The Witcher III: PCs, Plots and Immutable Interfaces

Welcome, oh lovely travellers, to the Wayback Machine, a time travel device made entirely out of toilet roll tubes and unlikeliness. Through the whims of this stalwart mechanism I’ll be moving back and forth along the scales of pop culture, investigating and reviewing current and ancient entertainment alike, because we all know it’s vitally important to have a threadbare fictional explanation for why we’re inclined to write reviews and articles about things that are no longer current. The real reason is because there’s a lot of interesting things about there that I haven’t had chance to write about in a while, and it’s about time I got caught up. And, if a perspective enhanced by time lends itself to a different consideration to what you might have previously read on the subject, then well ain’t that a lucky coincidence!

Our first trip back in time is a short one, back to play The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, the biggest game of two years ago. Or at least, one assumes, given that the version I picked up was handily marked ‘Game of the Year edition’. But then again, what does that mean? There’s no supreme justice of gaming who decides what the very best game of any year was, probably simply because no-one deserves the amount of internet grief that said arbiter would receive when it inevitably made a controversial choice.¹ Indeed, so many publications throw out similar awards – everyone loves a good ‘best of the year’ list every December – that the moniker is essentially meaningless. And that’s probably why we all read ‘Game of the Year edition’ as ‘Game + DLC’ without paying attention to what the words actually say, and I guess the moral of the story then is that developers ought to be a bit more modest.

Seriously, take it easy heroes.

That’s not to say that The Witcher III isn’t great, because it is. But it’s a very odd kind of great. Conceptually, for example, the world is open for free roam, but the various areas of the world are divided into map cells, and though you can see them from the start, access to more cells only comes along at various points in the story, with each cell also having a general sense of level requirement guided by the relative level of the quests that get you there. There is a very definite structure to this open world; progression is tied to story in a way that initially, I found rather rankling. But there’s a chance I’m coming at this from a position of bias, given that the last four games I’ve played have been Fallout 4, Skyrim, Just Cause 3 and Breath of the Wild i.e. four of the most open and navigable sandboxes of the current generation. Part of what I loved about the former two games especially was being able to, from the start, go to places I shouldn’t probably be able to get through yet, and finding inventive new ways to bumble my way to a highly unlikely victory (have you ever tried to take on the mage boss at the end of Skyrim’s Dawnbreaker quest at a low level? ‘Highly unlikely’ hardly begins to cover it). Those games never railroaded me in a particular direction; if I saw something on the horizon and liked the look of it, then I could go there.

That last point is especially true of Breath of the Wild and Just Cause 3, whose navigational mechanics are among the most joyous things I’ve ever experienced in videogames. I could fly around on JC3’s wingsuit for hours, and that alone would be satisfactory; that particular game was unique in that it had a fast travel system whose convenience was outweighed by how fun it was to just travel to a place manually. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never ever thought that about a game ever before, and I highly doubt I will again. The problem with open worlds, especially in this generation, is that they’re massive, and great as that is, no-one wants to spend their time trekking back and forth across familiar parts. Fallout 4’s fast-travel disabling survival mode sounds excellent in terms of realism, but horrible in terms of fun.

So, with all that in mind, I found The Witcher III’s structure to be, well, pretty jarring. Even quests have a particular level requirement, and early on the game seems to find a particularly vindictive pleasure in giving you the starting keys for quests that are far above the player’s ability. My quest log is teeming with all sorts of things – mostly monster hunts – that I’d love to have a crack at, but I just know will destroy me over and over again. I can have a go at them – indeed, there’s more than a couple of quests that I have muddled my way through against the advice of the numbers, but whereas triumphing against the odds in a game like Skyrim was a great feeling, in W3, there is no such tangible sense of victory; even when I’m on the cusp of victory over that group of level 23 dwarves that have been tearing holes in my level 15 character, the only sensation I get is that the game is tutting at me for daring to be so bold!

Not pictured: the likelihood of this ending well.

The reason for this is intricately tied to the game’s combat system, which is at best awkward, and at worst god damn it Geralt why are you trying to swing your sword at the enemy on the other side of the field when three other guys are right next to you stabbing a spear into your gut. The seams of transition from general control to combat control are incredibly obstinate and difficult to predict, mostly because it’s an automatic process that triggers a change in stance when hostiles get close enough. What exactly constitutes ‘close enough’ is a great mystery for the ages, as I’ve on occasion found myself alternating between screaming at Geralt to get into combat so I can block the swarm of ghouls bearing down on me, and randomly pulling my sword while in the wilderness and turning to face an enemy that isn’t even there. Lock-on and target selection is tied to the right control stick, but the limited movement of Geralt’s combat stance and his tendency to auto-home on nearby enemies regardless makes actually using that system more trouble than it’s worth, especially when I’ve been trained by years of videogames to use the right stick to steer the camera to keep my enemies in sight; try to do that here, and you end up transferring your lock on to the aforementioned enemy on the other side of the field while his friend twats you in back of the head.

Ultimately, though, none of this really matters, because if you’re fighting enemies that are appropriate to your level, then combat is pretty easy. The game throws an overwhelming amount of combat options at you very early on, but doesn’t seem to require you to use any of them consistently in order to do well. I get by mostly by means of swinging swords around - dodging, blocking, parrying – and liberal use of two of the five magic sign abilities. That leaves the other three magic signs, the crossbow, bombs, and the game’s vast variety of alchemical concoctions that I’m just not doing anything with. And for all that the game seems to support a pick-and-choose system, given that the number of character upgrade slots is so small and slow to unlock that you’ll have to choose between maximising efficiency in two or three fields or being a tiny bit better at everything for the vast majority of the game, the sheer abundance of stuff begins to feel like so much wasted memory.

This sense of over-complication infuses the entire game: the very first map is a prolonged tutorial, essentially introducing you to the game’s various elements, and you can choose between powering through it and having information spammed into your eyes, or taking your time, visiting the various map markers, powering yourself up and forgetting the things that you’ve already been told. I opted for the slow path, and still found myself spamming past tutorial screens when they popped up because there’s only so much of that I can handle before I begin to lose interest. But once you’re past that, you still have to deal with the overwhelming deluge of stat comparison that comes with deciding whether to swap your old piece of gear with slightly more armour out for this new piece that has less armour but a potentially beneficial secondary effect, as well as the overwhelming amount of raw materials that you need to collect in order to craft weapons, armour and alchemical ingredients. I’m not necessarily opposed to any of this; indeed, when I get into it, I really enjoy this rather old-school style of raiding and dungeon-crawl-esque gear-getting. But in this game, you have to fight with the incredibly clunky interface to get it done, and that’s where it all falls apart. Here’s an example of how that goes down: on the crafting screen, it’s possible to buy individual ingredients that you might be missing in order to complete a piece without having to navigate to the shopkeeper’s inventory. But when you go to a herbalist, you’ll discover that for absolutely no discernible reason, you can’t do that for alchemy ingredients. All you can do instead is mark an individual recipe, move over to the shop screen, drag the cursor past the mountain of stuff in your inventory and the vendor’s in order to find the highlighted ingredients, buy them, and then go back to the alchemy screen to oh my god I’ve gone cross-eyed. You can only mark one recipe at a time as well, so if you’ve got a lot of things that you want to make, prepare to do lots of tabbing back and forth!

I actually need about 10% of those items on the left. I have no idea which 10%.

The same problem is evident on the quests and map screens. You can’t mark multiple quests at once, and, even more damningly, every time you complete a quest, the game automatically picks a new quest to track for you, usually whichever main quest it thinks you should be doing. In my experience, the quest it chose was almost never the one I wanted it to. At the point I’m at right now, halfway through the game’s second act, it keeps triggering the opening quest of the third act. Back in the first act, when I had two concurrent main quests, it kept picking up the one that required me to travel a significant distance, rather than the one that was happening in the area where I was. The upshot of this was that I spent far too much time dragging myself into the quest screen, reminding myself what I was wanting to do, reselecting the relevant quests, tabbing to the map to orient myself, and then setting off. The game doesn’t track statistics like ‘time spent in menus’, but I reckon it’s got my ‘time spent playing’ stat looking over its shoulder worriedly.

If I were to hazard a guess as to why the game is built like this, I’d pin it on developer intent. This is a PC game, ported to consoles without thought as to how that might change the experience. Or at least, that’s certainly true of the previous Witcher games, which began their lives on the PC and were ported to home consoles later in their life cycle. But this game was developed for concurrent release, which means either the developers didn’t playtest the game on console thoroughly enough, or they refused to compromise for the console market. Perhaps Projekt Red feared the cries of ‘dumbing down’ that Skyrim suffered from (not that it did suffer, since the only people angry about that were the PC gamers who were free to mod it to their liking anyway, and that game’s interface is one that as a primarily console player I find simple and effective, come at me master race). Is it too much to ask that developers design their games to be as effective as possible for every console? That’s the question at the heart of this, and it’s a difficult one to answer. My heart says no, but my head is under no such delusions, and offers a vehement yes. I had a great idea for a re-imagining of this game’s menu system that draws on the potential of the PS4 controller’s touchpad, but that kind of thing couldn’t be implemented on the Xbox One controller: why spend time on individual incarnations built to take advantage of specific consoles when instead you can build a version that basically functions on every system, and call it a day? As much as we might like them to cater to our whims, and believe that as consumers we should be able to possess the best version of a thing possible, developers have limited resources, and honestly, they don’t have to listen to us. In the end, we can’t always get what we want, but that doesn’t mean that we deserve what we get. And it’s a pretty long fucking step from there to ‘game of the year’ isn’t it? It’s a good job words mean nothing, else my poor broken thumbs might have something to say about this.

With all of that in mind, then, I cannot conclude that The Witcher III is not a flawed game. But, as you might recall, I did say earlier that it is a great game, and I’m gonna stand by that. All of the various flaws and fiddles that I’ve just listed are definite problems, and aren’t diminished by the parts of the game that I do really like. But when this game is good, it’s really good. I went into it with no knowledge from either of the preceding games, aside of a basic backstory primer and whatever I’ve since picked out from the game’s built-in encyclopaedia, and while that’s still creating occasional moments of confusion when the characters talk about past events or someone turns up who I’m clearly supposed to recognise but obviously don’t, I accept that that’s my problem, not the game’s, and move past it. But even with that hampering my comprehension, I still find myself utterly absorbed in this world. The world-building, tone and general atmosphere all take great pains to point out how much life would suck in such a setting, with misery, mayhem and death standard procedure for most of the people born with the grave misfortune of irrelevance to the overall plot. It’s the classic A Song of Ice and Fire realist fantasy, except that it also embraces magic and the fantastic in a way that that series refuses to, and that makes it much more attractive to someone like me who generally enjoys ASOIAF but also often finds it to be a miserable slog and wishes everyone would lighten the fuck up once in a while. As a result, this world feels much more real, and interesting, and the quest chains and character arcs that play out under my control make this feel very much like the sum of what George R.R. Martin’s world might have been if it had been specifically designed to my more optimistic interests. And also if it didn’t have such endlessly lavish depictions of food and feasts, for goodness’ sake George go and make a sandwich already.

THIS IS AN ARTICLE THAT EXISTS

Another thing that intrigues me is the curious duality of the main character, Geralt of Rivia. As a ‘witcher’, a highly-trained and mutated monster hunter, he plays up to the in-universe meme that his people are emotionless zombies who only care about the dollah, and thus tips his hat to the classic videogame everyman/silent protagonist/player stand-in archetype. But he’s not emotionless, as is on occasion noted by the people he meets; he might sound like Solid Snake with a grudge against personal pronouns, but he does have feelings that go deeper than his default tone of exasperation at the ridiculous world and all the ridiculous people with their ridiculous problems (a feeling I often share after the twentieth time I arrive at a quest objective only for the game to move the goalposts, which honestly happens far too often). His character informs his own story, while keeping him an obstinately neutral interloper in the lives that he touches, and it’s left to the player to make up the difference. When I write it out like this, it really doesn’t seem like it should work, but somehow, it more or less does, and it makes the story-based progression all the easier to swallow; by the time I’d finished the main questline of the first act’s area, I was emotionally satisfied by the arcs of the characters I had dealt with, and ready to move on. Usually, in a ‘regular’ open world, that won’t happen until I’ve scoured every single rock and cave in a region and grabbed absolutely everything that I can from it, but in this game’s weird structure, I’m okay with it.

I don’t know, in the end, if all of this works out from a purely gamer’s perspective. In fact, I strongly suspect that in a different setting the over-complications and unavoidable flaws of this game would have led me to walk away from it by now. But in the end, fantasy is my jam, and the world of The Witcher III is a really interesting, complicated and often subversive fantasy that I find fascinating both from an entertainment and a literary perspective, and that’s what’s really keeping me in the game. At this point, I’m only halfway through, if that – this story-based progression makes it hard to tell, and also I think the game might be hiding some maps from me, so it remains to be seen whether this precarious balance will ultimately land in the game’s favour. But I’m willing to see it through, so I guess we’ll find out.

I’ll let you know! Until now, dear traveller, it’s time to step out of the Wayback Machine. Next time, I’ll be talking about the Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who, specifically David Tennant’s first season in the title role, since I’ve finally convinced the missus that it’s entertainment that is worth her time, only to become unsure myself if it actually is.

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^{1.The closest thing to such an institution would be the World Video Game Hall of Fame in NY, who you might have heard about recently; their 2017 inductees included Halo: Combat Evolved and Pokemon Red and Green. Naturally, the internet exploded, although personally I think there’s a strong case for recognising both of those.↩}

The Stolen Revolution

A remark on Brexit on the eve of the Referendum, originally posted on social media.

'Every generation needs a new revolution', Thomas Jefferson said, but Brexit is not our revolution. The Leave campaign has tried to position itself as the rebellious underdog, the voice of the people as they kick upwards against European oppression, and it utterly blows my mind that such bullshit has been allowed to stand.

Brexiters, look at who your spokespeople are: the leader of a party of racists who thinks nothing of turning the refugee crisis into a photo opportunity. Our own knockoff Donald Trump whose only agenda is securing the premiership by dethroning the leader of his own party. Michael freakin' Gove. What on earth qualifies these people to speak for you?

Look at the lies they have told: 350 million pounds plastered everywhere, a massive overstatement that Vote Leave still wears like a medal of honour despite it's having been debunked a thousand times over. The false equivalency of immigration to a failing NHS and a housing crisis, two things that are the fault of the government for failing to invest, but which are so much easier to lay at the feet of your new Muslim neighbour who makes you feel uncomfortable. How does this nonsense qualify as reasoning?

But most of all, look at your foes, for there is no better way to understand your campaign than to get the measure of the people who oppose it. Who wants to remain? The left, the liberals, the young, a whole generation that has grown up with freedom of speech and human rights, that pulls together against atrocities like the Orlando shootings rather than blaming what they don't understand. The furthest left Labour leader of our lifetimes, who no one expected to be taken seriously until he was allowed to speak. Us, all of us, your sons and daughters, the generation Vote Leave has lost in the cloud of its own hubris.

We will wear the consequences of tomorrow's vote for longer than you, and we're screaming to Remain. Maybe you should hear us out. Not every revolution needs to be violent to be recognised as such, and this is ours: a revolution against standing alone in a world that is bigger than us.

Tomorrow, vote for everyone, not just yourself.

Vote Remain.

An Open Letter to Grammar Pedants

Last time, I had quite a bit to say about the things that don't appear on my Facebook feed. This time, in the best tradition of crowd-sourcing ideas from the internet, I'm going to talk about something that does appear on my Facebook, and, as opposed to all that Britain First nonsense that I'm not really that invested in, this time it's something that's very close to my heart: grammar pedantry.

What I'm not talking about is grammar Nazism. I really don't like that phrase, and in any case it refers more to people who weaponise pedantry as a type of non sequitur counterargument. Nothing to say in response to someone? Criticise the shape they presented it in, not the point itself. No, grammar Nazis are, by and large, dipshits, and they're not my indented audience. But they come from the same source as the more casual pedants that I am in mind of, the people who keep popping up on my feeds and smugly reposting infographics about the correct uses of their/there/they're like it's a mark of betterment.

Case in point. You don't gotta be a dick about it.

At the heart of all this is prescriptivism. Prescriptivism is a particular school of grammar that we all, unavoidably, come across in our lives, because it's the one that is taught to us. In school, we learn that there are correct ways of doing things, and that certain things are just straight up wrong. Their, there and they're all serve specific purposes and are not interchangeable. That's how it is, and for most people, that's how it ends. This sort of thinking tends to dovetail with ideas about the correctness of 'standard English' and thus the comparative 'wrongness' of colloquialisms and dialects, further imprinting ideas about what is essentially 'right' in our heads as we grow up. And from there, we regurgitate what we've learned back onto others, sometimes just to prove them wrong.

But that's not the full story, guys! Prescriptivism isn't the only way of looking at grammar. Elsewhere, there is the descriptive approach, which doesn't set out to enforce rules, but simply comments on how grammar actually works and what people do with it, regardless of whether the 'rules' are obeyed or not. There's a particular example that I've seen come up quite a few times, and which serves to demonstrate this quite well. It's the curious case of 'should of'.

Prescriptively speaking, the correct form of the auxiliary here is 'should have', as in 'I should have used should have correctly'. Yet lots of people are saying 'should of', instead. Why are they doing that? Why won't they stop being so belligerently wrong? Well, maybe they're not wrong? 'Should of' comes from how it and 'should've', the generally accepted contraction of 'should have', are basically interchangeable in spoken English. Spoken English is the most flagrant abuser of the 'rules' - and the sorest point of contention for me when people try to apply them - but it's also the kind of English we encounter the most. Of course particular elements of that would leak back into the written word. And this is where descriptivism comes in; this particular development is fascinating, and a marker of our language's most potent ability, its ability to change. 'Should of' angers people because they think it's wrong, but actually, it's just our language, doing its thing. We should embrace it, not shun it.

This is from Grammarly,
the 21st century equivalent of  'Fragment: Consider Revising'.
Don't take it as law.

Who do self-righteous images like this save the English Language from, then? No-one owns English but us, i.e. everyone who ever spoke it. There is no supreme arbiter of right and wrong; when you pass judgement on people who you believe to be speaking incorrectly, you're stepping into the shoes of a judge who doesn't even exist. The 'rules' as we understand them came about from collective usage, from the constant of change; eventually, enough people started doing a thing a certain way that it just became the way it is. 'Infographic' didn't used to be a word (Chrome's spellcheck still refuses to recognise it as such). Once, the idea of a verb called 'Google' was unthinkable. Stick to the rules too hard, and these things don't happen. A language that doesn't change is a language that stagnates, and a language that stagnates is a language that dies. Ultimately, if you're championing prescriptivist approaches on things as petty as 'should of', then you're strangling your own language.


Okay, so that's a little bit drastic. I'm not saying that we should all embrace the anarchic science of descriptivism, and let all the rules go in favour of just watching what happens. Most of the 'rules' are still very important; the reason that we learn English through a prescriptive lens as we grow up, and particularly as a foreign language, is because it's the best bloody way to. If we lived in a world where English was completely DIY.. well then no-one would have any idea what the fuck anyone else was talking about. So no, my point here isn't that we should throw out prescriptivism; it has its place, just as descriptivism does. I just want to point out that there is another way. English works on a constant cycle of cause and effect between these two approaches, with the rules informing our observations, and our observations leading to new rules. In this mish-mash, your prescriptivism is important, but it's only half of the story. So please, don't feel obliged to bring the force of your scorn down on every error you encounter, because half the time, when you think something is wrong, it might just be that it's different.

And if you're hating on something because it's different, well, then you are a Nazi.

Newspeak vs. my Facebook feed

Last night I went to see a theatrical production of George Orwell's 1984, and it was pitch-perfect in the exact way that it should have been: a black-as-all-hell rendition of a state that commands absolute power, a surreal, cerebral lens of study for totalitarianism and all the awful things that come with it. It was my first time truly engaging with 1984 as an adult: I read it once when I was a teenager, when angst and rebellion were right up my alley, but in the time since then everything but the most cursory details of the plot had fallen away from my mind, thus enabling it to be thoroughly blown anew.

In a telling tale of how my priorities have shifted, the main thing I took away from 1984 this time around was not a rousing round of 'woo fuck the system', but a serious gnawing horror about the very idea of Newspeak. For those who aren't aware, in 1984 'Newspeak' is what the ruling party call the new language they are building, a severely reduced version of English that serves to reduce the population's ability to form contrary opinions by taking away their ability to vocalise them. In Newspeak, the word 'free' does not include the definition 'able to consider opinions other than those that the ruling class beams into your head'; the only meaning that the party allows it in the sense in which we might say 'this cat is free of fleas'. Semantically, we can argue for a similarity, but the characters of 1984 can't, because the alternative meaning has already been crushed out of existence.

Y'all probably know already that I'm a massive fanboy for the sheer capability of language, for the infinite amount of expression that it allows, so you can probably imagine my reaction to the idea of taking a purposefully reductionist approach to it, of chopping off bits you don't like, shaping it into  form that benefits you and you alone. It makes me goddamn mad, all the more so because it isn't just a fictional conceit; this shit happens all the time. I've been especially aware of it of late because of the recent UK Labour party's leadership election, because of poor Jeremy Corbyn, who suffered through a deluge of shit from pretty much the entirety of the UK media in order to get elected nonetheless; for the past month or two it has been pretty much impossible to swing a cat round in journalistspace without whacking it against someone who was lining up a shot at Corbyn. The spin is everywhere.

Check this out:

Notice how 'I've no interest in being part of a cabinet and have held this position for decades' becomes, with but a deft revision, 'this man would not take a job from Jeremy Corbyn'. I mean both things are ostensibly true, but one is a neutral fact that only speaks of Skinner's character, and the other is positioned to be an attack of Corbyn's legitimacy as a leader. And even that is build on the false dichotomy that there's a difference between 'working' for Corbyn, and being an MP in the Labour party. The two are one and the same, unless they can be used to make an anti-Corbyn point: then, words can only mean one thing. Newspeak, bitches.

I mean good grief. Now I'm not an out-and-out Corbyn fanboy, but the more of this sort of crap I see, the more I want him to carry on upending this system - as Skinner quite cathartically does above. It's not just the right-wing media that's on with this either; even institutions like the BBC, which I previously considered to be fairly even handed, and which you wouldn't expect to have much love for a Tory government, are getting in on this action. Even the Guardian, one of the few left-leaning media institutions I thought I could trust, was full of pieces from 'big' names like David Miliband doomsaying the prospect of a Corbyn government, for reasons that I can only assume are borne from fear of him being too liberal to win anything. And yet, as these articles were appearing, it was becoming increasingly apparent that he was going to win the shit out of that election.

And that's what gives me hope. For all the endless spin and bullshit that the media tries to pour into our ears, there are increasingly things happening that give me hope that we're not going to go the Newspeak route, that the people of the world are getting increasingly pissed off by this nonsense. There are smart people out there who won't stand for it any longer, like Dennis Skinner above, and like this dude:

Both this video and the proceeding one came from, you may be surprised to hear, my Facebook feed. Judging from some folks who I've spoken to, there's been a marked increase in recent months of reposted bullshit - namely niche, Britain First-esque nonsense like repurposed nationalist images accompanied by completely fabricated anti-immigration, anti-feminist, anti-whatever messages designed to provoke defensive, xenophobic responses. I don't know if that's true of your Facebook, but, actually, it isn't of mine! Instead, my Facebook trades in the exact opposite of this: mostly informative, progressive stuff that either satirises the aforementioned content or condemns it, pleading with the kind of people who post it to please, please, think for yourselves. Add that to stuff like the tidal wave of amusing memes that have arisen from David Cameron's pig-gate scandal, refreshingly transferring the shoe to the other foot for a change, and, well, it's good for the soul.

Of course, this isn't Facebook's own doing. But it provided the platform for all of the excellent people I know to object to all the crap that self-serving idiots would have us believe. The poor doomed characters of 1984 didn't have that. They'd lost all means by which they could object to the bullshit they were being spoon-fed; their only rebellions were petty, individualistic acts that meant nothing, and in the end they lost that too, lost the ability to do anything other than just accept it. But we don't have to do that: we have the power to look at these endless reams of bullshit and say no. We've got our language, we've got our heart, and it warms mine to see people using theirs. That, in the end, is the point of this whole post: a shout out to those who won't be having with this gentle-into-that-good-night fatalism, a big internet hug to everyone who dares to give a shit. Keep being awesome.

The Men in Hats: Several Sides of SEO (sample copy)

Once you’ve finished with the nitty-gritty of setting up your business and are ready to hit the web, you come to the next problem, a rather major one: no-one on the internet knows who you are. In order for people to start finding you, you’re going to have to figure out a way to get yourself indexed on the various search engines that people use to sift through the internet. Thankfully there’s already a field of industry that covers this niche, and that is the process of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO uses a variety of different techniques that work towards the same endgame: your website, highly ranked on Google. But! Not all of these techniques are what you might call good – they’re effective, sure, but morally, they might leave something to be desired. These techniques are known as black hat techniques, the modern wild west of the internet having appropriately absorbed the nomenclature of villainy that a man in a black hat represented in Hollywood’s classic westerns. Similarly, the better SEO techniques are known as white hat; we’ll get to them later. First, let’s meet the villains.

The Black Hat Gang

Probably the very worst thing about the gang of vagabond techniques that represent black hat SEO is how obvious they are. The most sinister offender, the ringleader of the gang, is probably keyword stuffing, the technique of shoving whatever particular word or term it is that you’re looking to pop up in search results for into a text as many times as possible. This is the text-based equivalent of when you get sent to a dodgy website to download something and are greeted by fifteen different ‘download’ buttons in various fonts and styles, each of which is poised and ready to ruin your day with popups and malware. If my keyword was keyword, then using the keyword keyword as many times as possible ends up with sentences like this one, which feature the keyword keyword so many times that the keyword keyword starts to seem like it’s haunting you, keyword. This is no use to anybody, because it makes your content look amateur and doesn’t actually help anyone who finds it. What’s the point of being the top result for ‘western metaphors in SEO’ if someone who is looking for information clicks on it and finds garbage? Well, you got a click; if that’s all you’re after, congratulations. But we can do better!

Other black hat techniques include the application of tiny, hidden text, links that don’t look like links and will, upon accidental click, send the browser off on another adventure, sneaky redirects, and the incredibly cheeky act of directly changing the content of a page once it’s been indexed!

The White Hat Sheriff

The real heroes of SEO are the ones who wear the white hats, and who outdo the black hat outlaws simply by being better than them. The true sheriff, the most important difference between black hat and white hat SEO, is a focus on user experience. Implement keywords, sure, but where they’re relevant. Focus on putting together a quality piece of content that helps the person who’s searching for those keywords; if the second best result for ‘western metaphors in SEO’ is a complex treatment of the theme, then that disgruntled user who clicked off the previous result is more likely to stick around – and time spent on a page is just as important as the initial click that gets us there. So write like a human, not like a robot that got stuck repeating keyword keyword keyword.

The search engines themselves are designed to reward this kind of content; thanks to the continued evolution of machine learning, their algorithms are getting smarter at detecting context all the time. Google can tell the difference between keyword spam and a well-written sentence, and will sort accordingly; good content goes up, bad content goes down, and the worst content might even get removed if it’s judged to be suitably unethical in its SEO applications. The Black Hat Gang will, inevitably, end up in internet jail.

The idea of user experience goes beyond the text, as well. It’s also about presentation; if your content is pleasing to the eye, it’s pleasing to the owner of that eye as well. So optimise! Design a website that looks good, reads well, and presents itself nicely on computer screens, phones, tablets; any conceivable means by which people might visit it. Then apply some of the other white hat SEO techniques: pop keywords into URLs, use keyword tails that search engines themselves suggest, curate strong, legitimate backlinks; even something as simple as having a website that loads quickly is a boon. All of these techniques, when used well, will drown out the black hats, and send your content to the top.

The Taming of the West

The web is different now to the dark days of the early 2000’s, when the black hats had an easy time of it. SEO isn’t just about language anymore; search engine results aren’t driven by how many times one can stuff variations of a keyword into a text. Nowadays, the most important difference between black hat and white hat SEO techniques is that one type has a future. Here in the dying days of the new west, the black hats are the last few cowboys, clinging to a land of lawlessness that is slowly being tamed and remade into a civilised land of quality content, with reputable locales that are linked by serviceable infrastructure and curated by good people. It might not make for as exciting movies, but at least we can find what we need!

Sonnet 17

Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were filled with your most high deserts?-
Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And with fresh numbers number your graces,
The age to come would say ‘This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces.’
So should my papers, yellowed by their age,
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage
And stretchèd metre of an antique song.
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice: in it, and in my rhyme.

—————

I've really rather fallen for this sonnet. As opposed to its immediate successor, Sonnet 18, it feels incredibly human and fallible. The poet is far less confident of the infinite nature of his art, or more accurately, less confident of his poetic ability to represent the beauty of his subject without invoking such dramatic hyperbole that the scholars of the future think he’s lost the plot. I know the feeling, when words don’t work. It manifests here through the rather shaky start; 'come’ and 'tomb’ is a half-rhyme at best, and there’s no damn way I can make a rhyme of 'desert’ and 'part’ without severely mangling at least one of those words. But then the poet gets it; play to the impossibility, and do the impossible:

If I could write the fortune of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say 'This poet lies,
Such heavenly touches ne'er graced earthly faces’.

Even if I could tell the tale of your beauty, says the poet, it wouldn't matter, because I’d get called a hack for it anyway. This subtle jab against the very nature of the romantic sonnet, which is reiterated in the hilariously self aware 'stretchèd metre of an antique song’ at line 12, is Shakespeare at his most deconstructive, and a wonderful precursor to Sonnet 18, when he takes umbrage against the very nature of a summer’s day as a rubbish thing to compare such beauty against. But it’s also heartbreakingly romantic in how it pierces through to the very core of affection, and both laments and celebrates how the curious nature of love individualises our opinions of its targets in ways only we can see. The author tried to leave this note for the world, to mark his love, to save a portion of his subject’s beauty, and ultimately he doesn't seem to care very much whether anyone believes him or not.

Of course the point of this sonnet is a procreation sonnet, which is why the closing couplet turns towards 'have a baby, nudge nudge’ like its precursors. I'm not a big fan of this part of the sequence, as I honestly just think it’s kinda weird, but it doesn't faze me in this sonnet because, whatever the poet might have intended when he started Sonnet 17, the nature of procreation ends up as an afterthought, displaced by rising senses of affection and a preoccupation with survival through verse that leads us very nicely into Sonnet 18, and a'swinging off from there. 17 is ultimately a turn-point, a pivot, but that doesn't make it any less than what came before, and what will yet follow after.

So we've got romance, transitioning themes and deconstruction. No wonder I was so inclined to write about this rhyme.

Building English, one adjectivised medical condition at a time

Today I'm concerned about the word 'halitosical’, which basically means ‘of the nature of a breath condition’. Or at least, that’s what I’m deciding it means. It’s basically the adjective form of 'bad breath’ that doesn't officially exist - by which I mean, it’s not in the Oxford English Dictionary, a fairly solid resource for words that are real and words that are kblupt.

Just to be fair, though, I googled 'halitosical definition’, and got three results. That was thrilling enough in its own right for being such a rare combination of words to not even generate a full page of results, but the real point of this was that none of those results I did get were definitions, from the OED or otherwise. This doesn't change the fact, though, that if you search for 'halitosical’ on its own you get 66 results of people who have used this word, in defiant ignorance of the fact that it doesn't actually exist.

Anyway, I joined the halitosical party (which would be the worst party ever) because I needed the aforementioned adjectival form for my book, and it was either that or 'bad breathy’. The only other option that OED does have an entry for is 'halituous’, but since said word only takes the Latin root 'halitus’, for breath, and omits the suffix 'osis’ that denotes the medical condition aspect, 'halituous’ only means 'of the nature of breath/vapour’, and so wasn't quite sufficient.

Basically what this all means is that I've discovered myself to be part of a small group of people who have thought fuck it, bent the language to their will and made a new word happen when they needed it. I'm a witness to a live change to the English language, and it’s pretty cool. A prescriptivist like the person I raged at on Facebook last week when she sniped at people for daring to use non-standard English in conversation would probably be reloading their shotgun right now, but fuck 'em; this is what our language is - effervescent, constantly in flux, changing to the needs of the speaker - and I wouldn't take it any other way.

“Swelled with the potency of potential agency, Marcus found that he just couldn’t quite bring himself to go along with letting this halitosical hustler nick his stuff.”

P.S, or more aptly, Note-to-self: In delving the etymology of 'halitosis’ I've also discovered that a more apt translation into layman’s English would be 'breath condition’, not 'bad’ breath’ as I've always considered it. The more you know.