First one I encountered was Braid, that has puzzles based on manipulation of time. The basic tool at your arsenal is the ability to rewind time. To move the clock backwards. Undo your mistakes, undo your deaths. This is coupled by environments where more complex time manipulation is available – objects that are unaffected by your meddling. Objects that are affected by the echo of your actions. Objects that are tied by your spatial location to their temporal position. And all coupled by the tale of you trying to find The Princess. Who is still in another castle. It’s a beautiful game, with perfect music and perfect graphics. Touching to the bone.

The second game is Eversion, which is a very classic platformer, where the objective is to find The Princess, and the way to do that is to collect all the gems in the worlds and complete all the worlds. And to be able to do that, you need to traverse sideways, altering your perception of things, entering darker and darker dimensions, where at first the clouds become solid, then time stops … then something seems to be after you.. it’s a sugar-coated game that starts with a H.P. Lovecraft quote. Should tell you enough.

I assume I will be hooked on this game for years to come, which is nice.

The older I get, the more I seem to appreciate the simple things like that. When you can simplify a large group of something in a game to just a large group of something and be happy about it. While games full of individuals are fun, it’s nice to be able to identify groups as well. And in a large scale games, even better so.

When people ask what my favorite video game of all times was, I answer Star Control 2 without hesitation (unless I’m feeling exceptionally nostalgic about some other game that very moment). A big great part of the affection has to do with the amazing job the designers did with the various races in it. The basic setup of the game is that there are these big evil Ur-Quan things that have pretty much subjugated the whole galaxy under their rule (read: They’re The Evil). Including the human race, who are now living under a slave shield, stranded on Earth. The only beacon of hope is the player’s Captain and his super-ship, who goes around the star-systems, meeting old alien allies who have turned hostile or gone into hiding, trying to convert them back to the good fight. And maybe make some new allies in the process.

The races (read: factions) in the game are wonderfully unique when compared to each others. They are made quite simplistic, so that they don’t have a huge number of defining characteristics. A big part is of course the speech-patterns and the way they look, but they also have quite a personality. Each race is like an extension of a very solid, vivid, coherent personality. There is the sycophant, the coward, the honor-obsessed, the angsty, etc. race. The race as a collective share the traits, but there might be individuals who are individuals, while still being part of the race. Each of the races have a couple of these character traits that they embody, and each have a very strongly defined society. They have their superiors and they have their political systems. They have their passions and they have their quirks. But, all in all, they can be discussed with caricatures. “Those hippie birds”, “The honor-obsessed kamikaze/samurai rodents”, “The communication impaired great old one fish” and so on.

And they have a wonderfully complex relationship with each other. No man is an island, so to speak. Even if in this case the men are alien beings that aren’t even remotely human. To quote something from the game:

“This may come as a shock, but the Shofixti are reborn. We have a Shofixti Captain here with us. Now do you believe?”

If this is being a true thing, there will be many changes.

But we are a species long wise in the ways of deceit.

Ye must be proving these words ye say, Captain.

Send the Shofixti to us as a way of proof.

Those were the words of the Yehat, a funny-looking bird-like race who lived and died by their code of honor. When they failed to protect their marsupial allies, the Shofixti, the whole race fell into despair, and only through the leadership of their queen, they managed to stay even semi-coherrent, and joined the Evil Side to forget the tragedy.

I’ll switch to tabletop roleplaying for a moment – You might have heard of a game called Vampire: the Masquerade, where they came up with a great mechanic that has been later dubbed the clubhouse system amongst friends. Every character belongs to a club. Membership is mandatory. A character can belong to a single club. And can’t change their colors. The vampires’ clubs in Vampire: The Masquerade were their clans. You get bitten by a vampire who belongs to a clan and you belong to that clan as well. There was an artist clan, there was a businessman clan, there was a rebel clan, there was a clan of ugly vampires. And that worked damn well. It was easy to connect with, easy to vary, twist, mirror and all that. You could make a vampire character that was a part of the businessman clan, who was a brute. You could make him as much of a brute as you wanted. But he was still initiated into the vampires through the a part of a proud and long tradition of businessmen. He was chosen by the businessmen to become a vampire, and thus he is defined by the clan even if he wanted to be defined by it or not. If he had been a part of the artist clan, the fact that the artists had chosen to turn the brute into a vampire would have mattered as much, or even more, than the fact that he’s a brute.

And it was easy to build political structures for the vampires. Every relationship was in the end defined by the clans – even if some vampire boss managed to rule his city so that all the different vampires from different clans were one big shiny happy family, if one of the clans’ big names arrived to the city, the clan members were more than likely to flock under his wing. And usually even this wasn’t needed for the players to talk about things like “Wonder what the Tremere (the magician clan of the vampires) are up to, we haven’t heard anything of them lately” or “If we want to go to the woods, we may need some help from the Gangrel (the half-animal vampire clan)”. Even if the whole local Gangrel population was a group of former zookeepers and biology professors, the instinct would be to run to them when planning a woodland trip, because “The Gangrel, they know the woods.”

Besides the clans, there was the division between “us and them”, the Camarilla and the Sabbat. In the early works, Sabbat was pretty much an undefined terror that was only very loosely described in the source books. Camarilla was the group where the clans belonged to and that had all the player characters in it. Later, Sabbat got some clans as well, making it equal to Camarilla and as playable. But before that, while there might have been political squabbles and backstabbing between the Camarilla clans, when it came to Sabbat, there was a nice solid threat that everyone hated equally.

White Wolf released several games in their game line after Vampire: The Masquerade, that tried to follow the same mold, but only Mage: The Ascension came close to managing a good, pure mandatory clubhouse system. With games like Werewolf: The Apocalypse, where the clubhouse you belonged to was determined by birth (thus there being no “why is this character part of our club” thing) or Wraith: The Oblivion, where the clubhouses were kind of odd and hard to point out, it didn’t just work. In Mage, the character gravitated towards one of the clubs because of the similarities in their worldviews, which made the club something that could be more easily thought through.

Now, exit the old White Wolf games and enter the next generation. The clubhouse system evolved there. Each strain of bogeymen (vampires, werewolves, whatnot) have not one, but two clubs they belong to. The club they are born into (this might be the vampire’s clan, or the fairie’s type) and the club they join (the vampire’s ideology, much like Camarilla or Sabbat in the old days, or the court of faeries the critter belongs to, or something like that). This creates a far more complex network of relationships between various factions, as each character is usually loyal to at least two external bodies. And as they say on the internet, “OMFG TEH DRAMA” when these two come to clashes.

But it’s taken something away from it all. Without the clear-cut clubhouses, the factions have become blurred, and it’s no-longer a question of wondering what the Tremere are up to, it’s a question of the individuals in that particular city. It takes away from the grandeur of it all to know that you’re most likely just involved in local politics than to be, through the clans, actually affecting something greater. To return to the earlier example of Star Control 2 – the fact that you were dealing with a real faction allowed something like the following to happen:

“All right, I’ll send over the Shofixti.”

We are scanning the separation of a vessel from yer fleet, Captain and indeed, its configuration matches that of a Shofixti Scout vessel.

This had better not be a trick, Captain!

We are knowing the power of a Glory Device, and if you detonate the weapon near us the price for you shall be dear, very dear.

The Scout has docked, and we await the pilot’s appearance at the airlock.

The atmosphere cycle is complete… the door slides open… and

AWK!! BRAAK!! YEEP!! IT IS TRUE!!! THE SHOFIXTI ARE ALIVE!!!

Look at that furred muzzle, those shining black eyes, the sweet claws!

Our children have returned from oblivion!!

But now we are faced with the cruellest truth!…

…We who have sacrificed our honor! We who have lain with our enemy!

WE ARE NOT WORTHY! WE ARE NOTHING!…We are less than nothing.

But wait! We are not Spathi. We are Yehat… OF THE STARSHIP CLANS!

We will NOT live this lie any longer!

Listen as I speak these words! If our Queen makes the dishonorable command

then it is THE QUEEN WHO HAS NO HONOR!

And a dishonorable Queen is NO QUEEN AT ALL!

We, the Zeep-Zeep, are the only Clan who remember the TRUE MEANING of honor we shall TEAR THE QUEEN FROM HER THRONE!

The two-thousand year reign of the Veep-Neep Queens IS OVER!

THE REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN!

Sorry. A bit carried away there. But if you’ve played the game, you know how much pathos that bit of text contains. I mean tha because it’s clear that the Yehat are a honorable race, and that they mourn over the loss of the Shofixti, it’s possible, that when the race (as an entity) is presented with a Shofixti captain, they will actually rebel against their queen. Not just go “oh well, me and Bob agree with this and think the system’s a bit bad now”, but have a revolution.

In old Vampire The Masquerade this sort of wholesome clan-movement happened a lot. One of the Camarilla’s clans actually got fed up with Camarilla and left. The Gangrel got fed up at some point with the system and decided they could leave it behind. Of couse a few individuals here and there stayed behind, but the Clan, the Club, as a faction, decided to call it quits. And when I spoke of how the clan defined a lot about the character, it came quite obvious at that point. If you were playing a Gangrel, you would be defined as “a Gangrel who stayed as a part of Camarilla” if you were one of those who didn’t want to leave.

While any game benefits from strong characters and individualism, I love to think that there is a huge benefit in being able to lump these individuals into generic boxes. Be it as simple as race “He’s a bugbear”, or profession “he’s an adventurer”, or something a bit more complex “He’s one of the people from the Northern Mountains”, it still makes cataloging the person when big wheels turn on the world. If you know the people from Northern Mountains have declared war, you have to make judgements about the people frrom NM whom you know.

The basic eye-opening moment required an additional “ooh..” moment stemming from thinking up an example from polar opposite. I know people who are highly educated and use their brain on levels of analytical depth that’s alien to me, and on daily basis, they use vocabulary no “ordinary” person has to ever face. They are also somewhat detached on personal level of communication. Everything is questioned and referred and quoted for wise words of masters of relevant field. Everything said is important, not mundane. To me, something feels missing when I listen to them.

Maybe lack of words does not mean lack of communicative abilities, it just drives the communication through emotional and empathic pathways. Body language. Slightest twitch of some hidden muscle somewhere which is registered by an ever-observant lizard brain hidden under our clever superbrain capable of analyzing things down to quantum levels.

Using and knowing too many words leads to reduced level of empathy and that curious “automatic” communication. Go even further with words that are inherently “too sophisticated” and “out of my league” and you end up emotionally distant from the ones who are listening to you. You become an alien most people can’t connect with anymore.

Now, games.

First, games that draw you in and make you ooh and aah on the vague feeling of intimacy of the world itself. ICO and Shadow of Colossus come to mind as first examples. They connect with you, which means they’re able to communicate with you even though they are not something you’d talk and converse with. Yet, they manage to deliver the very feeling of soul of the gameworld in a way you accept with open arms, with your defenses down. They pull your walls down, fullstop. Does this remind you of other such games? Which ones are they? Do they have lots of dialogue, or do they have a distinct lack of it? ICO has minimal dialogue, and even then it’s fictional language..

Second, games that feel deeply interesting and urges you to dig deeper. Clear notion of a traditional story, lots of little details, carefully constructed world and everything connects with everything else. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow Of Chernobyl comes to mind. Half-Life. Witcher. Bioshock. Fallout 1 through 3. Tinkering with things, objective-based gameplay with new dialogue, diary notes and events presented along the way. They tell you things through words coming out of NPC mouth, or by text. Possibly lots of it. Depth of the world is achieved by presenting you with a barrage of information your brain begins to click through, creating coherent forms and shapes that define the world. World is couraged to observed as realistic, open for literal interpretation. Very, very much like reading a book, except you have to fight and solve your way through the pages of it. No “automatic” flow as such.

So, there’s two different ways of communicating to the player what world he or she is in, and how he or she should take it in. They’re very probably better kept separate, and not mixed up. Further from the middlegrounds, better the impact. Mixing them up might tickle up an irrecoverable “that’s not right, dunno why but it’s just not right.” -reaction one can’t justify even if asked. It’s the automatic bits of our brain that dictate how we feel about things, and games should always feel just right with no apparent reason. Apparent reasons come through analytical thinking, feeling of just right comes from clicking with the game, and that’s empathy.

The video game Left 4 Dead is begging to be mentioned when one talks about creative ways of using diegetic and extra-diegetic sound in games. The survivor side of the game plays with high reliance to soundscapes, sound cues and music. So much in fact that you could say beyond the very basics of survival, everything in the game boils down to listening to what’s happening in the game.

L4D uses both character level and player level audio to support the game play. The very basic soundscape of L4D is made of player level music (well, more like long synth chords, most prominent at start of levels, to open up the level) and character level ambiance sounds of the environment like crows and sounds of thunder. This creates a very strong base mood for the game.

The second way sound happens is through the sounds of the player characters. First of all, they produce the sounds that you’d expect – when you shoot a shotgun, you hear a shotgun sound. When you move around muck, you hear squishy footstep sounds. But beyond these, the characters comment on the environment actively, even without the player telling them to. When they get attacked, they scream for help. When they notice one of them is low on health, they tell the other character to heal up, etc. This is fully happening on the character level. The player can intrude on the character level and command his character to say some of the pre-scripted things, for example to call out that there is a boomer ahead, around the corner even if the character is unaware of it. There is a player level audio bit to some of the character actions as well – getting attacked by a special infected will cause a dramatic song (again, mostly synth chords) to boom out from the loudspeakers. Also, worth mentioning that the characters’ dialogue sometimes dips into the metadiegetic level of story-within-a-story when they reveal things of their past or when their comments tell the story of the infection, as well as telling the player what the character-level story is (in the “We have to follow these tracks to an abandoned military base” style). (thanks Kham for pointing that last one out)

One of the ways people grief when playing Left 4 Dead is to make their character repeat some stupid line of their repertoire like “PILLS HERE” every second or so, causing the other players lose their ability to keep the character level separate from the player level, falling into disbelief of the whole character level of the game in the progress. Not to mention it’s annoying as hell when someone keeps shouting “PILLS HERE” in your ear.

The third way, of course, is the other actors of the game besides the player characters. The helicopter flies above you and use a megaphone to tell you to head to Mercy Hospital. A gas station explodes with a thundering roar. Infected people whimper and moan. And then there are the special infected. Each of them having a distinct sound following them. The smoker coughs, the boomer gurgles, the hunter snarls and then screams when he’s moving. The witch cries and sobs, and the tank roars. And when you hear the multitude of gnarls a horde of normal infected generate, you know there’s a lot of nasty heading your way. These are all character level sounds. When you turn your head in the first person mode, you notice the sounds move left to right and right to left, allowing you to pinpoint a boomer hiding behind the corner a long time before you see it, or hear the witch getting closer as her sobs grow louder. And spotting the specials before they are upon you is really the only way to survive on the higher difficulty levels, when things get tough in the game. On top of those, the witches, tanks and hordes also have a player-level musical theme, that emphasizes the mood of the situation – with the witch it’s a surreal melody that gets piano hits when the witch is almost agitated and turns into a panicing cacophony when she’s out to get you. With the horde, you get a couple of creepy chords a moment before the screeching starts and the masses start flowing. And with the tank, it’s a very doom-inspiring track that makes the player scared enough when the big bad things is coming.

There is a fourth level of audio in the game, if you happen to get into a team that is doing it. The game supports voice communication between the players via microphones. As any conversation between real people, this sometimes is just silly chatter to lighten up the mood. Sometimes it’s completely unrelated to the game, and sometimes it’s a repetition or extrapolation of something the characters could have communicated on their level. For example, a player might say “a hunter got me” to the microphone, even if the audio cues of the character level in the game could have given the same information to the other players (the characters shouting “A hunter got Francis” and Francis screaming “Get it off me”). Thus, there is a player level communication going on about the game as well as the communication that happens via the detour of the character level. And then there is singing. There always needs to be singing to the microphone. I have no idea why.

On IRC, I “hang out” on about a dozen channels these days. There’s one that’s actually quite active, but sadly, the activity is something that doesn’t really concern my life a lot anymore – it’s the channel for my old main subject’s student group. Then there’s a “nowplaying” channel, where music I listen to gets pasted on, in real time. Pretty much like last.fm does. Sadly, haven’t found a spotify-mIRC plugin, so not much of the music I listen to these days actually gets pasted there. And it’s very rarely someone listens to something there that grabs my attention. Then there are a couple of “legacy” channels – channels that used to be active, but have gone into some form of a hibernation in the past years. I join the channels, and hope someone would talk about something, but the best they can do really is paste a couple of links and not really comment on anything. Some of the channels I’m on are only about organizing games these days. RPGs or Online Games, depending on the mood and time. But there is nothing really interesting to chat about there either. And on the rest of the channels, people hang out because it would be impolite to leave the channel as the two or three other people you know would take offense. Some of these channels are silly to the point that the people on the channel won’t talk to you on the channel, but start a private conversation, killing any hope of some conversation happening on-channel.

In case it doesn’t show, I’m thinking of quitting IRC.

On MSN the situation is actually much better – While there’s only a handful of people I talk on it, the conversations are much better. Even if there’s not a community feel to the conversations, they at least seem to exsist. But there are a lot of dead contacts there as well. I don’t even know why I have half of the contacts I do, anymore.

Facebook, as Larsa put it the other day, is something that you thought you would hate, but is actually quite great when you got into it. For me, it’s not that important, except for the few people I keep touch in through it. There are of course downsides to every coin, but mostly it’s a very “cute” system of staying in touch with people without actually staying in touch. Or to internet-stalk your ex-girlfriends, if you’re into that sort of thing. The only thing that really bothers me about it is the careless way some people seem to regard their own personal information. Somehow there’s been an abundance of memes going round that, when seen by wrong people, can be used for malice. Like provide the reader with information like “your mother’s maiden name”, something that is used quite commonly as a user verification question.

City of Heroes has seen some turmoil in the past few weeks – the EU offices are being shut down and moved to the US, something that might cause horrors to the EU players. But that’s something that only time will tell. Meanwhile, a small group of people that I know only through the game provide me with lots of great humor and good cheer. The group of us (all many-year veterans of the game) do a couple of hours of teaming every now and then and catch on on the latest gossip. Stories of what has happened to one another (who has gotten married, who has been in a drunken bar fight this time) and to those that we haven’t seen online in a while (but someone in the group happens to know in real life). Compared to the other communication channels, the fact that I haven’t met any of the people I play these days with in real life makes it quite unique compared to the others.

Which leads to Left 4 Dead, another game I’ve been playing actively. The main difference between CoH and L4D crowds for me is the fact that there is voice chat in the game. The people I play with vary from those I know in real life to those I’ve never met. But not having to rely on keyboard to expres yourself, and the game being very action-oriented, changes the communication quite a bit – most of the things said are very much related to the gameplay, which leads to text that’s very, very shallow – I have no idea what’s going on in the other players’ lives, whereas in CoH someone might curse his girlfriend’s cat or other small things that are in no way relevant to the game, but are quite intimate.

I also mentioned Second Life. I’ve been a user for so long that they’re actually paying me to log in every week, but I’ve never really “got” the environment. I guess it’s all those flying obscenities that man can imagine that keep me distant from it, but I must admit, there are some good things here and there – “specs of light” as one might say. One is a garden decor store a friend of mine runs there – a shop full of very “normal” things for sale. It’s almost unnerving to see someone sell a well-crafted rock when you’re mostly used to seeing … well, unnerving things. And another thing I’m going to have to buff is the Second Life Shakespeare Company, that try to provide some meaning to the damn place.

None of these really beat human interaction on a “real” level. A phonecall from a friend usually means a lot more than him pasteing you a link of people walking across a road.

For those who don’t know what Tru Calling is about or don’t have the muscle strength to click on the link about, the show’s sort-of-premise is “Cute girl relives days, to prevent nice people who died and asked her for help not to die.” Funnily, that’s fact only maybe in the pilot. What makes the show very watchable in comparison to other series with clear-cut formulas is the fact that the formula is there only to be broken. It is specifically indicated in a few episodes that when things happen the “Cute girl relives days, to prevent nice people who died and asked her for help not to die” way, they happen off-screen. The main character relives days and saves people, mostly on Mondays and Thursdays. But when we get to see it on screen, there is some variation to the pattern.

It might be something small like “the guy who needs saving isn’t a good guy” or “it’s not about saving just one person” or “It’s about saving not only the person, but your own life also”. The writers are very aware of the core concept and know how it can be explored. And what they were planning doing with it was quite awesome as well. Shame it never got explored better. But in a world where even the best shows tend to get stale because they don’t have the guts to explore the show’s concept more often, Tru Calling was really a nice exception.

And yes, not to disapoint the eager, I will go on to a gaming tangent on this one as well. Puzzle games are really great at this. You are given a set of tools from the start. You start by solving the simplest possible obstacle with the one tool you’ll end up using most. And level by level you are presented with new problems you can solve using those tools. Usually the end levels need you to wrap your head around every concept you’ve learned and possibly understand how certain basic rules you thought existed in the beginning are broken. It’s a shame that games outside the puzzle genre rarely use this to their advantage. Or it might be so that once you include that pattern to your game, the game gets classed as a Puzzle game. Portal being a good example of the latter.

Would be interesting to see this pattern expand to other games. In MMOs, this can be seen when people do things like “Let’s try to complete this instance with sub-optimal group setup” and in some games, people are giving themselves restrictions on what they can do so they have challenges. Typical way games seem to raise the bar these days is just increase number of enemies or make you smash things with bigger reaction times. But very rarely you end up with a situation where you find yourself constantly exploring the awesome things you actually can do with the resources you could have used from the beginning.

Notice I’m not treating all games under the same ideology, just those heavy on story (or depicting a notion of one, even if there’s none).

Context! There’s this thing called .. well, that. If I perform an action in a depicted world and it doesn’t reflect there, I get annoyed, miffed and irritated to bits. Example: You have this wonderfully graphic character you’ve paid attention to, guided him/her through the world that has presented him/her with new skills and whatnot. Then you walk against a wall and there it goes, stupid mindless videogame avatar doing a videogame walkcycle, standstill and unaware of the bloody brickwall scrubbing his face.

All of a sudden, your character is reduced into a representation of player navigation mistake. Ta-ta, it was nice seeing you, miss Believability and mister Immersion. Sorry about the stale wine. Oh, and if I change the world, I expect the change to be permanent and propagate with ripple effects, depending on how it affects other things / NPCs / whatnot connected with it in the gameworld.

Immersion in faked out world built using stiff-at-best mechanics is a bitch to implement. Mainly it becomes a swamp that has no bottom – as you hone in some important detail that colors the world that much more, it creates a dependency or requirement to do another to support it, and so forth. You’ll start to realize how much you miss on the real world when you begin breaking things to their elements. Just a moment in your own time, even if you’re not doing a thing. It’s insanely complex, and you can’t simulate it.

You just have to try your best to fool the player to think he’s immersed, when you’re just really drawing his attention away from flaws.

Walk, walk, walk, nothing out of ordinary, walk to a staircase and if your eyes are keen and lively, you might notice your character grab the handrail casually .. Or strum his fingers against the radiator in a room if he’s close enough. Glance at something, being natural. Something surprising happens – look! Nothing to act by, just birds taking to flight. Tilt your head slightly at a sound of distant rock falling. Little things your character should be doing. What you’d do. Context-aware.

Okay, bit thin cookie-cutter examples considering the depth of subject matter. However, it’s still about the context and how living and breathing the world around you seems. Everything should happen within context of the world and surroundings, and there should be parts of the world represented to the player even if they’re not important, or even required. As you, the player, observe the world, the world should observe you back, unashamedly. Giving you context when you don’t expect.

Think of the very moment your character is in. What’s happening in the world that doesn’t give a flying wack about your character, a pebble beneath the bedrock trying to make a change? What sounds does that world make? What defines the local space around him at that very moment? What does it look like? How it all bounces off of him? What gets sucked in? What’s the string that connects YOU there?

Say. How about a character that reacts to the player? Not a blind representation of your actions, but more like companion. Did you guide him to a thorny bush? Is he pissed off? Wait, what, did he just throw a rock up in your direction and shout obscenities?! Well, at least he still follows your mouse clicks. Maaaybe.. If you promise to behave. You find yourself in some strange semi-conversation, just without voice. Oh, you do get commented on, so tread carefully. Especially since it’s multiplayer. Other players companion character trots by, laughs with your char about the idiotic failure you, the player did just some time ago. Semi-public shame! But you’re so immersed in the living commentary of your actions in the world that you just stare, bewildered. Then you hear the other character taunt affectionally his player, as if he was a puppydog who just wasn’t housetrained yet. Characters momentarily take over and become the players themselves, just from outside perspective. It all becomes delightfully confusing, wondrous and profoundly different.

Would that create the necessary string between the player and world? Or something completely different? Could it be possible to build some multilayered insanitychains on tabletop RPG using this idea? I expect Alvan to wear some feathers and run to the woods to meditate on this.

Now, why the hell did I focus on character issues only? Why not hints of context and surroundings in Web2.0 where you, the social browser, need to know there are other people present, not just minute “lol my cat hiccupd” lines and some bling on screen? It’s not just games. How to drive advertisements deeper into people now that they’re so accustomed to them? Hell, these days marketing guys need to come up with  bloody big campaigns to launch a new advertisements. Jeeves, could you let me know at what point do we need to start figuring out how to sell ourselves the idea of real world around us? You know, with people becoming so superficial, shallow and black/white? What has made them so distant from it?

Meh.