Personal History

Our lives today are more tracked, recorded and interconnected than ever before, for good and ill. Our phones can track our every moment, CCTV and other forms of physical recording have reduced our opportunities for privacy whilst out in public and, as the Leveson inquiry showed, modern technology makes it easier and easier for those who want to to keep tabs on all our activity. However, the aspect of this I want to discuss today concerns our online presence, something that is increasingly becoming a feature of all our lives.

On this blog, I try to be careful; I don’t mention my name, age or specific location and never put any photos of myself up. I also try, wherever possible, to be careful in other places online too; I don’t put photos on my Facebook page (since photos can be seen by anyone, regardless of whether they are your friend or not), try to keep a hold of my tongue when on forums, and try to operate a ‘look don’t touch’ policy in most other areas. But then again, I’m kinda lucky in that regard; I am not highly sociable, so rarely find myself in the position of having 100 embarrassing photos & videos put up concerning ‘that HILARIOUS thing you were doing last night’, and am not a public figure in any way. Basically, I am able to maintain a reasonable degree of privacy on the web by virtue of the fact that other people are unlikely to… contribute to my online profile.

Others are, of course, not so lucky; either that or they don’t especially care, which is, I suppose understandable. Sharing information about ourselves is, after all, pretty much exactly what Facebook and the like are for. However, we are frequently told how damaging it is to have such a wealth of information about us so blatantly available online; a quick Google and Facebook search of a client is now pretty much standard procedure when it comes to job applications, and even if there aren’t any pictures of you with underwear round the ankles vomiting into a fountain, they can build up a negative image of a potential client. An interviewer (well, a presumptive one) might, for instance, take a look at all the pictures showing you hanging round with mates at a club and think you are a habitual drinker and partygoer, neither of which exactly say ‘productive worker who’s always going to be in on time and in top condition’. Even beyond the world of work, there is the potential for serial embarrassment if pictures that were meant to be shared between friends make it out into the big wide world, and there is even the worrying idea of ‘cyber stalking’, made so easy thanks to the internet, entering your life.

However, perhaps most interesting are those in the public domain, both people and companies, who must control what totally uncontrollable, and usually unknown, people can choose to put online about them. Not only can this be personally hurtful for individual people, but for many such figures their livelihood is dependent on their reputation. All it takes is a spree of bad press reports for a negative image to tar one’s brand for a long old time, and all of the incalculable lost revenue that comes with that. The internet has a large memory and billions of people to contribute to it, and even a few particularly vociferous bloggers can keep bad words in the Google suggestion bar for a very long time.

This has lead, in the last few years, to the rise of a new industry; that of online reputation management. These companies have a simple enough remit; to disassociate their client from negative connotations online wherever possible. Unfortunately, this isn’t a matter of just shutting people up, because this is the internet and that kind of thing never ends well.  No, these businesses have to be a mite more subtle. For example, let us imagine, for the sake of implausibility, that Benedict Cumberbatch is linked with a rabbit-murdering syndicate, and although nothing is ever nailed down there are enough damning news bulletins and angry blogs that this thing is going to hang around forever. A reputation management company’s initial job would be to get this off the front page of Google, so they have to create some more content to hide the bad stuff; 94% of Google searches never get off page one. However, they can’t just produce huge numbers of spam-like articles to the vein of ‘Benedict’s a nice guy! Look, he’s cuddling a kitten! He gives money to nice charities!’, because people are smart enough to tell when that kind of thing is happening. So, a large amount of neutral or neutral-positive stuff is generated; certain sites might be paid, for example, to talk about the next film or theatre project it’s announced he’s appearing in. A variety of content is key, because if it’s all just carbon copies of the same statement people will smell a rat. Once the content’s been generated, there comes the matter of getting it circulated. Just writing a program to generate hits artificially isn’t enough on its own; this is where the world of sponsored Facebook links comes in, trying to get people thinking and talking about non-rabbit murdering stuff. This prevents more negative content from being generated and existing stuff from getting traffic much more effectively. The job is, however, an extremely slow one; a news story that breaks over the course of a week can take a year or two to fix, depending on the ferocity of one’s opponents.

When the world wide web, or ‘the information super-highway’, as it was also known back then, first came into our workld back in the 90s, people had high hopes. We could learn things, share things, discover stuff about one another, foster universal understanding. And, whilst we can now do all these things and more, the internet has become infamous too, scaring corporations and people alike with what billions of interconnected people can make happen. It is a strange place that many try to tame, out of necessity or out of fear. For many, it’s a battle they are doomed to lose.

PS: I feel like I should slightly apologise for not really having anything to say here. I guess I didn’t really think of a conclusion in advance

Advertisement

One Year On

A year is a long time.

On the 16th of December last year, I was on Facebook. Nothing unusual about this (I spent and indeed, to a slightly lesser extent, still spend rather too much time with that little blue f in the top corner of my screen), especially given that it was the run up to Christmas and I was bored, and neither was the precise content of the bit of Facebook I was looking at- an argument. Such things are common in the weird world of social networking, although they surely shouldn’t be, and this was just another such time. Three or four people were posting long, eloquent, semi-researched and furiously defended messages over some point of ethics, politics or internet piracy, I know not which (it was probably one of those anyway, since that’s what most of them seem to be about among my friends list). Unfortunately, one of those people was me, and I was losing. Well, I say losing; I don’t think anybody could be said to be winning, but I was getting angry and upset all the same, made worse by the realisation that what I was doing was a COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME. I am not in any position whereby my Views are going to have a massive impact on the lives of everyone else, nobody wants to hear what they are, and there was no way in hell that I was going to convince anyone that my opinion was more ‘right’ than their strongly-held conviction- all I and my fellow arguees were achieving was getting very, very angry at one another, actively making us all more miserable. We could pretend that we were debating an important issue, but in reality were just another group of people screaming at one another via the interwebs.

A little under a week later, the night after the winter solstice (22nd of December, which you should notice was exactly 366 days ago), I was again to be found watching an argument unfold on Facebook. Thankfully this time I was not participating, merely looking on with horror as another group of four or five people made their evening miserable by pretending they could convince others that they were ‘wrong’. The provocativeness of the original post, spouting one set of Views as gospel truth over the web, the self-righteousness of the responses and the steadily increasing vitriol of the resulting argument, all struck me as a terrible waste of some wonderful brains. Those participating I knew to be good people, smart people, capable of using their brains for, if not betterment of the world around them, then perhaps a degree of self-betterment or at the very least something that was not making the world a more unhappy place. The moment was not a happy one.

However, one of the benefits of not competing in such an argument is that I didn’t have to be reminded of it or spend much time watching it unfold, so I turned back to my news feed and began scrolling down. As I did so, I came to another friend, putting a link up to his blog. This was a recent experiment for him, only a few posts old at the time, and he self-publicised it religiously every time a post went up. He has since discontinued his blogging adventures, to my disappointment, but they made fun reading whilst they lasted; short (mostly less than 300 words) and covering a wide range of random topics. He wasn’t afraid to just be himself online, and wasn’t concerned about being definitively right; if he offered an opinion, it was just something he thought, no more & no less, and there was no sense that it was ever combative. Certainly it was never the point of any post he made; each was just something he’d encountered in the real world or online that he felt would be relatively cool and interesting to comment on. His description described his posts as ‘musings’, and that was the right word for them; harmless, fun and nice. They made the internet and world in general, in some tiny little way, a nicer place to explore.

So, I read through his post. I smirked a little, smiled and closed the tab, returning once more to Facebook and the other distractions & delights the net had to offer. After about an hour or so, my thoughts once again turned to the argument, and I rashly flicked over to look at how it was progressing. It had got to over 100 comments and, as these things do, was gradually wandering off-topic to a more fundamental, but no less depressing, point of disagreement. I was once again filled with a sense that these people were wasting their lives, but this time my thoughts were both more decisive and introspective. I thought about myself; listless, counting down the last few empty days before Christmas, looking at the occasional video or blog, not doing much with myself. My schedule was relatively free, I had a lot of spare time, but I was wasting it. I thought of all the weird and wonderful thoughts that flew across my brain, all the ideas that would spring and fountain of their own accord, all of the things that I thought were interesting, amazing or just downright wonderful about our little mental, spinning ball of rock and water and its strange, pink, fleshy inhabitants that I never got to share. Worse, I never got to put them down anywhere, so after time all these thoughts would die in some forgotten corner of my brain, and the potential they had to remind me of themselves was lost. Once again, I was struck by a sense of waste, but also of resolve; I could try to remedy this situation. So, I opened up WordPress, I filled out a few boxes, and I had my own little blog. My fingers hovered over the keyboard, before falling to the keys. I began to write a little introduction to myself.

Today, the role of my little corner of the interwebs has changed somewhat. Once, I would post poetry, lists, depressed trains of thought and last year’s ’round robin letter of Planet Earth’, which I still regard as one of the best concepts I ever put onto the net (although I don’t think I’ll do one this year- not as much major stuff has hit the news). Somewhere along the line, I realised that essays were more my kind of thing, so I’ve (mainly) stuck to them since; I enjoy the occasional foray into something else, but I find that I can’t produce as much regular stuff this was as otherwise. In any case, the essays have been good for me; I can type, research and get work done so much faster now, and it has paid dividends to my work rate and analytical ability in other fields. I have also found that in my efforts to add evidence to my comments, I end up doing a surprising amount of research that turns an exercise in writing down what I know into one of increasing the kind of stuff I know, learning all sorts of new and random stuff to pack into my brain. I have also violated my own rules about giving my Views on a couple of occasions (although I would hope that I haven’t been too obnoxious about it when I have), but broadly speaking the role of my blog has stayed true to those goals stated in my very first post; to be a place free from rants, to be somewhere to have a bit of a laugh and to be somewhere to rescue unwary travellers dredging the backwaters of the internet who might like what they’ve stumbled upon. But, really, this little blog is like a diary for me; a place that I don’t publicise on my Facebook feed, that I link to only rarely, and that I keep going because I find it comforting. It’s a place where there’s nobody to judge me, a place to house my mind and extend my memory. It’s stressful organising my posting time and coming up with ideas, but whilst blogging, the rest of the world can wait for a bit. It’s a calming place, a nice place, and over the last year it has changed me.

A year is a long time.

“If I die before I wake…”

…which I might well do when this post hits the internet, then I hope somebody will at least look down upon my soul & life’s work favourably. Today, I am going to be dealing with the internet’s least favourite topic, an idea whose adherence will get you first derided and later inundated with offers to go and be slaughtered in one’s bed, a subject that should be taboo for any blogger looking to not infuriate everybody; that of religion.

I am not a religious person; despite a nominally Anglican upbringing my formative years found most of my Sundays occupied on the rugby pitch, whilst a deep interest in science tended to form the foundations of my world beliefs- I think (sometimes) to some personal detriment. This is a pattern I see regularly among those people I find as company (which may or may not say something about my choice of friends)- predominantly atheists with little or no religious upbringing who tend to steer clear of religion and its various associated features wherever possible. However, where I find I differ from them tends to be when the subject is broached when in the present of a devoutly Christian friend of mine; whilst I tend to leave his beliefs to himself and try not to spark an argument, many others I know see a demonstration of his beliefs as a cue to start on a campaign of ‘ha ha isn’t your world philosophy stupid’, and so on.  I tend to find these attacks more baffling and a little saddening than anything else, so I thought that I might take this opportunity to take my usual approach and try to analyse the issue

First up is a fact that most people are aware of even if it hasn’t quite made the jump into an articulate thought yet; that every religion is in fact two separate parts. The first of these can be dubbed the ‘faith’ aspect; the stories, the gods, the code of morals & general life guidelines and such, all of the bits that form the core of a system of beliefs and are, to a theist, the ‘godly’ part of their religion. The second can be labelled the ‘church’ aspect; this is the more man-made, even artificial, aspect of the religious system, and covers the system of priesthood (or equivalent) for each religion, their holy buildings, the religious leaders and even people’s personal interpretation of the ‘faith’ aspect. Holy books, such as the Bible or Torah, fall somewhere in between (Muslims believe, for example, that the Qur’an is literally the word of Allah, translated through the prophet Muhammed) as do the various prayers and religious music. In Buddhism, these two aspects are known as the Dharma (teachings) and Sangha (community), and together with Buddha form the ‘three jewels’ of their religion. In some religions, such as Scientology (if that can technically be called a religion) the two aspects are so closely entwined so as to be hard to separate, but they are still distinct aspects that should be treated separately. The ‘faith’ aspect of religion is, in most respects, the really important one, for it is this that actually formulates the basis of a religion; without a belief system, a church is nothing more than a place where people go to shout their views at those who inexplicably turn up. A religion’s ‘church’ aspect is its organised divisions, and exists for no greater or lesser purpose than to spread, cherish, protect and correctly translate the word of God, or other parts of the ‘faith’ aspect generally. This distinction is vital when we consider how great a difference there can be between what somebody believes and what another does in the same name.

For example, consider the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban currently fighting their Jihad (the word does not, on an unrelated note, technically translate as ‘holy war’ and the two should not be thought of a synonymous) in Afghanistan against the USA and other western powers. Their personal interpretation of the Qur’an and the teachings of Islam (their ‘church’ aspect) has lead them to believe that women do not deserve equal rights to men, that the western powers are ‘infidels’ who should be purged from the world, and that they must use force and military intervention against them to defend Islam from said infidels- hence why they are currently fighting a massive war that is getting huge amounts of innocent civilians killed and destroying their faith’s credibility. By contrast, there are nearly 2 million Muslims currently living in the UK, the vast majority of whom do not interpret their religion in the same way and are not currently blowing up many buildings- and yet they still identify as Islamic and believe in, broadly speaking, the same faith. To pick a perhaps more ‘real world’ example, I’m sure that the majority of Britain’s Catholic population steadfastly disagree with the paedophilia practiced by some of their Church’s priests, and that a certain proportion also disagree with the Pope’s views on the rights of homosexuals; and yet, they are still just as Christian as their priests, are devout believers in the teachings of God & Jesus and try to follow them as best as they can.

This I feel, is the nub of the matter; that one can be simultaneously a practising Christian, Muslim, Jew or whatever else and still be a normal human being. Just because your vicar holds one view, doesn’t mean you hold the same, and just because some people choose to base their entire life around their faith does not mean that a person must be defined by their belief system. And, returning to the subject of the ridicule many practising theists suffer, just because the ‘church’ aspect of a religion does something silly, doesn’t mean all practitioners of it deserve to be tarred with the same brush- or that their view on the world should even matter to you as you enjoy life in your own way (unless of course their belief actively impedes you in some way).

I feel like I haven’t really got my point across properly, so I’ll leave you with a few links that I think illustrate quite well what I’m trying to get at. I only hope that it will help others find a little more tolerance towards those who have found a religious path.

And sorry for this post being rather… weird

Bouncing horses

I have , over recent months, built up a rule concerning posts about YouTube videos, partly on the grounds that it’s bloody hard to make a full post out of them but also because there are most certainly a hell of a lot of good ones out there that I haven’t heard of, so any discussion of them is sure to be incomplete and biased, which I try to avoid wherever possible. Normally, this blog also rarely delves into what might be even vaguely dubbed ‘current affairs’, but since it regularly does discuss the weird and wonderful world of the internet and its occasional forays into the real world I thought that I might make an exception; today, I’m going to be talking about Gangnam Style.

Now officially the most liked video in the long and multi-faceted history of YouTube (taking over from the previous record holder and a personal favourite, LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem), this music video by Korean rapper & pop star PSY was released over two and a half months ago, and for the majority of that time it lay in some obscure and foreign corner of the internet. Then, in that strange way that random videos, memes and general random bits and pieces are wont to do online, it suddenly shot to prominence thanks to the web collectively pissing itself over the sight of a chubby Korean bloke in sunglasses doing ‘the horse riding dance’. Quite how this was even discovered by some casual YouTube-surfer is something of a mystery to me given that said dance doesn’t even start for a good minute and a half or so, but the fact remains that it was, and that it is now absolutely bloody everywhere. Only the other day it became the first ever Korean single to reach no.1 in the UK charts, despite not having been translated from its original language, and has even prompted a dance off between rival Thai gangs prior to a gunfight. Seriously.

Not that it has met with universal appeal though. I’m honestly surprised that more critics didn’t get up in their artistic arms at the sheer ridiculousness of it, and the apparent lack of reason for it to enjoy the degree of success that it has (although quite a few probably got that out of their system after Call Me Maybe), but several did nonetheless. Some have called it ‘generic’ in music terms, others have found its general ridiculousness more tiresome and annoying than fun, and one Australian journalist commented that the song “makes you wonder if you have accidentally taken someone else’s medication”. That such criticism has been fairly limited can be partly attributed to the fact that the song itself is actually intended to be a parody anyway. Gangnam is a classy, fashionable district of the South Korean capital Seoul (PSY has likened it to Beverly Hills in California), and gangnam style is a Korean phrase referring to the kind of lavish & upmarket (if slightly pretentious) lifestyle of those who live there; or, more specifically, the kind of posers & hipsters who claim to affect ‘the Gangnam Style’. The song’s self-parody comes from the contrast between PSY’s lyrics, written from the first-person perspective of such a poser, and his deliberately ridiculous dress and dance style.

Such an act of deliberate self-parody has certainly helped to win plaudits from serious music critics, who have found themselves to be surprisingly good-humoured once told that the ridiculousness is deliberate and therefore actually funny- however, it’s almost certainly not the reason for the video’s over 300 million YouTube views, most of which surely go to people who’ve never heard of Gangnam, and certainly have no idea of the people PSY is mocking. In fact, there have been several different theories proposed as to why its popularity has soared quite so violently.

Most point to PSY’s very internet-friendly position on his video’s copyright. The Guardian claim that PSY has in fact waived his copyright to the video, but what is certain is that he has neglected to take any legal action on the dozens of parodies and alternate versions of his video, allowing others to spread the word in their own, unique ways and giving it enormous potential to spread, and spread far. These parodies have been many and varied in content, author and style, ranging from the North Korean government’s version aimed at satirising the South Korean president Park Guen-hye (breaking their own world record for most ridiculous entry into a political pissing contest, especially given that it mocks her supposed devotion to an autocratic system of government, and one moreover that ended over 30 years ago), to the apparently borderline racist “Jewish Style” (neither of which I have watched, so cannot comment on). One parody has even sparked a quite significant legal case, with 14 California lifeguards being fired for filming, dancing in, or even appearing in the background of, their parody video “Lifeguard Style” and investigation has since been launched by the City Council in response to the thousands of complaints and suggestions, one even by PSY himself, that the local government were taking themselves somewhat too seriously.

However, by far the most plausible reason for he mammoth success of the video is also the simplest; that people simply find it funny as hell. Yes, it helps a lot that such a joke was entirely intended (let’s be honest, he probably couldn’t have come up with quite such inspired lunacy by accident), and yes it helps how easily it has been able to spread, but to be honest the internet is almost always able to overcome such petty restrictions when it finds something it likes. Sometimes, giggling ridiculousness is just plain funny, and sometimes I can’t come up with a proper conclusion to these posts.

P.S. I forgot to mention it at the time, but last post was my 100th ever published on this little bloggy corner of the internet. Weird to think it’s been going for over 9 months already. And to anyone who’s ever stumbled across it, thank you; for making me feel a little less alone.

Misnomers

I am going to break two of my cardinal rules  at once over the course of this post, for it is the first in the history of this blog that could be adequately described as a whinge. I have something of a personal hatred against these on principle that they never improve anybody’s life or even the world in general, but I’m hoping that this one is at least well-meaning and not as hideously vitriolic as some ‘opinion pieces’ I have had the misfortune to read over the years.

So…

A little while ago, the BBC published an article concerning the arrest of a man suspected of being a part of hacking group Lulzsec, an organised and select offshoot of the infamous internet hacking advocates and ‘pressure group’ Anonymous. The FBI have accused him of being part of a series of attacks on Sony last May & June, in which thousands of personal details on competition entries were published online. Lulzsec at the time made a statement to the effect that ‘we got all these details from one easy sting, so why do you trust them?’, which might have made the attack a case of trying to prove a point had the point not been directed at an electronics company and was thus kind of stupid. Had it been aimed at a government I might have understood, but to me this just looks like the internet doing what it does best- doing stuff simply for the fun of it. This is in fact the typical motive behind most Lulzsec activities, doing things ‘for teh lulz’, hence the first half of their name and the fact that their logo is a stick figure in typical meme style.

The BBC made reference to their name too in their coverage of the event, but since the journalist involved had clearly taken their information from a rather poorly-worded sentence of a Wikipedia article he claimed that ‘lulz’ was a play on words of lol, aka laugh out loud. This is not, technically speaking, entirely wrong, but is a bit like claiming the word ‘gay’ can now be used to mean happy in general conversation- something of an anachronism, albeit a very recent one. Lulz in the modern internet sense is used more to mean ‘laughs’ or ‘entertainment’, and  ‘for teh lulz’ could even be translated as simply ‘for the hell of it’. As I say, the argument was not expressly wrong as it was revealing that this journalist was either not especially good at getting his point across or dealing with slightly unfamiliar subject matter.

This is not the only example of the media getting things a little wrong when it comes to the internet. A few months ago, after a man was arrested for viciously abusing a celebrity (I forget who) using twitter, he was dubbed a ‘troll’, a term that, according to the BBC article I read, denotes somebody who uses the internet to bully and abuse people (sorry for picking on the BBC because a lot of others do it too, but I read them more than most other news sources). However, any reasonably experienced denizen of the internet will be able to tell you that the word ‘troll’ originated from the activity known as ‘trolling’, etymologically thought to originate from fishing (from a similar route as ‘trawling’). The idea behind this is that the original term was used in the context of ‘trolling for newbies’, ie laying down an obvious feeder line that an old head would recognise as being both obvious and discussed to its death, but that a newer face would respond to earnestly. Thus ‘newbies’ were fished for and identified, mostly for the amusement of the more experienced faces. Thus, trolling has lead to mean making jokes or provocative comments for one’s own amusement and at the expense of others, and ‘troll’ has become descriptive of somebody who trolls others. Whilst it is perhaps not the most noble of human activities, and some repeat offenders could definitely do with a bit more fresh air now and again, it is mostly harmless and definitely not to be taken altogether too seriously. What it is also not is a synonym for internet abuse or even (as one source has reported it) ‘defac[ing] Internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to families’. That is just plain old despicable bullying, something that has no place on the internet or the world in general, and dubbing casual humour-seekers such is just giving mostly alright people an unnecessarily bad name.

And here we get onto the bone I wish to pick- that the media, as a rule, do not appear to understand the internet or its culture, and instead treat it almost like a child’s plaything, a small distraction whose society is far less important than its ability to spawn companies. There may be an element of fear involved, an intentional mistrust of the web and a view to hold off embracing it as long as possible, for mainstream media is coming under heavy competition from the web and many have argued that the latter may soon kill the former altogether. This is as maybe, but news organisations should be obliged to act with at least a modicum of neutrality and respectability, especially for a service such as the BBC that does not depend on commercial funding anyway. It would perhaps not be too much to ask for a couple of organisations to hire an internet correspondent, to go with their food, technology, sports, science, environment, every country around the world, domestic, travel and weather ones, if only to allow issues concerning it to be conveyed accurately by someone who knows what he’s talking about. If it’s good enough for the rest of the world, then it’s surely good enough for the culture that has made mankind’s greatest invention what it is today.

OK, rant over, I’ll do something a little more normal next time out.

Attack of the Blocks

I spend far too much time on the internet. As well as putting many hours of work into trying to keep this blog updated regularly, I while away a fair portion of time on Facebook, follow a large number of video series’ and webcomics, and can often be found wandering through the recesses of YouTube (an interesting and frequently harrowing experience that can tell one an awful lot about the extremes of human nature). But there is one thing that any resident of the web cannot hope to avoid for any great period of time, and quite often doesn’t want to- the strange world of Minecraft.

Since its release as a humble alpha-version indie game in 2009, Minecraft has boomed to become a runaway success and something of a cultural phenomenon. By the end of 2011, before it had even been released in its final release format, Minecraft had registered 4 million purchases and 4 times that many registered users, which isn’t bad for a game that has never advertised itself, spread semi-virally among nerdy gamers for its mere three-year history and was made purely as an interesting project by its creator Markus Persson (aka Notch). Thousands of videos, ranging from gameplay to some quite startlingly good music videos (check out the work of Captain Sparklez if you haven’t already) litter YouTube and many of the games’ features (such as TNT and the exploding mobs known as Creepers) have become memes in their own right to some degree.

So then, why exactly has Minecraft succeeded where hundreds and thousands of games have failed, becoming a revolution in gamer culture? What is it that makes Minecraft both so brilliant, and so special?

Many, upon being asked this question, tend to revert to extolling the virtues of the game’s indie nature. Being created entirely without funding as an experiment in gaming rather than profit-making, Minecraft’s roots are firmly rooted in the humble sphere of independent gaming, and it shows. One obvious feature is the games inherent simplicity- initially solely featuring the ability to wander around, place and destroy blocks, the controls are mainly (although far from entirely) confined to move and ‘use’, whether that latter function be shoot, slash, mine or punch down a tree. The basic, cuboid, ‘blocky’ nature of the game’s graphics, allowing for both simplicity of production and creating an iconic, retro aesthetic that makes it memorable and standout to look at. Whilst the game has frequently been criticised for not including a tutorial (I myself took a good quarter of an hour to find out that you started by punching a tree, and a further ten minutes to work out that you were supposed to hold down the mouse button rather than repeatedly click), this is another common feature of indie gaming, partly because it saves time in development, but mostly because it makes the game feel like it is not pandering to you and thus allowing indie gamers to feel some degree of elitism that they are good enough to work it out by themselves. This also ties in with the very nature of the game- another criticism used to be (and, to an extent, still is, even with the addition of the Enderdragon as a final win objective) that the game appeared to be largely devoid of point, existent only for its own purpose. This is entirely true, whether you view that as a bonus or a detriment being entirely your own opinion, and this idea of an unfamiliar, experimental game structure is another feature common in one form or another to a lot of indie games.

However, to me these do not seem to be entirely worthy of the name ‘answers’ regarding the question of Minecraft’s phenomenal success. The reason I think this way is that they do not adequately explain exactly why Minecraft rose to such prominence whilst other, often similar, indie games have been left in relative obscurity. Limbo, for example, is a side-scrolling platformer and a quite disturbing, yet compelling, in-game experience, with almost as much intrigue and puzzle from a set of game mechanics simpler even than those of Minecraft. It has also received critical acclaim often far in excess of Minecraft (which has received a positive, but not wildly amazed, response from critics), and yet is still known to only an occasional few. Amnesia: The Dark Descent has been often described as the greatest survival horror game in history, as well as incorporating a superb set of graphics, a three-dimensional world view (unlike the 2D view common to most indie games) and the most pants-wettingly terrifying experience anyone who’s ever played it is likely to ever face- but again, it is confined to the indie realm. Hell, Terraria is basically Minecraft in 2D, but has sold around 40 times less than Minecraft itself. All three of these games have received fairly significant acclaim and coverage, and rightly so, but none has become the riotous cultural phenomenon that Minecraft has, and neither have had an Assassin’s Creed mod (first example that sprung to mind).

So… why has Minecraft been so successful. Well, I’m going to be sticking my neck out here, but to my mind it’s because it doesn’t play like an indie game. Whilst most independently produced titled are 2D, confined to fairly limited surroundings and made as simple & basic as possible to save on development (Amnesia can be regarded as an exception), Minecraft takes it own inherent simplicity and blows it up to a grand scale. It is a vast, open world sandbox game, with vague resonances of the Elder Scrolls games and MMORPG’s, taking the freedom, exploration and experimentation that have always been the advantages of this branch of the AAA world, and combined them with the innovative, simplistic gaming experience of its indie roots. In some ways it’s similar to Facebook, in that it takes a simple principle and then applies it to the largest stage possible, and both have enjoyed a similarly explosive rise to fame. The randomly generated worlds provide infinite caverns to explore, endless mobs to slay, all the space imaginable to build the grandest of castles, the largest of cathedrals, or the SS Enterprise if that takes your fancy. There are a thousand different ways to play the game on a million different planes, all based on just a few simple mechanics. Minecraft is the best of indie and AAA blended together, and is all the more awesome for it.

The almost slightly actually not quite triumphant return

Hello to all who may be listening- I have returned to my little corner of the blogoverse! My time off has given me, among other things, a lot of time to muse upon potential topics for me to cover in the coming weeks (in part due to the fact that I have been watching way too much TV), but to begin I thought I might wander away from my normal format. Rather than an essay, here’s a story idea I’ve been toying with for a while- for a laugh more than anything else. Brownie points to whoever can guess the setting before the end.

…

Jake sprinted forward as the shockwave from the explosion hit him.

He had known the chopper was coming down- it always did- but an untimely bit of suppressing fire had kept in him his spot for a moment too long. The chest-high wall behind which he had been crouched mere seconds before was now smothered in a heap of burning, twisted metal and, somewhere amidst the wreckage, the corpse of some poor pilot. Jake would have felt sympathy for him, had all his thought not currently been occupied with the ball of flame and shrapnel currently flying towards him. One slug of metal caught him hard in the back, pitching him forward with a sharp cry of agonising pain. He lay there, face buried in the dust, his eyes swimming. Everything was blurred, out of focus- droplets of sweat and blood clouding his vision. His ears seemed to slowly switch off, the once crystal-clear noises of the battlefield now seeming dull and quiet, like listening through cotton wool. He was very aware of his breathing, taking short, sharp, gasping breaths, as if determined to savour each if it were to prove his last. The world seemed distant now, his world consumed by the pain of his back. The edges of his sight were closing in, as if he were staring down a tunnel, his peripheral vision reduced to near blackness. He was close to unconsciousness.

Suddenly, a harsh rattling sound yanked his senses back into reality. The noise and chaos of the battle returned into sharp focus, and Jake wished they hadn’t- the sudden assault on his ears sent almost sent his brain into shock after the momentary lull. He was lucky to be alive, and knew it. Had he been a nanosecond slower, then the sound of the explosion might have been the last he heard. Jake’s instincts as a soldier quickly returned to the fore; he flicked his head round to his right, ignoring the crick in his neck, and was faced with a wall of concrete. Good- another wall. That was why he wasn’t a colander of bullet holes right now.

Jake gave himself a few seconds to recover. Despite the ferocity of the explosion and his proximity to it, he seemed to have fared remarkably well- a testament, no doubt, to the human body’s almost superhuman resilience and ability to recover in times of crisis. In a but a few short moments, it had recovered almost completely, and Jake was able to pull himself up into a crouch without too much difficulty. Almost instinctively, he pulled his weapon up to his shoulder. ACR, standard army issue. Not the best, but it was resilient and a damn sight better than the AK’s the terrorists used.

As if reading his thoughts, the sound of sub-machine gun fire split the air near his head once again. Jake dipped his head, and cautiously peered around the edge of his wall. Two obviously Middle Eastern men, heads draped in simple red turbans, were crouched behind another wall a few metres in front of him, both holding weapons perched over the wall. Jake would have giggled at the blatant stereotype had one of the men not immediately spotted him, jumped out from behind his cover, and sprinted towards him. Big mistake. In one fluid movement, Jake turned his body to face his attacker and brought his gun up to his eye. For the briefest of moments, a red dot sat square on his target’s head. A long burst of fire later, and he was down, dead before he hit the floor. Boom, headshot.

The other man, perhaps slightly in fear after what had happened to his comrade, seemed more cautious. After a short while, Jake realised that he would be quite happy sitting behind his wall and firing bursts at regular intervals, meaning Jake would have to go on the offensive in order to reach his objective. However, he did not favour a frontal assault- risky at the best of times, employing one against an armed, aware opponent across a 15-metre stretch of open ground with no  support was verging on suicidal. But, there was more than one way to skin a cat…

Jake’s vision changed. Somehow, he seemed to visualise himself in his field of view, as if suddenly in the third person. Himself, pressed against the wall, his aggressor, ducked below his barricade in between bursts. Slowly, Jake poked the nose of his weapon around the edge of the barricade, waiting. His opponent popped up, and began another burst, but Jake was ready. His gun aligned itself with his target almost of its own accord, as if guided by some benevolent computer rather than Jake’s hand. One deadly burst of fire later, and the other man was slumped over the barrier.

Shaking himself, Jake’s vision restored itself and he cast a quick glance around to check his position. To his left rear lay the still-smouldering remains of the helicopter, forming just another part of the landscape of destruction. Around half a mile back lay the drop zone, where Jake’s team had arrived a short while ago. The battle was meant to be just over a small suspected weapons facility stuck in the middle of an otherwise empty desert, but it was clear from the number of people defending it that it was a far more important target than the top brass had envisaged. Artillery fire had forced Jake to find cover in a crashed, but still surprisingly intact, aircraft, and he had become separated from the rest of his team, hemmed into a single alleyway of death by walls of debris, wreckage and barbed wire. If it hadn’t been for the concrete walls providing cover, Jake very much doubted he’d be alive. Still, he was close now- the compound lay ahead.

After a final check that there were no hidden gunmen waiting for a pot-shot, Jake tucked his weapon into his belly and sprinted towards the recently-vacated barrier. As he passed the body of the man who’d run at him, something caught Jake’s eye. Not the corpse itself, but the weapon lying next to it. Stubby-nosed, with a short barrel and big stock, the weapon was obviously a shotgun, and Jake had been in enough firefights to attest to the power of the version the terrorists used. Unfortunately, he only had space to carry two weapons… but what the hell, HQ could cover the cost of one missing weapon.

As he swept by the body, Jake’s free left hand reached down to the holster on his leg and flicked out a standard-issue army handgun. Whilst manoeuvrable and quick to aim, they were no match for the shotgun for clearing out a room, and Jake’s was dropped by the corpse. He then used the same hand to grab the shotgun and, still running, slipped it into the now-vacated holster. The holster itself was a masterpiece of design- intuitive to use and allowing for quick storing & readying of weapons, Jake had seen it take weapons ranging from pistols to RPGs, and had never seen one lose its grip on a weapon, even when hanging from a rock face. Not that the design mattered excessively- it made staying alive easier, and that was all he cared about.

As he skidded in behind the barrier, and tried desperately to ignore the smell of the corpse draped over it next to him, Jake surveyed the scene ahead of him. Around 20 metres away, a doorway lay open, leading into the main compound. Judging by the view through both it and the window next to it, the room appeared to be deserted. But Jake knew better- that room would always have someone in it to guard against overly cocky intruders. Quickly switching weapons, the shotgun’s power more use than the assault rifle’s accuracy in this situation, Jake charged towards the door, weapon at the ready. As expected, another terrorist was seated at a table within the small room, but before he could reach for his weapon Jake had emptied two shells into his chest. Satisfied that he was out of the picture, Jake readied himself, and moved to the next doorway, before stealing a glance down it.

The corridor ahead appeared deserted. Plain, ugly concrete walls decorated with wires and seemingly pointless control panels were all that greeted him. He stepped through and proceeded cautiously, keeping his weapon at the ready. Reaching the first door, Jake bodily booted it down and was inside in an instant. Nothing- just an empty desk and a few papers. Nothing important- at least, nothing related to the mission in any case.

The next door yielded a similar result, but the third, at the end of the corridor, was far more interesting. It was what looked like a large canteen area, tables and chairs scattered about the place and several on their sides. However, more of a pressing concern was the four terrorists currently occupying the space.

Jake leapt forward, just about avoiding the streams of bullets erupting from the terrorist’s assault rifles as he skidded behind an upturned table. He turned quickly, and saw another man, previously been hidden behind the door. Jake reacted first, and unloaded another shot into him- the terrorist collapsed, limp and lifeless. Jake swung back around to see a retreating back as another enemy made for the safety of a dividing wall- another shot, and he too was down.

Jake quickly surveyed the scene in front of him- of the two remaining men, one had taken refuge behind another table and one was currently shooting from a window onto another man down below. He had to move fast- if he delayed then whoever was on the ground could be killed, which would free up another gun to train on him. Jake ran out from behind his cover and immediately launched another shot at the terrorist’s hiding place. It was as much for a distraction as anything else, but he was surprised that the wooden table held so well. Running an angled line off to his left, Jake dodged around the side of the table and, before his adversary could so much as squeeze a trigger, unloaded a slug into him that sent his body collapsing into the floor. As he leapt over the corpse, a small part of Jake idly wondered why he hadn’t moved the table.

It didn’t matter though- he was on the last man. He was trying to bring his rifle round to face Jake, but he stood no chance of getting there in time- Jake’s shotgun already had him in its sights. He squeezed the trigger.

*Click*. Out of ammo.

“Oh f-“

Suddenly, vision went to third person again as Jake’s limp corpse was flung backwards by the force of a clip of bullets  slamming into his chest. He fell back onto the floor, arms loose like a rag doll. Everything faded to black.

“DAMMIT”, screamed Jake in frustration as the kill cam replayed his failure. For a moment, he considered throwing his controller at the wall- he’d been playing for a couple of hours already now, and the weather looked pretty nice outside. Well, for a moment, before the obsession returned and he settled down for another crack at this b*stard of a mission.

-Yeah, sorry, I don’t play FPS’s, so I may be a bit out with the specifics here. Hope you enjoyed it anyway, even considering that this is twice as long as the average post.

This blog is getting WAY too nerdy…

Looking back over my more recent posts, I’m starting to spot a trend. My first few posts ranged widely in style and content, from poetry to random facts. Now, however, (if I can spot a trend in a blog only 15 posts old)all my posts are basically mini-essays. Time, murder, SOPA… all have their little 1000-word studies here.
The reason why this has happened is fairly obvious- they are what’s going through my brain, and the way my mind and writing style works means it is easiest for me just to write studies of whatever crosses my mind. 2011’s round robin letter was an idea that popped into my head while out walking one day, while the poetry wasn’t even intended for online publication. Why are they up? Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
So, what to do? Either I carry on with all this essay-writing, or I try to think of more… abstract and different stuff to put up here. Those who know me would probably agree that abstract would be a better expression of my personality (although most of my supplies of odd are used up thinking of Facebook birthday messages- for anyone reading this, ‘Happy Birthday!’ is the dullest thing you could possibly write, and it would make birthdays certainly a lot more entertaining if there were a little more… variety). But… I don’t know… essays suit me. I haven’t had to write one formally for a long time now and either I’m getting some seriously retarded nostalgia/withdrawal symptoms or my inner soul is just a massive masochist when it comes to spending way too long writing stuff that is ultimately not likely to be read by more people than I can count on my fingers (can you tell I watched a Yahtzee video before writing that sentence?). Or maybe it’s just that writing essays is a lot more fun (to my inner nerd anyway) when the subject is something you find interesting, or at least that you have chosen so can’t complain about.
Meh, I don’t know. In fact, I’m not even sure why I’m writing this post- it’s clearly not going to turn into something especially meaningful any time soon. But, then again, why am I writing this blog at all? It gets very few readers, little notice, and most people I know don’t even know I have one,  so it’s clearly not because it gives me a sense of achievement. To me, this blog serves a similar purpose to a diary- it’s a vent for all the various thoughts and ideas that clutter up my mind and that I never get a chance to express. As the little description bar says, this is a window into my mind. But I don’t just have the deep, inner thoughts people write in diaries- I have all these random ideas, all these flames of interest and inspiration sparking off inside my head. It does them good, I suppose, to get out and get an airing. Maybe a few of  them will help other people, maybe make them think. Maybe one or two will inspire them. This blog lets ideas live. So, for as long as my thoughts express themselves as facts and reasons and essays, I guess that’s what I’ll be writing. Thank you internet, for helping me make up my mind on this one. I wonder how often the web gets to read a train of thought? But that may be a post for another time…

Failure and Happiness

To anyone who may end up reading this who does not currently have a wordpress blog, please allow me to inform you as to one feature of it. In the top left-hand corner of the screen, there is shown a small graph, demonstrating activity on your blog for the last 48 hours. For the last few days, mine has been empty. I have had no views of my blog.
Now, a blogger’s task is, ostensibly, to attract attention and traffic- the average blog is started by someone with a pressing need for attention and validation, which certainly explains why I’m here, and so this fact basically means that I am failing as a blogger.
So, I thought I might share with the internet something on the subject of failure, something with which I have extensive experience. For example, the rugby side play for are basically out of this year’s league competition having won 5 from 13 matches- this coming after a season in which we won the league, lost only 3 times and were undefeated for around 5 months, while the side I support are currently lying 11th out of 12 in the league and have lost either 5 or 6 games on the bounce, just 4 years after they won the league. From the social front, I can count the number of friends I consider to have had over the years on my fingers, am perpetually single and not long ago finished a period of counselling- this helped, but I now find myself in the midst of even greater psychological issues. My mood cycles between mental and deeply depressed on an annoyingly regular basis and I see little sign of my situation improving. I could go on. I consider myself to have failed, to some extent, in every aspect of my life- and yet as I sit writing this, I exist as a happy person, or if happy appear too strong, then to say the very least I am content.
Why? This seems to make no sense- my reasons for happiness seem minimal. The experienced conscience-attackers among you may like to point to the fact that, from the very fact I am writing this, I have access to a computer, I am able to play and watch sport for enjoyment, have access to psychological support, have a roof over my head, food in the fridge etc, etc, but the kind of people who say these kinds of things have probably been shouted down often enough to know the kinds of arguments that can be proposed against them. But what they have to say does have relevance. You see, to someone without a roof over their head, a house may seem an impossible luxury. To a child who gets one meal a day and is developing kwashiorkor, the delicacies of a fridge may seem unparalleled delights. To the manager of a small business struggling during the economic downturn, the stability and prosperity of a larger, more successful business may seem a cruel injustice- and yet the manager of this business, surviving far easier than it’s smaller compatriot, may consider his stability to be just as bad as his struggling compatriot, compared to the prosperity he may have experienced in recent years. Conclusion- the satisfaction a person shows with their state of existence is entirely relative to their personal experiences.
When you think about this, you know it already, but it is genuinely astonishing as to the amount of stuff that can be understood simply by thinking over stuff you know. For example, any parents or soon-to-be’s reading this, for example, who want my advice on avoiding bringing up the kind of spoilt brat every parent dreads, could well consider this principle. Children who are ‘spoilt’ are basically always wanting more. The reason (it seems to me from my experiences anyway) for this is that their experiences of asking for something are that if they are showered with the modern, expensive, toys, then always having the latest toy or gadget seems to them a normal state of existence. When this changes, and they are not allowed their new favourite, this seems to them akin to an invasion of their human rights, and as such they complain and get the ‘spoilt’ tag (N.B. I know that I am in no way qualified to give this advice, so please don’t treat it as fact- it’s just what seems logical to me).
Now, how then does this relate back to me? Well,  having considered this logic, I began to realise that all my adjudged ‘failures’ were relative to previous experiences. I consider the rugby side I support to be failing, but the side who are in joint 11th with us have just been promoted and their fans are probably glad to be mostly out of the danger of relegation. I consider 5 wins from 13 to be a bad record, but considering the calibre of side some of those losses have been to, I can think of a few teams who would give their eye teeth for that record. And the list goes on- my social life is bad now, and compare to guys I know it’s appalling- but I know that I am a better person, with a better social life, than I was before my counselling- I feel things are bad now because I am not progressing at the same rate as I was previously. As such, I consider all my problems, and realise they are not problems, really at all. And it is this that enables me to consider my life more objectively, remind me of my family, the people I do love spending time with, the epic wins that will stick in my memory together, and the amazing camaraderie of my team- the drinking sessions, the laughs, the mates. And it makes me a happy person.
For one last comment on the subject of failure, I turn to one of the most inspirational quotes I have ever heard, courtesy of Michael Jordan:
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed”