A slightly sad post. Fire Hazard Games is shutting up shop, and I wanted to make my own permanent record of my time making games with them. I’ve worked for them in fits and starts since 2015, and honestly, I’m more gutted about the fact I won’t be doing so again that I have been about some of the full-time jobs I’ve been made redundant from.

It was Douglas that got me involved, in 2015 as part of their Shadows over Shoreditch game – they needed an MC, and their standards at that time amounted to “Loud voice, doesn’t mind making a bit of a tit of himself, can learn most of a script and improv the rest”, and I just about managed that. Their standards have improved since then, and they now hire professional actors for that kind of work, but I absolutely loved what they were doing from the first moment I got involved.

It’d be very easy to call my involvement with them bittersweet, because it was while crewing Shadows in 2015 that Douglas suffered his accident. Absolutely nothing to do with Fire Hazard, just a sad coincidence, and if I’d never worked for Fire Hazard again, it would 100% have been that bittersweet thing I looked back on.

But I’ve worked on five or six of their games since, over the years. I’m never going to forget wandering around the Russia Dock Woodland at night in a giant Cthulu mask, barely able to see, but able to scare the bejesus out of the players, for Shadows over Southwark, the more ambitious sequel game they did the following year. (The costume was quite a lot scarier coming at you in a darkened wood, I assure you…)

I did my longest continuous stretch of crewing on their game called Undercover, and after starting out in the simplest role, I think I played just about every part it was possible to play over many weekend, and was stage managing or MCing it more weekends than not at one point in it’s run. It was a superb bit of game design, that managed to involve a lot of direct player-vs-player competition that nonetheless could never really get mean spirited or confrontational, and I’d always wished it would run again one day.

Plus it involved one of the crew standing in Leicester Square in a giant bird costume. What’s not to love?

My own involvement tailed off a bit over the years – having a permanent day job meant that a lot of the games they produced didn’t run at times I could work on them, so I didn’t audition to join in. And let’s be honest: by that point, they did not need my dubious abilities in any case. But I loved doing what I could, when I could.

I’m doing a few nights of stage managing for them yet, on Jekyll and Hyde, arguably their most immersive and narratively ambitious effort to date – not a lot, just enough to be involved, and cover when their more regular stage managers might not be free. I’m very pleased I am, because it’s going to be their last show, and I’m glad to be able to say I was involved in it, and I’ve made a special point of booking to attend the last night of the run as a player. (Tickets are still available for most of the nights. Book. You won’t regret it.)

I’ve met amazing friends through it, I’ve had a huge amount of fun, and it’s had a huge impact on my thinking about how to use technology in games, and in how I approach running my own live games company. I’m sad that I’m not going to have their standard to measure up to in the future. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t already thinking about producing my own variations on some of their tech for my own games, if I can, but it’s the way they approached empowering their crew (come to that: paying their crew – they were the first live-games company that I encountered that did that) that has made me determined to try to live up to the example they set.

I can’t thank, Gwyn, Amy, Michelle, Tony, Ziz, Sofia, and all the many other people I worked with, or who played the games we were making, for all the fun and games over the last 4 and a bit years. It’s been brilliant, and I’ll miss it terribly.

The world is on fire. Absolute bastards are hell bent on reducing the country I live in (and many other) to ruins, and stripping my generation, and those that come after us, of all the rights and privileges that our parents enjoyed.

So with all that taken as read: I really can’t look back on 2019 with anything other than happiness.

I’ve had a good year. I was hoping for a more settled and stable year than I had in 2018, and I absolutely got that. I’ve spent time with family and friends both old and new, I’ve enjoyed my job, I’ve been generally happy with how I’ve spent my spare time, and most importantly of all, Miranda and I got back together, and are actively planning for a future together, and I don’t have words for how happy I am about that. (That’s a lie. I do. I’m really really happy about that. No, happier than that. And happier than that, too.)

I can’t say I’m looking forward to 2020 on a global scale, but on a small and personal level, I’m really excited for the year to come.

I know that not everyone is as fortunate as I am, and that many people have had a shit year, or are staring down the barrel of a rough year ahead, or both. I hope things will improve soon.

I hope that when the time comes to take stock at the end of 2020, we can all find ourselves happier than we are today.

On Monday morning, I was swapping texts with an old friend, Hugh Hancock. The basic gist of those texts was “sorry we can’t catch up tonight, I’ll catch you in a few months”.

I never will. He died suddenly, that evening, of a heart attack, aged just 40.

To say he accomplished a lot in his far-too-short life is to undersell it. I don’t think he knew the meaning of the word “impossible” or “can’t”. Or anything like them. For as long as I knew him, he’d parked himself on the bleeding edge of technology and storytelling, and he was always doing something that no-one else was. It wasn’t always perfect. It wasn’t always polished. But no-one else was doing it. So he did.

His career took him all over the world, to speak and lecture. I’ve always been sorry that I never actually got to see him do that professionally, because I’m sure he was great at it. You only had to talk to him for five minutes before you saw his passion and heart, and it was bloody infectious. He poured it into everything he did, and he brought people along with him.

In the process of this, he named an art-form, Machinima, and made the first feature-length film in it, at a time when every else who was making Machinima thought they were doing well to make a five minute comedy short. When he concluded that one of the things that was letting his film-making down was the quality of the voice talent, he went out and booked Brian Blessed, Joanna Lumley, Jack Davenport and Anna Chancellor for his next work. I still don’t quite know how he managed it. I’m not sure he knew how he managed it.

I think it’s fair to say that Machinima wouldn’t look the same without him. And as if one art form wasn’t enough, in the last few years, he’d turned his attention to VR games, and storytelling. Lacking the equipment to do so, I haven’t played his effort in that field but from the reaction to it, and it sounds like he hit exactly the mark he was aiming for, and showed people that yes, you can use VR games as a narrative form.

I’ve read a bunch of the tributes to him, from his friends and from strangers who only knew him through his work, and of all of them there’s a comment on a facebook thread made by his close friend Johnnie Ingram (whose own tribute to Hugh is singularly perfect), noting “The number of people saying some variation of ‘he quite literally changed my life’ is extraordinary”. I think that’s very true, and is absolutely the measure of the man.

But as I remarked elsewhere, it’s not his achievements I’ll miss. It’ll be my my funny, warm, kind friend.

It’ll be the lunatic who decided he wanted to cook sous-vide at home, years before you could buy a home sous-vide device, so dragooned an engineer friend into helping him hack about with a slow cooker and an electric thermocouple, to create the monstrosity of wiring and water that he dubbed his “atomic crockpot”. (He did not know the meaning of the word “impossible”. He may sometimes have been hazy on the meaning of the word “safety”.)

It’ll be the man who reduced me to tears of helpless laughter describing the process of drying duck for a banquet between two computer fans.

It’ll be the man who I could (and did) talk about anything with, and be assured that he’d just get it. Whatever it was. The friend who I might not see for months or years at a stretch, but we’d meet, and five minutes later, it’d be like no time had passed.

On Monday morning, when he texted to cancel, I wasn’t upset. I was sure that I’d see him in a few months time, and it’d be like no time had passed.

It is so unfair that that’s no longer true, I don’t have the words.

He was 40. He’d done so much, and still I am sure his best work was ahead of him. The world has lost a brilliant and kind man, and many, many people have lost a dear friend. My love and sympathy goes out to everyone that knew him, most especially his partner, and the rest of his family.

As a professional idiot, I am often asked “Alasdair, has your brain stood on end and shat itself? Again?”

And I am forced to admit that yes, yes it has.

You see, I’ve just bought a month’s supply of this stuff.

It’s Huel. A UK equivalent of that Soylent stuff that all the weird Bay Area people who are too intellectual for food have decided is the future and we’re all to learn to enjoy out delicious beige slurry now, because it’ll be mandatory later.

So why the hell have I bought it? I mean, I like food. I really like food. I like everything about it. And I’m about to spend most of a month living on vanilla flavoured sludge, and pretending that it’s somehow a replacement for a thing that didn’t need replacing. I am not excited about this concept. What the hell am I doing?

Well, obviously, I’m curious to see what happens, that’s why I’m doing it. I want to know what’ll happen if I spend a month eating an actually properly balanced diet for the first time in my adult life. I’m not doing it for weight loss (although I suspect I’ll lose some) I’m doing it to see what it feel like to eat properly healthily, to give my body all the nutrition if actually needs, as opposed to just shoving some variant on red meat in it more times a week than is recommended by anyone with an ounce of sense.

What’re the rules here, then? I’m not doing this to self-flagellate, and I’m not going to pretend this is the future and a good thing. I am aware this is a mad thing to be doing. So I don’t feel the need to be ultra strict about how I approach this.

With that in mind, over the next week or so, I’m going to build up to living on a 2000-calorie a day Huel diet. (Doing it all at once would by my personally preferred approach, but I understand that can cause the toxic shits, so I’m going to ease in with one Huel meal a day for the first 2-3 days, then another few days of 2 meals a day, before I get to the all-Huel stage.) Once I am on that diet, I intend to operate under the following loose rules.

1) I am allowed to eat other meals, if I am in company (assuming I skip the equivalent quantity of Huel, obviously). Ideally not more than once a week. If I go an entire week without eating in company, and I find myself craving real food, I may allow myself an actual meal.
2) If I am at the pub to be social, I am allowed up to 2 pints of beer, or equivalent, if I really want it. I am allowed as much lime and soda as I’d like.
3) I am allowed as much fruit juice and coffee/tea as I’d like.

I’m obviously going to track my weight and a few other metrics as I go. I might post a vague summary of them at the end of this. Otherwise, well, yes, I am going to keep a diary of this, so you can all point and laugh at the idiot as I go. I imagine you’ll get the first installment tomorrow, after I’ve had breakfast.

None of this is any thrilling insight, or anything that’s not been said before by smarter folk than I, it’s just something that amused me this morning.

A significant part of my job is providing estimates. I break down what the client is asking for, suck air in through my teeth, and mutter “well, we can do that, but it’ll cost…”.

Complicating matters is that fact that with a coding-type job of any complexity/size, 90% of the time, I’m being asked “this thing you haven’t ever done before, how long will it take to do?”. Because if I’d done it before, the code would be around to re-use and the cost would low.

What constantly amuses (or frustrates) me, though, is non-technical people’s expectations of these costs. 90% of the time, I provide a quote and the response is “but it’s just doing X”. The idea that if something is simple to say, it must be simple to do is almost never true. But about 10% of the time (and it’s this 10% that makes my job worth it), someone comes to me and says “look, I know this is probably really expensive, but could we do X?” and I get to say “mate, I can do that for you in ten minutes, let me just sort that out for you now”.

It amuses me that the expectations gap cuts both ways.

This occurred to me this morning in a science fiction context, as my Apple TV screensaver kicked in, and I saw a beautiful ariel shot of dawn over New York, and I thought of a line in Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan, wherein he imagines a technology he called a “Wander Window”. Essentially, an apartment window that instead of showing the world immediately outside, showed beautiful views from around the world. In the fiction, a delivery man sees it, adn remarks on it as a highly expensive luxury item, saying something like “It’d creep me out, living somewhere this rich.”

My TV is now my wander window, and today, some version of this is a pretty trivial technology that’s baked into TV products pretty much as standard. My parents have it. When building these things, it’s the ten-minute job, rather than the “ooh, it’ll cost you…” job. And what’s interesting to me is that there was never really a time when putting a screensaver in a TV was an expensive job. As soon as it became possible to do it, it was (relatively) easy.

And of course this isn’t really about the fallibility of science fiction predictions (I mean, Warren was actually bang on with his tech prediction there), or the difficulties of estimating.

I find myself wondering what other science fiction technologies, when they get here, will be the ten minute job. What is there that, by the time we can do it, is going to be much easier to do than we think? Are we going to find that by the time we can send someone to Mars, that terraforming it will be trivial? What challenges are easier than we expect?

Bookmarking a link to an article in praise of Amazon’s Echo got me thinking about voice controlled computing, where it is now, where it’s going, it’s upsides and it’s flaws.

My major experience of it is with Apple’s Siri – via watch, phone, and TV. And I’ve found that I do specific tasks with Siri on each one. On the watch, I turn my lights out at night. (Yes, that much of a nerd.) On the phone, I set reminders and alarms. On the TV, I skip back 30 seconds, or sometimes a minute.

Yes, I really do just those specific things. Mostly because those are the things I’m confident with – I know they work, they do so reliably and are useful. Other things I’ve tried tend to either be hit-and-miss, or the technology just isn’t quite there yet.

Here’s an example: if I could say “Hey Siri, play Songs of Separation from the laptop via the speakers in the living room”, or “Hey Siri skip back 20 mins, then start playing last night’s audiobook on the bedroom speaker”, those I’d use a lot. They’re convenience tasks, which is what voice feels most natural for – things you want to do while also doing something else.

But those are currently too complicated for Siri – it simply doesn’t know enough (and I can’t teach it) to identify my home audio equipment, it’s not contextually aware enough, and it’s not deeply integrated with 3rd party apps (or rather, 3rd party apps aren’t deeply enough integrated with it), and it’s not good enough at parsing my specific speech – I have to speak in a way it understands, rather than it simply understanding how I speak. Even just being able to say to my phone/watch “Hey siri do X on the laptop” (eg: “open this link on the laptop for when I get home”) would be useful, but we’re still a while away from that.

So where do I see this all going?

An optimistic view: this feels very like the web felt in 1995/6. There’s definitely something here, and we’re a few years off it starting to get serious. Another few years after that, it’ll be everywhere, and ten years after that, we’ll barely remember a time when it wasn’t commonplace. My nieces are going to grow up shouting at their household appliances.

A less optimistic view: this isn’t the web. It’s not a set of interoperable standards that anyone can hook into, it’s a load of low-walled gardens. Siri works with Apple products. Cortana with Microsoft. Google have something or other, Facebook something else. They all talk to the everyday web to some extent, but for more advanced interactions, they only talk to some products provided by individually selected third parties, for commercial reasons.

The only one that makes me even a little optimistic is the Amazon one, Echo, because I can write my own back end for it – so Amazon do the speech to command translation, and fire something at my code, which does something in response. The problem is that that’s great for the web, but less useful for the home appliances.

On that front, Siri, and Apple’s homekit have a slight lead, but not much of one – it’s a closed system that requires hardware developers to work directly with Apple. We’re going to wind up with several sets of products, that don’t entirely work well together. It’s going to be the vocal equivalent of trying get a PC and Mac networked together in the early nineties, and we’re going to be stuck there for a decade and more.

An even less optimistic view: the idea that our homes are going to be full of internet-connected passive listening devices is unbelievably creepy, and a recipe for disaster – either from state surveillance or hacking (or more likely both at the same time). You could not pay me to put a Google or Facebook listener in my house – they’ll only make money off it by selling what it hears to advertisers, and I’m not up for that. I don’t like my web browsing being tracked, I am not having my casual conversation around the house being tracked.

Amazon – not sure, they’re at least a company who I pay for things, rather than a company that sell me to advertisers. Apple – most likely, they’re pretty good on privacy and encryption (assuming the US government doesn’t fuck that up for all of us), but they’re also the least interested in giving me something I can write my own commands for that exist separate to their devices. Either way: it’ll remain a problem that’s about 40% solved for ages.

I suspect we’ll get a little bit of all the above. The actual utility of voice control is only going to be better from here but it’ll remain fractured, so you’ll be forced to pick a product family to set up in your home, and when you make that choice, you’ll be able to choose between a cheap surveillance bot that sells your data, or a much more expensive suite of homeware that also come with the luxury of privacy.