Richard's Online Journal
Modern Warfare: No Russian
Achievement Unlocked: Best Terrorist Ever
So, I finally played it. I’d have played it earlier, but my copy was on Steam, so it only unlocked at midnight this morning and I decided to go to bed instead of participating in a terrorist massacre. I know, lousy priorities, but I was sleepy.
I have no idea how I’d have reacted to it had I come in cold, since over the last week or so, it seems like my Twitter feed has consisted of nothing but people arguing the pros and cons of the whole thing, the leaked video, arguments about whether games should be touching this kind of stuff at all… I realised long ago that, like the (genuinely good) nuke section in the original Modern Warfare, all I was actually going to feel when I actually got it up on my screen was “Oh, it’s this bit.”
How did I feel? “Oh, it’s this bit.”
See? I know me too well.
PC Plus: World of Wordcraft
Guess what game I was playing a lot of that month.
This was a fun article to write, even if I’m sure there’ll be at least one folk-etymology in there. I also managed to sneak in quite a few gags, which was a refreshing change from the norm. I love words (and highly recommend Bill Bryson’s books on the subject, especially Made In America) and it’s always good to know obscure little things that will trip you up in techie quizzes, such as where the word TWAIN actually comes from (it’s not an acronym) or the definition of ‘recursion’.
In retrospect, we should have left more space for the actual article part that runs along the bottom. When we planned out the page designs, we weren’t sure there’d be enough interesting stuff to say, but in the end it had to be cut down from about twice the length. It amuses me that while both ‘geek’ and ‘nerd’ are often seen as interchangeable, they in fact stem from completely opposite ends of some imaginary freak-curve. Still, no matter. I think it’s quite a fun little feature.
Spilling Be
Getting letters and e-mail is great. It’s not so hot when you’re dealing with an increasing pile of drive-by smirking about a typo or glitch on the third page of a four page feature. It’s fine when someone’s spotted something funny (nobody in the office noticed that we’d printed a picture of a ‘SEX AMBULANCE’ in a story about Essex, for instance). It’s fine if there’s a serious flub that needs to be corrected. It’s fine if the letter writer disagrees with an argument. No problem at all with that kind of thing.
But usually it’s just a missing apostrophe, or a character substitution, or something equally trivial, and really, what’s the point? What do the people sending these emails expect? A groveling apolohy, written in blood? The whole print run to be pulped and replaced with a corrected version? The writer to immediately jump into a time machine, rush back, and fix it, like Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap?
My time machine is reserved for far more exciting errands. Ask my pal Beethoven.
Sigh. At the very least, they could throw in a few words of comment along with the “Aha! Gotcha!” bit. Something to make it seem that it had more impact than an English essay under a particularly anal English teacher’s evil red pen.
One thing that probably won’t come as a surprise — every time I get one of these letters, there’s always at least one glaring oopsie buried in the righteous indignation. Oddly, the accuracy hounds never seem to appreciate having this pointed out to them.
In short, feedback is essential. One of the toughest parts about being a writer is that most things you do get very little response, and getting nice comments is one of the best ways of reminding yourself that everything you do isn’t just being shot into a black hole somewhere in a distant galaxy. It’s good to hear from readers, even if just a quick “Thanks, I enjoyed that article” or “Did you know…”
But please. Talk about the work, or the subject.
Not the bloody typos.
(The official typo of this post was the word ‘apolohy’. If you were planning to crow about spotting it, please slap yourself around the face and neck with a small shovel. A spade will also be acceptable. Best to avoid the pitchfork…)
On Game Scoring
All this fuss over Kane and Lynch (The last post poked fun at the story, but it’s worth pointing out that nobody involved has outright said what happened, so everything’s still very much guesswork and secret-source level gossip), and subsequent talk about scoring, really makes me nostalgic for Daily Radar’s wonderful system.
Scores, in a word, are useless. No matter how you try to explain your workings, nobody listens. Even if you think 6/10 means ‘mediocre, but okay if you’re into this kind of game’, most people are going to see it as a fail. Especially since most people talk about scores without even mentioning the review text itself. For my money, the best rating system around remains poor old deceased DR’s — which went something like this:
Dud. Miss. Hit. Direct Hit.
And that was it. Technically, not that far different to a score out of five. But much better as a stamp to put on the end of a review, and much less prone to mis-interpretation. And since ‘Miss’ especially could be anything from ‘doesn’t do anything new’ to ‘tries but fails’, it’s much harder to go off on one without taking the text into account.
Kindling
Here’s something I don’t get. Every time there’s a new e-reader tool announced, future-gazer types start talking about the Gutenberg Press. And that sounds fair. Moving to an all-digital system, with computers serving up any book in the history of mankind would be an incredible leap for society — bigger even than the wheel, or Bacon Salt.
Except there’s a catch, and it goes something like this.
Gutenberg Press: Took a locked down, incredibly expensive medium and made it affordable and accessible to all, heralding a world of democratic information and incredible social enlightenment.
E-Readers: Um… Not so much…
The latest one, Amazon Kindle, costs four hundred dollars. The books are DRM restricted, with best-sellers kicking off at around $10 a pop. It’s portable, like a book, except that you’ll be terrified of leaving it on the train or taking it onto the beach. It’s open, in the sense that there’ll be another one along next year, and there’s no chance you’ll still be using it in five years. And it ties you into one company for all your literary purchases and news, since content providers are about as good at co-operating as a sack of angry cats.
Basically, Kindle and its ilk are the books the Church would have made.
I’ve got quite a few misgivings about the whole e-book concept in general, not necessarily in the long-term, but certainly right now. The e-book market is tiny (to say nothing of seeing its biggest success in erotica, followed by geek-friendly subjects for the early adopters), and I’m not sure how much it’s going to grow if the only readers available cost as much or more than some laptops. Without fail, the systems available are horrifically over-engineered, critically restricted, and aimed firmly at the wrong market.
These systems should be just as affordable to someone who wants to read pulp as students, and at a price where you could drop one in the toilet and it would probably be okay. The market needs to be combined, so that buying a book on Amazon automatically drops the full thing onto your Kindle, or whatever other device, for no extra charge — with special deals on download only prices to gradually ween people away from standard novels. If they take off, if they’re popular, start pushing e-books as a thing in their own right. People didn’t want to do without CDs until they saw the benefits of digital files. Even if e-books are worth switching to, the resistance will be every bit as strong.
More, when you factor in cultural issues, and the average age of active readers.
As for the devices themselves, they need to be disposable. You should get one by signing up to a book-club — take out a 12 month subscription, get yourself an e-reader. They should be priced so that you can drop them in the toilet by accident and it’ll still be okay. Whatever the price, they need to be something other than a new toy for the small sliver of the population that just wants the latest gadget, especially since it’s likely to be the same crowd more likely to spend the evening with YouTube than Yates.
But that’s not the only thing. Books are an unusual form of entertainment due to the amount of attentiton they demand from the reader, and while you can certainly argue that the actual paper doesn’t matter (I disagree, but it’s a personal call…), it’s one where the torture of choice is particularly noticeable. The more media you have available, the harder it is to knuckle down and finish it.
This is good for the likes of Amazon, who’ll no doubt get plenty of cash from people switching on to continue reading, oh, the new Charlie Stross, before noticing that there’s a new Harry Potter spin-off, but bad when it comes to finishing books, for enjoying the storyline instead of racing to plug into something different, and especially for heavier going books not intended to be read in fits and starts. Everyone’s taken a book like Lord of the Rings on holiday, only to get back with half a page or so actually finished. Attention spans can be tricky enough, without oh look! A squirrel!
I do think that e-readers are a good idea in other contexts — in schools, for research, and to take on the plane or train instead of carting a big sack of books. But for general reading? Not really. Not for a long while yet. Right now, the industry’s firmly built on what the content providers and booksellers want to see, not how regular people actually read. Not to mention, with the declining reading figures in recent years, what’s really needed are ways of pulling people into reading, not defining the future of publishing as some exclusive club for those who can afford it.
For us bibliomaniacs, $400 may or may not be a lot of money. But it does buy a hell of a lot of books. And unless the e-balance e-tips considerably more in our favour than this, I don’t think I’ll be getting rid of my trusty shoulder bag any time soon.