If you break that phrase down, you get a good idea of the problem. It’s continuous, i.e. all the time. Even when I wasn’t in front of a computer, I had a phone. ‘Clearing my feeds’ became a constant, and I’d guess, conservatively, I was scanning and marking feeds read 20 or 30 times a day. It’s partial - because it didn’t take all that much effort, it’s something I’d do constantly, through a browser, on my phone, you name it. Even when there are much bigger things going on, a part of my attention was always on RSS. Finally, there’s the word itself - attention. I think some of the web punditry about attention borders on the absurd (I can’t help but think of this guy going on about protecting our precious bodily fluids), but at the same time, it is very easy to burn away hours and hours of your life on utter trivialities. Sometimes that’s exactly what you want and need to do - I don’t regret a minute spent completing Grand Theft Auto IV for example, which I’m sure the world at large sees as a triviality, but which I see as 60+ hours of interactive entertainment, and significantly more fun that sitting watching TV. But when trivialities become daily, and eat up a steadily larger chunk of time, they start to become unconscious obligations. RSS was becoming that for me.

Of course, it wasn’t all bad. I had RSS feeds which only updated two or three times a month, but which always provided in-depth, detailed, fascinating writing. Or indeed, just a bloody good chuckle. These longer, fascinating articles were what I really wanted, so when I binned RSS yesterday, I took note of the dozen or so sites I regularly found good, lengthy, interesting articles at, then stuck them in a bookmarks folder. Using Firefox’s open all in tabs functionality, I’ll scan these once or twice a day (taking maybe a sixth of the time it took to ‘clear my feeds’) and spot articles I’m interested in reading. In the past, this is where reading long articles fell down for me. I’d open a load of tabs, leaving articles open for days at a time and never getting round to reading them.

Enter Instapaper.

Instapaper is an incredibly simple, elegant solution to finding, storing and reading long content on the web. Clicking a ‘Read Later’ bookmarklet instantly saves any article to reading page associated with an email address or username you supply. You can also password protect it. You can then log in from any browser, (including your phone) to read your articles, which are formatted for simple reading on any device. If you finish the articles you’ve stored, you can read the top articles saved by other Instapaper users. In a single move, this has made long web content accessible and removed any need for RSS. I’m still reading words on the web, but now I’m enjoying it again.

I’ve found in the last couple of years that regular web use has pretty much smashed my attention span into tiny, tiny bits. This is a relatively recent phenomenon - I’ve been a web user for over ten years, and used it heavily for about five. I can sum up what’s destroyed my attention span in a handy acronym:

RSS

The constant drip-drip-drip of RSS makes the web a non-static, ever changing source of information, and makes it exponentially easier to stay glued to it. Five years ago, I’d log on at most once per day, often going without for days at a time. Then I got Bloglines, and latterly Google Reader, and now I can see, in close to real-time, when and how things are being updated. For sites like MeFi with a high update rate, that’s killer (in a bad way). I’ve slowly pruned my RSS feeds of the high-volume, short length, low value feeds (the Engadgets and BoingBoings of the world) in favour of MeFi and sites which publish relatively long pieces.

However, these pieces are still generally short in the grand scheme of things. A couple of thousand words from Bruce Schneier is awesome, but I miss being able to sit down with any book and get a lot out of it, fiction or non-fiction. I mean, really, six or seven years ago I was a two-books-a-week type. Now I’m lucky if I get through one a month. And I know exactly where that time has gone - web surfing. For a while now I’ve been considering junking RSS entirely, and going cold turkey on the web at large, because I really, really don’t want to wake up in my mid-forties and have spent twenty years punching F5 like a rat in a lab for what is, in essence, pretty ephemeral stuff.

General tips that I’ve found work even despite my small-invertebrate-like attention span?

• Good light (I sit by the door in bright sunlight).
• Good seating - get a good reading chair, and a lamp for the evening.
• Don’t read in bed if you can help it, you’ll drift off.
• Turn off the TV, radio and any other background noise (although nice music can really help if you have the ’silent room’ issue, which I’m convinced for many is a mental block created by memories of trying to study in school libraries in their youth).
• Have a glass of water at hand to still the ‘make a cup of tea/coffee/whatever’ instinct.
• I also like the ideas presented about using a notebook to record what I see as the ‘Google Twitch’. Constant exposure to the web makes it very easy to develop the habit of instantly acting on any mental question or query, in part because of ease of accessibility (why wouldn’t you look up the answer?) and partly because of the fear, whether conscious or not, that you’ll forget the question if you don’t act on it instantly. This is a valid fear in the kind of mind that RSS create - a constant river of new content. It’s less of a risk in slower, longer form discursive thought, but the notepad will be a handy crutch.

Since writing this post, I’ve gone through the sixty five plus feeds I was tracking and grabbed the ten or fifteen websites I spend 80% of my time on, copied them to a Bookmarks folder on the toolbar and wiped my Google Reader subscriptions list. Now I have a ‘Daily Tabs’ folder of regularly updated, interesting stuff, and a slightly bigger folder of ‘Weekly Reads’ with the low-volume, longer length stuff.

Let’s see how it works out. Do you feel your attention span getting shorter? Did you even make it to the end of this article?

Edit

And we’re done.

“What happens is dependent on how each player approaches it, but somewhere in the second act you become so notorious and feared that the underground [of medics and priests] says that you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, and stops giving you medicine,” says Hocking. The result is a twist on, or reversal of, Far Cry Instincts’ feral abilities. “As medicine is cut off you become sickly and grotesque, but still more notorious,” Hocking continues. “You transform from being this healthy guy that might occasionally shoot someone in the knee to somebody that’s literally dependent on being cruel and vicious, twisted and deformed and vomiting all the time. You invert your relationship with your own power – from being powerful because you’re healthy to powerful because you’re crueler than the enemy.”

Powerful and compelling stuff, especially in the completely open, non-linear world promised by Ubisoft. It really comes sharply into focus though, when you see a gameplay video that showcases an actual (and brutal) tactic of war as a gameplay mechanic - namely, shooting to wound, in order to draw out your enemy’s fellow soldiers. Grim stuff:

There’s a whole run of open-world FPS/RPG hybrids coming down the pipeline, from this to Fallout 3 and STALKER: Clear Sky. It seems the one thing they have in common right now is the chance to be a complete bastard, or try and survive in brutal fictional worlds through wit and charm and last-resort self defence. How do you play open-world games?

I’m now back in smoky ol’ London, but hey, that’s what holidays are for, right?

Because it’s a Monday, you needed cheering up, and I need to test Youtube embedding.

For the first time, shortly after GoldenEye came out, I had the slightly unnerving experience of feeling a very strong instinct to hug the wall and check corners for other players. At school. I kept expecting the tinkle of a grenade landing at my feet or the paff paff paff of a pistol being unloaded into my back. This is the point at which the anti-gaming lobby would throw up their hands in horror and claim my mind was irretrievably damaged, that blocky, pixellated headshots and a game that was way better than the film it took inspiration from, had turned me from mild-mannered kid into ticking time bomb. Sure, maybe if I was already halfway nuts then all-night sessions of GoldenEye may not have helped, but as a pretty well-adjusted kid with a great group of friends, I was exhibiting something much more harmless, and actually kind of cool - I had become immersed in the game.

At heart, we’re all pack animals, reacting to stimuli in the world around us, flocking in groups, constantly assessing and shifting in our relationships and hierarchies. The human brain has survived and prospered for so long precisely because it has an ability and aptitude for picking up new skills and patterns of behaviour. My mind was adapting to a new situation, learning new skills to help me ’survive’. You see it on sports pitches and in boardrooms every day - people learning the behaviours that get them through the day or game unscathed - why should gaming be any different? Especially when it’s the basis of comedy gold.

The learning and instinctive grasping of game mechanics continued, and not just in first person shooters or multiplayer blast-fests. I found myself automatically judging the speed and vector of approaching cars, ready to jack them, after months of Grand Theft Auto III. I wanted a flashlight and something hefty in my hand to enter dark spaces after Half Life 2. I learned the finer points of multi-tasking and developed a twitchy relationship with dealing with multiple inputs on a computer from micro-managing stockades across the New World in Sid Meier’s Colonization. All of these games succeeded in different ways, but they all shared a common factor - they were so good I played them at great length, and they were so immersive that they bled out into daydreams and odd moments during the day.

It’s continued of course. These days most of the games I play don’t even require a willing suspension of disbelief. With good headphones and the lights down low, the world of Rapture in Bioshock or a dust-blown street in Call of Duty 4 become incredibly real. Sound design, sharp graphics and realistic physics combine to create stunning virtual environments. It’s the reason I can’t bear to play the Condemned series - they set off genuine fight or flight reactions in me, and I can barely play for five minutes. I started to realise the power of this when sniping on Creek, one of the new maps released on multiplayer for COD4. I served in University reserve forces a few years ago, in an infantry unit. Years ago, I had actually lain on a hilltop with a rifle, scanning for enemy movement in the middle of a training exercise. In COD4, I did the same thing, waiting for the biological miracles that are my eyes to detect movement in the valley below, before snapping the rifle scope to my eye and blowing away another player. Two worlds merged - skills from life used in a game.

With Grand Theft Auto IV breaking new ground in immersive environments that invite exploration and experimentation, I’ll again be fighting the urge to jack the nearest car to get where I need to go or toss a grenade through a doorway before I enter, and every time I do, I’ll smile. Gaming is at its best when the borders blur, when strategies and memories and new ideas bubble up during our daily round. And its even better when we can stand up, turn off the gunfire and explosions and get a nice cup of tea.

In other news, some spamming fucker hacked my old blog, Happy Dave, so I’ve had to nuke it, and my photoblog along with it. Four years of posts gone. Seriously kids, keep those Wordpress installs up to date, even for blogs you don’t work on actively anymore. In a way I’m sort of glad - starting this new site on the main davidgoodman.net domain was meant to be a clean break, and now it really is - all gaming (and the odd bit of politics) all the time. Plus I’ve saved the pieces of writing I’m really proud of from Happy Dave over there in the essays section. Still, very annoying. I spent a lot of time building the 200-odd posts there. I think they’ll still be available in the database, if they haven’t been overwritten with spam. One day when it’s not nearly midnight I’ll have a go at recovering them on a vanilla Wordpress install.