Might As Well Admit It

A snowy walk outside Mach

Back in times of lore (the 1980's) I was a committed subscriber to a monthly magazine called Your Sinclair. It covered, basically, ZX Spectrum computer games, a subject I had a particular fascination for at the time, and it did so with an irreverent editorial style which lives on in such rags as Private Eye (indeed one of the Your Sinclair staff writers went on to write for that illustrious paper). Issues came with a cassette taped to the front cover, bursting with playable demos of new titles and full games of a more trivial nature. I read it from cover to cover. I tracked the Top 10 game sales each month on my own handmade chart. I totally geeked out on it.

13 Feb: Sowing the first seeds of the year - broad beans.

Inside, games were reviewed and marked out of 10 but none ever got more than a 9 (“a YS Megagame!”). The ratings were also broken down by graphics, playability, value for money and addictiveness. It's that latter quality that was the most important. A game could be drawn badly, hard to play, and pricey, but if it had you coming back for more time after time, it was a surefire winner. You wanted to be addicted to a game, if you were going to fork out fifteen quid for one.

Sixteen pallets of compost arrives to be divvied up amongst local growers

Later during my software programming years at Symbian, I recall discussions of Symbian's various smartphone User Interfaces (UI's) and the absolute necessity for them to be “compelling”. The user must be compelled to keep using it, to be drawn back to the screen by the slickness of the way the controls slide across when you swipe.




Now of course we have various social media giants connecting us via our smartphones to each other on their networks. And they, surprise surprise, have made their products as compelling, or as addictive, as possible. Why wouldn't they? They want the advertising revenue. Any company would do the same. The only snag is, most companies' products are not on our person 24/7. At least with a game console you can put it down after a solid ten hours of play and head out blinking into the sunlight. Not so the smartphone. It is always there, somewhere, its bleep announcing either a vital new Facebook message or an utterly trivial “What's New” suggestion. You have to check it to find out which.

My Jimny on its last mission, bringing muck.

There's a media backlash right now, but the media will eventually tire. It's up to each one of us to regain a little control. Ash Wednesday is tomorrow, the start of the forty days of Lent, which some people mark by changing some aspect of their lives. I offer the suggestion of visiting your notification settings on your phone and switching your social media to OFF.

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