"It's Only a Second."

Microsoft were definitely having a laugh when they called their program "OneNote." Dude… I've taken probably one-hundred thousand.

One of those sub-section's I've got adding to the word count over a period of years is called "dialogue." It's not dialogue for anything in particular, it's not even dialogue assigned to a particular character, it's just lines I've heard or thought of that I think "that's a dialogue line."

Whether or not it actually is, that's a bridge to cross when something including dialogue is actually released into the world. Until then, it's all just selfish scribbles for me, but some lines have stuck with me over those years.

One of them was from a call I was in with Sparky when he joked…

"People say, well, it's just a second. Yeah, it's a second I'm annoyed."

And I feel this accidentally sums up one of the minor yet major issues with modern gaming having to be connected at all times. Whether it's two-step verification every time I launch Uplay even when the PC is "remembered" for 30 days. The Connecting to Online Services tag being seen every time so much as your character's sunglasses are picked on F1 '24. Booting up Call of Duty after installing an update only for it to go, whoops, need another update for your update.

Two years ago I had the bright idea to host an 8 Week Assetto Corsa Mini-League… and while I'm definitely never, ever, ever doing that again, I can't deny that it wasn't a learning experience.

Not so much in game-development or community-engagement, but seeing every building block of a video-game truly is…

A variable.

Hosting that League for AC taught me how much you take for granted things like, collision barriers, texture streaming optimization, spawn-locations, road surfacing, ghosting, things that when each map, vehicle, and sometimes, even livery, is made by a different modder, are all variables where all it takes is one component to breakdown for players to have a bad experience, or sometimes, none at all.

An overall problem that I see in Software… fuck it, maybe just the world, is that we're conditioned to only pitch within ideal circumstances.

We want our ideas to be seen as good, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to only talk about that idea in a world where everything works as intended, and if it's not ideal?

Well hey… what if it's only a second?

Back when I was staying with friends at the Airbnb for a friend's wedding, on the Xbox Series X was Hydro Thunder Hurricane, I thought "hey, it's play that in Split-Screen, this should be fun."

We gave up 20-40 minutes later.

Turns out that, at least for Hydro Thunder, a backwards compatible Xbox 360 game does not support Guest accounts on the 8th and 9th-gen Xbox consoles, meaning your only recourse is to make three entirely separate Microsoft online accounts to play offline multiplayer.

Well hey… if all the accounts work, then it should only take a couple minutes right?

In many ways, I live this life twice, being an editor.

I've got this idea for a shot.

Hey, what if instead of telling the viewer with commentary and generic gameplay footage, I have a split-screen of three different games? One of those games is more likely to be played by a viewer and make it more relatable. It better illustrates that this is a widespread  topic in gaming in-general. Plus, it flows a lot better rather than letting one long-take run, or three super short takes cutting into each other.

It should only take a few minutes…

Right?

Assuming your three different games all have visual examples that are easy to record, and that your recording software doesn't come back with a blank screen, and your editing software doesn't chug down when adding the three clips together, and the three clips work well with each other, and the tools to make that split-screen don't corrupt in the middle of a project.

Experiencing this day in and day out, it's small wonder that when the friend who said this dialogue was at my house, the few hours that were spent gaming rather than running around the city, were with an original Xbox.

Only Forza Motorsport was the game that gets stuck searching for servers that didn't exist…

At the time.

Part of the reason I think this is a problem that may never go away however is that, in fairness, to experience a lot of these issues, does demand time.

Time that a lot of people don't have, and even if they do, don't spend on hundreds of games, or hundreds of hours on said games, and I'm not sure if there's ever going to be enough hours to make even those people sick enough of things like always online connections, DRM, and ISP monitoring, to build a large enough revolt against these practices.

Although, even one of my Doctors was complaining the other day about Disney+ and cancelling it because it'd keep bugging out on their TV/Console setup.

"It's only a second."

Yeah…

Sure it is.