I'm joining MicroBlogVember (thanks for the heads-up @iro), partly because i noticed myself quipping more again on Twitter and thinking "cohost is for effortposts" instead of "for all posts". That's the trick of twitter, i.e. things have been nominally calm for a week or so in your personal bubble, so you stop thinking you're literally on a wannabe 4channer's website putting your good stuff out there.
anyway, the treat is i finally killed the mosquito that's been haunting my legs all week. i'd post a picture but it would count as guro, so
That's what we're calling Mastodon, baybee.
(I kid.)
Recent events in media industry have really taken the shine off the idea of streaming and subscription services being the kind of archival, library-in-your-home concept that was part of the early pitch, and I'm already regretting some years-old decisions to delete old torrents after finding them on Netflix following its launch here.
Not even the insistence on physical media, as helpful as that is, will help that much, at least not with games, anyway, with more and more titles essentially becoming a download code in a box.
Hence, piracy. The old freedom to have "backups" that mutated into a way to get stuff without paying to the last tool left for economically accessible preservation of stuff you care to engage with again.
None of these, of course, are a solution to the problem of media preservation absent a genuine archival effort from first- and third-parties that is ideally backed on a societal level by the state or community, but on the level of "what can i do as an individual consumer", that's probably the thing you can manage that doesn't put you too much out of your way (and as we know, the least effective form of preservation is the one that's too much of a hassle to do regularly).
As an aside, I am ironically relieved and thankful for microsoft's unpleasant habit of syncing absolutely every picture and screenshot i take to onedrive. i ignored it for a long time but it came in handy when i needed to search through old photos i had uploaded to Viber for documentary proof for some legal things. It's a messy solution but it works in a pinch.
[This user Deliberately Did Not Research What "Jared, 19" Means before writing this part of the MicroBlog, and will only look up what it is after he's finished]
No idea who Jared is, but thanks to @TalenLee's excellent blog entry on Megatokyo, I thought about things I was doing and was into when I was 19, which would've been in 2004, exactly Half My Goddamn Life Ago.
[Webcomic aside: I was also reading the excellent Schlock Mercenary when I was 19. If you'd like an example of a webcomic that started in 2000 and, seemingly unlike MegaTokyo, only got better by posting daily for 20 years, read it.]
So I started poking through old drives to see what I had from that period, which would've been my sophomore year in college.
Photos were pretty much a wash, as I didn't keep any digital ones before 2007 or so. Attached is a screenshot of my Steam profile, which lists me has having signed up for Steam in August of '04.
Documents from that period were more productive, because I was in school and keeping copies of things.
Also attached are shots of my Communications BA thesis proposal, submitted in July 2004, which, of all things, was based on Ragnarok Online and Final Fantasy XI. I got the proposal approved, but ultimately the final thesis replaced FFXI with World of Warcraft because PlayOnline SUCKED here, plus my 19 year old brain was simply not up to the challenge of comprehending a PS2-era MMORPG.
[This User Has Now Researched What "Jared, 19" means]
Oh.
It's technically November 4th here, so I'll take this opportunity to get ahead of the prompts a little. I will not have this exercise suffer the same fate as my media thread (rip)
This is also a relevant prompt because much of my working-for-money time is currently spent on RPG Site, a game blog and news outlet that is, ostensibly, focused on RPG video games. And one odd background concern that hums behind our coverage decisions is how the lines have blurred these days. The nickname of the staff chat channel is "Everything is an RPG these days", a joke about the slow colonization of all of games by RPG-style progression mechanics. We semi-handwave concern-trolling about what is or isn't "RPG" enough for the site by saying that we're mainly for the audience of RPG players, and thus our coverage decisions are primarily driven by what they want to see - We regularly cite our decision to cover The Legend of Zelda and the occasional VN as part of that rationale.
And even in places where it doesn't always shore up (we passed on detailed coverage of both God of War Ragnarok and Armored Core VI even though those are both definitely in RPG players' wheelhouses), I think it works.
I also happened to notice today this article on GamesRadar quoting Todd Howard about how he see's bethesda's style of making RPGs as expressed in Starfield works. I haven't played enough Starfield to hold a coherent opinion on it, but if bethsoft games are made to emphasize 'defining and owning a literal role in the world", I'd say they've fallen flat in that respect since basically Morrowind. But that's a different discussion.
Anyway, this isn't exactly micro blog or even particularly together as a series of thoughts, but thinking about what makes an RPG again and how leveling is in absolutely everything now, makes me all the more convinced about how narrative and character and the ways in which those interact with player expression are gonna have to be the touchstones of what RPGs in video game form are gonna need to be, now that everyone and everything has coopted mechanically incentivized character progression as a central structuring pillar.
Come to think of it, everywhere I've lived, I've been upstairs neighbors seemingly by chance, so it's usually me that's going "the hell's going on down there" at the people living on the floor below.
Although I suppose the rat crawling around in my ceiling does count for the purposes of the prompt 😬
Remember 2-3 years ago when folks were mostly staying inside and learning hobbies? For us, that was turning our garden into a garden-garden. We live in an area with a lot of empty lots are are generally left to grow wild (bar a yearly trimming of the long grass for security), for a good year or so those lots became really useful little vegetable patches. Everyone was distributing and even selling small batches of homegrown produce.
Forgive the cliche, but for a good few months to a year, it really did feel like "the world is healing". Even the cows that grazed in a field nearby, which were slowly starving because the owner of the lot had been planning to develop it, came back looking stronger than ever thanks to a month or two of uninterrupted grazing. One day I went out for a walk and saw them eating the uncut vines off the fence of one of the lots.
We were no exception, and my father, with a new work schedule that kept him at home, found the time to tinker with a home hydroponics setup he bodged together based on YouTube videos.
Even now we're still using it to grow small batches of lettuce and tomatoes, though the heyday of produce productivity is behind us thanks to office real estate owners managing to twist the government's arm into effectively mandating a return to office for most people.
kind of like this prompt because it reminds me of what modern video games are best at: placing their players Somewhere Else. That somewhere else might be a different country, another world entirely, or someone else's body. They're really good at putting you elsewhere, augmenting the tired nerves in your imagination, those ones that can barely visualize their own room in a different color.
I don't subscribe to the idea of games as an empathy engine the way older proponents of gamification used to do (lol, lmao), but they do manage to get you thinking about other places in ways that are often separate from the tracks of narrative and plot, in a distinct fashion from books and cinema. I think Tom Chick captured that sense pretty well in his review of Assassin's Creed 3, where he praised the Americana of the game's incidental side quests and its homestead minigame.
This sense of place-ness and putting you in a real-feeling not-real situation is a particular forte of Ubisoft open-worlders, which is why I can't hate them in spite of gestures at everything else. Cyberpunk 2077 also does it fairly well in its image of Night City, and the sense of embodiment you derive from being inside V's shoes throughout the whole story and then some. Final Fantasy XIV does it with little tricks of perspective and scale that fall apart admirably when you get on a flying mount.
Even a gacha game like Genshin Impact, run through as it is with dailies and weeklies and monetization that undercuts everything about the world-build, manages some one-of-a-kind vistas, showcases of art and artistry that put very pretty clothes on its tainted gacha heart. If anything, my biggest disappointment with Honkai Star Rail, a better game by many measures, is that HSR hasn't managed those geographic feats nearly as well as its sister game.
I'm mostly citing big, triple-A titles here, but smaller games. Outer Wilds gives you space, but not "real" space, but the space of a tiny universe trapped in a death loop where wooden spaceships (complete with a houseplant for oxygen) plumb the stars.
Text adventures accomplish this, too. Choice of the Vampire and Choice of Romance are among my favorite Interactive Fiction works (IF being more "game-adjacent" admittedly, and the games' visions of a vampire-haunted civil war lousisana and a spain-like magical monarchy push the boundaries of what seems possible with mechanically-based narrative.