Missing moments in games

This weekend I finally played David OReilly's Everything. (I tried a pre-release build a couple of years ago, but I had trouble with the controller and gave up almost immediately. This time I played all the way through, or at least to what I can call an "ending".)

Spoiler warning: I am about to start talking about the ending ("ending") of Everything, and how it is constructed. I'm going to go into detail. So if your kink is surprises, buy Everything and play through it before reading this. It won't take you too long.

Death of the Author warning: I am about to start talking about the intent of games by seeing how they are constructed. Indeed, I will be making assumptions about how the design evolved. That is: I will be reading games as texts. I realize it's perfectly possible to go find the designer and ask what they intended, or how the game evolved -- but that's not the point here. That is not, as Alan Watts says in Everything's adopted narration, the game we're playing.

Myst 25th-anniversary Kickstarter

Cyan just launched a Kickstarter for a 25th-anniversary re-release of Myst. And all four sequels, newly updated for Windows. And the single-player Uru collection (Complete Chronicles). Myst (the first one) will be included in both classic slideshow and full-3D (RealMyst) forms.

Everything will be available on Steam, but the big prize is a physical collection of discs in a case which looks (of course) like a linking book.

(Regrettably, this is Windows-only. They don't have the resources to update all the Mac ports.)

Cyan has been hinting at this for a few days now. Also, you know, posting to Facebook about it, which goes a bit beyond hinting. But here it is.

So that's the headline. Is there anything interesting to say about it, other than "Back this"?

Obviously, we'd prefer a new game rather than a re-release of some old games. I still have all my old CD-ROMs of the Myst series -- although it's a shaky bet which ones might run on any computer that's not buried in a closet. But Myst 3 and Myst 4 have been out of print for a very long time. This release is a first opportunity for a lot of younger players. I'm rather keen on replaying them myself.

(Yes, 3 and 4 have some obvious flaws, which are running jokes in the Myst fan community. So do 1, 2, and 5. There isn't a one of them that I regret playing.)

The more important question, to me, is "What happens to Cyan next?" Recent articles have made it clear that the company is in very tight straits right now. Obduction did not make enough money to fund a new game. In fact, Cyan is still paying for Obduction work, since the PSVR port remains stuck in the pipeline.

So this Kickstarter, if it succeeds, will get some cash into the barrel. But it looks like they're just aiming to raise enough money to fund the production of the physical rewards. (They have, very sensibly, omitted all mention of stretch goals. If the project over-funds, they'll make more of what they've planned.)

Hopefully they've done their spreadsheets right and they'll break even on the rewards. Then they'll have an additional ongoing income stream from Steam sales. I don't know if that will add up to much -- as several developers have posted recently, it's a rough year for narrative games, and re-releases of old games are going to be hard put to compete. But any long tail is better than no long tail.

In the meantime, we'll have nifty memorabilia to fondle.

Why does Twitter allow third-party clients?

In last month's open letter to Slack, I wrote:

(Twitter may not block third-party clients, but it sure wants to discourage people from using them.)

The next shoe in that caterpillar cavalcade just hit the floor:

After June 19th, 2018, “streaming services” at Twitter will be removed. This means two things for third-party apps:

• Push notifications will no longer arrive
• Timelines won’t refresh automatically

That's from a web page, Apps of a Feather, which was just launched as a joint announcement from the developers of four popular Twitter clients. Twitter has responded by "delaying the scheduled June 19th deprecation date" (@TwitterDev, Apr 6) but it's unclear if their new Account Activity API will be sufficient for third-party apps to keep working.

This sucks for me. If third-party clients vanish -- and I see that day coming, soon or late -- I will not be switching to the official Twitter client or Twitter.com web site. I'm not saying that out of principle or anything. I just find the official Twitter experience to be abysmal. I can't do anything with it. It's noisy, it's out of order, and it's full of ads. No.

(Apps of a Feather is hosted by Twitterific, Tweetbot, Talon, and Tweetings. I use Echofon on iOS and Tweetbot on Mac. Echofon hasn't posted or tweeted anything about the issue, which is worrisome in a different direction.)

You might imagine, given my Slack post, that I will now write an open letter to Twitter telling them to continue supporting third-party clients. Sorry; nope; waste of time. Twitter isn't listening to me.

The question isn't why Twitter would drop support for third-party clients. The question is why they've kept supporting them for so long. Remember I just said that the official Twitter experience is full of ads? The clients I use don't show ads. I'm using Twitter ad-free. I am a freeloader! Why does Twitter put up with me?

They've never said, but I have a theory. I believe Twitter sees me as a selling point for their service. Not me, I mean, but people like me: early adopters with a lot of followers, who are seen as important or interesting people to follow. (In one circle or another.) "Influencers," if you will. I am a very small-time influencer, but there are a fair number of such people. Big-name bloggers, pundits, and so on.

We are, I am sure, the biggest users of third-party clients. We started with Twitter early, and we like how early Twitter behaved. (Ad-free, for a start.) We are cranky and unwilling to change our habits.

So for years (my theory says), Twitter has had a problem. They want to keep us early-cohorters around, because their selling proposition for newcomers is "Twitter is full of interesting people." But they don't want newcomers to use Twitter the way we do, because we're free-thinking radicals. Twitter wants newcomers to use the web site, which they have total control over. That's their only hope of getting and staying profitable.

This explains Twitter's weird, half-assed client support over the years. In 2012, they limited how popular third-party clients could get. (So old people could keep using their clients, but it's hard for those clients to acquire new users.) Over the past few years, Twitter has added new features which are not available to third-party clients. (I don't care about those features -- I just want my old-fashioned behavior -- but newcomers will want them.)

The problem with this, of course, is that every year there are more newcomers, and they follow more people who aren't me. Or people like me. Even if I'm right, the early cohort is a shrinking piece of Twitter's selling proposition. One day they're going to just shove us off the boat.

Last week's announcement, and partial retraction, is just another step in that dance. Third-party clients will still work, but maybe they won't refresh as smoothly. Or maybe they will. Nobody knows. Twitter isn't saying, because every year they're a little farther away from caring.

Where does this leave me? Off the boat. I can't use Official Twitter. I'll keep using third-party clients even if they become degraded. (I can use fussy, degraded interfaces for a long time.) If they go away entirely? I guess I lose Twitter.

There will be no Twitter replacement. I mean, there will be no service that is "like Twitter, with a Twitter-sized mass audience, but run with respect for users." You can't get that many users with an open service, because big services are expensive to run, and the only way to make money is to grind up your users for advertising paste.

On the other hand, I don't have a Twitter-sized mass audience. I have about 2500 followers. IF services that I help run, like IFComp and IFTFoundation, are of the same order of magnitude.

I have a Mastodon account: @zarfeblong (on the gamedev.place server). Perhaps the gamedev and IF crowd will migrate to Mastodon. That's not an absurd idea. Mastodon will never become a Twitter replacement, but it might work for my followers. I'm going to stay optimistic. Let's see what happens.