2016 - A YEAR IN REVIEW

Trump won.

Brexit.

Bowie died.

The End.

JUST BUTTON IT ...

I read with amusement this week of the kind of things that now come with internet connectivity. It seems we can’t seem to go for 5 minutes without reaching for our Blackberrys and iPads to check on our Tweets. Even most TV’s these days are capable of showing YouTube clips of laughing babies and dogs with sunglasses.

One newspaper illustrated the story with a photograph of "a typical TV remote" featuring "43 baffling buttons", annotated with captions telling you what each of these buttons did, just to make it look even more complex and bewildering: "cursor up", "cursor down", "a/v input connector 1", "device mode", and so on.

The thing is, there weren't enough buttons for my liking. Unlike my easily-confused mother, I love a complicated TV remote. They should have even more stuff on them: dials and joysticks and flashing lights. I yearn for a remote with its own mouse.

And I don't want a manual. I like to work out what each nubbin does through trial and error, poking it and staring at the screen. Best of all is the "menu" button, which grants you access to a whole new array of on screen options, replete with little icons and sliding scales. Sit me in front of a brand-new telly and it's the first thing I'll reach for, because new tellies often come with surprising and exotic new features provided by the gods of technology.

Cor !! I can design my own font for the subtitles !! Wow! I can flip the picture sideways so I don't have to lift my head if I'm lying perpendicular on the sofa !! And look !! There's a slider for adjusting the level of regional accents! Now I can make the Geordie bloke who narrates “Big Brother” sound like a Cornish fisherman !!

I'll happily spend hours fine-tuning everything to my liking. Woe betide anyone who hits the ‘restore default settings’ button. That's like smashing a piece of ornate pottery I've created or scrawling graffiti all over an oil painting I’ve done of St Paul’s Cathedral.

I tend to assume other people share my obsessive need to examine the settings until everything is just so, and get genuinely enraged when I go to someone's house and discover, say, that they're watching programmes in the wrong aspect ratio. My Nan is one of the worst offenders: she'll blithely sit through a repeat of “Dad's Army” that is unnaturally stretched across the screen so that the entire cast look like Stewie Griffin from “Family Guy”.

Faced with this, primal instincts rear up and over-ride my modern-man cool-headedness, I get acute back-seat-driver anxiety, and end up hectoring them like an exasperated pilot trying to teach a four-year-old how to fly a helicopter.

The last time I was on a plane, I was sitting beside a woman who couldn't comprehend how the in-flight entertainment system worked. The thing was she didn't understand the difference between the controls on my armrest and hers. There I was, halfway through “Iron Man”, when she patted cluelessly at my controls and switched it off. So I started it again, and then she hit my fast-forward button.

At this point, I politely explained what was going on and attempted to help her operate her own system. She nodded and went "ooh" and "ahh", but try as I might, she just didn't get it. Ten minutes later, she stopped my film again, and kept doing so intermittently throughout the flight, sometimes switching my overhead light on for good measure, as if it was just to annoy me.

Her screen, meanwhile, displayed nothing but the synopsis for an episode of “One Foot in the Grave”, which she'd selected by accident but simply never played.

She just sat there, staring at the synopsis for four straight hours.

However, reverse the situation - put me in a 1940s household, say, and ask me to operate a mangle, and the chances are I'd earn her contempt with an equal display of ineptitude. But it isn't the 1940s. It's now. So snap out of it. Hit the right buttons or get left behind, you medieval dunce.

Do you want the evil robots to take over ??

Because that's exactly what'll happen if we don't all keep up.

And it’s not as if I am immune to techo-rage myself. My old computer included a bit of speech-recognition software designed to prevent Repetitive Strain Injury by letting you talk instead of type, but I gave up after I spent more time correcting its mistakes. It got every sixth word wrong, which meant you'd swear in exasperation, and it would think you had finished each sentence by saying, 'Offer god’s ache', and then type that in too.

But my favourite moment of this nature will forever be one from during my student days, when a friend’s mum rang him with what sounded like some terrifying news;

“It’s your Father dear, I’m afraid he’s had an accident”.

My friend steeled himself for the worst, only to hear the reply;

“He’s deleted the printer icon from his desktop, how does he get it back again ?? ....”

I’ve never seen such relief on another human being’s face since.

GAME ON ?? DREAM ON !!

I have a request, planet Earth. I have graced you with my presence for 35 years and I think it's about time and only fair you do something for me in return. So here it is. I want everyone to stop using the word "gamer".

I know it's going to be tough. Language evolves, so it's going to be a hard word to let go of. It's been a great comfort in all the years that people who play videogames have spent battling for acceptance. To say one is a gamer is to belong to a group, and it's human nature to want to belong, to know that there are others carrying the pennant alongside you, even if it they have acne and smell faintly of stale milk.

It is frustrating that this image exists, but it's nothing anyone can help. It's a status quo thing and a mass media thing and those are always hard to shift. But people who completely aren't helping the case at all are the ones who take an almost revolutionary pride in their "gamer" status. "I am a gamer", they say, "hear me whine".

These are the people who hurl abuse at film critics who question the artistic potential of games and send strongly-worded to game developers - which ultimately only proves the point. Whatever happened to those guys, by the way ?? I guess after they got disbarred they slipped back down to the "strange man yelling from porch" level on The Sims 2 career track for culture vultures.

I'm not saying you have to be ashamed of playing video games, but I'm not saying you should be proud and shouting it from the rooftops either. It's not like being a blind chess grandmaster or a female boxer or an amputee table tennis champion. Being a player of games does not make one a minority or part of an elite club, as employing a label like "gamer" wordlessly implies.

The point I'm trying to reach is that playing games, as entertaining and fascinating and beneficial as it might be, is just something people do, not something they should be defined by. People don't call themselves moviegoers, or TV watchers, or book readers. That's the job of advertisers and Facebook spammers.

The glitzy lifestyle mags don't cover the games industry, because there aren't any identifiable Cheryl Cole-esque` personalities to shake a narrative stick at. Mario and Lara Croft are never going to go through marriage heartbreak and divorce together. The Tetris blocks don't get drunk and punch photographers. The most compelling character in any video game is you, the player.

The resulting lack of mainstream coverage means that, despite being about 10,000 times more successful than the British film and TV industries combined, the British videogames industry continually balances a pathological inferiority complex with a wounded sense of pride.

Quite why it still wants validation from these older, fading forms of media is a mystery. It's like a powerful young warrior disgruntled at being ignored by an elderly and irrelevant dying king despite half his leg having just been eaten by a dragon. But gradually things are changing. The biggest growth area in video games right now is the "casual gaming" market. For "casual", read "mainstream".

Effectively, this means games the average human being can relate to: anyone who's lived in a house can grasp what The Sims is, for instance; and anyone who's played tennis knows how to swing a Nintendo Wii remote. Grand Theft Auto IV might not look like a casual game, but it certainly appeals to a wide demographic, namely anyone who's ever fantasised about going berserk in a city centre armed to the teeth with a bazooka.

My mum has a Nintendo DS, and he solves crossword puzzles on it and does little digital paintings with it. My Dad was looking at a second-hand PS3 the other week, not for games, but as a Blu-Ray player. I occasionally still fire up my PS2 and my PSP Slim / Lite, and the very blog post you are readin right now, with your own eyeballs and brain, was written on a desktop PC that has been fired up for the first time in about three months.

This sums it up for me. Music, TV and games all have so much untapped brilliance for people of all kinds to get stuck into. All kinds of media have parts that are accessible and interesting to all kinds of people. It's like art too - "I don't like art." That just means you haven't found the kind of art that you like.

I suppose that makes it a bit like girlfreinds in that respect, then.