you a “typical playthrough” and make reference to “inevitable early death” I’m here for ages.)

I step outside the door and give a charming greeting to a passing commoner. The commoner is obviously in a bad mood and promptly stabs me in the stomach. I try and apologise, but he stabs me again, so I run away, bleeding a bit. I’m also now very hungry and very thirsty. Time to pay that tavern another visit.

Seriously hungry and thirsty now, and my stats now starting to drop from thirst, I impulsively spent my remaining coins on food and drink – some grape juice, a couple of food packets and some chocolate cake. When I leave a few hours later, I’m still thirsty but I’m not hungry any more. Plus I enjoyed the band’s song.

Back on the street, the sun is setting (Already? I must have been in that tavern longer than I thought) and I encounter a Thief. I charm him successfully and take his two pieces of silver that he was carrying – this equates to twenty copper pieces. It paid for the chocolate cake if nothing else.

Incidentally, reading the official guidebooks and cluebooks for The City indicate that successfully Charming someone is indeed killing them – you pretend to be their friend then stab them in the back. So to the Dwarf I met earlier… uhh… sorry! This is something you have to be careful of in your time in the City. Encounters fall into three categories – Good, Neutral and Evil. You can safely do whatever you like to Evil creatures. Attacking a Neutral creature (and these include most of the humanoid ne’er-do-wells such as thieves and fighters) first before they do anything to you is considered an evil act… and tricking or charming a Good creature is a very evil act. As you might expect, dropping your reputation in this way is a sure-fire way to get the whole city pissed at you.

In a case of art mirroring life, I find myself “very thirsty” again, much as I am feeling now, sitting here writing this with a sore throat. Keen to prevent my already feeble statistics (in-game) from dropping any further, I head back to Mom’s Bar to rehydrate myself.

I order three glasses of water and sit at the table for a while, sipping them. It’ll be time to sleep again soon, which should help me recover the injuries I sustained with my ill-advised encounter with the Commoner earlier. The band sings an entertaining if unnerving song about not going into bad parts of town at night for fear of being set on fire.

I stagger out of the tavern and head back towards the inn. Perhaps tomorrow will be a more productive day.

I wake up and, once again, I’m hungry and thirsty. Time for breakfast at Mom’s Bar.

Unfortunately, I get jumped by a Swordsman outside the inn. The swordsman steals all my coppers then cuts me up with his sword. Fortunately, he proves easy to Charm. I hold my hands up in truce until he comes over, then I snap his neck. Unfortunately, he seems to have eaten my coins, so I’m now penniless, hungry and thirsty.

I’m not proud of what I do next. I use my not-inconsiderable skills of persuasion to “convince” a passing Courier to part with what he was carrying. Unfortunately, he was the walking equivalent of a white van with a “NO TOOLS ARE KEPT IN THIS VAN OVERNIGHT” sign posted on the back, as he is carrying nothing but a bitter-tasting potion which disappears in a puff of smoke when I attempt to quaff it.

I do hit level 2, though, so it’s not all bad news.

I’m reaching desperation point now. I come across a Fighter and attempt to sweet-talk him out of some coins. This fails and I get hit again. I manage to run away before too much injury is done to me, but things are starting to go downhill.

Saved! I find another tavern – this one called the Misty Mountain. But they want three thousand copper coins before they’ll let me in. Given that I don’t have any copper coins whatsoever, I am quickly ejected from the premises.

I begin to feel that my demise might be on its way. Death is peering over my shoulder. I slink back onto the street, dejected, weary and very thirsty. I manage to dredge up a food packet from my pocket to satiate my hunger for the moment, but there’s no water anywhere to be seen.

Unable to help myself, I stumble into the path of a robber and attempt to beat him back, but I fail. He takes my last remaining possessions and runs away. By now I’m parched and starving, and I can feel myself weakening moment by moment. I must cut a pitiful sight.

I collapse somewhere around the city’s walls and am confronted by a guard. My attempts to mug the populace out of desperation have not gone unnoticed, it seems, as he attacks me without warning. By now, I am grateful for the attention. I put up some meager resistance but secretly, within, am hoping for the sweet release of death as this existence has become too difficult.

I am slain by his greatsword and crumple to the ground, never to be heard from again.

Alas, I am dead.

So there you go – in slightly longer format than I anticipated, but never mind.

Alternate Reality: The City is one of those games that is infinitely better when you treat it much as I did above – as a “playground” where you make your own story. This is largely because the game has no aim as such – partly due to its design, and also partly due to the fact that the whole series was never finished – a crying shame, as the whole series had a huge amount of potential.

For the unfamiliar, the series was originally planned to be split into several interconnected volumes – The City (and the Dungeon beneath its streets), The Wilderness, The Palace, The Arena, Revelation and Destiny. Only The Dungeon ever made it out onto shop shelves – as a separate game rather than part of the original City package. The Dungeon had much more structure and actually had an “end” too – or more specifically, a point that clearly led onto the final two chapters, Revelation and Destiny.

Revelation and Destiny were the interesting-sounding ones. Towards the end of The Dungeon, the player character was supposed to acquire a keycard, which could be used to enter the Revelation area where everything suddenly became a bit more futuristic. The player would find themselves walking the corridors of an alien spacecraft, looking out through windows into a dramatic spacescape, while Destiny would allow the player to finally discover the truth – that abducted humans had been placed into a form of suspended animation within “cocoons”, each living out their own parallel life in the city of Xebec’s Demise and its surroundings.

Hold on a minute, you might think. This all sounds a little bit familiar. A bit Matrix-y if you will. And you’d be right.

Philip Price, author of the series, claims he once met a pair of movie directors who wanted to discuss Alternate Reality. It’s never been verified whether or not this was the Wachowski brothers, but there are certainly plenty of similarities between the two series, and it makes a nice story for geek folklore nonetheless. It’s a crying shame that Price never got to realise his ambition, however, as the whole thing would have been a magnificent achievement had it come to fruition.

As it is, The City and The Dungeon stand as two extremely interesting (not to mention playable and addictive) curios – role-playing games that were many, many years ahead of their time that arguably could finally have their original intentions fulfilled nowadays. It would certainly be interesting to see Bethesda working on a re-imagining of the series. But I guess we’ll never know.

Some great info and links on Alternate Reality can be found here and here. Check it out. Oh, and here’s that glorious intro sequence in full – a five-minute long intro on a 48k machine isn’t bad going, is it?

POKEY my SID

Forget Sega vs Nintendo, it’s time for the battle of the old sound chips.

As I commented on the recently-released 8-Bit Computer Retrospectacular Squadcast (which I really do recommend you go and listen to – it’s our best yet), I was an Atari boy growing up, largely because that’s the system we had at home – there was none of this “own every system” malarkey that goes on now, partly because the systems were a lot more expensive in relative terms than today’s consoles, and partly because pretty much the same stuff came out on all of them anyway.

The bitterest battles that we Atari people fought were against the might of the Commodore 64, a machine of roughly equivalent power and capabilities to the Atari 8-bit series of computers. Both had very similar specifications, so it was common for owners of the two systems to try and outdo each other whenever possible. This constant effort of oneupmanship often took the form of trying to outdo each others’ graphics as seen here in this equivalent screenshot from Alternate Reality: The Dungeon on Atari (first) and Commodore (second).

Alternate Reality: The Dungeon (Atari)

Alternate Reality: The Dungeon (C64)

Atari fans were quick to point out that clever programmers were able to get 256 colours on screen at any one time while the Commodore often seemed to have a more limited colour palette. But then Commodore would strike back with something like this shot, the title screen from Draconus (again, Atari first, C64 second):

Draconus (Atari)

Draconus (C64)

Facepalm. “Hey, where’s all your colours now, Mr Atari?”

Graphics were all very well and good, but some of the bitterest battles were fought on the aural front, with both systems having a great sound chip far ahead of anything else at the time – Atari being armed with POKEY, Commodore with SID.

Okay, I may be exaggerating when I say “bitter battles” but it’s clear that there was some rivalry here. Some compositions sound clearly better on Atari while others are clearly superior on the C64. And it’s the SID chip’s sound which has endured in today’s chiptunes. There’s still POKEY players and archives out there, sure, but nothing on the scale of, say, the High Voltage SID collection, an exhaustive library of pretty much every piece of SID chip music, both retro and contemporary, you would ever want.

So, let’s take a look at a few examples. That is why you’ve read this far, right? To hear some funky old chiptunes? All right. Here we go.

Zybex – Adam Gilmore

Atari version:

C64 version:

Two versions of a cool song that you’ll be familiar with if you’ve read my past entries on game music. Adam Gilmore worked on a lot of music tracks for both the Atari and the C64 (including the theme for Draconus, pictured above) and was clearly very familiar with how to get the best out of both of them. It’s difficult to say which one is the best out of these two – or even if there is a “best” one. The Atari version, to me, has a cleaner sound, while the C64 version has some more interesting synth effects.

Warhawk – Rob Hubbard

Atari version:

C64 version:

Rob Hubbard was one of the undisputed masters of the 8-bit sound chips, with games featuring his music frequently marketed due to that fact – even if said music only appeared on the title screen, as was the case with most games, including Warhawk here. In many cases, the demands that pushing the sound chip hard enough to produce complex music put on the processor meant that having in-game music was often impractical.

I’ve gotta hand it to the C64’s SID chip here, the Warhawk theme sounds hugely better on it – partly because it seems that Hubbard actually wrote a more complex piece of music for it. Listen through, though, and you’ll hear the kind of effects that you’d expect to hear on a standalone synth – vibrato, tremolo, chorus, echo – it’s impressive stuff.

M.U.L.E – Roy Glover

Atari version:

C64 version:

A much older and simpler piece of music than the kinds of things Rob Hubbard dreamt up, the M.U.L.E. theme is still a catchy little piece. For my money, I prefer the POKEY version of this one as the sound envelopes that are used, particularly on the melody line, just give the whole thing a bit more “fullness” than the C64 version which sounds a bit “dry”.

Action Biker – Rob Hubbard

Atari version:

C64 version:

Oh dear. It’s clear where Mr Hubbard’s loyalties lie now, isn’t it? The pathetic, short loop used in the Atari version of Action Biker becomes an actual piece of music on the C64. Thanks. Thanks a lot.

Digital music

Bonanza Digi (Atari):

Digi Freaks Digi (C64):

What many people didn’t realise (even now, in some cases, and definitely not in the early days) was that both of these sound chips were more than capable of reproducing and sequencing sampled sounds, leading to much more realistic-sounding pieces. Of course, the sound quality is nothing to write home about, but there’s something gloriously 80s about the sound of “noisetracker” pieces such as these – a phenomenon which continued with the 16-bit machines, particularly with the C64’s 16-bit successor, the Amiga, whose sound chip was so far ahead of Atari’s equivalent effort for the ST (which in many cases sounded inferior to POKEY) it was ridiculous.

So there you have it. A few selected examples from the Atari and C64’s sound chip back catalogues. Back in the day, I was genetically predisposed to hate everything Commodore but on reflection, there are many examples of its superiority in music production. There’s certainly got to be a reason that the sound of the SID chip has endured as long as it has and remains popular to this day, while POKEY remains relatively obscure. I’ll always have a soft spot for those Atari sounds, though.

If you’re interested in making chiptunes, this plug-in for VST- and AU-based DAWs provides a good way to get started for low-cost, while fans of the old NES sound should check this (free!) one out.

Sonikku za Hejjihoggu

I know I said I was going to talk about Persona 4 and City of Heroes, but indulge me for a moment if you would. I’m going to talk about Sonic again, since I’ve been playing the Mega Drive/Genesis Ultimate Collection thing some more. Specifically, I’ve been playing a lot of Sonic 1.

Replaying Sonic 1 a number of years after I last “seriously” played it (in my case, when it first came out on the Mega Drive) was an eye-opening experience. Firstly, you forget how difficult old platform games are when compared to the hand-holding that modern games offer. Secondly, you forget quite how many swear words are actually in your vocabulary.

I have a confession to make here – Sonic used to scare me a bit when I was a kid. Not “jump out of your skin” scared a la Resident Evil, but “edge of the seat, worried, frantic” kind of scared. I could never really pin down why this was when I was a kid – I just knew that, although I enjoyed playing it, it freaked me out a bit too.

Now, I have one word to say why: traps. Or more specifically, spikes. One thing I don’t remember having seen in many games I’ve played recently on next-gen consoles is a good old-fashioned pit of spikes. Or a big heavy thing with spikes on it that drops on your head. Or a wall that suddenly shoots out spikes and impales you on them.

Sonic is full of spikes. And their simple presence makes the whole experience of running, jumping and collecting things that much more tense, because you know that they’re one of the things that can lead to premature death, even if you have shields and rings in place. Plus, when you think about it, impaling something on spikes, or dropping spikes on it, is a pretty unpleasant way to die, isn’t it?

Thinking about it, an awful lot of these old games featured incredibly unpleasant ways to meet one’s demise, usually involving spikes, being crushed, falling down a big pit or, in extreme circumstances, a combination of all of these things. Sonic isn’t by any means the only one to feature painful-looking death-makers. Mario also had plenty of spikes and crushy things to contend with, as indeed did pretty much any 2D platform hero of the time. And even though these games aren’t gory at all, having a spike penetrating a place that is not supposed to be penetrated by sharp things looks painful!

Enough about my spike phobia (and Jane’s, incidentally – she actually can’t watch me play Sonic for fear of the spikes) – I had another point. Sonic’s design understands player psychology perfectly. Each level is crafted to play with your expectations and make you want to slap yourself in the face when you fuck up the same bit for the fifth time.

A particular case I have in mind occurs in the Labyrinth Zone, which is full of spikes and long underwater stretches where you can drown, along with swinging ball-and-chain things and bottomless pits. It’s one of the least “friendly-looking” zones in Sonic, and (for me at least) one of the more challenging ones. The bit I’m thinking of sees you tempted by an invincibility powerup… only to clonk you on the head with a big spiky ball and chain if you mistime your approach – i.e. if you charge straight in without pausing to see if it’s safe! Later in the same level, there’s another invincibility powerup closely followed by a nasty bottomless pit. Naturally, when you grab the invincibility powerup, you feel invincible, so you take rather less care than you would normally, leaving you highly likely to go barging straight into the pit. It’s frustrating and results in some colourful language but the key thing is, each time you mess up, you know it’s your fault for falling into the psychological traps left by the level designers.

Coming at this from a modern, more experienced and world-weary perspective, it’s been a real pleasure to re-experience the whole game and understand a little better what they were doing when they put them together. Good level design makes the difference between a game that is “cheap” and a game that is “challenging”. When I first started replaying Sonic, I was all for screaming “cheap!” at it – but now, having put a bit of time in, I know what they’re doing. I still make mistakes, but I know they’re my fault now, not the game’s.

This is in direct contrast to the recent Sonic games, where deaths are just as (if not more) likely to be caused by poor game mechanics than by player error or design psychology. It’s been sad to see Sonic lose his way over the years, but it does make me feel a little bit better to go back to the Mega Drive originals and find that they really are timeless.

Old Shit

Hey all! Thanks for stopping by. I realise it’s been a while since my last post, but these things happen. Sometimes real life takes over with a veritable shitstorm of stupid things happening, and this was one of those times. This is not the place, nor is it the time to talk about these things, but suffice to say that blogging hasn’t been at the forefront of my mind just recently.

Still, I plan to change that now and get back into the habit, and what better way to get back into things than with a good old-fashioned retro games post? You’re absolutely right, there is no better way!

Okay. So my old Xbox 360 semi-died on me recently, with the DVD drive pretty much giving up the ghost and on several occasions failing to register that there was even a disc in the drive. This, of course, is a problem for a fundamentally DVD-based system – and also, the Xbox was acting as our primary DVD player in the house, too, thanks to its fancy-pants upscaling shenanigans.

So eventually after a bit of umming and ahhing we (yes, we) decided to purchase a new one. I picked up the new Premium, or Pro, or whatever they’re calling it now, with the 60GB hard drive, which will be nice. That 20GB drive on the old one filled up surprisingly quickly. However, I do wish Microsoft had had the decency to include a transfer cable in the box. You can get one for free by sending off a form to them (through the post… no online request option, how quaint… and inconvenient) but mine hasn’t arrived yet, so I’m using my new 360 with my old hard drive at present. FAIL.

The point, though.

Game were doing a couple of bundles with the 60GB model. One was with Call of Duty 4, a game which I know is fabulously good and marvellous and the best thing ever but I really have very little interest in whatsoever. What did interest me, however, was the Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection (or Sega Genesis Fuckfest as Tolkoto of the Exploding Barrel Podcast memorably dubbed it), which was the other game on offer. The irony of the fact I spent nearly £200 on a console only to get a bunch of Mega Drive games with it was not lost on me. You know what else plays Mega Drive games and costs approximately a tenth of an Xbox 360? A Mega Drive!

That’s not entirely fair, of course, because the 360 version of the Mega Drive collection comes with a veritable plethora of 16-bit entertainment including all the expected things (Sonic 1, 2, 3, Sonic and Knuckles followed by various Sonic spinoffs as the blue spiny dude’s credibility slowly began to wane, like a slow descent into alcoholism and drug abuse) plus some things that I personally am very glad to see in there but many others likely won’t give a damn about (Phantasy Star 1, 2, 3, 4 and Shining Force, Shining Force II and Shining in the Darkness) and some other things besides. Purchasing (let alone locating) all these Mega Drive games would take time and money, whereas there’s apparently over 40 titles to play with in this collection. I say “apparently” as they seem remarkably reluctant to list all the titles in too many places. Perhaps this means there’s some pleasant surprises tucked away somewhere.

Sonic the Hedgehog

What struck me having played a few of these is that many of these games are still fundamentally excellent games. Sonic in particular still plays very well, although it’s easy to forget with the rose-tinted spectacles quite how frustrating it was at times. It’s also interesting to play a properly optimised version of these games finally. I’ve spent my whole life thinking that one of Sonic 2’s great new features was the fact it ran at approximately twice the speed of the original Sonic. Not true. The PAL version of Sonic 2 ran at roughly twice the speed of the original PAL version of Sonic. In fact, this collection has taught me that Sonic 1 is actually quite fast and the original PAL port was one of the shoddiest 60-50Hz hack jobs of all time.

There’s also some pleasant curios on the collection, too. I never knew the Mega Drive played host to a Roguelike, for example, but it did, in the form of Fatal Labyrinth (which is one of those examples of Japanese titling where two random, vaguely related words are thrown together) – an absolutely shameless remake of Rogue with 16-bit sprite graphics and smooth scrolling. It doesn’t have much in the way of depth (as the original Rogue didn’t – it wasn’t until later titles like Moria and Angband that they became the behemoths they are today) but it includes a lot of the elements that make Rogue fun – the fact you don’t know what anything does until you take a risk and use it being the main one. Chug back a potion and you might suddenly be stronger. Conversely, you might suddenly go blind. It’s as brutal as Rogue and, despite its simplicity, it’s actually fun and addictive.

Fatal Labyrinth

There’s a whole batch of unlockable extras too, with the usual video interviews that you get with this kind of package, but also a selection of Master System and arcade titles too. All in all, it’s a great package that I will certainly enjoy delving into on a regular basis. Plenty of interesting Achievements to go for too – they’re not just of the “Complete Sonic” variety, there’s a little bit of creativity there, too. The Achievements are also used to unlock the additional content, too, so that actually gives you some incentive to go for them, too.

Anyway. More soon. I have plenty of things I want to talk about over the next few days, not least of which include Persona 4 along with City of Heroes and its new expansion, the Mission Architect.

See you soon.

Avatar Integration and Feeling the Burn

In my last post, I discussed the virtual world of Second Life. This is something that, as you probably noticed, is of particular interest to me – and I’m not the only one. Jenn Frank posted entries about the issue of avatars and personal identity at some length here and here – two articles on which I also commented at some length – and this led onto an interesting discussion of whether avatars were a reflection of your real-life personality or a fantastical creation from the depths of your own mind.

There are no particular conclusions to draw on this issue, as everyone’s different. Just because someone enjoys being tied up and sodomized in Second Life (not me, I might add) doesn’t necessarily mean that they will in real life. Just because a guy plays a woman (also not me, though I have been known on more than one occasion to play female characters in games), it doesn’t mean that they want a sex change. An avatar doesn’t have to look anything like the real-life human behind the controls, but sometimes it does.

My avatar, until recently, looked like me, sort of, a bit. A slightly-idealised version of me, if you will, if I were slightly cooler, less fat and able to pull off black leather jackets and red hair. This all changed the other night, however, when a friend that I had previously only had passing contact with on photo exchange site Flickr decided that tonight would be the night we would meet in-world. Said friend is an active Second Life photographer, fond of, as I am, grabbing groups of good-looking avatars, snapping some pictures of them and then Photoshopping the hell out of them in order to produce some pretty pics. I have something of a liking for this process myself, so here’s a picture of aforementioned friend following aforementioned Photoshop mangling:

(Incidentally, if nothing else, working on SL pics is a fantastic way to get to grips with Photoshop – I’ve learned far more about graphic design and image manipulation through playing with SL pics than by working on actual photos.)

But anyway: the point. Part of SL’s appeal is that you can change your appearance, shape and even gender on a whim. I hadn’t done this until now, as I felt something of a personal attachment to my avatar, as you tend to do anything that you “own” and “use” for a long time, or characters in a lengthy RPG *cough*Persona*cough*. Besides, I felt that my avatar was an expression of me – me putting myself “out there” as me. So it was with some trepidation that when Morgana and her friend asked me if they could try out a new skin and shape on me I accepted – I was stepping out of my comfort zone.

The new shape and skin were very different from what I had played before. I felt uncomfortable. It wasn’t me. But then the compliments started rolling in. Suddenly I was hot. As shallow as it sounds, a simple change in appearance – an easy matter in SL – was enough to bring these compliments and by extension, give me a huge amount of confidence. Over the subsequent few days, I have grown accustomed to my new avatar – so much so that I feel I am now unlikely to return to my old one, at least for now.

But something else happened in me, too. I looked at my new, buff, muscular self with cool hair staring back at me from the screen and I thought… “I wish I could be like that.” The next day I signed up to our local gym and swimming pool complex, and I’m now following a regular exercise programme. It’s funny the things that affect you personally and give you inspiration – I never thought the whole avatar thing would work in reverse, with it giving me a desire to do something positive about my real life appearance. And while it’s unlikely I’m ever going to look quite like my improbably-shouldered alter-ego, it was very much the “trigger” to set me off on this process. It’s an interesting inverse of the usual “avatar reflecting aspects of reality” thing that I hadn’t thought of previously.

I discussed this with some friends recently, and they each admitted that they had had similarly peculiar experiences where something “uninspirational” had, ironically, provided them with the inspiration to make a change in their lives. Each of these things carried a certain degree of personal shame to them, too, so I won’t embarrass those friends by sharing them with you now. Suffice it to say that I was faintly embarrassed to say that it was SL that inspired me to kick off this workout programme, until I realised that it really doesn’t matter what it is that inspires you, so long as it inspires you. And this is why I’m sharing this story with you now.

If you’re the slightest bit curious about following said workout programme and my feelings towards it, you can follow my progress on Tumblr here.

On Virtual Worlds

I haven’t really blogged about this much on this particular site, but I figured it’s time to sit down and talk about it as it’s something that I’ve found consistently interesting for quite a few years now.

The subject is virtual worlds – online spaces where tens, hundreds, thousands of people can log in and join a virtual community for one reason or another… it may be purely to socialise, it may be to battle monsters, it may be to have fun, it may even be to have sex. And I’m not talking about community or social networking websites here, as those are a different beast entirely. No, I’m talking about actual virtual worlds, where you can wander around as an avatar, explore the world, meet other people and interact with them in any of the ways described above.

There’s literally hundreds of virtual worlds available for people to use nowadays, of many types – some are more “gamey“, others are more “social“, others still are focused on the less salubrious side of online interactions. Today I want to focus particularly on the virtual world of Second Life and its appeal to me, despite its many, many flaws.

I remember first hearing about Second Life while I was big into The Sims. My whole flat at university became obsessed with The Sims shortly after I built our first house, made virtual representations of all six of us in the flat, then realised that we didn’t have enough money to buy beds to begin with, so the whole “family” slept in recliners. Over the years – yes, I was that guy – I bought most of the expansions and later moved on to The Sims 2.

I was, like many other fans of the series, extremely excited at the prospect of The Sims Online, offering the opportunity to have the same kind of fun, but with other people involved. It never made it over here to the UK – at least, not in any prominent way – so I never got the opportunity to try it. I forget exactly how I came across Second Life as a result of this, but it was something I stumbled across without hearing anything about it beforehand, and I thought that the concept sounded rather like The Sims Online, with players being able to design their own virtual person and “live” in a virtual world. As it happens, it has very little to do with The Sims Online, but I wasn’t to know that at the time.

For the uninitiated, Second Life is an ambitious virtual world project by Linden Lab, offering “players” (and I use the term loosely, as it’s really not a “game” as such… unless you choose to make it as such, which we’ll discuss later) the opportunity to enter a world that is almost entirely user-generated. Buildings, textures, landmasses, interface features, animations, body parts, clothing – everything is created by the residents of the virtual world, and this is the thing that initially fascinated me. I couldn’t comprehend the idea of being able to log into something where the content was so fluid, where there wasn’t a static virtual world that was always the same every time you logged in, with monsters in the same place, prime “camping spots” and so on. So I signed up and signed in, not really knowing what to expect.

Second Life is a peculiar experience the first time you log in, especially if you’re more used to aforementioned online games with static content, such as World of Warcraft. You quickly become used to the concept of “rezzing”, which is the process whereby you enter a new location and you can see things downloading and appearing around you. This is disconcerting the first time it happens (and more than a little irritating if you find yourself stuck against a wall which hasn’t appeared yet) but, like many things in the world, you become used to it the more it happens. Similarly, you become used to the fact that other residents’ avatars also go through this rezzing process in front of you, so it’s entirely possible that someone could appear in front of you with no hair and no face until the textures and shapes have downloaded. Rezzing accidents are the subject of many a good laugh amongst SL residents, but they are accepted as part and parcel of life in the virtual world. People more used to traditional MMOs will likely find it a complete turn-off though – at least until they accustom themselves to it.

Upon arrival in SL, the question on many residents’ lips is “what on earth am I supposed to be doing?” And the answer is not simple. Explore, interact, build things, take photographs, join groups, play games, look at art, shop, fuck, roleplay, pretend to be a vampire… the list goes on for a mile, and all of these interactions are built using the basic engine of the Linden Lab-developed software, with extensions built, designed and scripted by residents of the world, just like everything else. People make in-world money either by paying out of their own pocket to buy “currency” – or by working a job, just like real life (albeit with MUCH better hours). It’s always interesting to hear how seriously people take their SL jobs, whether they’re a DJ in a club streaming their music through something like ShoutCast, a live musician, a virtual performer, a dancer, a greeter, a builder, an estate agent, a facility manger, a prostitute, a Game Master for roleplaying areas – again, the list of things goes on, and people have the opportunity to completely subsidise their virtual existence through virtual hard graft if they so desire.

Another thing that is almost immediately noticeable about SL is the sheer diversity of the avatars present. And we’re not talking a set choice of races here, with arbitrary “body size” sliders. We’re talking complete customisation. We’re talking this situation here:

This wasn’t anything particularly special happening – it was a discussion group where we sat down and had a civilised chat about a set topic. Like a real-world discussion group in fact.

And that’s the thing with Second Life. It has this immensely odd (yet perfectly natural-feeling once you’ve been there a while) ability to combine the mundane and the absurd. Everyone is distinctive in Second Life – because you’re not limited to hard-coded appearance options, you can be whoever you want to be. You don’t even have to be human. I picked up an awesome Pac-Man avatar the other day that allows you to spawn dots and ghosts and turn any place you go into a game of 3D Pac-Man.

In fact, the question of not being human is one of the more interesting sides to Second Life that I haven’t explored yet. It also happens to be the side that there’s a lot of sordid assumptions about, particularly around the “furry” avatars. Yes, there are people who choose to represent themselves as furry animals and then have simulated sex whilst masturbating furiously at the sight of their interlocked pixels. But equally there are people who choose to represent themselves as furry animals just because they like them. On one memorable occasion I was spending some time at a hangout with my earliest friends in SL (who are still good personal friends to this day, I might add) and I was introduced to an immensely clever man from a university who was working on lots of exciting things to do with AI. My friend Lyndy, who introduced me, assumed that because I “knew about computers” I’d be able to chat to this guy no problem. However, he was explaining concepts that were way over my head… but they were interesting to hear. The really peculiar thing, though, was that he was dressed as a fox. Not a foxy lady, no, an actual fox. In a waistcoat. If anyone remembers a really old DOS point-and-click adventure called Inherit the Earth… the main character from that? Fox-in-a-waistcoat called Rif? That’s about it.

Why do I remember that? I never even played it.

Second Life is flawed in many ways. I’ve talked about this many a time with Jennatar, and she suggested the notion that virtual worlds are a much younger technology than the Internet. Currently with virtual worlds, she says, we’re at a similar sort of stage to the Internet was in in the early 90s in that there’s a lot of stuff out there to explore, but navigation, user interfaces, efficiency and practicality haven’t quite reached the level of stability you’d need to be completely “mainstream”. This means that titles like Second Life are, at least for now, going to be “niche” interests. However, interestingly, the “niche” for Second Life perhaps isn’t what you’d expect – an oft-quoted “statistic” is that of the many residents of the world, a significant majority of them are female and over 30. This is certainly true amongst my circle of online friends – I think there’s one guy and about thirty gals on my friends list. This is also backed up by the fact that the “retail” sector in the world is very much female-dominated, with vast business empires and shopping malls devoted to female clothing, hair, animations and the like, with male products often relegated to the virtual equivalent of a dusty old cellar. One may argue that this may lead to a lot of males representing them as females, and of course this goes on – given the opportunity to live out a fantasy life, I’m sure there’s plenty of men out there who wonder what it would be like to be a woman – and a hot one at that (no-one is ugly in SL unless you make a specific effort to do so!) – and give it a try.

There’s a kind of implicit understanding amongst residents though – don’t ask, don’t tell. If someone doesn’t want their “first life” brought into it, then you don’t ask. If it’s a female on the screen, then as far as you’re concerned, it’s a female you’re dealing with. I actually don’t have a problem with this. Perhaps it’s because I’m not spending my time going around having sex with these people, but it certainly doesn’t bother me – if they choose to represent themselves in that way, for whatever reason that might be, then that’s their business.

Despite its many flaws and its perceived “niche” interest, I have a lot of time for Second Life. It’s an experience that is very much made by the people you interact with. Without people to meet, talk to and interact with you’re relying on stumbling across interesting content solo – and while there is plenty of interesting stuff to do by yourself, it’s always better to share with other people. Much like real life, in fact.

I’ll certainly be very interested to see how virtual worlds develop over the years. Will Second Life remain in its pioneering position of almost entirely user-generated content? Will it be overtaken by something else? Who knows. I do know that I have made some genuinely close friends in its strange world, many of whom I am unlikely to ever meet face-to-face. And I’m fine with that. By having their “virtual” face in front of me on the screen – even if it’s nothing like their real-life face – I still feel like I “know” them better than people I interact with on the Internet in less direct ways. Perhaps “know” is the wrong word – it’s difficult to describe, but knowing someone’s avatar feels a lot more “physical” (for want of a better word) somehow than a username on a page of text.

It’s not an experience for everyone by any means. It would bore the pants off someone expecting to play an exciting game, because it’s not a game. But as a means for virtual social interaction, it’s an interesting experiment… one that still has a long way to go, but also has an incredible amount of potential.

I blog about my experiences in the world in more detail here. I post my photos from the world here. Feel free to check them out if you’re the slightest bit interested.

Communication, mmm-mm-mmmm

Back in primary school, we used to have to sing songs in Assembly every morning. Then on Thursday mornings, we’d have “Hymn Practice” instead of Assembly, which in most cases was simply an Assembly by a different name. And then there was the one afternoon a week where the music teacher (who was also my piano teacher at the time) would come into the school and make us sing even more, using material from the BBC’s Singing Together radio programme and companion songbooks.

One of the awful songs that has inexplicably stuck in my head ever since those dark, song-filled times ran thus:

Communication, mmm-mm-mmm,
Communication, mmm-mm-mmm,
Way back long ago men sent messages
Beating out rhythms on drums and bones

I remember the rest of the tune, but not the words. It was one of those songs that parents like to describe as “funky” when in fact, due to the fact it’s performed by tone-deaf primary school students accompanied by a miserable pianist on an out-of-tune piano, is anything but.

This is a roundabout way of introducing the topic I feel like talking about today which is, oddly enough, communication (mmm-mm-mmm). I apologise, but if you’re reading this post, you’ve probably indulged my flights into the bizarre in the past.

There’s been a lot of attention on sites such as Twitter recently, and particularly, it seems, in the last month or so. Ever since Stephen Fry happened to mention it on the Jonathan Ross show here in the UK, people in my group of “real-life” friends have been signing up to it like crazy. This is a big thing, because many Internet “fads” often pass by the UK, the general (i.e. non-geek) population here being afflicted by a sort of general malaise and apathy that causes them to denounce anything where you have to do something that could be remotely considered as “work” (i.e. something where you have to use your brain or, God forbid, write something) to be a Bad Thing.

To give you an idea of how this has gone, let me paint you a little picture. I have been using Twitter for some time now as a means of communicating with my friends in the Squadron of Shame, who are mostly based in the US and Canada. It’s been great for that, but it’s also been great as a means of “stress relief” – a place to post those thoughts you don’t really want to say out loud but you kind of want people to “hear”, if you catch my meaning. I often refer to it as a means of externalising your own inner monologue, and for many people it is. Of course, blogs also carry that function for many people, but the immediacy of Twitter, coupled with the fact you are limited in how much you can say, makes it an attractive option for “microblogging”, its originally intended purpose.

Now, as I say, I’ve been using it for some time both as a means of communicating with other people and venting my own frustrations, of which there are many, as you’ve probably seen. My friends here in the UK often wondered why on earth I was bothering with such a simple website when places like Facebook offered far more in the way of options, applications and other fluff – particularly when Facebook offers its own system for microblogging through its status update system. But the fact is, the simplicity of Twitter is the attractive thing about it. Facebook is full of fluff, and has been growing more fluff as time goes on, as have other sites like it. Now, much more than simply being able to post messages to that hot girl you fancy at college, or trying to avoid exes, Facebook markets itself as a “platform” for the interminable flow of applications that clutter up everyone’s profiles and get in the way of the original purpose – communicating.

Twitter does no such thing. Twitter gives you a box to type in what you’re doing, and a list of other people’s answers to the same query. Nothing more. And as a result, the communication involved is much better. If you want to ask someone something, you ask them. There’s no wading through their Tetris high scores, no comparing people and choosing who is “the most punctual” (thanks for voting for me on that one, you obviously don’t know me THAT well) and no looking at daily LOLcats. Simple and clear.

There’s a time and a place for these different types of communication, of course, but it was just interesting to me that it took a celebrity endorsement for people in this country to pay attention to something as simple as Twitter, while the glitz and flash of Facebook, MySpace and Bebo sweep through the lands like a plague.

With this in mind, over the last few months I’ve been exploring different alternatives for communicating on the web. With the ubiquity of the Internet these days, you’re never very far from some means of talking to another person – be that in real-time via instant messaging services or in a more “when you feel like it” manner via services like Twitter, Facebook and message boards. There’s an interesting variety of different approaches.

First, of course, is the humble blog. You’re reading this, and presumably you’ve got this far otherwise you wouldn’t know I’d said “presumably you’ve got this far”. Why are you reading this? It could be one of several reasons. It could be because you want to get to know me better, it could be because you’re nosey, it could be because you’re interested in the things I talk about (though I defy anyone to pin a single “topic” on this blog) or it could simply because you like the way I write. How did you find me? Chances are, in my experience, that you found this place either because I told you, or because you clicked on a link in one of my other friends’ sites. How you got here doesn’t matter. If you’re reading this, you’re effectively allowing me to talk at you for several minutes before I pause, look around the room at the people who have been listening intently (and ignoring the people who wandered off to look at porn several paragraphs ago) and invite questions and comments in the… um… comments. Blogs can be good starting points for discussions, but they’re inherently one-sided – the blog’s writer has most of the power, and commenters have a more “subservient” role, if anything. That’s not a bad reflection on any of you thinking about commenting, before you say anything – it’s simply the way the medium works.

I find a blog to be a great way of getting complicated thoughts or opinions out of my head in a way I (and hopefully other people) can understand – when expressing myself verbally rather than through text, I often find that social anxiety takes over and I get tongue-tied. Here, though, I can consider what I say before I say it, and then invite questions or opinions after the fact.

Next up, I’ve been exploring Tumblr. Tumblr is a strange one, somewhere halfway between Twitter and a blog in its execution. Different people use Tumblr for different things. For the self-confessed lazy blogger, it makes a solid, easy-to-use foundation for blogging in the manner I discussed above. For others, such as myself, it becomes a sort of digital scrapbook, a receptacle for all the random noise floating around your head or pictures of cats that you see on the Internet that you don’t want to clog up your Twitter stream with constantly.

For others still, it becomes a means of communication, though in a completely different manner to something like Twitter. Tumblr’s communication centres around the idea of “reblogging” – taking something that someone else posted, posting it on your own page and adding your own take on it. This is something that tends not to happen with blogs like this one – either because they’re too content-rich, too long or simply out of respect for the person who wrote it in the first place. After all, if you want to comment, there’s a comments box right at the bottom. Not so on Tumblr, however – because posts tend to be short and snappy – a quote, an excerpt from conversation, a photo – it’s easier to reblog them, comment on them and thereby expose them to more and more people. In that sense, Tumblr is very much a viral marketer’s dream. Post something cool once and if someone reblogs it, then someone else reblogs it, then someone else… each time it gets more and more views and is accessible to a wider and wider audience.

Take this awesome picture of Darth Vader, originally from the Wired blog, apparently. By the time I came across it, fairly randomly, I might add, it had already been through about ten people. Currently, there are 134 “notes” on the image, which means it’s either been tagged as “liked” or “reblogged” by 134 people. Similarly, take the Microsoft Songsmith stuff. There’s absolutely no denying that Songsmith is a work of great evil, but I bet you know what I’m talking about without me having to post a link. Viral marketing at work. Sort of.

Then there’s more “active” means of communication. I have had a long-time fascination with virtual world Second Life, it still representing a fairly unique branching-off from the typical massively-multiplayer scenario in that there are no goals, no scores, no experience points, no set content – pretty much everything – buildings, objects, scripting that makes objects work, bits of interface, even avatar clothing, hair and body parts – is created by the “players”. This is a spectacular achievement, when you think about it, and whatever you may feel about Second Life and the people who enjoy it, there’s absolutely no denying that it’s an impressive means of communication and expression. It is very much its own world with its own rules and conventions, and it’s an interesting place to spend some time, even if you don’t plan on staying. Just to confuse matters, I started a Tumblelog about my Second Life experiences here, and microblog about it on yet another site called Plurk, which feeds to a Twitter feed, which… you get the idea.

There are a million and one other sites I could talk about on this note but I feel I have carried on for far too long already. The point of this post is simply to celebrate the possibilities for communication that the Internet offers. It’s easy to forget – or at least take for granted – the fact that simply by sitting down in front of our computer, we can easily talk to and interact with people from all over the world. Let’s never forget how awesome that is.