Summer and games and advice
Hey all,
Here is my top hobby this week: watering the bit of the garden where there’s a big spider who lives in a log, and who when I start watering will run out, thrilled by the vibrations of her web and excited to feast on the presumed flailing beetle, and who then immediately gets wet and goes oh shit, no, it’s not lunch, it’s rain and runs back into her crevice. And if I do it again two minutes later she’ll do exactly the same thing. What inexhaustible optimism.
OLYMPICS, GAMES
Okay, if you’re only here for book stuff this might not be super interesting to you, feel free to skip. But: did you know there’s an official Roblox Olympics game? And that it’s quite odd?
When the project got announced, the sell was that it would engage Gen Z and give them a chance to “explore the Olympic spirit like never before”. But…
Okay, look. Back around 2012, I worked for a game design company (now closed) called Hide&Seek. We made a lot of different stuff but every now and then, our job would be to have ideas for games that advertising agencies could pitch to their clients. Usually, we’d get paid a bit for the ideas, the agencies would pitch, the clients would choose some other non-game project and go about their business, and the game would never get made.
At the time we were always bummed out by this but in retrospect it was often for the best, because the other possibility was that we’d have to actually make the idea we’d come up with. And then, usually — not always, but usually — someone’s boss’s boss at the client would play it, maybe the first game they’d played in years, and they’d say this is too hard or I don’t understand what’s going on, add another popup to explain it; or someone would go we need the logo on screen for longer, make the text appear slower, or I don’t get this joke, or we should get everyone to give us their email address before they play. And the game would get a little bit worse. And then the same thing would happen again the week after, and the week after that as well.
The thing that was true then — and which seems from the Roblox Olympics game to be true now — is that most clients and even most agencies still don’t understand what a game is or why it’s fun.
They think of games as a magical instrument for engaging young people, and they can look at a game and understand it as an aesthetic object. But when they try to actually play it, it’s not just that they don’t have fun: it’s that they don’t expect to have fun.
And so you get something like this official Roblox Olympics game, which is beautiful, one of the prettiest Roblox games I’ve seen. It has the Olympic rings and the Visa logo all around, so a whole lot of people have signed off on it. And it’s a really satisfying space to wander around: tunnels, a lake, pathways, trees, lovely buildings, trampolines you can bounce on to get a great view.
But the thing you actually do in it, in theory, is play a bunch of little vaguely sporty games, none of which — presumably due to licensing restrictions — are actual Olympic sports: “Tightrope Balance”, “Golden Discus”, “Coin Frenzy”, a game called “Obby But You’re Going For Gold” (this is niche even by the standards of the rest of this paragraph and it absolutely doesn’t matter, but: the game in question is not actually an obby, it’s an endless runner). The games are short and buggy and confusing and look, I don’t want to be a dick about it because it’s clear that SO much work has gone into this project. But the actual games that you play in it are not just not fun, they’re in some cases not even functional, as in they freeze and you have to quit out of Olympic World entirely.
There’s quite a lot of this vague jankiness. When you log in, for example, your welcome to the game is a little dude who runs up to you with a disclaimer about sponsored content.
The leaderboard for Golden Discus, which is basically frisbee golf, has the people with the highest number of throws at the top rather than the lowest, so the people who have taken sixteen thousand attempts to get their discus in the basket are declared the winners. There’s a message board where you can leave a message, but the message has to be one of four specific pre-approved messages, one of which is “This is my favourite event” (the message board is nowhere near any events). It’s a jankiness that’s pretty normal for a Roblox game, a lot of which are made by kids — and honestly, a player deliberately missing sixteen thousand throws of a frisbee to top a leaderboard feels like an extremely Roblox thing to do. But it’s weird, right? For something that is so, so officially THE OLYMPICS OFFICIAL OLYMPIC OLYMPICS VISA OLYMPICS GAME? Something that’s had a bunch of coverage in articles about how the OLYMPICS is DETERMINED to MEET THE YOUNG PEOPLE WHERE THEY ARE?
And I don’t think this is the developers’ fault! It feels so recognisably the result of a series of obfuscated compromises that it’s almost making me nostalgic.
I think it’s the sort of thing that happens when the focus of the commissioners is entirely on how the game looks and not at all on what it does. And when there’s a mismatch between the priorities of who is paying for this and who this is for. And when there’s a huge distance, as well, between “person who makes the decisions” and “person who makes the thing”, who must be separated by so many layers of money and brand guidelines and meetings, A employs B pays X pays Y employs Z. It’s the way that the middlemen, the agencies tend to obfuscate this distance to their clients as well; nobody is saying “yeah if you hire us we’ll go and find a different little agency and they’ll hire some freelancers who even we might never meet and THEY’LL make this thing for you”.
It’s basically the same as that “the Olympics is making some weird disaster NFT videogame” story that’s been going around: it’s decisions about games being made by people who don’t really think that some games are better and some games are worse, that some games are fun and some are not, but who just think that games are a handle that can be cranked to generate either youth engagement or money. So you end up with this gorgeous little Parisian Roblox world but there’s nothing to do there unless you want to visit an online museum and look at a photo of Michael Phelps.
Team USA has its own Roblox game too, incidentally, which apparently has Roblox versions of some of the athletes hanging out in it and which seems from screenshots to be at least as weird as OLYMPIC WORLD, but you can’t play it in the UK so you’re spared my take.
ANYWAY! THINGS I’VE ENJOYED LATELY
Ella Frears’ Goodlord, a novel/poem in the form of an email to a letting agent, fun and funny and astute and strange - the formatting means it doesn’t work great in ebook, but the hardback is a lovely satisfying object.
Getting the commuter riverboat along the Thames, highly recommended if you have any excuse at all.
Olio, which is a sharing app for getting or giving away food and household items. I’ve been trying to clear out some cupboards lately and within minutes Olio had found a home for a wrongly sized air filter, a bunch of cat food our cats loved for a month then suddenly refused to eat, a white periwinkle and a box of free skincare samples that I got sent last time I bought sunscreen. Incredibly high “people turn up when they said they would” reliability too.
Sunlight, extremely nice stuff there.
SOME ADVICE
Okay, last little thing. I’m currently working on a project inspired by all the old how-to books I’ve picked up from charity shops over the years. I’ve got so many of these, most of them about hobbies that I definitely don’t want to take up: How To Solve It (on maths), Mountain Hazards (on hiking), Creative Miming (on, y’know, miming). I’ll write more on the actual project soon, but in the meantime here is some fantastically discouraging advice from Paul Draper's On Tap Dancing, from the 70s:
"I fear that keeping time is an innate quality, and either you can or you can't — like being tone deaf or color blind. Keeping time is an essential tool of the dancer. If you can't do it, then accept the fact and find some other medium of expression."
Incredible. Thanks, Paul!
More soon,
Holly