Stumbling through a mysterious bog you find a series of transcripts in the sludge...............

 

 

 

 

 

29.09.11                                                 'THE TUNGSTEN/CARBIDE STOMACH OF THIS VIDCON ERA. . .'

Hold B and Down when the ball closes to increase chance of successful capture. If you're using an Ultra Ball the you have to switch to B and Up or the pokemon shall be lost.

Everyone I knew did the first one. I remember the second as more of an obscure microvariant, possibly just one limited to me and my brother, although there's really no way of telling. I can't remember how these rumours were spread or what possible origin points there could be for them. Looking it up online gives dozens of alternative rituals, different button presses, issues of timing. The amount of different variations out there give the sense that the exact form of the ritual doesn't matter, as long as something exists to fill this structural void.

http://www.animeforum.com/showthread.php?74813-Your-Pokemon-Catching-Button-Press Researchers in experimental occultism debate and exchange their findings:

"

I do the B when the ball opens, then I start mashing everything else as I turn away from the screen and listen for the sucessful capture music."

"Hit A every time the ball shakes, because it stops the pokemon from breaking free."

"

It's all so long ago but I think I pressed B every time the ball wobbled. But then I tried everything from that to tossing the gameboy away after throwing the ball and pretending not to watch. It's similar to blowing or licking your cassette when the game refuses to start (I just know everyone did that)." 

 

 

The disavowal of all these ritualised aspects, and the full knowledge that something like not looking at the screen could never (?) have an impact on events even as one continues to do it, is interesting too. Slavoj Zizek has repeatedly (repeatedly) pointed out that this is the exact space where ideology operates: "of course i don't believe in it, but i'll continue to act as though i do believe". The supposedly cynical, empty performance of a role for the benefit of a viewer who doesn't exist outside of one's own head. There could be a point to make here about some kind of player conception of an Ideal Developer (and a converse developer conception of an Ideal Player) as a kind of overarching idea or presence which knits together all the disparite 'stuff' in-game. Right now I'm not sure about that - for the moment, at least, it might make more sense to treat ideology as a network of internalised assumptions and ideas through which reality is filtered.

There's a sense in which playing any kind of game means entering into a kind of cargo-cult relationship, hallucinating an unseen whole from bits of cast-off fragments. Picking up supposedly significant elements and using them to gain a picture of the relationship in which all the parts hang together. Maybe this holds for all fiction but I think the very formalised nature of games, coupled with the need for the audience to actively respond to the signals being generated in order to progress, make this ritualistic element stronger than most. In a suprisingly good London Review of Books article on vidcons the writer talked about the frustration of having something like the theme and setting of Bioshock, say, be obscured by all the "gamey" elements involved. Whether or not you think that's a fair criticism I do think it's easy to overlook the extent to which thinks like the second-to-second movement and calculation of shoot, reload, check ammo, watch for threats, gauging means to progressing to the next area, etc, gets just internalised as the background noise to what the game really is. And one of the reasons I find something like the ClassicsOfGame youtube channel so interesting (and hilarious) is due to the way it decontextualises all these small, insignificant moments in videogames and then pushes them forward. Banal, repetitive mechanics ("charging" laser bolts to fire at mindlessly charging enemy trapped on other side of ravine), sounds, events.

Game design in general is, I think, mostly concerned with minimising the noise of these overlapping systems and elements. One of the reasons the first level of Super Mario Bros is held in such regard is because of how gracefully it was able to map player perception to design intent - start left facing right to show the need to move right, gradually introducing mechanics, and so on. Challenges can be easily identified as such, along with a sense of just what is required of the player to overcome them (a similar idea generally holds in discussions of what constitutes a good adventure game puzzle).

A 'bad' game design is one which generates uncertainty, noise. Often it revolves around information which the player couldn't or shouldn't be expected to know: which walls can be blown up, how many times one must click the wall to have a character kick through it, etc. One example which sticks with me is the first battle for the RPG Maker game "Bat Castle", a game which has kind of fascinated me since I first played it. This battle is extremely difficult and adding to this is the fact that the item and skill descriptions are written in fragmented, semi-comprehensible pseudoenglish. Rather than a strict application of known values the battle consists of constant experimentation coupled with a sort of vague, associative reaction to the names of various items and skills. It should be pointed out that (importantly) random or pseudorandom chance is a factor; certain skills may deal varying amounts of damage, or miss entirely, or accidentally yield a critical hit. Even winning the battle, it was hard to replicate apart from crudely copying my (mostly guessed) strategy from the first time and trying to reapply it as verbatim as possible. Later sections of the game include the ability to collect valuable healing items from apparantly random, visually indistinguishable sections of wall, or for certain sections of ground to suddenly and permanently plaster an obnoxious clipart graphic over the center of the screen. Another RPG Maker example: the game "Ghosts Of Aliens", which includes a section where the player must check a single tree among dozens of identical ones to gain access to a dungeon.

Noise and uncertainty are contagious; they spread like the fractured realities in a Philip Dick novel. If I get stuck again, how do I know it's not because I didn't check a random section of wall or pick up a certain item twelve rooms ago? How do I know that this entire route isn't a permanent dead-end? How do I know my save-states were early enough?

You could, I think, make a fairly solid case that these games are abusive, in the sense of encouraging pattens of behavior which are basically repetitive, obsessive, paranoid, unhealthy. Rather than a clean exchange with all rules and expectations set openly on the table, the dynamic here is shifting and amorphous (although of course it's not difficult at all for "well-designed" games to encourage awful, obsessive behaviour patterns). But there's still something about them that I find engaging or haunting, maybe because of this amorphous aspect: by encouraging noise, by breaking down distinctions between the significant pieces of a videogame experience and the background 'stuff' which constitutes most of the actual content, these games also defamiliarise and render threatening this content. It would probably be a dead-end to try to view these games purely on some moral level of detatchment and demystification... I think of them as a kind of Saturnalian inversion of videogames, where the conventional structures are upended, rendered grotesque and ridiculous, shown in a new light. Rather than a wholly new approach to designing or playing games it's more of a refracted lens put on the mainstream, a bringing to light of what was latently present.

So what does this have to do with Pokemon? I doubt any of the rituals mentioned at the beginning of this piece carried on to how players treated the rest of the game: as far as I know nobody is going to elaborate lengths of timing and input pressing in order to, say, get lower prices in shops or increase the walk speed or encounter rate (there are some very interesting exceptions to this rule, though, which I'll get to shortly). Even if there are other rituals, this one seems very localised: it starts, in some form or another, from the moment the pokeball is launched. Why?

Firstly (and I'm restricting myself to the first-generation games here - Red, Blue etc) while the formula used in determining "catch rate" is not random it nevertheless involves generating random numbers, which involves some degree of variance - the odds of throwing a ball and having the Pokemon get caught are generally not wholly deterministic. This isn't anomalous, and things like the damage from an attack are also calculated by using random numbers in an otherwise deterministic formula. In the latter case, though, the player sees a clearly defined output statement showing the exact amount of damage dealt. In the case of the pokeballs, throwing a ball results in one of five possible outcomes:

- the ball misses entirely

- the ball catches the pokemon, who breaks free after one "shake" of the ball

- the ball catches the pokemon, who breaks free after two shakes of the ball

- the ball catches the pokemon, who breaks free after three shakes of the ball

- the ball catches the pokemon, who is captured after three shakes of the ball

It's not hard to build some kind of picture of how, say, a pokemon breaking free after one shake is too powerful to be caught. But trying to 'read' this output coherently and formalise it for future reference is a trickier prospect. What goes on under the hood to determind whether a pokemon will be caught or break free after three shakes? What's the distinction between three and two? Random chance? There's a gap here and an uncertainty which is abhorred by the player's attempt to sort through the noise of the game and identify the underlying systems, and into this gap flows superstition, reflex activity, 'cheats', rituals.

An drive to sort through, to organise, a kind of taxonomic drive which constantly pushes at the gameworld and orients itself by what holds and what buckles, is I think an integral part of how we approach games (or how we do so "seriously", anyway - I enjoy goofing through roguelikes and glossing over the ridiculous, beautiful layers of systems but that's because i've already given up any idea of an investment in them which goes any further than that). It's a drive that flows into and pushes open cracks - Missingno summoning rituals and secret ways to board the S.S. Anne. It absorbs everything, like a rolling katamari ball, and then tumbles onwards without making much attempt to sort through the junk which constitutes most of its body. The likes of Bat Castle seem threatening to it for exactly resisting this drive, for never being pulled entirely into it. For everything else, all strangeness, all lacunae, is just more content to be assimilated, and it's in the action of developing frameworks to assimilate these things that we see the true, bizarre essence of what we really experience in the act of playing....

The Tungsten-Carbide Stomach of videogames...

It's a tough situation, truly...

...

Barf!

 

 

09. 09. 11                                                                       SLUDGE ZONE

Interstitial locations in games. Flicking through one of my brother's old Xbox magazines means looking at dozens and dozens of screenshots of warehouses, sewers, abandoned tenements. Concrete parking lots and corridors. Subway stations and ventilation shafts. A grey and faceless city street of generic office buildings. If it's out in the open then odds are it will be in the context of some kind of military action. The carpark or the road through town repurposed as makeshift barricade with people in camoflague uniforms firing over the top. Burning cars and rubble. All these anonymous non-spaces, with a kind of militaristic subcurrent as connecting thread.

The warehouses and industrial zones are all abandoned apart from crates, metal shelves, and vicious dudes. I keep thinking of the infinite labyrinth-slums in the Dirty Harry NES game, endless winding corridors filled with snakes and "punks", tenements totally divorced from function and turned into abstract nightmare locales. The magazine screenshots show vast amounts of totally featureless space, maybe punctuated by a stairway or low cement wall. Things like the dark, claustrophobic spaceships - along with who knows how much else - probably grew out of other media such as the first "Alien" movie: second-degree representations of an "industrial" aesthetic, divorced from the concept of actual industry. Anonymous and deterritorialised space patrolled by bulkily kitted-out soldiers. If you flick through the pages you can see Generic Eastern European Land meld into Generic Middle Eastern Land meld into Generic Urban West Land. The fratboy protagonists of Army Of Two run across a blasted Iraq surrogate and next they are gunning down generic thugs in a corridor with unpainted cement walls and metal grille flooring. Turn the page and you have a Condemned 2 screen set out behind the warehouse, in a parking lot deserted but for a van and some mutants. Turn over again and you can see a burning car or a group of soldiers creeping through a grey death-city.

This stuff could be and is often described as "generic", which is probably accurate in the sense that a lot of it is based on following certain pre-established conventions and signifiers. Divorced from any specific representation of places or events, growing and mutating into the realm of the symbolic. Nervous soldiers creep through urban interstices which have turned hostile and alien with the passage of time. An endless web of girders, backdoors, fire-escapes, warehouse walkways, forking corridors.

I remember reading some collection of Micheal Moorcock's "Jerry Cornelius" stories a while back and wondering if this strange, constantly shifting world, where mod clothes and uniforms and genteel parties and tiny wars merged into and clashed against each other constantly, wasn't a kind of weirdly perfect psychic distillation of the entire 20th century. I wonder kind of the same thing about videogames over the last decade and this collective universe of militarised non-space.

Barf!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

03 JULY 2011                                                               MASKCHAT

I'm gonna have to put off on that Tomb Raider post for the moment, I think: the more I play through it the more boring & obvious my original thoughts about it sound, in the sense that whatever I wanted to say about spatial exploration and physicality had basically been dealt with as effectively as possible in the game itself by the end of the first level. All I'd say right now is that a whole lot of it feels like a kind of surprisingly sophisticated fragment of some alternate-universe gamedesign canon, or maybe just a period of time when 3D spaces were suddenly very viable to play around with while 3D cutscenes were less so (ahahaha suddenly remembered that goldeneye 64 did that halflife 2 thing of having dialogue cutscene stuff happen ingame but with the additional benefit of being able to actually murder people while they were talking ie ACTUALLY MORE ADVANCED, the lowpoly ecclesiastes...) and also that it's really nice to find out that something I'd always kind of dismissed as pandering garbage is more worthwhile than it looks!

So instead of that I am gonna take the easy way out and talk about Majora's Mask for a bit. And it IS the easy way out, I think... Or at least when it comes to trying to discuss neat shit in games, since it's a lot easier to pick up on interesting and unique stuff in terms of aesthetics and theme than it is to try to explain why some seemingly goofy trash is a lot more striking than you'd think. I guess I think that Tomb Raider works as a game in such a way that it puts the cliched or pulp elements into a new light, whereas Majora's Mask has ambitious and strange aesthetic goals that violently grind against the kind of shitty gameplay parts.

For the record, that wasn't a DISS or anything and I do think these are both interesting approaches with their own special benefits and downsides. But more generally, a big part of why I find it maybe easier than it should be to overlook the more or less gross gameplay mechanics in MM is the sense that at least on some level it really is engaging in a very conscious struggle with ideas of what's required of it as a game, and more particularly as a game in the Zelda series. If this sounds dubious - too much guessing at the designer's intentions - then I'd just say that MM is a sequel.

I don't want to get into the weird and nebulous relationship that sequels have with their original source material, mainly because I haven't thought much about it, but it IS a relationship and I think a very deliberate one since it necessarily involves ideas of what's worth continuing, what CAN be continued, what's gained and lost in tying the new work to the older, what was valuable (or profitable) about the original, and so on. Videogame sequels, though - and particularly ones with a lot of money involved - have maybe a stranger attitude to their predecessors than most, since they also have to take account of the actual structural mechanics at work and, generally, attempt to replicate, improve, expand on them. There's a tendency for game sequels to be more like remixes, which recycle the same plot and characters and settings over and over while rejigging the underlying systems to provide a mixture of familiarity and new content, and this becomes weirder and more jarring as the recurring characters and plot elements are fleshed out somewhat or given more weight in the game design. Metal Gear Solid 2 is a sequel to a popular, successful videogame which takes the demands and ideas implicit in what it means to make a sequel to a popular successful videogame and writes them explicitly into the plot. The similarities with the original game - the ridiculous over-the-top villains and sudden heart attacks as people are just about to reveal crucial information - are eventually revealed ingame to be a conscious attempt to turn the events of the original game into a kind of structural template intended to provoke a certain type of experience. Majora's Mask is a sequel to a popular, successful videogame which, while not as blatantly, devotes a lot of time and resources to openly repeating scenarios, gameplay elements, characters and musical cues from the original title in a way which at times seems to similarly play on the uneasy mixture of familiarity and newness to provoke a sense of general strangeness and distance.

Or it might, at any rate. Because however I try to spin it it's hard to see the section of the Swamp where you infiltrate a castle by sneaking past guards in a hedge maze or navigate through a shallow Lost Woods imitation labyrinth, the bit in the Goron Village where you use the magic eye thing to follow a ghost, the part after the first temple where you race through a Dante's Crypt-esque underground maze and so on as anything other than basically pandering filler. But by the same token, it's difficult to say the focus on returning characters and music segments in MM is a product of this same pandering, since a lot of emphasis is given to the fact that these familiar faces are just slightly unfamiliar enough in their new roles to be offputting. And if THAT sounds like it's reaching then I'd point to the way the most recognisable image of the game is most certainly the enormous, looming, grimacing moon, as visible a reminder as you can get of the way the familiar and strange are played off each other in unsettling ways in the game (important note: playing through MM again it was startling to see how little narrative space this moon took up - if i remember correctly then you don't even see it in the introductory Clock Town cutscene, and only become aware of it either through looking straight up at your own initiative, realising that something is astray by dialogue cues given by a few people, or waiting until the observatory section as the first real story-mandated moment of showing the moon really does have a massive face on it), and that the opening sequence itself consists of turning the main character into a shrub thing and introducing an entirely new set of mechanics in the process.

Maybe these kinds of conflicting signals are appropriate for the game as a whole, though, since what was extremely striking to me when I played it recently was the amount of NOISE there was in the game. Wandering around Clock Town I bumped into Ingo, the ranchhand from OoT. Here he's the leader of a circus troupe, and following him throughout his day shows dialogues between him and other characters where, variously, his booking in the festival has been cancelled, his room at the inn has been let to somebody else, and the bartender at the local "milk bar" refuses to serve him for lack of membership. The character model for the bartender is a revamped version of the ranch owner from OoT, Ingo's boss and rival in that game. Talk to him and he tells you he gets his milk from a ranch outside town; go to the ranch and you'll find it's run by both the older and younger character models of the ranch owner's daugher from OoT, here shown as sisters with different names and no apparant relation to the bartender. Their milk run is being disrupted by bandits; the bandits are two yokel brothers who have the same character models as Ingo. I really doubt there is any kind of significance in this, beyond some returning character models holding roughly similar roles to their original incarnations. But that strange metanarrative noise persists as a constant presence through the game: the sense of a bustling, complex, absolutely devoid-of-meaning emptiness.

And there's another level on which this sense persists, which is maybe the most obvious: in the character relationships themselves, in Clock Town as a whole particularly which is in essence an enormous mass of interlocking schedules for each character. If you're in the inn at a certain time on the first day, you can see Ingo argue with the receptionist about his room booking. If you're in the Mayor's office at another time, you can see him react to the news of the performance being cancelled. If you go to the inn after this you can see him desperately beg the bartender for a place to sit and think for a while, and if you see him do all these things then a kind of story emerges. Here's the thing, though: it's still a Zelda game, which (thankfully!) makes absolutely no concessions to realism or psychological depth at all. If you try to talk to Ingo outside of these appointments, he will say something like "Bother, bother! Get lost kid, I'm busy!" over and over again. The appointments themselves consist of equally stilted, cardboard dialogue with basically zero dramatic interest or importance. There's also the fact that your only means of interacting with characters is by (a) tapping a 'talk' button (b) tapping a 'talk' button while wearing a mask or (c) slashing uselessly at their ankles with your sword. You as a character are for the most part a blank slate in the town: people don't talk to you, they talk at each other in your presence or at best air their problems in your presence. All the NPCs are fundamentally opaque, alien. They will follow their fated routines and have zero interest in you at all even if you could talk to them in a way which wasn't just hitting a button. And there's another thing, too: that Ingo thing happens all the time, with a lot of different characters. I walked into a random shop at night and came across a mugger fencing a bag of bombs, an action you could actually prevent earlier in the day. On one level this is neat; on another it is kind of a bizarre experience to see these crude, one-note characters have a sudden discussion at a certain time of the day with no evident resolution and then disappear again; on yet another it's exactly this sense of dramatic aimlessness which makes wandering around town charming.

And overall this section of the game is DENSE: you're not told when any of these events are going to happen, or where. Instead you have a little book to fill out yourself, and the assumption that you'll spend enough time hanging around town to do so. My favourite part of the game so far is the opening section, exploring town as a Deku Scrub, just because once you've finished running to and fro on the various fetch quests there is literally nothing you can do except sit still and wait for the world to end. To wait for the three-day ingame clock to wear itself out. If you know where to look you can find ways of skipping twelve hours at a time, but I don't think this was the intention for first-time players. Instead, I wandered around town for the three days: played minigames, talked to people, tried to keep an eye out for special events. It wasn't perfect - a good amount of characters are frustratingly static - but I kind of admired the sense of being deliberately plunged into this new place and left to explore it pretty much at your leisure. Which makes it even more frustrating and disappointing that most of the places outside the town rely so much on bullying the player into linear fetch quests.

I like Majora's Mask a lot less than I thought I did, I guess - most of the neat stuff is put in the background while pretty much every dungeon area is a slog in the most boring way. But I do think there are hints of places where the traditionally "clean experience" of most Zelda games is distorted, turned in on itself, blurred in uncomfortable noise. Not as much as I'd remembered, and not as often as I'd like, but it's still there, a kind of delirious shadow-game lurking in the background. There's a part of Majora's Mask where you take a boat through the swamp and, looking around at the strange and elaborate greenery, for a second it reminded me of a videogame version of Max Ernst's "The Entire City". I just wish it'd let me run free in it a little more.

  

  

 

 

 

23 JUNE 2011                                                                  GAMES GAMES GAMES JEEZ STEPHEN WHY DON'T YOU JUST MARRY A GAME

Thinking recently of why I started making games in the first place. The trailer for the neat-looking film "You Meet The Nicest People Making Videogames" had a scene of some dude explaining how he liked games because he was able to draw, able to write, able to make music and so on and games were what allowed him to explore all those avenues at once. I find myself in the opposite position: not being really able to draw anything interesting, or write anything interesting, or makr music which is interesting, but being able to put those things together to make things I think are interesting. Like the map screen in Biggles On Mars, or the first section of Paul Moose, or the cavern in Space Funeral, or maybe all of Ghost Voyage: for me making them, at any rate, there was a sudden sense of these kind of routine elements coming together and combining into an overall mood or sense of place which was more interesting to me than the seperate parts.

This sounds kind of pompous and mystical so I guess the example I'd give, and it's maybe the best example, is what I still think of as the UR-FEELING of gamemaking: makin a little sprite thing move around with button presses. It is a deeply goofy and exciting moment which kind of sums up why I like this as a hobby. You start off with these two kind of dopey components: say a crude mspaint horse and an equally crude movement script in GM or whatever. Then you put them together and waaaaoohh!!!! you are suddenly moving a horse around a room!! and you can go ANYWHERE in the room, just because the code behind it all is more generalised than some press-x-to-cycle-available-options thing. Both the code and the horse are thrown into new light by the experience caused by their combination, and the experience is put into new light from the awareness of the discrete elements at work behind it all.

Maybe another analogy could be the process of writing and how it can be surprising to see the ideas you had in the back of your mind suddenly come out and reshuffle themselves on the page, making new connections between thoughts and dismissing old ones and in this way maybe being able to glimpse in some way the underlying firmament of what you're really interested in. You put two things together and realise there was a third thing connecting them the whole while in your head, and now it's externalised and you're able to think about it from a distance.

Most of Space Funeral was made up as I went along. The original intention was to just toss out ideas, images, music I liked, books I'd read, throw them all into a kind of melting pot and reformat them within the basic RPG Maker engine and see what came out. In some ways this is a flawed idea: the actual RPG mechanics ended up having more of an influence than I'd expected and I found myself being drawn in again and again to kind of boring old tropes and methods of organising ideas/worlds. But overall what surprised me was how consistent the whole thing ended up being. The ending and 'plot' was just made up because I thought it would be funny - this goofy game that ends up being some kind of weirdly hegelian message thing all along - but it ended up being more suited to the finished result than I'd originally thought, and acted as a kind of remix of my original ideas about what I was trying to do.

I dunno. Sometimes I worry about PK Dick's idea of the Chinese Finger Trap of paranoia, where the more you struggle to get out the deeper you're enmeshed. There's something eerie about realising the hold that certain ideas have on you. Or maybe it's just the blow to the ego of realising that you're not complex, really, you're still harbouring the same obsessions and desires. They might be filtered through bookchat and Beckett rather than homemade videogame maps and rented movies but you're still the same person. It's kind of a sad feeling but it's also a hopeful, grounding one as well, I think. There's something horribly insular and self-absorbed about trying to understand yourself, or at least of using this as the focus of your life, but maybe not. It could be that real self-knowledge is being able to see yourself in context and hence involves an equal amount of awareness about the world, your place in it, how you think about it, the secret lights by which you make your way through it.

...

Barf! Barrrrrrf!! Ha Ha Ha!! A-A-A-ANARCHYYY!!! DESTROYY!! BARRFFF... an extra long barf for what amounted to an unusually long and introspective post, considering it was originally about just moving horses around in a game engine... it looks likle stephen "crustpunk" "smash the state" thecatamites is not immune to melancholy after all... stephen "autumnal" thecatamites... madeleines, where are the snowboard kids 64 of yesteryear...

 

 

22 JUNE 2011                                                                        TRACTS OF THE ULTIMATE

http://www.wavecomposition.com/2011/06/not-simply-for-those-moments-sake-a-retroactive-manifesto-for-late-twentieth-century-pop-music/

A great article tracing the roots between pop music and modernism (I'm sorry, I'm still going on about this... lemme get it out of my system, that's all I ask..), which is actually something I meant to go into a little here: particularly the use of it by people like Joyce and Pound, the deliberate attempt to capture the strange echoes of popular music... What Noel Coward referred to as the extraordinary potency of cheap music. Seems strange to me that I'm not talking more about music, though, since it's maybe my oldest interest and the one which has had most impact on my games. Maybe that's why I can't talk about it too well, though. It's overfamiliar: I find myself slipping back into catchetism...

Anyway, the one place that article falls down for me is at the end, when it contrasts the idea of pop music as a kind of massive cultural unifier to the "atomised" world of infinite internet choices. And I guess the reason this irritates me is because I felt pretty much the same way for a long time. I'm not sure I do now, or at least this reading seems a little glib and inadequate when it comes to something which is itself a kind of culmination of modernist ideas about art: Brecht's two-way newspaper, the democratisation of creative tools and distribution channels championed by punk, and so on. To ignore this in favour of pining for a universally-accepted canon is dangerous, I think, and at risk of slipping into the bad old ways of superstar worship / mystification.

A much more unsettling idea, I think, is that of the net as just a kind of huge escape valve from ubiquitous "real" media, which seems ever more alien... The implicit sense that most of these mass cultural products (big films, pop acts, etc) are essentially as unstoppable and untouchable as glaciers, that criticizing them or trying to think of them as human products - in the context of human systems of ideology&finance which promotes some ideas/works and treats others as untouchable - is by now impossible. That they just sort of happen, and complaining about it is like shouting at clouds. I don't really have the critical vocabulary to talk about this properly but there's a sense in which the generally accepted idea that anything worthwhile will just be tucked away secretly on some server is only possible due to a mass alienation (aaaa) from 'wider culture' as a whole. And hence that there's some level of reduced expectations and internalised cynicism at work in the way we think about those things. The 'mole'/'toad' idea that all you can do or hope for is burrow your own hole in the massive plains and hope maybe someone steps in it... even this geocities site is a function of this idea, maybe...

....

Gulp! anyway I'm trying 2 start a new game in which the goal is to explore a strange and deadly 'zone' by sifting thru individually inadequate or awful means of representation in order to form a mapping of the world around you. It's just a brainstorm and may never get made?? but if it does I think it will use 2d sprites moving through a 3D world as in Virtual Hydlide, which is simple enough to do in Unity I think... just texture a really thin cube with what you want to see... anyway... time will tell...

Barf! Hope to write analyses of 'Tomb Raider 1' and James Joyce when I get a chance! or maybe... both at once?!?! you can't afford to miss this startling new "stance" which is sweeping the nation as we speak...

  

 

18 JUNE 2011                                                                       LEGACY OF CROMM

I don't want to keep harping on about this but three examples of the "pulp modernism" idea: Thomas Pynchon's "Inherent Vice", JG Ballard's "The Atrocity Exhibition", and the Richard Linklater adaptation of P.K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly", which I've just finished watching. Both Pynchon & Linklater take the double- and triple-crossing tropes of crime and amplify them to the point of ridiculousness and incomprehensibility, as well as drawing parallels with the circular, paranoiac reasoning of addiction (probably Burroughs would be another good example but I'd need to reread him). Instead of being used to provoke some kind of catharsis or sense of closure these turnarounds are treated as ridiculous, arbitrary, almost devoid of impact within the plot or at least insufficent for explaining it. This sense of insufficiency shows in refracted form an insurmountable gap between experience and retroactively-assigned meaning. "A Scanner Darkly" is about interference between different modes of representation: between lived experience and representation on the scanners, between different modes of self-representation as an addict and a narc, between dreams and reality in the scene where Arctor sees a one-night stand's face dissolve into that of his girlfriend both in real life and through the "objective" standpoint of the scanners, and finally the conflict between the two hemispheres of Arctor's brain interpreting reality in two different ways. Dick defined reality as "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away": here reality is a kind of slippery, unattainable gestalt, only available in refracted form through navigating different means of representation. By the end Arctor's only hope is that the mechanical scanners are able to preserve some element of objectivity, as the human representations gradually bleed into each other and come crashing down. "Inherent Vice", meanwhile, uses the impossibly convoluted flow of names, dates, plots and conspiracies as a kind of psychic index which aren't so much interesting in themselves as of signifiers of some deeper social shift or battle. What's key here is the "moment of unveiling" in detective stories, where a new plot twist puts all the previous elements of story in a new light. In some way, this moment relies on the idea that: what you see looks like such-and-such, yet there is something else behind it all, some invisible axis on which the events take place. By downplaying or trivialising the actual details and making these switches occur with obsessive regularity, the emphasis here is on the "behind": it becomes impossible to take any of the groups or conspiracies seriously, since we know that they will invariably turn out to become just minor players in an even bigger or even more trivial game at work. It's a ridiculous kaleidoscopic power struggle, and in the end it's precisely the P.I. protagonist Doc Sportello's incomplete, worms-eye-view of the proceedings that keeps him detatched enough to grasp a wider picture at work, and walk away (even temporarily) from the paranoid frenzy of control.

What these have in common is that they use narrative tropes of pulp for the purposes of modernism (which I'm here thinking of defining as: knowingly, openly fictitious systems which use their artificial nature as a way to get at some underlying idea or sublime. The distinction with postmodernism is that the latter uses fictitious mechanisms to show the absence of this underlying nature). Where Ballard's "Atrocity Exhibition" differs, then, is that rather than hitching pulp elements to an essentially "serious" work, it takes the pulp format itself and just amplifies it into oblivion. The repetitive nature of pulp, the need for hack writers to draw again and again from the same well of obsessions to meet a deadline, the strange reflected engagement it has with the popular media landscape as a whole, the fragmented machine-like incoherence, are all literalised and fed into the plot. We see the same names, the same places, the same events happening over and over, cars crashing, Travis killing Karen Novotny over and over, the frustrating lack of a real climax, building, repeating, turning in on itself with feverish intensity. Rather than a linear narrative it spreads out in all directions, encompassing more elements and changing them in the process, mutating constantly. What could be said to the the "real plot" is Travis's plan to encode his trauma within every aspect of the world: a cracked runway in a deserted airway, a car crash, Elizabeth Taylor's eyes, the stance of a passerby. The true analogy is pornography, arguably the truest manifestation of pulp in the first place: the mixture of obsessive repitition and the desperately omnivorous tendencies of the libido which picks up pieces of the world out of context (pieces of the body, pieces of media, pieces of memory, pieces of ourselves and our place in the world, pieces of the organic and inorganic) and redirects them into sex and an attempt to realise what sex means to us.

 

That ended up being larger than I'd expected, since what I'd originally intended this bogpost to be about is why exactly I'm writing so much about books, films, music and so on in the first place when my real focus is on videogames. There's always the possibility, which can never be totally ruled out, that it's just some vain and superstitious temptation to "legitimise" a hobby or interest within the context of some Great Western Canon or other. (heh, think you know gamechatr?? this aint your fathers gamechat...) I hope this isn't the case and I don't think it is, if only because a large part of the reason I am getting interested in games again in the first place is from the ability to look and think about them in a new way that came from an interest in (mainly) reading. Left on its own my actual interest in videogames died out pretty quietly, as I just wasn't able to muster the energy or enthusiasm to, say, make it past intro missions or develop the skills required to progress through a game. There was a sense, and there still is sometimes, of having the strange and neat world which I wanted to poke around in being constantly funneled through an arbitrary system of hoops and challenges. What felt like the developers reminding me who was REALLY in charge here, who was really controlling the experience and what reactions and emotions were really required of me. One of the reasons it felt harder and harder to play past the first fifteen minutes of most new console games, from GTA4 to Bioshock, was that those minutes were usually enough to tell that what was being offered wasn't a game you could play around in but a ~crafted immersive experience~. Maybe no bad thing in itself (?) but alongside the feeling that most of the experiences offered were fucking stupid and worthless it meant it was hard to get past a vague feeling of resentment. I don't know if this is a reasonable way of looking at things: I'd have to replay those games, which is something I'm neither able nor willing to do right now. I have seen a similar dislike of carefully controlled experiences eventually turn into the kind of mutilated, hateful nostalgia that characterises certain strands of the "hardcore gamer" and which ends up treating any sign of "pretension" or obstacles to "fun" with equal contempt. On one side a crab pit of hateful nerds making sure nobody gets above themselves, on the other (both in big budget titles and a lot of indie circles) the cult of the auteur crafting immersive emotional experiences. I didn't really have the energy or willingness to go either way so for the most part I just stopped playing them, and didn't feel much of a loss.

Most of my ideas about what I'd like games, or art in general, to be or to touch upon came from reading. I'm very aware that games and reading are maybe as far apart as mediums can get, or at least that's how they seem to me, and that just porting over one set of concepts to this completely different setting is probably a mistake. The thing is, I think it's this difference that made me interested in the first place. What struck me about books to begin with, when I started seriously making an effort to read more starting about four years ago, was how ALIEN they seemed. Reading them felt like an almost physical effort: it meant trying to adapt to an entirely different pacing than I was used to, not skimming over paragraphs as one does on the net to accumulate the pertinent pieces of information but going through word by word, something which felt both labourous and weirdly sensual, hearing the sound of each phrase and how it echoed in a new way. Reading poetry was almost impossible for a long while, the sparseness and density incredibly offputting in the efforts they required. And even beyond this there was the sense that the ideas expressed or taken for granted within the books belonged to an entirely different culture, that they belonged to an entirely different discourse to what I was used to and what I usually implicitly defined myself for and against. These books didn't just differ structurally from videogames; they seemed almost their antithesis, explicitly against what games stood for or claimed to be.

I mentioned in an earlier blogpost the sense of fascination with other cultures and contexts that we have no immediate reference points for, and how this runs through a lot of art. But I don't think this is entirely reducable to exoticism. If exoticism is the urge to submerge oneself within an alien culture, then what I'm talking about is in some way the opposite: using the differences of the new as a kind of negative mirror of ones own self, ones own culture and implicit ideas or influences or sensations. Becoming estranged from your surroundings to the point where you're able to recognise them as your own. McMurty's book wasn't about Walter Benjamin or Europe: it was about trying to fit Benjamins ideas to his own rural American background, seeing where they fit, where they fell apart, trying to build up in this way a picture of his own world.

In the same way it feels to me like reading, an activity which seemed diametrically opposite to the videogames I'd grown up on and to some extent internalised in pacing, format, ideals and aims, was what helped me to re-engage with games on some level, to be able to consider them in a new way. Recognising the strange echoes, the way that a line in a 19th century book could seem to have its realisation in the new background of a videogame mechanic or aesthetic.

I'm not sure how valuable this is, really, or what it means for actually making games in general: I don't think many of mine have ever been directly influenced from books per se aside from one or two superficial echoes. But it looks like a recurring idea in these bog posts is that of accessing reality through a refracted representation of it, and what I'm talking about here seems to roughly fit that same structure. So it looks like I'm gonna have to keep finding ways to explore this idea in, yes, the refracted form of vidcon blogging. "Worlds Within Worlds", europe endless....

....

...barf!

 

 

 

 

 

 

09 JUNE 2011                                                                             COIN YOUTH PT VII

 I've been meaning to write an entry on pulp to counter the recent weight put on formal literary modernism in this blog, since it feels kind of smug by now (heh, you think you know vidcons? i'll show you vidcons *sprains a musil*) and not really indicative of what I like and appreciate about games in general! Or not what I find most exciting about games, which is less to do with highminded modernist auteurs carefully crafting masterpieces etc than the sense of some relentless low-level mutation constantly bubbling and twisting and pushing into new areas, assimilating and turning back on itself as it spreads... My go-to example here would be something like early Marvel comics with their tremendous day-glo mashup of nuclear paranoia, classical mythology, science fiction, soap operas, and, yes, pulp thrillers all crammed into one bombastic package. There are a ton of other examples, including but not limited to nearly all pop music of the last sixty years, and videogames fit firmly in this tradition, I think... You only have to poke through some old Spectrum games to see the familiar mix of lurid entertainment and deep strangeness piling on strangeness poking up again...

 That said, I'm not sure it's either possible or wise to try to make a clean cut between pulp and modernism to begin with. I'd claim that they were both in some sense a product of the assembly line, of an increased awareness from the mechanical aspect of art and an ensuing alienation from it. The classic modernist tropes of pastiche, fragmentation, collage, montage & interruption all rely to some extent on a kind of reification of the 'surface elements' of style and technique to the extent that they can be used almost autonomously within the context of a wider whole. Similarly, pulp relies upon some level of detatchment from stylistic tropes to the extent that they can be used as an empty mould to be filled up and shipped out as quickly as possible. The main distinction is that modernism put priority on some kind of organizing creative agency behind the stylistic tics, while pulp pushed a template house style which sidelined individual trappings, whether it was cheap paperbacks or comicbooks or pop music at places like Motown or the million similar places.

I would argue that both pulp and modernism need each other to realise their respective projects: for modernism, pulp gives a venue from which to excise the last remaining traces of romanticism. I've mentioned before how mysteries and detective stories found a kind of sympathetic echo in the works of a whole lot of 20th century (post)modernists who used the template as a vehicle of exploration, but scifi, slapstick comedy and comicbooks fulfilled a similar role. Pulp as an engagement with 'popular' culture as a whole, as a way out from the mandarinesque elitism of an Eliot or Nabokov. And pulp needs modernism to stop itself becoming stagnant, as a way of revitalising the format in a recognisable way. Without the other, both pulp & modernism shade towards irrelevancy and inbreeding.

 Pulp Modernism, then. A way of moving forward that takes into account the strangeness and excitement of popcult and technology without falling into smug Now Thats What I Call Pop Culture '11 garbage and that can be serious without falling into some selfserving image of Seriousness...

 

 Barf!

 

 

05 JUNE 2011                                SODA MOUNTAIN

I've mentioned Samuel Beckett in passing here once or twice but maybe his work is worth discussing in more detail, since in many ways it's the best illustration I can give of what I think is worthwhile and interesting about the absence/lacunagames I've been talking about.

There's something gamelike about Beckett's fiction in particular, in particular his later plays and novels. Over and over we see closed systems consisting of several actions in constant permutation against the backdrop of a blank, static world. The old men in "How It Is" crawling through the muck with their sacks of tinned food, moving, resting, coming upon and losing each other in the dark. Molloy and his stones, Clov and his ladder, Krapp and his bananas, Winnie and her bag, the mimes in Act Without Words II... And at its most extreme in the stark likes of "Come And Go" or "What Where", terse sequences of motion and word repeated and permuted with strict mathematical precision. I haven't read it but the synopsis of "The Lost Ones" sounds almost like some old Commodore game, taking place within an enormous closed rubber cylinder of ladders and alcoves within which people roam constantly in search of the other who will make them whole. Even his constant use of slapstick humour, his clowns, speak to his fascination with carefully coordinated and usually ridiculous systems of motion and language.

Mostly these systems are not constant; they tend toward entropy, stillness, implosion, the characters acting them out wear down and grow silent. But it's important not to reduce Beckett's work to some miserabilist doom-and-gloom caricature or figure of pure depressive negativity. What's most worth taking away from Beckett's work, and what I think makes it particularly worthwhile from a videogame perspective, is how this starkness and formalistic quality, this constant process of subtracting and pruning from language and structure and 'humanity' and representation, is what allows him to explore ideas of being & existing at the most sripped-down and elemental level without falling into egotism or cliche or triteness. To pinpoint some sense of what parts of that being are worth holding on to in a way which is all the more potent for being able to weather the supposed bleakness of his vision.

An analogue which comes to mind, and which the noble engineers of the Magic Research Facility would be able to discuss in more detail, is the 'Mu Training' section from Earthbound. Mu here is referred to as 'nothingness' and the training takes the form of, again, constant subtraction: of allowing the ancestral ghost to take your legs, your arms, your ears, your eyes, and even your "mind". The obvious comparison is with the protagonist of Beckett's "The Unnamable", who sits limbless and voiceless in a pot outside a tavern. The crucial difference is that the Unnamable has not yet lost his mind. The text of the book takes the form of his incessant, rambling, muttering consciousness, compelled to speak as he desperately wishes to be silent, to invent stories and characters and parade them uselessly across his psyche in the hopes of finally exhausting himself. A desperate, chattering voice that knows itself to be an intruder: "perhaps that's what I feel, an outside and an inside and a middle, perhaps that's what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be thin as foil, I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in the middle, I'm the partition". It knows itself to be irreconcileable with the peace it pines for, in fact the barrier to that peace, and consequently that any attempt to try to talk directly of it or to claim it or to explicate upon this "nothingness" would be just another useless evasion. But Beckett is looking for a "language of the unword" and the nothingness seeps through: in the pauses, in the unsaid words, in the gaps of this eternal inescapable monologue. This nothingness is all that most of his characters long for but the important thing is that this nothingness is never equated with death, but rather with LIVING on the most essential level: on the level of breath, of silence, of presence. It may be glimpsed in dying, as in the other monologue of "Malone Dies" (the Unnameable, incidentally, claims that both Malone and Molloy and all the other interchangeable creatures of Beckett's early fiction were just stories invented by itself) but at the risk of indulging in the sentimentality that Beckett carefully avoided it could be said that this peace is something inextricable from the question of existence in and alongside the world, something which is too often lost beneath the intermineable egotist drone of selfconsciousness.

It should be pointed out that for all his distrust of language, Beckett was extremely careful and precise in his use of it (contrast with, say, the cutup experiments of William Burroughs which Beckett dismissed as "plumbing"). Many of his works hit a kind of sparse and strange beauty, and I think this beauty should also be examined from the perspective of the nothingness mentioned above. The best example I can give is in the play "Krapp's Last Tape", in which the titular Krapp, obsessively recording his thoughts for each day, listens to an earlier tape of himself. He sneers at the pomposity and self-absorbation of his younger self while the tape of his own voice skips and stutters, before recording yet another equally worthless entry. But then he listens to the earlier recording again:

"-gooseberries, she said. I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her eyes. [Pause.] I asked her to look at me and after a few moments-[Pause.]-after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over to get them in the shadow and they opened. [Pause. Low.] Let me in. [Pause.] We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! [Pause.] I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side."

Krapp freezes as his younger self continues, alienated from his own words to the extent that he can feel what lay beneath them, the experience underneath the language.

One of the reasons I can't seem to let go of this thing about lacunagames is because of the influence of Beckett, or more precisely of how USEFUL his influence seems and how useful it has been in my own life in letting me glimpse some way of existing that wasn't defined by twisting constantly on the spot between smugness and depression by way of some interminable Scrubs Voiceover idea of consciousness and life. So that's my excuse. As for why I think his work is useful in terms of videogames as a whole, part of it goes back to that similarity in terms of systematic structural representations and so forth but another is that this similarity seems to suggest a different type of game to begin with, one where similarly to Beckett the 'point' of the game wasn't in the prose/music/gameplay but where all these things were used as tools to get at some experience beneath all this. Spacechat, glitches, gaps are interesting to me to the extent that they're able to suggest or evoke this 'space' beneath it all, which I'm more and more convinced is the thing which I find really worthwhile and interesting about games and why I find most other formalist looks at the medium to be kind of lacking.

This is an obscuricantist viewpoint but it works for me...

For the moment...

...

Barf!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

02 JUNE 2011                                                                  GRAVE COP

Interesting to play old 2D games and be aware of some sense of the designers having to grapple with ideas of perspective and representation in order to make the world or mechanics cohere. I guess examples could be Foton and Friday The 13th for the NES and innumerable old Commodore games. Both Foton and Friday The 13th tried to implement some sense of depth in the gameworld; in Foton this consisted of moving forwards and sideways through some grimy maze, in Friday The 13th the sidescrolling levels would suddenly open up to show a road leading into the distance which would vaguely correspond with your map of the camp. I still find it difficult to map the linear sidescrolling "paths" of that game onto the top-down map; I guess the disjunction is the idea of an implicit third dimension under the sidescrolling parts. For some reason I still find the idea of a strictly horizontal level representing a diagonal cut through an in-game map kind of unsettling.

Sometimes playing these games makes me think that the constant struggle for adequate perspective and representation was a big part of what necessitated formal invention; they both involve trying to find workable simplified surrogates of the world. And sometimes I get the sense that the advent of 3D games removed this formal drive, or even removed a lot of what made those early games games, just because it presented a way around this roadblock which led to a greater focus on worldbuilding and such rather than structural representation.

Playing N64 games in particular it's hard to escape the feeling that the developers weren't sure what to offer in place of those old gameplay tropes. So what you got instead was a revamped version of old ideas and a lot of surplus systems that never really cohered to anything. I'm thinking of old Rare games like Banjo-Kazooie and Donk Kong 64 in particular here, which not only had a ridiculous amount of gameplay "skills" consisting mostly of just ways to approximate new barriers to progress (shoot the target to open door. gain 'speed shoes' to rush in door. this is made even more ridiculously transparent in the first level of Banjo Tooie in which the amount of arbitrary obstacles - on top of the 'mechanics' from the first game - make it almost unplayable) but also an even more ridiculous amount of collectibles, hidden notes, coins, gems, crystals, powerups, ammunition etc in each level. There's a sense of a gap opening up in videogames at this point where the "gamey" elements, suddenly allowed to roam free in a 3D world rather than engage in a constant struggle within the strict parameters of a fixed perspective, are also detatched from any real sense of purpose. What you got instead, with Rare games anyway, was a kind of maximalist approximation of purpose and "gameplay".

I guess I'm bringing it up because it's this strange gap which has always fascinated me in a lot of old 3D games. I've talked kind of incoherently about it in relation to the freeroaming Hyrule Field sections of Ocarina Of Time on the saltw.net forums. A kind of depthless, purposeless space, the hollowed-out husk of a game.

I dunno. Another gappost / lacunapost. I can't help it, i'm like the dude from close encounters of the third kind who is mysteriously compelled to pile up garbage into strange heaps.... i'm s. spielberg, it's me....

Barf!

 

 

30 MAY 2011                                                             MOUND POLICE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAXngmDJ5TY Interview with Dennis Potter about "The Singing Detective":

"By being able to use, say, the musical convention, the detective story convention and the 'autobiographical' conventions, and making them coexist, so that the past and the present weren't in strict sequence - because they aren't, they are in one sense obviously, in the calender sense. But they're not in your head, that sequence, and neither are they in the way you discover things about yourself, where an event twenty years ago can be more- can follow yesterday, instead of precede it. And that out of this... morass, if you like, of evidence, of clues, and searchings and strivings, which is the metaphor for the way we live, we can start to put up the structure called self, out of which... we can walk out of that structure, saying, 'At least I know, and you know, better than before, what it is we are.'".

Y   e   s  . Not so much a unified whole which can be absorbed at once as a collection of traces and elements from which we can derive some wider sensibility or outlook. This seems especially relevent to videogames with their strange structural mapping of the world and how to get through it and also maybe to the beckett/bootleg post re. some kind of absence or gap which demands a more reflective or probing response than one of one-sided emotional reaction to what's happening on a screen... The natural analogue to which is detective fiction, mysteries, the tracing of clues. Which is why the real development in the field of detective stories consists of people like Pynchon, Burroughs, Dick, Auster, Bolano, Friedrich Durrenmatt, David Peace, Adolpho Bioy Casares and Flann O' Brien, writing detective stories with the solutions pulled out, tracing that gap... ahahhahaha i forgot about Beckett's "Molloy" and maybe "Murphy" too, and later Ballard from what I've heard.

That's a kind of glib summation of those writers and kind of a trite metaphor for the Investigation Of Reality but maybe it's a start....

....

....

Baaaarf!!

 

 

29 MAY 2011                                                   MISC

Stevie Wonder's vocal performance on 'I Was Made To Love Her' involves a sort of gleeful tension, something sliding between exuberance and total control, a purpose. He tears at the song, mocking it, twisting the rote lyrics and sound into a new form that fits: "You know my papa disapproved it/ my mama boohoo'd it" gets spat out with almost an audible sneer, the emphasis is shifted, he draws out the words and makes them ridiculous before moving on with an even greater urgency. There's a force and a momentum to the voice which seems at odds to the music, determined to push it under. "Even if this mountain tumbles/if the whole world crumbles/by her side I'll still be standing there": the "her side" is sped over without a glance and what's left is the pride, the confidence, the control.

With Sly Stone on '(You Caught Me) Smilin'', or almost anything else on Riot, there's a similar tension and even an urgency, but the control is on the other side; the song pushes forward while Sly lopes back, dropping in and out of the mix, slurring lines and breaking off midway into a high moan, a scream without the release. There's a torpor but also the strange nervous energy of depression, the energy of being uncomfortable in one's own body and disgusted with one's own voice, a writhing quality. His voice is pulled in two different directions, like he has to get the words out and hates them as he does so, a performance and an anti-performance, mocking himself, turning and twisting, trying to get off the hook. The music pushes forward still and he contorts in time with it: I'm thinking here of the Accordian Man from Dennis Potter's "Pennies From Heaven" and the desperation on his face as he mimes helplessly along to 'Serenade In The Night'.

 

 

On a different topic, I've just finished Philip K. Dick's "VALIS". Strange and unresolved feelings. It seems to demand a RESPONSE of some sort, but nothing seems quite adequate: emotional response, philosopical response, sociological response, "readerly" response. Some of it is painful and depressing to read in the sense of a very obviously damaged and unhappy mind but it's the attempt to deal with this that registers. There's still a shrewdness and ambiguity to the way he tries to work through his experience, the breakdown or religious experience he felt in 1974, there's a constant sense of probing it and looking for answers. Framing and reframing it in terms of fiction, autobiography, pulp scifi, theology, narrative, tractate. It's an unsettling book partially since I'm still not sure what his conclusions were, or if he had any. But it's lingering with me, and Dick's work still sometimes hits me in a way which more "literary" fiction never does.

A lot of VALIS is a pretty sharp analysis of what could be called the problems of living, of staying alive without falling into neurosis or death-wish, what he calls the "Black Iron Prison", referred to as a chinese finger trap that tightens as you strain against it. It's encouraging to see someone talk about this so well and kind of distressing to see that the smart guy saying it has no response to these problems that isn't completely insane. I'm not pessimistic enough to think this signifies anything particularly about these problems or the world in general, and I don't think Dick is either as the overall impression and theme of a lot of the book is a guy constantly trying to pour any kind of explanation, reasonable or not, into the gaping hole in his experience. But maybe part of the unsettling nature of the book results from trying to tell where one ends and the other begins.

 

 

27 MAY 2011                                             C.R.I.M.E. IN THE CITY

McMurty also talks about the initial disorientation and claustrophobia of arriving at a large city after growing up in a completely open countryside. I know I've sometimes been startled by how you can turn a corner in some parts of Dublin and feel like you're in a whole other world, by how easily you can lose your bearings when the sky is obscured by tall buildings on all sides. Most of the places I find beautiful or evocative here arise from that same sense of dislocation. The sight between the houses in Kilmainham Lane where the brief glimpse of ivy, iron railings, a stairwell, space, seem to suggest some tiny paradise hidden just beyond sight. The accidental tableaux formed by the sight of a chimney or a tree reaching over a brick wall. The quiet shadowy lanes on Thomas Street or the smoking pipes and vast metal tankers of the Guinness Brewery. St Stephen's Green in general, a tiny labyrinth with the TARDIS-like property of seeming much bigger on the inside than it really should be. There is probably a case to be made that modernist and postmodernist fragmentation, from Ulysses to Public Enemy, are both products of an urban environment. Sometimes I wonder if the attraction I feel towards the ephemeral and the fragment are both just a result of growing up in the middle of a city.

...

Barf!

 

 

27 MAY 2011                                             RETURN TO SHIT CITY

Last post resembled some cryptic Brother Theodore rant but it's maybe worth giving another example in the form of the Metal Gear Solid games, with their layers of ridiculous and vestigial game mechanics (heart sensor! propelled rocket! capture frog! eat frog! wear a 'spook mask' to increase you spook gauge and gain chance to 'spook' and disarm the opponent! custom talk-about-old-movies-when-you're-trying-to-save system!) and storyline elements which never cohere at all. The overall impression is curiously flat and facade-ish... the awkwardly crammed-in game mechanics draw attention to the lack of a unifying gestalt behind them... the flat characters and stilted dialogue seem like signifiers or symbols for something else... the plots are wandering and vague, lurching through parody and a paranoid desire to keep the player on the outside...

I have only played the first three in the series and that was a long while ago, and I don't doubt that they were all kind of worse and dumber than I remember, but even on its own terms as a game it seems strangely appropriate that whatever goofy blockbuster it turned into is consistently dogged by a much more interesting shadow-game, one whose presence is only hinted at by the occasional dead-end of plot or mechanics...

On another note I just read Larry McMurty's "Walter Benjamin At The Dairy Queen" because it was lying around the house and I liked the title. I liked it a lot; one of the ideas driving it was engagement with and fascination by a different culture. In McMurty's case, it was growing up in the isolated rural West of America and his growing interest in European literature like Proust, Benjamin, etc, city types who were keenly aware of their own history and their place in it. I guess one of the reasons I liked it is because this sense of a whole other world is one of the main reasons I loved/love U.S. postpunk stuff. I remember listening to a lot of the ~canonical~ British stuff with friends in highschool and finding it kind of, well, obvious in things like the sound and the ideas behind it all and the lyrical interests... I can see how people would like that year-zero starkness but I found it sort of drab. But I was fascinated by the American stuff because of the sense that they were much more obviously trying to position themselves within their culture and contest it and engage with it in a different way. Since I knew nothing about this culture this meant I was pretty mystified by it all. Why were the Minutemen covering Steely Dan?? Why did Lydia Lunch move from no-wave nihilism into weird Creedence and Chuck Berry covers?? Why were Sonic Youth obsessing over Madonna and what exactly was going on with the cover art to 'Bad Moon Rising'?? What is a 'Mystery Train'?? Having no real references for this stuff gave it all a sense of being part of some wider picture that I was only able to glimpse peripherally... I wonder how widespread this feeling is, actually. McMurty growing up as a real-life cowboy in the middle of nowhere was fascinated by European moderns... European moderns like Baudelaire and Husymans were obsessed with the work of Edgar Allen Poe... Soviet filmmakers were apparantly obsessed with Hollywood, which led to the famous picture of Eisenstein shaking hands with Mickey Mouse... Modernist European composers like Kurt Weill and Stravinsky were fascinated by jazz, while Miles Davis would feel the same way about Stockhausen... American writers like Henry James and TS Eliot became almost more european than the europeans while Ezra Pound translated chinese poetry... The Cahiers Du Cinema crowd loved Nicholas Ray... Afrika Bambaataa sampled Kraftwerk while british punks obsessed over reggae...

I'm not sure if the appeal of this stuff just boils down to novelty. Sometimes I think it's more along the lines of a trauma of some sort, something that breaks in and subtly changes the way you see your life... When what once seemed like a closed system becomes pregnant with possibilities again.

Barf!

 

 

26 MAY 2011                                               FAKE GAMES

"It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the impeturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to it falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today." - Samuel 'Subs Not DUbs' Beckett

 The most interesting thing about chinese bootleg games like this isn't so much the obvious weirdness/uncanniness of the music or graphics (although they ARE uncanny, a cheap cargo-cult pastiche of game aesthetix, loaded with constant noise which just draws attention to the underlying silence) but the sense that even the menus, the battles, the mechanics and gameplay are equally crude and superficial. That even the parts that constitute "the real game" have been stripped out and replaced by a crude forgery. That what's left once everything has been taken away is the husk of a game, a lacuna-game, where the inescapable absence in the centre of the experience itself forms a kind of foundation for the game... A foundation based on distance and uncertainty, one where the actions of the player character onscreen are not to be immersed in as the focal point of experience but rather held at a distance, mistrusted. The real focus is the gameworld, or what can be seen of it at any given moment, while the gameplay and characters are an exploratory tool, a means of probing and tracing the outline of the damage done and the hole at the centre of things.

It would be tempting to invoke the ideas of distance and detatchment and constant scrutiny on a moral/ascetic/brechtian level but the fact is that I just LIKE it, usually far more than the game underlying it all... Pulling back from the gameplay and structural mechanisms at work to look at what's actually happening consists for me of being extremely and suddenly aware of things like the strange and wonderful colours, tones, sounds, actions that are present. Beckett and chinese bootleg games are obviously in their own league but I do think that most (all?) of the games I've made have been fake games, ones where the usually crude and insultingly static gameplay and structure was an attempt at setting up a foundation or a platform with which to get at the strange sense of world or space that I've always been actually interested in.

Maybe a better term than fake games would be mimic games, both in the sense of a crude and organic approximation of something else and also in reference to poorly-recieved horror film 'Mimic' in which a race of gigantic mutant cockroaches learned to disguise themselves as shabby men in overcoats in order to hunt the subways of New York. I think there is a lot of mileage in the image of a seemingly normal and benign person or object which is in fact a hideous slobbering mutant. This is an analogy which "has legs" as they say and should be borne in mind during future thoughts on this subject...

...

...

Barf!

 

 

index

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Hit A every time the ball shakes, because it stops the pokemon from breaking free."

"I do the B when the ball opens, then I start mashing everything else as I turn away from the screen and listen for the sucessful capture music."

"It's all so long ago but I think I pressed B every time the ball wobbled. But then I tried everything from that to tossing the gameboy away after throwing the ball and pretending not to watch. It's similar to blowing or licking your cassette when the game refuses to start (I just know everyone did that)."

The disavowal of all these ritualised aspects, and the full knowledge that something like not looking at the screen could never (?) have an impact on events even as one continues to do it, is interesting too. Slavoj Zizek has repeatedly (repeatedly) pointed out that this is the exact space where ideology operates: "of course i don't believe in it, but i'll continue to act as though i do believe". The supposedly cynical, empty performance of a role for the benefit of a viewer who doesn't exist outside of one's own head. There could be a point to make here about some kind of player conception of an Ideal Developer (and a converse developer conception of an Ideal Player) as a kind of overarching idea or presence which knits together all the disparite 'stuff' in-game. Right now I'm not sure about that - for the moment, at least, it might make more sense to treat ideology as a network of internalised assumptions and ideas through which reality is filtered.

There's a sense in which playing any kind of game means entering into a kind of cargo-cult relationship, hallucinating an unseen whole from bits of cast-off fragments. Picking up supposedly significant elements and using them to gain a picture of the relationship in which all the parts hang together. Maybe this holds for all fiction but I think the very formalised nature of games, coupled with the need for the audience to actively respond to the signals being generated in order to progress, make this ritualistic element stronger than most. In a suprisingly good London Review of Books article on vidcons the writer talked about the frustration of having something like the theme and setting of Bioshock, say, be obscured by all the "gamey" elements involved. Whether or not you think that's a fair criticism I do think it's easy to overlook the extent to which thinks like the second-to-second movement and calculation of shoot, reload, check ammo, watch for threats, gauging means to progressing to the next area, etc, gets just internalised as the background noise to what the game really is. And one of the reasons I find something like the ClassicsOfGame youtube channel so interesting (and hilarious) is due to the way it decontextualises all these small, insignificant moments in videogames and then pushes them forward. Banal, repetitive mechanics ("charging" laser bolts to fire at mindlessly charging enemy trapped on other side of ravine), sounds, events.

Game design in general is, I think, mostly concerned with minimising the noise of these overlapping systems and elements. One of the reasons the first level of Super Mario Bros is held in such regard is because of how gracefully it was able to map player perception to design intent - start left facing right to show the need to move right, gradually introducing mechanics, and so on. Challenges can be easily identified as such, along with a sense of just what is required of the player to overcome them (a similar idea generally holds in discussions of what constitutes a good adventure game puzzle).

A 'bad' game design is one which generates uncertainty, noise. Often it revolves around information which the player couldn't or shouldn't be expected to know: which walls can be blown up, how many times one must click the wall to have a character kick through it, etc. One example which sticks with me is the first battle for the RPG Maker game "Bat Castle", a game which has kind of fascinated me since I first played it. This battle is extremely difficult and adding to this is the fact that the item and skill descriptions are written in fragmented, semi-comprehensible pseudoenglish. Rather than a strict application of known values the battle consists of constant experimentation coupled with a sort of vague, associative reaction to the names of various items and skills. It should be pointed out that (importantly) random or pseudorandom chance is a factor; certain skills may deal varying amounts of damage, or miss entirely, or accidentally yield a critical hit. Even winning the battle, it was hard to replicate apart from crudely copying my (mostly guessed) strategy from the first time and trying to reapply it as verbatim as possible. Later sections of the game include the ability to collect valuable healing items from apparantly random, visually indistinguishable sections of wall, or for certain sections of ground to suddenly and permanently plaster an obnoxious clipart graphic over the center of the screen. Another RPG Maker example: the game "Ghosts Of Aliens", which includes a section where the player must check a single tree among dozens of identical ones to gain access to a dungeon.

Noise and uncertainty are contagious; they spread like the fractured realities in a Philip Dick novel. If I get stuck again, how do I know it's not because I didn't check a random section of wall or pick up a certain item twelve rooms ago? How do I know that this entire route isn't a permanent dead-end? How do I know my save-states were early enough?

You could, I think, make a fairly solid case that these games are abusive, in the sense of encouraging pattens of behavior which are basically repetitive, obsessive, paranoid, unhealthy. Rather than a clean exchange with all rules and expectations set openly on the table, the dynamic here is shifting and amorphous (although of course it's not difficult at all for "well-designed" games to encourage awful, obsessive behaviour patterns). But there's still something about them that I find engaging or haunting, maybe because of this amorphous aspect: by encouraging noise, by breaking down distinctions between the significant pieces of a videogame experience and the background 'stuff' which constitutes most of the actual content, these games also defamiliarise and render threatening this content. It would probably be a dead-end to try to view these games purely on some moral level of detatchment and demystification... I think of them as a kind of Saturnalian inversion of videogames, where the conventional structures are upended, rendered grotesque and ridiculous, shown in a new light. Rather than a wholly new approach to designing or playing games it's more of a refracted lens put on the mainstream, a bringing to light of what was latently present.

So what does this have to do with Pokemon? I doubt any of the rituals mentioned at the beginning of this piece carried on to how players treated the rest of the game: as far as I know nobody is going to elaborate lengths of timing and input pressing in order to, say, get lower prices in shops or increase the walk speed or encounter rate (there are some very interesting exceptions to this rule, though, which I'll get to shortly). Even if there are other rituals, this one seems very localised: it starts, in some form or another, from the moment the pokeball is launched. Why?

Firstly (and I'm restricting myself to the first-generation games here - Red, Blue etc) while the formula used in determining "catch rate" is not random it nevertheless involves generating random numbers, which involves some degree of variance - the odds of throwing a ball and having the Pokemon get caught are generally not wholly deterministic. This isn't anomalous, and things like the damage from an attack are also calculated by using random numbers in an otherwise deterministic formula. In the latter case, though, the player sees a clearly defined output statement showing the exact amount of damage dealt. In the case of the pokeballs, throwing a ball results in one of five possible outcomes:

- the ball misses entirely

- the ball catches the pokemon, who breaks free after one "shake" of the ball

- the ball catches the pokemon, who breaks free after two shakes of the ball

- the ball catches the pokemon, who breaks free after three shakes of the ball

- the ball catches the pokemon, who is captured after three shakes of the ball

It's not hard to build some kind of picture of how, say, a pokemon breaking free after one shake is too powerful to be caught. But trying to 'read' this output coherently and formalise it for future reference is a trickier prospect. What goes on under the hood to determind whether a pokemon will be caught or break free after three shakes? What's the distinction between three and two? Random chance? There's a gap here and an uncertainty which is abhorred by the player's attempt to sort through the noise of the game and identify the underlying systems, and into this gap flows superstition, reflex activity, 'cheats', rituals.

An drive to sort through, to organise, a kind of taxonomic drive which constantly pushes at the gameworld and orients itself by what holds and what buckles, is I think an integral part of how we approach games (or how we do so "seriously", anyway - I enjoy goofing through roguelikes and glossing over the ridiculous, beautiful layers of systems but that's because i've already given up any idea of an investment in them which goes any further than that). It's a drive that flows into and pushes open cracks - Missingno summoning rituals and secret ways to board the S.S. Anne. It absorbs everything, like a rolling katamari ball, and then tumbles onwards without making much attempt to sort through the junk which constitutes most of its body. The likes of Bat Castle seem threatening to it for exactly resisting this drive, for never being pulled entirely into it. For everything else, all strangeness, all lacunae, is just more content to be assimilated, and it's in the action of developing frameworks to assimilate these things that we see the true, bizarre essence of what we really experience in the act of playing....

The Tungsten-Carbide Stomach of videogames...

It's a tough situation, truly...

...

Barf!