The Triforce

So I wrote a letter to Quorn. It was nice and polite and the upshot was I got £5 and £5 worth of Quorn sausages and now I’m addicted to complaining, nicely. I’m not going to take consumer defeat anymore. I’m going to champion my own rights and be super polite about it.

That said, my second letter, to Morrisons (sent using a form on their website which only allowed 1000 characters) has yet to receive a reply:

Hello Morrisons!

Only 1000 characters, eh? I better get on with this.

I bought some cookies from your Shepherd’s Bush store on the 3rd of September. They are The Cake Shop’s “Improved Recipe” Milk Chocolate Cookies. There were five of them. There are still five of them because each cookie has some kind of solid white substance compacted in the bottom. 

Now, it is probably harmless. Here is a picture! 

http://i54.tinypic.com/21o4fi9.jpg

The white part looks like paper, gum, crumbles like plaster. I am not sure what it is. I would bet  it is edible, harmless, but I have not eaten it because I don’t want to be that story on page seven of Metro about the man who died finding out that a 95p bag of Morrisons cookies contained Anthrax. I am sure it’s not Anthrax! That would be crazy! But I don’t like cookies enough to take that chance.

Four of the five cookies are now in the bin. Let me know what you want me to do with suspect #5.

Thanks,

Stephen

P.S. 39 characters to spare! Amazing!

You’ll note I signed it ‘Stephen’. I was going the formal route. And for the extra four characters.

So, what now? I suppose I’ll write them another one. This isn’t just about the 95p. It’s about CONSUMER RIGHTS. Also cookies, disappointment, anthrax(?). 

BRB.

At the end of August I’m going to Belgium for a wedding. After the wedding I’m going to travel around Belgium for a week (and probably visit Luxembourg, too). Why? HOLIDAY. What am I going to do? NO IDEA. The Eurostar to and from Brussels has been booked but beyond that I don’t have any actual plans and that’s where I’d like you to help.

I am really enjoying Google Plus. It’s somewhere between Facebook and Twitter, which means it has the asynchronous follow aspect of Twitter that I really, really like but with Facebook-style multimedia updates and the ability to restrict who sees what content.

But it feels quite incomplete at the moment. This is a list of things I’d like to see to make me super happy. I’m not sure why I’m putting it here but I really wanted to write it down for my own clarity and, well, it seemed like I might as well publish it too. That’s the internet. Might-as-well journalism over compulsion-to-report journalism. Anyway, maybe someone reading this will recognise a workaround or point out that I’m being stupid. Unlikely as the comments are still broken. SORRY ABOUT THAT.

1) Integration with Google Calendar. As soon as event management makes it over to G+, as I’m sure it will, I will feel able to quit Facebook. I probably won’t quit Facebook (because there are always people who find it easier to contact you there) but I will completely stop using it as a social hub.

2) Ability to select a default stream. It’s all very well putting people in circles like “COLLEAGUES” or “FAMILY” or “I THINK THESE PEOPLE ARE AWFUL BUT I AM OBLIGED TO LIKE THEM” but Google doesn’t differentiate between the ones you want to hear from all the time and the ones you want to ignore. It shows all the updates from everyone. Selecting a default stream would fix that (or FB’s ability to block would be OK, too, but seems wrong here).

3) Completely smooth Picasa integration. Almost there, but there are some bugs and wrinkles. And why can’t I share single photos from an album? Seems wrong but I might be missing something…

4) Better chat. The chat function that carries over from GChat (which is pretty elegant) seems a little broken here if you’ve got it open at the same time as a GMail window (I understand what it’s doing but it seems to be doing the wrong thing). Also I’m not clear on where it’s getting the chat people from; shouldn’t it be people who are mutual adds? Maybe not. Anyway, it’s a million times better than Facebook’s new fucked-up system.

5) Maybe that’s it, actually. I do worry I’m losing track of who’s added me and who I should have added back. It also seems right to have shared circles — like Facebook groups — where you can mutually add and remove people; just like you should be able to have shared photo albums and (you can?) have shared docs.

Anyway, it’s well good. C U THERE. Until we all move back to Friendster.

Twenty minutes ago. Walking behind two awful men and hating a world in which it’s OK to bray loudly in a shopping centre about your sexual conquests.

“Yeah had to wait for lonnnnng time but when I did it was so worth it”

“Mannnnnnnnnnn…”

“It is so SWEET, bruv. You gotta get you some of that.”

Anyway, to cut a short story shorter it turned out they were talking about ice cream, I felt like a cunt and then one of them held the door open for me.

So one of the other things I’m avoiding is re-reading previous entries or hitting the delete key. Which means on occasion I’ll repeat myself. I’m avoiding re-reading previous entries or hitting delete, you see. THAT WAS A ‘CLASSIC’ TRIFORCE-STYLE JOKE.

I didn’t write much after Monica for lots of reasons. Because I’m lazy, sure, because I was sick of crushing deadlines and the aching fatigue / boredom that came after beating one. Because I thought it was the best thing I’d written and I couldn’t imagine doing that again.

The same was true on a smaller scale with the blog. I (think I) said yesterday that I’m my own biggest fan and harshest critic. This is true; I used to re-read my own published work over and over again and I derived so much satisfaction from that. I still do, only now it’s about design docs, Powerpoints or particularly perfect emails. Awful, right? In at least two ways. The harshest-critic part is equally true. When I’ve written something I know is poor it disgusts me so much that I can’t look at it and now we’re back to reasons why I stopped blogging.

So one of the other things I’m avoiding is re-reading previous entries or hitting the delete key. Which means on occasion I’ll ETC YOU KNOW WHERE I’M GOING WITH THIS.

Another reason I’m back is because of Edge.

I don’t know if you’ve seen Edge recently but it has had a ‘redesign’. That’s often magazine publisher code for a relaunch to fight falling reader numbers. For Edge, whose readership never seems to vary much from 28k, it’s more about ensuring it’s still fresh, relevant and surprising. I don’t read much videogame journalism these days for fairly obvious / tedious reasons. I haven’t read all of the new issue of Edge yet, either, but I can tell you this much: the new design is nothing like the old one and it is great. It plays to the strengths of a magazine, like a weighty fuck-you to websites. It is proud of being tangible. 

As part of their relaunch Edge published 150 ‘classic’ reviews on their website. Because I was chief emo adolescent / hyperbole vehicle / troll of the Edge team during the PS2 / Xbox / Gamecube era, several of these stand-out reviews were mine. I remember them as being fun, overwritten, punchy. I remember being proud of them. I was not so proud of them when I reread them. I have not been back to the site since. 

But as big a shock as it was to discover younger Ste was not The Greatest Writer Of His Generation (and mortifying to realise everyone I worked with must have recognised this at the time) it was also helpful. Before reading my work on Edge Online I’d always assumed I was exactly the same writer I was ten years ago. Now, thanks to my own sense of (initially unnerving) disgust, I know better. I know I’m better — maybe not by much, but enough to make persistence worthwhile.

Armed with that knowledge I revisited Monica over the weekend. It is still, structurally speaking, the smartest thing I have ever written (actually, I noticed structural niceness in those old Edge reviews too, obfuscated by the words of a young writer trying too hard). Much of the dialogue is paraphrased from real online conversations I had at the time so judging it against my other writing is hard; but it is certainly imperfect, I can recognise a clumsier voice in there, and excising those words in favour of better ones is cathartic. To what end? Maybe just catharsis, honestly. We will see. I always found editing easier than writing.

Incidentally, on that subject, I wrote the script (and did almost nothing else) for the upcoming 3DS version of Crush. Had to fit all the dialogue inside a pre-set template, visiting already mapped locations. It wasn’t really writing, more like Sudoku, but fun in itself. The game is brilliant and you should all buy it. Particularly if you have a 3DS.

I’m learning to write again.

Though I kept up the pretence with paragraphs of forced-out bullshit here for a while, I really stopped writing in two stages. First when I stopped doing ‘paid’ writing work in 2006, five years ago, and decided to concentrate on making videogames. With no monetary incentive to keep going I was left with the creative compulsion and that ended not long after, with Monica. Monica was the play I wrote for the Edinburgh Fringe and, at the time, I believed I’d never write anything better. So I stopped writing.

There was another reason too: pressure. For a while this website was a pretty big deal in the pretty small world of personal blogs. Simon and I invented Toothing; David got blown up; other posts and projects gained attention, generated links and, in turn, caused Google to love us more which brought in more readers and so on. We never did anything with that power (‘power’), apart from cause mischief. But we had readers, a tiny community we’d built of people we liked. And it felt like I was constantly disappointing them. 

When you know people are reading you want to make each post perfect and that can be paralysing — not that anything I wrote here was close to perfect, stressful in itself when you’re your own biggest fan / harshest critic. But the number of times I gave up writing things halfway through grew and grew and grew until there was no point starting anything anymore. Then Twitter emerged. It’s easier to stress over 140 characters than three paragraphs of half-assed bullshit. Quicker, too. I’ve always enjoyed word counts.

It’s been five years and the desire to write is coming back. Reasons for that might make another post, but for a while I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a different blog, or blogging more on the OLL site, or whatever. It sort of makes sense to do it somewhere else — The Triforce began as a way for David, Simon and I to keep track of the things we did together and we haven’t done anything together for many, many years. 

But while that’s where we began, the site actually evolved into something more than that. It’s a record of a good part of my life and, actually, if I need a place to write down thoughts that don’t fit on Twitter, why not put it here? Why build something else? This is a ghost town but it’s our ghost town. The pressure’s off. I feel free.

If there’s anyone reading, please don’t expect regular updates. Two blogs in two days now and maybe I’ll do another tomorrow — equally, months may go without a post and every entry could be the last, even this one. I won’t be reading comments, either, so if you want to say something you’ll have to email me. But I’m learning to write again and this feels as good a place to do that as any.

Hi. Missed you, a bit. xx

I’m back. I think I might be back. 

The second thing I wanted to show you is Chime.

Chime is a puzzle game on Xbox Live Arcade by Zoé Mode, the videogame developer where I’m Creative Director. It costs 400 points which is something like four pounds. People have described it as Tetris meets Lumines meets Qix and I think that’s fair, though to me it’ll always be pentominoes vs a sequencer. It features music donated by Philip Glass, Markus Schulz and Phil Hartnoll from Orbital. I think it is pretty and compelling, but I would.

This is how Chime works.

We made Chime for OneBigGame, Martin de Ronde’s charity publisher. To be clear on what that means, Zoé is donating ALL of its royalties on Chime – that’s 60% of the cost of the cost of the game, all the Chime-related cash we have the power to donate – to OBG, who donate 80% of the money they receive to their chosen charities, Save the Children and the Starlight Foundation. It is not, as reported elsewhere, ‘profits’ we’re donating; we’re not covering our costs at all. That seems crazy, right? But we can justify it to ourselves because we keep the IP, so if Chime’s a success we can theoretically make a followup. OneBigGame want us to do that because if working with them works out for us, the first developer to take this gamble, then more developers will follow. And that means more money for charity, which is sort of the point.

So will it work out? I don’t know. I hope so. People who play it seem to like it a lot and that makes me happy. Lots of people have asked if we’ll be putting out DLC or a sequel with more songs. The answer to that is quite straightforward: we’ve done our bit for charity now and we can’t continue doing that forever because companies need to make money. If Chime sells enough copies we’ll be able to justify doing more Chime stuff, and I really, really hope it does. Not just because of the charity thing, or because there are a few niggles with this version and there’s lots of new things I’d like to try. There are, for sure, but the real reason I want to do a followup is because I’m genuinely addicted to Chime and want more. That’s it. Fingers crossed.