Less And Less Control Over What My Computer Does

As noted last month, I was facing the deterioration of my laptop after 3.5 years.  Over the Christmas period it got worse, regularly overheating (despite cleaning out the fans) and consequently crashing.  With the sales on, it seemed like an opportune time to buy a replacement.  Knowing that this one is unlikely to make it far into 2018, I spent one third of the money I spent on the last one, so it will not be such a pain when I have to dump it.  The trouble is, now I buy a laptop and it is on Windows 8.  So much stuff is buried far deeper than in the past.  I battled even to change the wallpaper on the main screen.  Everything I do I seem to have to log in and re-log in and verify myself.  Even to play the Mah Jong matching tile game, which is free, I now have to establish an account with Xbox.  I also had to receive a code to my mobile phone, just to play a simple, free game.

What makes it worse is that it is not simply Microsoft which is asking me for verification at every turn, but because I bought a Hewlett-Packard computer, their facilities are constantly on to me to link to its provision often in contradiction to what Microsoft are peddling to me.  They have no appreciation of how I work, they want to connect everything in the way they see best.  This has long been my concern with computers, that these days, the systems patronise you rather than offer the facilities you need, they try to get you to fit to their approach.  With Windows 8, I had to disable a score of apps that I have no desire to use and had to work to put all the stuff I like, such as Word and work packages like Excel and PowerPoint into a place where I could reach them easily without having to dig through recommendations for a New Year diet or trips to places that I could never afford.  There needs to be a setting which recognises - 'this person bought a cheap computer at a sale price, thus he does not have the income to afford all this stuff we are shovelling at him'.

Back in the 2000s if I bought a computer, I bought a tool.  Now what I have bought is a billboard, constantly piling me with extra things I might want to buy and locking my identity into everything.  I got sick of this and so have established an entirely anonymous account unconnected to anything else.  This, however, then bars me from playing the Mah Jong matching game.  The trade is constantly, 'you can only have basic functions if you allow us to keep shoving advertising at you'.  In the 2000s, I paid about the same amount of money and was left alone.  Is such advertising necessary to fund the cost of these machines?  What is tiresome is that I spend more time disabling all these facilities than I actually do working on what I want to work with.  It is as if I have bought a car but on the way to work I have to go by a route chosen by someone else so that I can stop at shops along the way that I have no interest in.  Just wait until the 'updates' start and I have to switch on my computer so that it can simply play with itself for 30-60 minutes apparently 'updating' something that looks identical when it has finished.  Sometimes it deigns to allow me to focus on what I want, but that is never within the first hour of being on.

The other thing is Cloud storage.  The hacking of such facilities is well known and yet I am constantly being pummelled to put my documents and photos into Cloud storage.  Microsoft, Dropbox and Hewlett Packard have all offered me totalling around 5TB of Cloud storage.  Why on Earth would I want to us that?  I am not rich and having bought a laptop I see no reason to go out and also get a smartphone or a tablet.  I would get one not all of them.  Typing novels on a phone is a waste of time; searching for an address when on the move is something different.  However, we are encouraged to see every tool as universal, rather than seeking out the best for what we want to do.  Again, the companies feel they know better than us how to live our live - am I the only one for which that is dystopian?  I am not a teenager and so I recognise that I might be out of step with current trends and indeed have no interest in current fashions in technology.  Then again, I am not a man who would buy a car because it looks good, I buy a car which I hope will work well and is safe.  Companies seem to forget that dull people like me make up the majority and many of us do not even want to try to look cool.  For me a computer is a tool not a lifestyle choice.  If Sony can be hacked, what hope do I have that my Cloud-stored materials will be safe?  If Hollywood celebrities can end up with their photos everywhere, people could send mine around without a second thought.

Memory sticks are leaping on almost on a monthly basis.  Three years ago, I got a 4GB for £29 (US$45; €37) now I can buy a 32GB memory stick for £20,  Yes, you can have memory sticks stolen or you can lose them, but for work stuff, my fiction, even photos, even if I want to use them on different devices, why risk using the Cloud, when I can have them all on a tiny piece of metal affixed to my keys?

What I am seeking, perhaps foolishly, from computer and software companies, is to be treated like an adult.  I want a tool that does what I want it to do.  If I want extra, I can make that choice in time, I do not need to be advertised to every time I switch on.  Indeed, I think they do not recognise that how in so many people it instills hostility to the very things they are promoting.  I want tools on my computer that I can use without going online.  There seems to be a fantasy at Microsoft and Hewlett Packard as with many companies that the internet is universal and always available.  They clearly do not work in the average office let alone try to use it in a cafe.  Having to incessantly connect even to use mundane products, slows the whole process up.  We have long put aside the concept of the 'information superhighway' and know at best it is a B road.  However, these companies seem determined to fill it up with ice cream vans seeking to sell you the latest gimmick. 

Each time I buy a computer, I seem to spend a larger amount of my money on getting things I do not want and finding access to what I do want harder than ever.  Perhaps in an era when utility companies charge you in advance for energy or water you are never going to use, I should not be surprised that as a consumer, despite the apparent 'choice' it is ever harder to get the right tool for me.

Three Years Old And My Computer Is Dying

In the movie, 'Blade Runner' (1982), the replicants, the life-like androids have a life expectancy of only four years.  The portrayed society of November 2019, like that of the Roman Empire, is worried that its slaves would become too strong and would overpower the citizens.  The plots of the movie is around replicants seeking their maker to have their lives extended.  It seems that we are quite a way from having androids threaten our society, though Stephen Hawking fears basic artificial intelligence will be able to do it first.  However, the built-in expiry date seen in 'Blade Runner' already appears to be in place.

In the summer of 2011, I bought an Alienware laptop computer for £1400 (€ 1750; US$2240).  Being a keen PC gamer, I ordered one of the highest graphic and sound quality and with a fast processor so that I could enjoy the online 'Total War' games and 'World of Warcraft' to the best standard.  This summer, 2014, moving into a room I was renting in a new house one of the current tenants, a postgraduate pharmacy student asked me about my laptop and when he found out it was coming up to three years old he scoffed, asking me how I hoped to achieve anything with something 'that old'.  I did not mention that my mobile phone was bought in 2005 and does not have a camera in it.

My housemate's predictions rapidly have come true.  I know in terms of online games, you expect fast developments and I do not expect it to run as quickly as it would have done in 2011.  I am also aware that in a house with five residents, even broadband gets stretched between all the uses.  However, even offline, the computer now struggles.  It is a pain to watch it labour to open Word and you have to expect it to crash at random even when simply looking at text documents.  It can struggle to open a second document or move between two.  Very challenging when you write as much fiction as I do.  I spend a lot of time watching a spinning disk against a black or a white blank screen.  Ironically I end up reading the newspaper, writing a diary (by hand with a pen) and even practicing Chinese characters, again with pen and paper.  It is almost as if my laptop feels that I am too old these days to use its facilities.

The deterioration in speed over the past three years has been phenomenal; declining very rapidly this year and so naturally I worried something was wrong.  I have a scheduled 'defrag' every Wednesday and a virus check every Monday evening.  I run through the list of all the software I have installed and eliminate anything which does not appear to be of use.  I removed every image from the laptop and put it on a 1 TB external hard drive, not that I had that many photos that it should have taxed the laptop.  I have even taken it apart and cleaned the fans, concerned they may be clogged and so it was overheating.  None of these things have been able to halt the slowing down and the increases in crashes.  It is as if, in the way my housemate viewed it, at 3.5 years old, my laptop is elderly and no longer can even do the basic tasks it once did such as handle a Word document, let alone play the games it was bought for.

Part of the problem is that the computer only occasionally does what I ask of it.  Much of the time I can switch it on and it can happily play with itself.  Every day there is some download that seems to take precedence over anything I might want to do.  In the middle of games, the machine will shut down and tell me it has to restart to accommodate a new update which seems to make absolutely no difference to the running of my computer bar from ruining my game.  Humans now have minimal control over their computers.  We are shaped by what they want to do and they make it clear our interests are a long way down the list behind the masturbation that are all these updates.

Obviously I feel that I have thrown away a lot of money on something that really was going to cost me £700 per year for the kind of service I wanted.  There seems to be no point in buying anything except the cheapest computer next time round.  Clearly online gaming with a PC is really only open to people who can afford £1000 per year in hardware in order to engage with it.  Given that my car cost £900, it is clear that I am no longer in that social class and so will be shut our of 'Total Rome II' let alone 'Shogun 2' which taxes my machine even more because of the greater landscape graphics.  Yes, before you suggest it, I have scaled down the graphic detail on these games and that is all that has allowed me to play them into mid- to late-2014, but clearly not in 2015.

I feel an idiot for believing if I spent a large sum of money it would be enough to own a machine that would remain with me for five years.  Clearly you can only expect to have the performance you paid for, for two years.  This adds to the ever growing pile of discarded computers and all the components that go into them.  It also makes them devices which have a life expectancy far less than many electrical devices out there.  If you had to replace your washing machine every two years, it would become tiresome.  Even while I write this, the computer is straining to keep up the connection to the blog and is going into overdrive downloading some update that I cannot even see when I search the system.

I would be grateful if someone could direct me to a company that makes computers that do what you want them to do rather than insisting that their desires have priority.  Clearly that company is not Alienware and I am angered that I was so misled by them.

Hotmail: Let Me Be

Back in 2007: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/07/computer-let-me-be.html and 2008: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/02/computer-let-me-be-2.html  I commented on how patronised and infuriated I was by the computer systems I use.  Rather than allowing me to get on with what I want to do, I was always being prompted to do it the way the computer felt was right.  In many cases it got it wrong for the UK context, for example, breaking up the word 'fora' into 'for a' and trying to put 'Yours truly' at the end of a letter.  The other thing that infuriated me was the number of downloads the system and the software wanted to do for no apparent gain, so slowing up my work and my use of the computer for games.  The sense that the company knows better than the user has not gone away.  They keep chiding you whether within your computer, e.g. 'clean up icons you are not using' - why? or that you should be using the latest software even if you are quite happy with the current stuff.  It is often stated that people only use about 10% of a software package anyway, so what is the point of introducing additional features that no-one will use, and not only that but constantly insisting that you engage with them.  I know they want to appear dynamic and to keep you interested.  However, this even begins to bore teenagers always seeking the latest thing, let alone the rest of us, certainly people like me still driving a car which is 15 years old.

The latest software to infuriate me is Hotmail.  I have had the same Hotmail account since 1999 and have used the same password throughout.  In those 11 years no-one has hacked into my email and abused it.  There is nothing particular of value or interest in there anyway.  However, apparently, my one word password has proven insufficient and last week Hotmail insisted that I change it to something involving more capital letters and numbers.  It would not let me progress to my email account until I had.  The trouble is, having typed in the same password for over a decade I now find it difficult not to do so and so I keep on being told that the wrong password has been entered too many times.  I am then compelled to try and guess what letters and punctuation are shown in a squiggly picture and enter that too in order to access my own email.  Many capital and lower case letters look pretty similar especially when distorted and as for full stops (periods in the USA) and commas, they look very much like each other when twisted around.  Consequently I now battle to access the account that I had been using successfully for 11 years.  Has it increased security?  Only in the sense that it is now harder for the legitimate user to gain access to it.  Is that a gain for me?  No.  However, as always, the provider believe they know so much better than the user and insist that I play to their rules rather than what I want, which, in fact was safe enough.

An additional gripe once I am in my Hotmail account is how they now handle attachments.  This is vital for me at the moment as I apply for jobs.  I long gave up on trying to attach images to any of my emails because you had to set up some complex piece of software which I tried more than once without success.  However, up to now, receiving documents was no problem.  That is until a few months back when suddenly they all had to go through the new WordWebApp.  This allows me to see my document without being able to save it to my own computer so I am unable to do anything with it.  I can go further and install another piece of software that I do not want, Silverlight.  I tried this with no success, I cannot understand why.  However, I am dubious of the added benefits of documents downloading faster and text looking clearer with it.  I have had no problem with either of these issues with the old system.  There is an alternative which is I can 'Edit in Browser' which then tries to open the document in the so-called SkyDrive.  It then says that is not possible so suggests that I open it in Word, which is what I have been trying to do all along.  However, given that I, like thousands of people, am running Word 2003 on Windows 2003, it stops and says I need to buy the 2010 package, not even the 2007 one.  The company before last I worked for had not even moved to Windows 2007 by the time I was made redundant in mid 2009.  Being unemployed I certainly cannot go out and buy new software packages, I just want to continue with what I have got.  However, now any documents sent to me by email are useless.  Unsurprisingly, after 11 years with Hotmail I am looking for an email system that actually works for me.

This attitude that we must constantly be upgrading was very well satirised in the children's movie 'Robots' (2005).  It is set in a robot populated world with a late 1950s styling.  In it the evil Ratchet has ruledthat those robots who could not afford upgrades, termed 'rusties' were to consigned to being incinerated.  Fortunately there is a robot uprising and the former leading robot inventor, BigWeld is brought out of retirement to ensure that those struggling along with older equipment are not excluded.  Of course, in this world there is no such uprising.  Instead people like me struggling to find work are yet further excluded from even simply using our email systems to apply for it.  The digital divide always finds new ways to manifest itself, driven very sharply by the insatiable desire of software companies and other providers to constantly get us to upgrade.

Me and the 'Total War' Series of Computer Games

In a recent posting looking at my favourite computer games of the past decade: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/04/my-favourite-computer-games.html  I mentioned that there was one set of games that I would leave for a separate posting of their own.  These are the 'Total War' series of computer wargames.


Shogun Total War
The first, 'Shogun Total War' was launched by The Creative Assembly in 2000.  In many ways it owes a great deal to the board game, 'Shogun' (released in 1986; new version 2006; also known as 'Samurai Swords') which allowed up to 5 players to take on the role of one of the Japanese samurai clans fighting for dominance in the Sengoku period ('Age of War') between 1467-1573 CE.  The victory of the Tokugawa clan in this conflict led to the establishment of the Shogunate which ran until 1868.  The aim was to conquer territories and eliminate opponents either in battle or through assassination.  It was often difficult to get together a group of five players, so the appearance of a computer version in which you could play one of seven clans, fighting against the computer, was ideal.


'Shogun Total War' was never a mainstream success, but gathered a very loyal fan base, many of whom who have continued to buy all the Total War series in the following decade.  One reason why it was never going to be a mainstream success is that it is very involved, like any wargaming.  The game spreads over decades and it combined strategic planning on a wonderfully rendered map of Japan on which you could move soldiers representing your armies (so replicating the board game) with three-dimensional real time battles when your armies came into conflict with other. As with many strategic games, provinces you controlled varied in terms of resources and the types of troops that were the strongest recruited from there.  You could develop your tax revenue, harvests, trade, and troop training and equipment by constructing various buildings, so you had to balance the economic as well as military aspects.


The province-running had been seen in many games before, but the use of three-dimensional battles was what really marked a leap forward in computer wargames. Previously you had to settle for static icons or at best the small animated sprites of the kind used in the Talonsoft wargames.  The battles were real-time rather than turn-based, as all the other computer wargames of the time used.  In 'Shogun Total War' you got three-dimensional units moving independently across the landscape.  A huge reason for the success of the Total War series is that the game controls become intuitive allowing you to fight a battle effectively even when you have hundreds of soldiers on various parts of the field.  There are factors like tiredness, experience, morale, running out of ammunition, to take into consideration. You did not have to play the full campaign, you could play sequences of reconstructions of historic battles or create your own if you just wanted to concentrate on fighting rather than management too. Those facilities would appear in all the other Total War games. 


Alright, each soldier looked the same, but you could zoom down to their level and 'march with' them across the landscape, a huge leap forward. These days the graphics might look a little simplistic, but still hold their own against many other games.  The varied landscapes of Japan which impinged on your troops, (i.e. one column in your square could move slower than the rest if it went into the trees or a slightly steeper slope) and the very varied weather made the game all the more engaging.  The attention to detail of the troop types, assisted by the highly renowned historian of medieval Japan, Stephen Turnbull appealed to gamers like me who were looking for an authentic experience.  There is historical reference to things such as the arrival of the Portuguese and Dutch in Japan, and the appearance of firearms and Christianity. Of course, the minute you start playing you are moving into counter-factual scenarios, but it is nice to have that in a genuine context.


One flaw in the game that was not a big issue in this one but would become so later, was the strength of 'special' units. In this game, the key unit type was the Yamabushi, Buddhist warrior monks. They were a strong unit that could easily defeat others though were not invincible, especially if outnumbered. Conversely, there is no point recruiting arquebus or musket carrying troops in the game as they are so weak; it is better to stick with archers. In reality by the time of the Battle of Sekighara in 1600 the one commander who brought archers was laughed at for being so behind the times. Saying this, as late as 1815, the Duke of Wellington noted that his troops would have had more effect if they had carried bows rather than muskets. However, it must have been more than fashion that led daimyo to abandon bows in favour of guns by the late 16th century. In this, however, game you are lucky if a whole unit of musketeers can kill a single infantryman or cavalryman.


The styling of the game was important in adding to the engaging experience.  Things like the style of the frames, the shouting of the soldiers in Japanese and especially the music and incidental sounds gave the game a real flavour.  Unlike the following games in the series, this first one made great use of mini animated movies, notably when you are approached by the representatives of other daimyo (provincial rulers), the Portuguese or Dutch and when you launch an assassination attempt against a general or daimyo.  Ninja feature in the game as do other strategic characters like ambassadors.  After a while the movies became a little repetitive but were great for adding flavour.

The cut scenes at the climax of the game had an approach I would love other wargame programmers to copy.  Assuming you are victorious, a little movie plays outlining what happens in Japan after your faction has won.  Even if you have been a Christian faction you end up kicking out the foreigners and banning Christianity in the way the Tokugawa did.  However, the final scene is of a precinct in modern Japan at night and the camera goes past a statue of whichever leader you picked to play the game as.  As a counter-factual fan I just loved seeing an Uesugi or Mori or Imagawa shogun being celebrated at the end because of what I had done.


One of the advantages of battling in medieval Japan is that it is finite.  Though you could easily spend weeks playing the game, the conquest of Japan could be achieved in a few days' worth of hard gaming covering a few decades of conflict.  This is in contrast to subsequent games in the series in which you can be battling over four centuries to conquer the whole of Europe or North Africa, fun, but a different experience.  The Total War series has evolved in sophistication since 2000 and it is nice to see that a sequel 'Shogun 2: Total War' is planned for 2011 with you able to play one of eight factions in the years following the Onin War of 1467-77 CE.


The success of 'Shogun Total War' led to the release of expansion kit in August 2001.  This added extra troop types and historic battles to the original game and altered the representation of the maps, doing away with some of the movies too.  However, the game now opened with a extract from the movie 'Ran' (1985) by Akira Kurosawa which certainly got you in the mood for gaming.  The expansion allowed you to start you campaign in different periods rather than always starting from the same year as in the original game and it was interesting to start in an era when each of the factions was much weaker.  The big new opportunity was to play in the 13th century facing the Mongol invasion of Japan, which they attempted to do in reality in 1274 and 1281.  The Mongols had a whole different set of troops and the challenges of being an invading rather than an indigenous force.  The Japanese still had crossbowmen, a unit that had gone out of style by the 16th century.  It was interesting to play a different type of army and at least in this game the Mongols can be beaten.  A new ending was added for if the Mongols won which showed a statue of Kublai Khan in the precinct, talking about Japan as just a province of the great Mongol empire, very nicely counter-factual.


Medieval Total War
The release of 'Medieval Total War' in August 2002 by The Creative Assembly and Activision was as much of a step forward in computer wargaming as the release of 'Shogun Total War' had been two years before.  This game also won mainstream appeal and topped the charts for sales.  You did notice though a lot were dumped onto the second hand market pretty quickly as a lot of gamers more used to first/third person shooting games sold off their copies pretty quickly.  'Medieval Total War' needed real commitment.  Its scope covered all of Europe and North Africa in the period 1087-1453 (i.e. the fall of Constantinople to the Turks) and evenings could go by and you would find you had only covered a couple of years in the game.  It could take months to complete a whole game, though you could start in 1205 or 1321 if you preferred.


The approach of the game was similar to 'Shogun Total War' combining the strategic map divided into provinces on which you moved the tokens representing your armies and then the three-dimensional battles.  In 'Shogun Total War' there had only been one battlefield per province.  In 'Medieval Total War' the battlefield you came onto in a province depended on the direction you had marched into the province from.  There was again a variety of weather, everything from snow and thunderstorms to desert sandstorms.  Sometimes it was almost impossible to find your opponent in the fog or whirling sand.  There was a huge range of factions, covering the leading powers of the time.  A lot of actors were employed to give appropriate voices to the different nations which varied from England, France and the Holy Roman Empire right over to the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires and the Egyptians.  There was a huge range of different troops, some unique to particular factions.  Covering such a time period there was evolution in weaponry as the years passed.  Religion also played a part with priests, imams, crusades and jihads, all available.  You could win by achievements such as building a particular cathedral or holding specific provinces but the usual way to victory was conquest of the whole map.  I found when I travelled to the countries concerned, and in this period I went abroad far more often than now, I would come back wanting to play the state I had visited.  In this way played 'Italy' after visiting Venice and the Holy Roman Empire after travelling around Germany, France after a holiday in Normandy, then Spain after going to Barcelona.


Again, there was attention to historic detail (though in some cases playability meant conflating some things, such as having an 'Italy' rather than a multiplicity of states) and the landscapes and buildings were a delight to look at.  The atmosphere was assisted by the voice acting (even the sounds of camels were used where appropriate) and the music was different for the location you were battling in.  There was also a greater role play element as different rulers, generals and agents developed different characteristics and could become more or less loyal to their faction, offering the chance for rebellions and civil wars. 

This was an immensely engaging game.  You could play the same faction and have completely different outcomes.  Developments could be happening in other parts of the world without you being aware of them.  I remember realising when playing 'Italy' that history had diverged greatly when the 'Earl of Wessex' turned up in a battle and he was from the Egyptian faction.  You could award your generals various titles adding to their management or command abilities, a nice feature that was dropped in subsequent games.


'Medieval Total War' had a siege function which allowed you to attack castles and forts.  It was seen as rather simplistic and the catapults wrecked castles in minutes rather than the days or weeks it took in reality (even when cannon came in), but I suppose that was a compromise to playability.  The problem of special units began to be very apparent in this game.  You would see a single Kataphrakt cavalryman (a heavily armoured unit from the Byzantine Empire) managing to battle off two hundred spearmen for ages, inflicting a numerous casualties.  While the special units should have been tough, in this game they became superhuman.  In such a situation the Kataphrakt would have probably been crushed by the crowd let alone pierced through with numerous spears.  The Mongols appeared in this game and were hard to defeat even in circumstances that they were defeated in real life, i.e. fighting in forests or over ploughed and hedge-rowed farmland.  I know that the Mongols were a potent force and drew on sophisticated Chinese technology to successfully besiege cities and it was more luck that spared Europe from them, but they were certainly not immune to damage and coming up against longbowmen, the Mongols and their horses would certainly have suffered far more casualties than the minimal ones they do in this game. 

Rebellions and civil wars are always a challenging aspect of wargames with a strategic aspect, but in 'Medieval Total War' they were particularly troublesome.  The key difficulty was that the rebels and groups, such as returning factions that had previously been eliminated, would have such strong armies suddenly appearing meaning that you could do nothing except flee the province.  These armies were often far larger than the province could have sustained, and yet, even holding a single province these rebels did not lose troops over time in a way you would have to do yourself with such a small territory as you would not be able to fund the upkeep of the troops and would soon face bankruptcy.  I can accept that medieval rebels often had noblemen and knights at their core and that they could often draw on foreign forces and mercenaries, but certainly they could not draw people from the future.  Often you would find the rebels with far more sophisticated weaponry than the highest level available anywhere in your empire or those of your neighbours, making it very hard to raise an army well enough equipped to defeat the rebels.  I am glad to say that this aspect was rectified to a large extent in the following games.


Another difficulty which would increase in subsequent games was using strategic agents.  These were people like princesses, ambassadors, spies and assassins.  In the latter case it was almost impossible to build up their expertise as their death rate when carrying out the first few missions was prohibitive and it was pretty much pointless spending money to recruit these agents.  Despite these flaws, this game kept me entertained for years.


In January 2003, the expansion 'Medieval Total War - Viking Invasion' was released.  It added some new factions to the original game and things like flaming arrows.  Importantly you now could line up the order in which different reinforcing troops would arrive on the battlefield rather than having them coming randomly as before, which meant often your weakest, smallest units would appear and soon flee, just when you needed the best troops to tip the balance of the battle. 

The expansion also introduced a whole new campaign, purely focused on western Scandinavia and the British Isles 793-1066 CE, i.e. from the start of the Viking raids to the Battle of Hastings.  In this era, generally the technology was less advanced; in particular it took longer to develop farming.  As the game wore on some units appear which really belong in later centuries, but given that it is counter-factual if the Vikings had gone to war in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland as they tend to do full scale in this game, then new types of force may have developed.  The Viking expansion campaign is one of my favourites.  I liked turning the whole British Isles into a Pagan Viking kingdom, though you can convert to Christianity if you like.  You can play as Saxons, Mercians, Lancastrians, Welsh, Scots and Irish too, each with distinct units. For the first time, rebel factions were named and would collaborate with other rebels rather than just clinging to a single province.  I think, as with 'Shogun Total War', the finite nature of the game focused on one region adds something.  Again, the early medieval music and styling of the game really contributes to your engagement with game.


Rome Total War
'Rome Total War' was released in September 2004.  It is probably the most seen game outside the gaming community as it was used as the basis of the television series 'Time Commanders' (2003-5).  In the programme teams of non-wargamers had to command a particular force in an Ancient battle, sometimes doing surprisingly well, for example, defeating the Germans trying to kill Varus's legion in 9 CE and other times failing very badly.  The graphics were of a standard deemed good enough to use on television so it is unsurprising that we waited with anticipation for the game to be released.

The game covered the period from the 4th century BCE in the preliminary stage and then 270 BCE-14 CE in the main part of the game. Now, rather than having a map of provinces into which tokens representing your armies were put, the armies actually walked around a relief map and would often struggle to find a fast route or get backed up behind other armies.  The computer-run factions never made such errors, always moving the armies precisely which put humans at a disadvantage and needed you to make regular saves when trying to assemble a sizeable force just in case your army decides it wants to walk to the target location by a very round-about route.

Conversely the ships that your opponents use are far better at tracking down your fleets than even modern day warships are with all their radar and other equipment.  I found it galling that, given even in the 1800s, Lord Nelson had to chase the French fleet back and forth across the Atlantic before bringing them to battle, in this game I found that whenever one of my ships or a fleet set out it was immediately intercepted by my enemies, no matter which route it took.  As with the agents, this made it very difficult to build up an experienced fleet which meant that even if you came up against a weaker fleet you would often lose.  Given that much of the game is around the Mediterranean, again this made it far harder for human players.  In contrast to the computer-run factions who always found you straight off, as a human you would often spend ages sending your ships back and forth trying to find the elusive enemy fleets, just as Nelson was to do 2000 years later.


Though the graphics had been improved and the successful mix of strategy and three-dimensional battles was continued, during development, playability seems to have won out over historical accuracy.  The attention to detail in terms of armour and weaponry was excellent, the key problem was in the political set-up.  Rather than having most of Italy under the rule of the Roman Senate, in the game this only controls the Rome itself and much of the peninsula is divided into three Roman factions: the Brutii, the Julii and the Scipii.  Annoyingly it is as one of these factions that you have to complete the preliminaries before unlocking other factions.  The Gauls are shown as controlling less of Italy than was the case in reality.   A key problem for all the Total War games from this stage on is that there are really too few cities on the game (this is often one of the first thing fan-created modifications alter) and, with your armies having to tramp between them, it can be very frustrating.


Another flaw is the portrayal of the Egyptian forces.  By the time the Romans interacted with the Egyptians they were under the control of the Ptolemies, a Greek dynasty, who had been in power since 305 BCE.  Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt in 332 BCE and, after Alexander's death, Ptolemy, one of his companions, took over running Egypt in 323 BCE, ultimately establishing a dynasty.  Whilst the later Ptolemies (the last of the dynasty was the famous Cleopatra VII, lover of Mark Anthony and Julius Caesar) tended towards Egyptian dress and style, the earlier ones had been clearly more Greek or, at least, Macedonian in culture.  Thus, it is anachronistic to see the Egyptian forces in chariots and with axes of a style that was centuries out of date by the time this game begins.  Their forces should look more like those of Macedonia or the Seleucids, another successor kingdom to Alexander's empire, controlling modern Iran.  The game developers apparently did not want another phalanx based army and felt mainstream gamers would prefer the traditional Egyptian forces.  They are fun, the chariots are unstable but deadly.  However, it would have been better to have an expansion or something that went back in time to before Alexander if they wanted to include these.  That would have been interesting as you could have also had the tribes of Italy such as the Samnites, Latins and Etruscans battling for dominance of Italy.


Obviously the game allows lots of nice counter-factuals such as Carthage being victorious and the Roman Empire being destroyed by the Gauls or even the Macedonians.  As in all the Total War games, the scope for shaking up history is immense.  What I also like is that the Marian Reforms kick in at a different period each time you play the game.  In our history these were introduced to the Roman Army by Gaius Marius in 107 BCE and transformed the leveed, three-line structure into the legion system with the armour and weaponry that we generally think of as being the classic Roman Army.  In the game, these reforms can come earlier or later, because some other general introduces them instead.


I enjoyed 'Rome Total War', but, like many players, was irked by the anachronisms and lack of historical accuracy.  This is when I was told about how fans were developing their own modifications to games.  This has always been the case with strategic games, it was a phenomenon I noticed as far back as the days of 'Caesar III' (1998) a classic city-building game set in Roman times.  On the internet you are able to find tens and tens of new scenarios, some historic, some fantastical (e.g. Romans in China or in a chequer-board land-lake country) developed by fans.  Strategic games requiring months of work to play attract attentive people often with the computing skills to develop modifications.


For 'Rome Total War' the modification which stands out above all others is 'Rome Total Realism', released in 2005.  It made the game into what it should have been.  It has an immense attention to historical detail and more complex development in terms of building up your territories.  There were a great deal more cities which made the game more engaging and playable.  It also stretched the map East as far as India allowing much more involvement of the Seleucids and the Bactrians. Development has gone on to the stage that we are now at Version VII with sub-sets such as battle for the western Mediterranean and the Carthaginian invasion of Iberia.  I never went back to the original game.


There were official two expansions to 'Rome Total War' and the first of these 'Barbarian Invasion', released in September 2005, is probably my favourite of all the Total War settings.  It covers the period 363-476 CE when the Roman Empire had split into two and Europe was facing 'hordes' of steppe peoples, notably the Huns and people they had displaced, such as the Goths and Vandals, coming into the continent.  In this game, when rebellions break out, especially in the Roman empires, new factions can appear which is a nice aspect rather than having generally nameless rebels to oppose.  You can actually enter into diplomatic relations with these rebel forces.  In previous games you could only bribe them to join you.

It is a difficult game, because if you start as a settled faction or are one of the nomadic ones which settles (as happened with the Goths in Spain and Vandals in North Africa in reality) you have these immense hordes to contend with and it is difficult to bring sufficient forces to bear on them.  However, this is an era which is less well covered in popular histories and elements such as the nomadic peoples, the competition between Christianity, Zoroastrianism (practised in the Sassanid empire of modern day Iran/Iraq) and Paganism is interesting.  Within Christianity some individuals follow 'heretical' views too, such as Arianism or Donatism.  The troop types are very varied, being the link between the classic Roman legions and more medieval style units.  I ended up playing a modification which started in 420 CE but allowed you to play more factions and gave the Sassanids some half decent infantry for the first time.  Playing as the Romano-British restoring the empire is fun, as is playing as some of the horde factions.


The 'Alexander' expansion set came out in the Summer of 2006, but I was deep in 'Barbarian Invasion' still and though I bought it, I have never played it.  It covers the brief period of Alexander the Great's conquests 336-332 BCE.  Rather than encompassing a season or a year as in the previous Total War games, each turn in this one covers 7 weeks.  It allows you as the Macedonians (the only playable faction) to fight some of Alexander's greatest battles.  This kind of approach was not followed up with other generals, it would have been good to follow Julius Caesar or as with the latest Rome Total Realism expansion, Hannibal.  Despite the timing I wonder if the release was triggered by interest in Alexander following the 2004 movie.


Medieval II Total War
This was effectively an update of 'Medieval Total War' introducing the relief map approach pioneered in 'Rome Total War' to the medieval period.  It was released in November 2006.  Though The Creative Assembly developed the game, the publisher was now Sega rather than Activision.  Sega also took over publishing the previous games and the various bundled packs that included them.  It maintained the mix of strategic turn-based and tactical real-time battles.  It covered a longer time period running from 1080-1530 though in 2-year turns.  Of course, many of us added on a modification to return this to single year steps.  The longer time period allowed the introduction of the discovery of the Americas and the chance to build an empire there, fighting groups like the Aztecs.  This opened up wonderful counter-factual opportunities such as an Almorad empire in Mexico.  Gunpowder units also got to play a larger part by the end of the game.


Many of the flaws I have noted above, continued, for example the fleets able to flawlessly track you down.  In this game the Mongols were even tougher than before and it was basically pointless playing eastern states such as the Poles or Novgorod after the Mongol invasion of 1240.  Interestingly, given that the Mameluke Egyptians were able to defeat the Mongol forces in reality, they find it far harder to achieve that in this game.  In addition, forces such as the Timurids with elephants carrying cannon on their backs (a historically authentic force) are again almost impossible to defeat.  The only way to see off such forces is to jam them in the streets of a fortified town.  Even here the Mongol cavalry are far more effective than they would have been in reality.  The overwhelming nature of the Mongol faction totally imbalances the game and makes it pointless to play some of the factions.

The use of catapults on the battlefield was ridiculous.  Siege weapons were wheeled and as a Channel 4 programme proved a few years ago, trebuchet actually work better when on wheels rather than fixed.  However, never in human history were catapults able to move around the battlefield like armoured vehicles of modern day.  Even a ballista, effectively a huge crossbow would take time to move into place, let alone to get it firing accurately.  However, in 'Medieval II Total War' you can have your troops aligned at a top of a hill and find they are being shelled accurately from the first shot and at angle that would be challenging even for modern day artillery.  Try doing the same in reverse and you find your catapults drop rocks everywhere else but on the enemy.  I know they are supposed to build up experience and become more accurate over time, but it proves very difficult to gain experience as you only get that when your missiles kill enemy soldiers, not from breaking down walls which was their prime purpose.  This is a terrible imbalance between the human players and the computer ones.  The sight of catapults trundling around the battlefield (even in Napoleonic times cannon were hauled by up to 16 oxen) and firing so accurately up hill, would be comic if it was not frustrating.


The problem with agents was increased.  The introduction of merchants who could be sent to exploit particular resources was a nice addition.  However, they were driven out of business almost immediately by more experienced computer-run merchants.  This meant your merchants could never build up the experience to see off such challenges.  As with other agents in the previous game, this left you feeling there was no point in recruiting them. 

Inquisitors sent by the Papacy or other factions could also make your life impossible, especially if the Papacy, as a military power, turned against you.  When playing Spain I could not move any of my generals out of cities without them being seized by an inquisitor and being immediately executed.  Despite diplomatic efforts, I could not win the Papacy back over and so was doomed as my dynasty was steadily wiped out. 

The capricious nature of the diplomatic system was also frustrating.  However, hard you worked to build up alliances and good relations, it only needed one state to decide to attack you and generally you found all your allies deserted you immediately and you were almost instantly against the bulk of factions.  On one hand diplomatic relations were hard work, that was proper, but the way the systems crumbled as a result of nothing you had done, was frustrating and again made you not bother to engage with this aspect.  Given that the game designers had balanced playability against historical accuracy, you think they could have better balanced these aspects too.


Ulitmately, of course, I turned to modifications which better balanced the game play and also introduced far more cities and allowed you to play different factions.  The amount of work amateurs put into these modifications is astounding.  Some simply produce new 'skins' e.g. so that the soldiers appear in particular armour; some introduce new factions, I remember Portuguese and Swedish players providing modifications so you could play their countries, others bringing about an overhaul of the whole game.  Being able to tweak the game because of these modifications has certainly allowed me to enjoy it more and be able to overcome the flaws that the game designers seem unable/unwilling to tackle.

The game producers are a very defensive bunch and the official online discussion fora, though very active, are strenuously policed and anything which is critical of the game is shut down.  I believe this comes from the corporate culture of Sega which, in line with many other Japanese corporations, is happy to elicit fans support but is unwilling to stomach any, even mild, criticism.  This kind of attitude in the software/media context was well characterised by the cyberpunk author William Gibson in his novel 'Idoru' (1996) though interestingly he overlooked internet-based updates of a bought database.


In August 2007 the expansion pack was launched called 'Medieval II Total War - Kingdoms'.  This unfortunately did not update the Viking Invasion expansion of 2003 but provided four new regional scenarios.  These were Teutonic campaign set along the Baltic coast in the 13th century allowing you to play the Teutonic Knights, their opponents the Pagan Lithuanians and other regional powers such as Poland, Novgorod and Denmark.  Obviously the Teutonic Knights with their overblown armour and their bullish approach are an attractive force to play.  Playing as the beleaguered Lithuanians is a real challenge, especially if you remain Pagan.  An interesting phenomenon are the crusading 'tourists', European nobles who pay to fight with the Teutonic Knights and reward the faction depending on how much action they see.  This is based on actual historical developments.  The Mongols appear, and whilst a challenge are not unassailable, as they are in the original game.


The Crusader States in the the 12th century, provide another scenario,which is very enjoyable and opens up wonderful counter-factual opportunities.  Of course, if you do not behave as foolishly as some of the crusaders did, you can hold on to Jerusalem far longer.  You can play as the Principality of Antioch (encompassing the County of Edessa and its specific troops too), a state which has always fascinated me (though in the game they speak French rather than Occitan) as well as the Kingdom of Jerusalem (including the County of Tripoli), the Turks, Egyptians or Byzantines.  There are interesting units and it is good to have a finite space in which to operate without the game going on for centuries.


The Britannia campaign is set in the mid-13th century when part of the British Isles was controlled by Norway.  The ability to build forts across the map had been available since 'Rome Total War' but in this game they can be developed further freeing you a little from the established geography.  This is a pretty straight forward campaign good if you like the standard game but want to play something a little quicker.

The Americas campaign is the most exotic allowing you to play the Spanish settlers in Central America and various tribes, not only the Aztecs and Mayans but also lesser known ones such as the Chichimeca, Tlaxcalans and Tarascans.  Aside from the Spanish, no-one, bar the plains tribes you later encounter, has cavalry, so it is a different form of warfare with specialised troops, wearing outstandingly colourful uniforms, in some cases.  It is again a great opportunity for counter-factuals, especially playing an American tribe pushing the Spanish back into the sea or ruling an Aztec empire running from Florida to Venezuela.  The Kingdoms games all seem pretty balanced and whilst you face different challenges when playing different factions, these scenarios seemed more rounded in the way 'Shogun Total War' and to a great extent, 'Medieval Total War', had been.


Empire Total War
The Total War series has always demanded the latest specification in computers.  I had to delay playing 'Medieval II Total War' until I bought a new machine.  With 'Empire Total War' I had to wait from March 2009 when the game was released until November when I got a job that gave me a powerful enough laptop to play the game.  Unfortunately, having been laid off, my second redundancy in 12 months, I had to give it back and currently cannot play this game. 

'Empire Total War' marked a change in the way you access the game.  Up until now generally people bought the CD/DVD-ROM and loaded the game that way.  Being able to purchase it and download had come with 'Medieval II Total War'.  However, with 'Empire Total War' even if you bought the game on disk you still had to access the game via the Steam website.  This did enable updates to be installed more easily an aspect which was more important after the huge patches such as the 1.2 patch of 613MB for 'Medieval II Total War'.  It did mean, though, that if playing on a wireless-equipped laptop in a town with erratic coverage (as I did), you would often find yourself unable to play whereas before being able simply to stick the disk in and play had been a benefit of the earlier games.  To some degree it may have also been a way to draw some attention away from the modifications provided by amateurs, because these days 'Rome Total Realism' is a bigger draw than the original game.  By letting out new troops and other upgrades at regular intervals, it keeps the interest of the core fans of the Total War games coming back and raises revenue as though reasonably priced these upgrades are not free.


I had long been awaiting a game set in the Napoleonic period and had had my hopes dashed by 'Imperial Glory' (2005) with its pathetically small units and repetitive missions though with surprisingly excellent naval combat that 'Empire Total War' seems to have copied, and 'Crown of Glory' (2007) which was fine on the economic management but weak on the battles.  However, 'Empire Total War' just covered the 18th century.  Again, as with 'Barbarian Invasion' it was a bold move to focus on a less well known period and actually makes for a very interesting game.  There are three zones: Europe/North Africa, the Americas and the Indian subcontinent, though, in fact, you can walk from that zone into and out of Europe/North Africa.  With gunpowder weapons being dominant the gaming is different to the previous titles.  The muskets inflict what seems to be an accurate amount of damage rather than being underpowered as had been the case from 'Shogun Total War' onwards.  You can play a whole host of factions and states like the United Provinces and Poland-Lithuania turn up.  I also like the fact that you can play the Indian states of the Maratha Confederacy and Mughal Empire and can kick the Europeans out of India (and, in fact, out of Europe).


The big jump was in terms of naval battles which is appropriate for the era.  On previous Total War games naval battles were resolved without you participating.  This meant that as a skilled commander you could not pull off a clever victory over a larger force in the way you could on land.  Having been playing these games for a decade now, I imagine if I dropped through time to one of these periods, my experience in fighting hundreds of battles from 240 BCE to 1800 CE would allow me at least to make a good showing with any army I commanded, but that may just be an illusion.  Anyway, the naval combat, dependent on winds and capabilities of the ships, is very interesting and needs you to develop a whole different skill set to charging a group of concealed cavalry in to save the battle.  You can see your powerful fleet outmanoeuvred by a weaker force with wind on their side.


Many of the flaws of the past seemed to have been rectified.  No faction is so powerful that like the Mongols it wrecks the game.  Agents still seem difficult to keep alive, but there are more chances of escape from a failed mission than there have ever been before so you are not getting through spies on a turn-by-turn basis.  You can also control members of your government too, though you naturally have less power in a democracy than those factions with an authoritarian government.

The technological developments are interesting, fostered by 'gentlemen', 'scholars' or 'brahmin' at your universities.  Ironically, the political gains make your population restless for more and you can find yourself demolishing universities to keep down clamour for reform.  Weapon developments have a real impact on the battlefield, for example having bayonets.  They also allow the recruitment of specific units and types of ships.

What is nice is how many factions there are and it is interesting dealing with small states like Bavaria or Savoy.  The diplomacy is rather cranky.  States make unreasonable demands, such as demanding you giving them all your American colonies and they get aggressive if you refuse.  However, if you want to try to swap technology even to get one advance, you have to bribe them with money and a whole slew of technological advancements. There is a real imbalance here.  I accept that states will work to get a good advantage but they seem unwilling to compromise, asking repeatedly for very generous offers even when you are far more powerful than them.  Why does Denmark demand Virginia, steam engine technology and 2000 gold in exchange for just telling me about field enclosure?

The real let-down of this game for me was the 'Road to Independence' section based on the Thirteen Colonies and the American War of Independence.  I had hoped to fight the war in its own right, but rather you get almost a training series of connected missions, the early ones of which are very easy.  You can only get to play the colonies, not the British.  I imagine this is a sop for the American consumers, who, as I have noted here before, are always unhappy with any game that allows players to overturn the 'manifest destiny' of the USA and let another country win. See my posting: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/11/denying-counter-factual-issues-around.html  This is a shame because the British could have won the war so changing US and British history.  In the main game, if you rule the Thirteen Colonies well, then they remain a British protectorate and the USA (or another grouping of American states with a crown in the place of the ring of stars on the flag) only appears through rebellion.  As the British in the main game, I never let this gain ground so never effectively has a war of independence.  This element of the game, is not really, as suggested on Wikipedia, an expansion, it is there in the original game.

The real expansion for 'Empire Total War' is 'Napoleon Total War', rather than this being a separate game as Wikipedia suggests.  You need the former game installed in order to put 'Napoleon Total War' on.  This came in February 2010 and finally allowed the playing on the Napoleonic Wars one of the most popular settings for wargamers whether with figures or on computers.  Aside from simplistic, though interesting games of the late 1990s, computer wargamers had been denied a decent Napoleonic set game. 

This game adopts a mission-focused approach with Napoleon's fight at Toulon then his campaigns in Italy and Egypt to get through before you can begin conquering the whole of Europe or playing one of the states opposing him.  This is great fun.  I managed to conquer Russia by 1808 and launch a successful invasion of Britain after the inconclusive Battle of Portsmouth of 1805.  Alternatively, you can unite Germany under Prussian dominion 70 years early.  You do not have to conquer every territory, you can create protectorates which retain their identity but work with you.  This nicely reflects how Napoleon ran his empire, for example creating numerous Italian and German republics and a Polish kingdom rather than ruling them from France.  An expansion kit focused on the Peninsular War 1808-14 is promised.  This would be good, as if you play well in the main game you can have victory by 1808 and so miss out on the Spanish and Portuguese resistance, backed by Britain, which, second only to the Retreat from Moscow, was a key factor in bringing down Napoleon.  I just have to see if I can get hold of a powerful enough computer by the time it comes out.

I have no idea how many hours/days of my life have been spent playing the Total War games.  Some would say it was time wasted, but it has been a key aspect of my leisure time for the past decade and I expect it will be well into the 2010s.  I am not alone in my dedication to and enjoyment of the games, there are thousands of us out there.  Probably many are those men of a certain age who once would have played figure-based wargames on tables, though despite the complexity of the games I know younger people who enjoy the games too.  The combination of wonderful graphics and audio with interfaces which quickly become intuitive and the combination of strategy and tactics are what make these games so easily engaging.  They are not without their flaws and these can be incredibly frustrating at times.  Fortunately modifications produced by amateurs, but as good as much professionally produced work, can overcome these.  The community of Total War fans is an added strength of playing these games and for me has continued my engagment with them when I might have turned away a little exasperated.  As I have noted above, this is pretty common for strategy games, as the woman in my house has found when digging out modifications and additional scenarios for 'Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile' (2005) city-building game.  While the companies may be ambivalent towards fan-produced material, they should see it keeps a base of support alive which is liable to snap up their next official product.  Over the years I have thoroughly enjoyed turning history on its head and I have no doubt I will continue to do so, returning to these games even when they look terribly dated.

The Super Information Highway Choked with Weeds

When people wrote science fiction in the past even when they began digging into the cyberpunk dystopias in the 1980s they did no address one of the major downsides to the area in which technology has leapt forward in the past thirty years, i.e. internet communication.  Even in the movie 'Blade Runner' (1982), Rick Deckard who is dealing with rogue replicants running around the city does not switch on his computer and have to wait thirty minutes while it installs all the different updates without there actually being any apparent change in how his computer runs.  He does not open his email account to find the important messages dumped in Junk and the whole of his inbox filled with stuff advertising drugs to keep his penis erect or ways he can liberate millions in funds in some far away country or even ten advertising emails from the last company he shopped from.  When he searches for data he is not sent off to a different search engine which takes only one of his terms and then lists things he can buy rather than the information he wants. 

This kind of thing is the reality of using computers and communication devices today.  I answer my telephone and I find five times out of six that it is not even a human trying to sell me something, it is simply a recorded message; my text inbox on my mobile phone is filled with messages advertising things.  I know I do not know lots of people and in fact my friends tend to write postcards to me, we are that archaic, but stuff I do not want is now sent to me far more often than anything I am interested in.  The closest I have seen to all of this in a science fiction novel was the subliminal advertising in 'The Merchants' War' by Frederik Pohl (1984) in which people are bombarded with advertising that they are not even aware of constantly.

I play 'World of Warcraft' and I guess that makes me vulnerable.  People want to break into accounts on the game so that they can benefit their own game characters by asset stripping your character and also because game items and game money sell for real money on auction sites.  Thus, people use spyware to try to identify my login and password and sometimes they are successful.  If something is recording your key strokes then it does not matter how complex the password is they will read it.  I have just started a new job and was told my password must not use any words that appear in any dictionaries anywhere in the World.  How can I know that?  I cite the case of the Commodore computer company who found the title of their machine the Vic and that of their Pet were rude words in France and Germany respectively; the same happened to the pop group Roxette who had to perform as The Rockers in South-East Asia.  How do I know that my made up password is not some legitimate word in Thai or Samoan or something?  In addition, how am I supposed to remember it?  One company I worked for made you change your password every month and you could not repeat a word until 10 months had gone by.  Trying to remember the password for that account as opposed to all the company websites I have to log on to in order to buy a train ticket or a book or simply check my bank account means you end up with files of lists of different passwords.

Of course, all this security is necessary as we are under constant attack.  My World of Warcraft account was hacked and I could not access it for two weeks.  This also seemed to open the gateway for a lot of mal(l)ware (I assume it is 'mall' as in the US shopping centres as it is usually trying to sell me something, but increasingly I see it written as 'mal' which is quite ironice, but perfectly appropriate as in French 'mal' means sick or bad) and spyware.  I have McAfee package that I pay for, the free AVG one as backup and now Spyware Doctor to catch the persistent spyware the others seemed unable to get.  I have spent over £60 on subscriptions and protection.  I have not had my account hacked again (yet), but now whenever I switch on my computer I have to wait ages for updates and scans.  I keep on being asked if I want to run additional scans.  The systems do (generally) bounce off the spyware but as a result my internet browser keeps on recording failed connections and asks me if I want to restore a whole string of links to those connections every time I want to browse the internet.  I  know these security systems are important but they are intrusive and keep bugging me to buy an add-on or run a scan when I want to get on with my work or play.  I get severely annoyed when battling some difficult monster in Azeroth to have the game minimised so that I can be asked once again if I want to run a scan. 

The updating means that it takes about 10-20 minutes once I switch on before I can actually do what I want to do.  Ironically I am now reading newspapers far more than I have done for years as I sit at my desk waiting for the download or the check to complete and have nothing to do except pick up the newspaper and read.  I do not want to clean up my desktop of items, if I did I would delete them myself.  I do not need to be asked two times every time I switch on if I want someone to do it.  I am an adult, I can make decisions myself.  I know how to write a letter, I do not want to do it in a juvenile, American way, why do I have to keep telling the system that?  I disable and I disable, but it seems that constantly I am being bugged to do something the way someone else wants to do it not.  Would you drive a car which decided the way it would take you to the shops?  To some extent I do, my sat nav comes up with the strangest routes and has been proven to be unable to deal with the narrow backstreets of Exeter without trying to get you to drive through a house at the end of a cul-de-sac (this happened twice last week on different cul-de-sacs).

The most annoying thing is despite all the security I have bought (or perhaps because of it given the fact that anti-viral software now seems to come with its favoured search engine and none of them are the one I prefer) every time I search for a term, such as today, for 'Victorian labour newspaper' I click on one of the results and instead of being taken to the page of Wikipedia or Spartacus or some other general historical resource, I am taken to another search engine which gives me a list of shops in Victoria (Australia) or even a list of employment agencies or just a list of newspapers.  These results are always commercially focused not the knowledge-focused answers I was seeking in order to write a story or find out about something.  Sometimes my security systems seem able to stop this but sometimes like today they lose the battle and so my searching time is doubled or trebled.  In fact if I analyse my work on a computer, probably 20% of my time is disabling or reversing things that the computer, a service I have bought into or even worse some intruder software is trying to get me to do.  Far from being the speedy way to get information it is increasingly becoming a very slow way and one filled with frustration.  To a great degree internet searching is now censorship as I am told 'you must be interest in buying not learning' and 'even if you want to know something, you must only learn it from one of our sponsoring partners'.

I know we may never rid the world of the thousands of people who want to peddle stupid stuff to us.  I would hope though that we could get more of the things we subscribe to, to work in the background and for computers to accept that we can make a choice and if we say we do not want to clean up our desktop or to write a letter our way we are allowed to do that.  If we change our minds in the future we will let the computer know.  What we have now was never the image of the future.  If people selling services knew how resentful you come of something you have subscribed to if you constantly get updates and queries then hopefully they would back off.  I do not know when this will end, but for me, it had better do so soon, because battling every day to get my computer to do what I want to do is driving my blood pressure sky high.

P.P. 26/11/2009: Well, mistakenly I thought that things were beginning to be resolved with my computer until I turned on yesterday and found that somehow the machine had 'forgotten' that it has an internet browser.  I worked for three hours, and then, the woman in my house, far more expert at ICT, tried for four hours to restore the browser.  We stripped away a lot of software, did a system restore, re-loaded Internet Explorer 8 and so on, but still I cannot browse the internet.  Client systems such as the World of Warcraft still work fine, but anything that needs a browser in place such as the McAfee anti-virus software will not work and keeps sending alarmed messages.

This is one of those situations in life when people say 'but that's impossible' and say 'but have you tried ...?' only to recommend an approach you did six times three hours ago in the hope that it would just work 'this time'.  Then they begin to doubt your competence, 'but you must be doing something wrong', they say and disbelieve you can have such a problem unless you actually show it to them directly.  I have had these kind of responses over the years with everything from televisions to telephones to cars and, of course, computers.

If anyone can explain how you can be accessing the internet one day and then the next time you switch on not only has the browser entirely stopped working but it appears impossible to install a new one, despite good internet connection (as proven by the World of Warcraft connection) then I would be interested to know.  If you could provide a solution to this situation, I would be extremely happy.

P.P. 2/12/2009: The problem was finally resolved.  After seven hours' work from myself and the woman in my house, I paid for two hours' work by a 'computer doctor' (costing £102; make sure you book a 'no fix, no fee' person) to resolve it in my house.  He could not do it there so took it away for another day to wire it into his next work and bombard it with anti-viral software.  All other software had to be removed though documents, photos, etc. were quarantined and have not been lost.  He said that he had read 400,000 people have suffered from this very virulent kind of virus and anti-viral software even stuff you pay a subscription for, generally cannot fight it.  I can understand people hacking computers or using spyware to get access to your bank account and to steal money, even (though to a lesser extent) people getting into your computer so they can steal the virtual money and magic items you have in 'World of Warcraft' but in this case I have been told it was simply a question of revenge.  Apparently the man who hacked my 'World of Warcraft' account in October was angered by the fact that through friends alerting Blizzard who run the game, he had my account taken from him and given back, so he sent out a virus which 'jammed open' my computer allowing all the nasty stuff viruses, mallware and spyware which is constantly on the internet seeking a chink in the armour, to flow into my machine, as some kind of punishment for me getting my own account back.

I have commented before about the twisted morality of a lot of people active on the internet.  Ironically while the internet gives you potential access to millions of people it seems to narrow many people's horizons and makes them feel that their greed is all that matters and to sate it is legitimate.  There is a spectrum from bloggers like me who arrogantly think people might be interested in what I am going on about across the vindictive who relish their power in turning people's lives upside down.  I almost feel there is more honour in someone who steals money electronically than in someone who behaves in a childish way, hitting back at people because they will not give up their toys to them for free.  My key concern is, given the level of anti-viral, spyware and mallware protection I had what is to stop this all happening again next month?

The Change4Life Console Game Controversy

Like me you probably get random emails coming into your inbox which are not really junk, but you do wonder how they got on your mailing list. For many years I used to receive emails about safety equipment for children's playgrounds and invitations to conferences about such facilities and I could only think that someone had written down my email address at some event by mistake or the company had got the wrong suffix, the whole thing of @hotmail.com and @hotmail.co.uk and @mail.com and so on. Anyway, on one of my email accounts I get industry news about computer game design. I think this may stem from me contributing to various message boards about computer games. However, the thing that attracted my attention is the hostility coming from gaming companies to the UK government's Change4Life campaign which is aimed at getting children to eat more healthily and exercise more.

The Change4Life campaign up to now has featured television advertisements of a plasticine family stopping watching television and eating fattening foods and getting out and exercising. The Change4Life campaign is being termed a 'movement' and is receiving widespread support from medical bodies and charities such as the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and Diabetes UK who worked with advertising agency The Gate on the project. Many local groups are getting on board and doing initiatives to get people exercising and eating healthier food. With the recession biting, ironically consumption of takeaways and high carbohydrate and fatty foods has risen. In the UK apparently 2 million children aged 2-10 are overweight (25% of girls and 20% of boys in that age group) and 700,000 are clinically obese. Health provision is already having challenges with obesity in adults but clearly if this high level of children is moving in that direction the death rate in the UK will rise in the next few decades. There is also a rise in illnesses associate with overweight, not only heart disease but also Type 2 Diabetes which leads to complications and can result in blindness and amputations as the body decays.

Now we come to the controversy which raises all sorts of questions about how big business seeks to restrict the ability of government to act. The print advert appearing first in women's magazines which has angered games companies the most shows a boy probably about eight or nine years old slumped on a sofa with a games controller in his hand staring blankly at a screen. The slogan says 'Risk an Early Death Just Do Nothing'. I have tried to put a copy of the advertisement on this posting but probably due to copyright sprites it will not upload. You can access it here: http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/4973/change4lifelarge.jpg

MCV an online gaming publication made an official complaint last week to the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) about the advertisement claiming it was 'unfair and inaccurate'. They say that the advert implies that to stop children playing such games will improve their health and that is not true and simply damages small businesses. Of course it is not the small businesses who have reacted most harshly it is the very big ones.

Sega said it was 'disappointed and frustrated' by the advertisement. They said: 'Television, radio, cinema, listening to music, computing, video gaming and of course, reading all require a high element of passive participation, but of all these media types it is video gaming that provides the most potential interaction and activity. It seems that an advertisement has been put together by a poorly informed advertising agency.' Of course this is rubbish, the government especially since the era of Thatcher and the spin days of Blair has always known precisely what it is doing with its advertising. The government's media image and its use of things like Directgov website are very precise. Other companies have complained including Atari, Konami,Tiga and Sony plus Future a publisher of games-related magazines. Industry body ELSPA demanded an immediate meeting with the government and then went on to pursue the charities. They feel the campaign has gone against their 'responsible' guidance on the Ask About Games website. Of course, ask a child how often they have visited this website and I will be surprised if you can find one.

Richard Wilson head of Tiga began creating wonderful new excuses and whining: 'This advert is absurd and insulting in equal measure. To imply that playing a video game leads to a premature rendezvous with the Grim Reaper is a non-sequitur of colossal proportions. Alcohol and drug abuse, smoking, obesity and involvement in violent crime are forms of behaviour that risk an early death. In contrast, many video games are mentally stimulating, potentially educational and social and some involve physical exercise.' Richard, in the UK far more children and adults will die of obesity than violent crime, I think you are believing some of your gaming scenarios far too much. I think Atari have been more honest when they said: 'At best, the campaign is misleading and at worst, damaging to the industry, its reputation and its potential.' Naturally their profits especially in the recession are what really concern them. These companies only think about children as consumers rather than people who have to live.

Sony has gone one step further and because the child in the picture has a 'Playstation-like controller' they are angered that they were not consulted before the advertisement went ahead. This is just appalling thinking, that a company should be able to stop a government health campaign. Sony are looking into sueing the government over the campaign. I hope they do and I am sure they will lose.

In response the onslaught, the Department of Health has refused to apologise for the campaign, not feeling it was at all misjudged: 'The campaign takes a direct approach, setting out the issue in succinctly and in straightforward language. An unhealthy lifestyle, including poor diet or being inactive, can lead to health problems in later life. If current trends continue, nine in ten people will be overweight or obese by 2050. This can increase your risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and certain cancers."We are not saying that children shouldn't play computer games or eat treats, but parents and children need to be aware of the benefits of a balanced diet and an active lifestyle. The activities portrayed are examples of poor diet and lack of physical activity.' Diabetes UK has been quoted as being surprised by the harsh reaction of games companies and plans to make legal challenges against the campaign.

I am a big fan of computer games and do not want the industry to suffer, but the time has come for the games industry. They are in the position that MacDonalds and other burger chains were in the 1990s and the cigarette companies were in the 1980s when people realised that what these companies were legitimately promoting were actually doing great harm. Burger chains have responded and the menus especially for children are a world away from what they were twenty years ago. The games companies are looking petulant and bullying. Those complaining are multinationals unused to being challenged. If they react in such a hostile way they are likely to egg the government on to stricter measures such as banning sale of games to anyone under 18. In New Zealand parents face a fine of NZ$10,000 or 3 months' imprisonment if their children play games with a higher rating than their age, notably violent '18' certificate games. I am sure we will see something similar. Keith Vaz, MP, was talking to a select committee about this problem in the UK only recently.

Games companies would be sensible to learn from the MacDonalds approach to health challenges. The Wii physical games can be seen as the first 'healthy option' on the games companies menu but they will have to do more. It is interesting that these days you do not get things as you did on 'Stronghold' (2001) a PC castle building game, had a function that after a certain period of game play your advisor would tell you that you had been playing the game for too long and that you should take a break. City-, business- and castle-building games are very easy to lose track of time with when playing. I think all companies should be compelled to introduce a function in all games which effectively has an 'interval' say after 45 minutes of play the screen freezes just where you have reached and will not release for say 30 minutes compelling you to go off and do something else. This can be introduced first for games which appeal most to children and as with the MacDonalds advertisements they should advise children to go and get some exercise. Of course this will generate hostility for parents many of whom use game consules as a way to keep the child quiet and out of their hair. That change, though, is just what Change4Life is about and it is going to upset people, but it may keep them alive. Evidence this week has shown that even if you do not start exercising until you are over 50 years old, it will lengthen your life.

The games companies no doubt have decided to adopt the 'don't blame us' approach and like many industries in the past especially in the face of a Labour government, will use the full weight of the law and their vast funds to try to stop government policy. They may win, some industries have in the past. However, this is not something like releasing control over copper supplies or not nationalising the sugar industry, this is about the health of children and that is a very emotive subject which parents can be made to feel very guilty about in a way no games company can assuage. In addition, this campaign is perceived as something coming from the government or particular charities but the games companies have missed the fact that it is in line with policies already in place especially in schools and leisure facilities. This is the most prominent bit of the iceberg, but there has been a lot going on in the UK regarding children that they seem to have been oblivious to. If they are sensible games companies will be looking at ways to alter their products. As the Department of Health has noted they are not seeking to ban children playing computer games, but the more hostile the industry is, the more likely they will move in that direction. To get through this the games companies need to be clever not aggressive which does them no favours.

P.P. 24/04/2009 - Online games industry journal MCV is lauding the 'shock U-turn' in the Change4Life advertisements as the latest ones say that exercise got through games such as those used with Wii that make the players move and jump around can contribute to the children's daily fitness. The industry feels that its bullying has paid off. Many games companies tried to censor the campaign last month when it rightly said that if children were simply stuck in front of console and computer games they would have an early death. Of course Change4Life has not done a U-turn, it always said that restricted games playing by children was fine, but of course the games industry had to act in its exaggerated outrage arguing the government was seeking to ban console games. In addition, it is not a U-turn because active games such as those provided through Wii remain a small minority of console and computer game playing. The Wii has sold 50 million units across the world since 2006, Playstation 2 has sold 136 million, but of course many are in use by second and third hand owners now. The Wii has sold 4.9 million in the UK and the Playstation 3 has sold 1.9 million since Marh 2007. So passive-activity games consoles still remain predominant. The console games industry cannot be allowed to bully or censor health campaigns and like the fast food industry has done, need to wake up to the harm their products can cause, especially to children.