SLRC - Subterranean Loner Rendered Comatose

SLRC is dead! Long live SLRC!

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 07:21:00 +0000

At 2:39am on January 26^th, SLRC died. (tl;rd - New blog/website here.)

SLRC knew it had died because a number of things tipped it off. Primarily, the reasons for its existence at the time of its inception were no longer applicable. The spirit of the thing had departed it. For the benefit of any readers who joined since, say, the start of 2009, SLRC started life as a place to write about music and sound and videogames. And also as a place to write specifically about the videogames I personally was interested in; games like System Shock 2, which at the time of writing in November 07, I felt had not received its share of critical attention in the critical-games blogosphere.

A lot of that naturally had much more to do with my lack of breadth in reading and awareness of the field than it did any failing on the part of the community. To get an idea of how much has been written about even SS2, before and since SLRC started, check out the results for a quick search on Simon Ferrari’s Game Blog search engine, or on Michel McBride’s own variation on the same (they’re both great resources, by the way, and deserve more attention and use than they seem to have attracted so far). SLRC seems to have both naturally and productively drifted away from these early aims and morphed into something completely different.

And that was the first tip-off that it was perhaps time to retire the old blog, coming as it did late last year. The second came just as subtly but much more recently as a growing malaise and uncertainty about videogames blogging qua blogging. I’ve been reading Geert Lovink’s ‘Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture’ these past few weeks and in his opening chapter he positions blogging as a ‘creative nihilism’. I’m finding that thought increasingly attractive and pertinent the more time I spend with it.

As bloggers and technology-using types, we like to imagine that technology is meaning agnostic, that it’s whatever we make of it that counts, or more importantly that we are in charge of what we make of it. But the truth is less certain. It is becoming increasingly obvious that technology imposes its own logic, its own way of doing things, and that can both resist as well as reinforce hegemony. As Lovink says,

“Blogs fix the social in a specific manner. These techno-fixes are not neutral; they reflect the broader cultural atmosphere of our time.” (p.2)

On a similar note, Danah Boyd has spent a number of years researching the different ways that online social technology interacts with real-world societies. In her case it was American teens and how MySpace/Facebook, etc divided along class lines.

So blogging is not a medium devoid of cultural and social baggage. Things that a given site allows for, like reader comments, ‘fix the social in a specific manner’ as it were. We tend to say that blogging is a ‘democratising’ force and celebrate the way it empowers people who have something to say, but we pay less attention to the attendant downside which is, as Lovink points out, that;

“as much as democratization means engaged citizens, it also implies normalization (as in the setting of norms) and banalization. We can’t separate these elements and only enjoy the interesting bits.” (p.4)

So whether we like it or not, and whether it is intentional or not, blogging changes things. Michael Walbridge wrote recently about his own first hand experience with the world of games journalism post-these changes – i.e. “making it” as a videogame journalist is not only increasingly hard, but it’s also looking more and more like a mugs game. There’s just no money in it, and the fact of the matter is that when people as brilliant and talented as Michael Abbott, or David Carlton, or LB Jeffries, or Wes Erdelak are all willing to give away their stuff online for free why would anyone pay for it? Heck, if Tom Bissell can’t make a buck at games journalism now that Crispy Gamer has folded what hope is there for the rest of us? As numerous influential people have piped up to say in the comments to Michael Walbridge’s piece, the field is getting overcrowded. In the final tally, blogging and, by inference, us lot are complicit in bringing about the demise of print journalism and old media structures (hooray!) with a million bleeding cuts in the form of our brilliant blog posts.

But this is by no means the only (or even the major) reason that I’m not going to ‘blog’ anymore in the way I have been doing at SLRC for the past two years and five months. The practical differences in what I’m changing may be relatively minor, but I feel like they are a gesture that should be made nontheless. They are encompassed tidily by this speculation by Lovink, who suggests that when blogs have reached their peak and subsided,

“most likely the social aspect of blogs will be phased out and developed elsewhere into other products, leaving blogs to perform the introspective duty of the online diary.” (p.29)

Hello Facebook!, Hello Twitter!, my new friends. We are enjoying our new time together, and I’d invite you to join us – friend me on Facebook and gain regular access to all the strange and wonderful links I pull from all across the internet with my network tendrils. Or catch up on them via RSS if that’s still your thing (it’s becoming less and less mine – there’s just too much stuff). Unless you’re one of the few established videogame blogs (Hi Michael Abbott! Hi Mitch Krpata! Hi Corvus Elrod! You guys are seriously wonderful) trying to build a big and thoughtful community on a new site it feels like a folly similar to the abovementioned breaking into games journalism. And why would I even need to bother trying when I've got Facebook and twitter right here already? What’s to stop you from using Facebook as a blog? I seriously considered it but decided that I'd have to compromise a bit too much of my personal information (pictures, statuses, etc) to make it worthwhile, but everyday it seems there are new and excitingly customisable privacy settings.

I also find a lot of value and not an insignificant amount of personal satisfaction in posting links on Facebook, not least of all because I’ve gained something of a reputation amongst friends as always posting quality links, but because very nearly everyone I know and whose opinion I care about is on Facebook already. It's also very convenient and works just like a blog with an archive for links and the aforementioned RSS feed and everything.

So my blogging is becoming more like diary keeping, and Facebook/Twitter are taking over the social aspect of the equation. Obviously, as a writer I am compelled to keep writing things, but SLRC is no longer the place for them.

The important question now becomes what, or more importantly where, is this new blog I’ve been keeping for stuff that doesn't go to Twitter/Facebook? Right now it’s located at http://iam.benabraham.net and I’ve been writing there for much of February 2010 already. Unlike SLRC it’s not restricted to publishing important essays or creative stories, etc, etc and is more ordinary, like an diary, and more flexible in subject matter – I also plan on using it to store up and write-out ideas for my PhD research (which I’m already super excited about doing by the way).

In the past, I’ve always gotten a lot of the mileage out of being able to write out related tangents and seeing where they lead, but SLRC was never the place for that. Exploring tangents and experimental connections are, for me at least, a useful strategy for getting at The New. One of the very first things impressed upon our cohort at the start of honours research in 2008 was that you simply cannot predict where The New is or where you’ll find it in your research. Which may sound trite and obvious to some, but could also be completely backwards and counterintuitive to others. I think that it’s almost certainly not such an obvious fact given that so much of our society and our collective time is spent rehashing, renewing, refocussing and refining pre-existing ideas. I guess that’s a reasonably successful strategy, but it seems to only get us so far. After all, if we knew where to find The New or if it were completely mapped out, it wouldn’t really be New anymore would it?

All that aside, in keeping with the phasing out of social aspects as mentioned by Lovink, ben abraham dot net doesn’t allow comments. As allude to above, I’m not out to build a community, but just to keep a diary. Doing away with the now ubiquitous “add a comment” feature is just another way to “fix the social in a specific manner”, and in this case do something to push-back against the author-reader-commenter relationships established by blogs as the De Facto operating mode for the internet. If you’re after the social, join Facebook, join twitter and you’ll find me easy enough. If you want to read the online diary, go have a look and maybe get the RSS or catch up infrequently whenever you remember to load up the site. Since it’s becoming my go-to place for my writing, I'll probably write my GDC trip in March there. The new format should be conducive to some good stuff.

I will leave SLRC with a last line from Byron that I read in a great book recently. See you around.

-- Ben Abraham, 17^th February, 2009.

Fare thee well! and if for ever,
Still for ever, fare thee well.

Dreams of Falling

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:13:00 +0000

I am floating in a sea of deep blue. A carpet of clouds is below me. The sun shines brilliantly through the rarefied atmosphere. There is no sound and no sensation of any kind of movement.

I turn my head to watch my jet plane float away from me at a jaunty angle. I look down at the ground far, far below me and when I look back for my plane it has disappeared.

I notice the wind whipping past as it catches at my clothes. The deep sapphire blue above me slowly recedes as the clouds below grow in size. Mountains of verdant green show through in places.

I play with turning, using my arms and reorienting my view. Time passes and as the cloud level approaches I notice how slowly I have been floating downwards.

I speed up my descent and travel down past the top of a nearby mountain. The angle my flight takes on while at this newly speeded up pace makes it appear askew in my vision. Floating turns into flying.

I do tight circles over the airfield I plan to land on and I slow my descent by stretching my body out and letting wind resistance decelerate me.

I pull the cord for my parachute about a hundred metres above the ground and continue circling the airfield. Barely metres above the ground a hurricane fence appears as if out of nowhere and is too high to continue over on my current trajectory. Rather than slam into it I ditch to the ground at a sharp angle and at great speed, injuring myself in the process. Flying turns to falling.

Barely seconds have I spent on the ground and I am already yearning to go back up and float in the sky again.

Regaining my feet, I search up and down the fence for a gap – a large number of villagers are walking parallel to it but they don’t show a way through. It’s then that I realise there is an easier, lazier way to get across the fence.

Calling the agency, I order a small personal sized gyrocopter and it lands in the field of grass on top of the canister of blue smoke I dropped. I hop inside, start up the rotors and sense of floating returns. I hover up and over the fence. I have a mission to start - a mission bound to the ground - but the dream of floating and falling and flying lingers.

With every jump I float through the air, briefly detaching myself form the tyranny of The Ground. But the jumps with their brevity make a mockery of the true floating and are much the poorer for it. I try not to jump unless I have to.

My 2009 in Important Reading for Human Beings

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:10:00 +0000

The end of the year is a time for looking back over the previous one, looking forward to the next one and other such clichéd nonsense. I am, however, increasingly interested in the future: what’s going to happen in the next 1-10 years? How is it going to go down, and what will be the consequences of that 'getting down'? I believe the outline of the answers to these and many other fascinating and unrelated questions can be glimpsed by casting our eyes back over the year of 2009 while keeping in mind the one to come. So I present to you, this list of My 2009 in Important Reading for Humans Beings.

A word on my methodology: These were all posted to my Facebook account at one stage or another, a good indicator of my own estimation of their value and importance. That's about the extent of the methodology.

This is the first of a planned three parts, the first being constrained to pieces written or published this year that I found to be important reading; the second will be pieces that are perhaps less ‘important’ but no less interesting or potentially informative as to the shape of things to come; and the final third piece will be are pieces I discovered this year, written in previous years and decades that, I found particularly prescient or relevant.

This list begins in March.

March 19, 2009 – ‘The Big Takeover’ by Matt Taibbi

The first piece on my important reading list in 2009 is Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone expose on the 2008 GFC bailout and what it means for the future of our society. It’s big, it’s long, and it’s assertive in its assessment of the future impact of the ‘necessary evil’ that was the $700 billion dollar bailout. If Taibbi is suggesting we may be living in the tail end of the era of the American Empire – with his opening allusion to insurance giant AIG as “a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire” – then it is an assertion rapidly gaining currency, as we shall see at least once more further down the list.

April 15, 2009 – ‘Inside the Precision Hack’ by Paul Lamere

The next piece of important writing comes from an unlikely source – the ‘Music Machinery’ blog pulls the thread behind a Time.com online poll and uncovers the machinations of the group of anonymous users from 4chan who came together to rig the poll by stuffing ballots. There are a couple of ways to read this piece; as either a rather typical cautionary tale about the underlying potential for abuse in online media, or as testament to the growing power and political influence of anonymous. This was no Fox News ballot stuffing – it was Time and they let it stand. The fact that the people in charge decided to leave the results as is perhaps says more than any simple poll result.

May 21, 2009 – ‘A Day At Sydney’s Pinball Expo’ by Ben Abraham

Because this is an indulgently personal list, I’m going to say that the next important piece was something I wrote for Kotaku Australia about visiting Australia’s first annual Pinball Expo. It’s important, I feel, less for the points that it makes about the differences between Pinball and Videogames (which are kind of interesting) but because it represents a mainstream videogame media willing to publish writing about games from an untried author, writing that’s a bit different, a bit off the beaten track and that’s a bit more experimental. Of maybe it’s nothing of the sort – it’s still on my list.

May 28^th, 2009 – ‘Shhhh. Newspaper Publishers Are Quietly Holding a Very, Very Important Conclave Today. Will You Soon Be Paying for Online Content?’ by James Warren

In a short piece (for this list of generally extra long pieces) at The Atlantic, James Warren mentions that a News Industry group were meeting that week to discuss monetizing online news content. It’s an important piece because, firstly, in the time since the piece was posted in May some news organisations have actually begun to charge for their content online. The future for online news is still uncertain, but I hazard a guess that, as hinted at by the earlier piece on Anonymous, it’s future is going to be influenced more and more by people like 4chan’s anonymous and less and less by the Packers and Murdoch’s of this world.

June 6^th, 2009 – ‘The Learjet Repo Man’ by Marc Weingarten

In this piece for the website Salon, Marc Weingarten chronicles the upswing in business for one high flying reposesor of luxury items like private jets and expensive yachts that accompanied the 08/09 financial crisis. If Taibbi’s ‘The Big Takeover’ was about the political implications of the bailout, then ‘Learjet Repo Man’ is about a small, vertical (ha!) slice of the practical impact on post GFC life.

June 14^th, 2009 – ‘TehranElection on Twitter’ by Abdul-Azim Mohammed

Instrumental in spreading the first Iran Election twitter info, the 31 tweets all from the day and night of June 14^th spoke of injustices at the ballot boxes and restricted internet and phone access as the government spread its own election winning propaganda. His last tweet is only “I have to shut down for a bit, the police are looking for satellites” but the word was out, and plenty of other Iranian twitter accounts sprung up to similar effect. As far as I know, his ensuing fate is unknown and my cursory googling turned up no relevant contemporaneous hits.

June 13^th, 2009 – ‘The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers’ by Frank Rich

In a piece for the New York Times Frank Rich writes about the increasing politicisation of republican media outlets like Fox News and their inflammatory influence on the extreme political right of America. Rich asserts that these “silent enablers” in the media could very well be trying to incite indirect violence against the President. It’s a sobering thought, and alongside another piece later in the year, can be looked upon confidently as indicators of a polarisation in politics in 2009, as the gaps between the left and the right were wedged right open.

June 30^th, 2009 – ‘The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online’ by Danah Boyd

Boyd presented her research findings at the ‘Personal Democracy Forum’ in New York and it’s important reading because it challenges the rhetoric employed in tech circles that often has the tendency to ascribe utopian properties to technology. The crux of her argument is that, “For decades, we've assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with "access" and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the "digital divide." Yet, increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions.” Important stuff and again it’s a theme that will come back later in this year’s list.

July 5^th 2009 – ‘I’m a proud braniac’ by Roger Ebert

Another trend perhaps always present in every year but particularly easily identifiable in 2009 was an up-swell of defensive reactions to critical thinking and reasoned, thoughtful critique. Roger Ebert wrote in defence of reading ‘too much’ into films instead of passively and unquestionably consuming in a piece titled “I’m a proud braniac”. More recently this year we even got ‘Moffs Law’ summing up why the case for ‘not thinking as much’ is not really a valid discursive argument.

July 6^th, 2009 – ‘Babes of the BNP’ by Gavin Haynes

This year saw an interesting phenomenon in the UK in the form of unprecedented voter support for the British National Party, a far right extremist political party that would like nothing better than to reverse immigration and send everyone non-white out of Britain. It’s seems to me it’s only further evidence of the widening between the left and the right across the globe, and it’s important to understand why these people think the way that they do. So, to find out we have this cheeky series of interviews with the ‘Babes of the BNP’. Easy targets perhaps, but it’s quite amazing to see just how misinformed some of them are.

July 6^th, 2009 – ‘Huh?! 4 Cases Of How Tearing Down A Highway Can Relieve Traffic Jams (And Save Your City)’ by Yonah Freemark and Jebediah Reed

In a case (or four) of the accepted wisdom being turned on its head for the betterment of everyone, Freemark and Reed write about how removing freeways in four cities around the world has actually improved traffic flow, as well as being beneficial to the city. This is a personally important piece of reading because it reflects a gradual eclecticising of my interests. I’ve somehow gained the belief this year that the low-level curiosity instilled in me by diversifying my reading habits will pay dividends in the long run. There really is no telling which fascinating new tangent will inform some other area of interest or lead to some interesting new idea.

July 15^th, 2009 – ‘Confessions of a Radical Prof’ by Julie Matthaei

As if proof of the previous point, I bought a book earlier this year about print design for magazines and online, which led to finding the website that ran this fascinating and important piece. Matthaei is an economics professor here explaining the failings of economics teaching in providing an education to its students. For example, “I always took care to explore the fact that equilibrium – where the supply and demand curves cross, and quantity supplied equals quantity demanded – does not mean that everyone is happy, or that basic needs are met. Many people could, in fact, be starving because they are too poor to be able to “demand” what they need. Even when no lines or shortages exist, people can still be dying from starvation. Despite my lessons, many of my students were unable to point out the falseness of the statement “everybody is happy in equilibrium” on their tests.” As the earlier pieces on the GFC have made patently clear, we need more professors like Matthaei to teach these kinds of things to the next generation of economists.

July 15^th, 2009 – ‘Losing my religion for equality’ by Jimmy Carter

In a year marked strongly by the aforementioned growing divide between the political left and right (which I can’t seem to stop mentioning – probably because it was a big deal, right?) it’s notable when someone argues for a more moderate stance on religion and equality, doubly so when it’s a former US President and now-former southern Baptist. Here he is arguing for equality before dogma, and a new equality for women in the Christian faith.

July 21^st, 2009 - ‘An Easy Way to Increase Creativity’ by Oren Shapira and Nira Liberman

Another piece I found personally important, if not, perhaps, on the same scale of world-wide socio-political import as others on this list, was an article in Scientific American that detailed research that found gaining distance from a problem, even purely imagined mental distance, increases ones creativity and ability to solve problems. Absolutely fascinating, and something I’ve found applicable a number of occasions this year.

July 29^th, 2009 – ‘New Game Column at Edge’ by Chris Dahlen

Another important moment for games writing this year was the green-lighting of Chris Dahlen’s (now not so new now) weekly Edge column. It’s an important piece because, again, it represents the triumph of more of what I want to see from games writing. Offbeat, occasionally humorous, just as often insightful, and always grounded in something like personal experience, Dahlen’s column (and there are too many good ones to mention them all) was an important part of my 2009.

August 5^th, 2009 – Symbol of Unhealed Congo: Male Rape Victims by Jeffrey Gettleman

For all the patting on the back we (and I include myself) may do here in the west, there are still so many places of the world that are just not okay. Rape is always a tragedy, but something in the stories of the male rape victims of the Congo seemed to capture something of the absolute desolation of the place, as Jeffrey Gettleman writes some of their stories for the New York Times.

August 4^th, 2009 - ‘When Did Americans Turn into a Bunch of Raving Lunatics?’ and August 11^th, 2009 - ‘What Really Happens When You Demand the President Produce His Birth Certificate?’ by John H. Richardson

Something of a reasonably late development in the year was the almost-legitimisation in the conservative American media of the ‘Birthers’ and their absolute conviction that President Obama was not a real American. Esquire’s John H, Richardson goes on the road throughout the Bible belt to find out first hand why these people are such sore losers. Then again, I bet they said the same thing in the aftermath of the 2004 election controversy.

August 11^th 2009 – ‘TIE Fighter: A Post 9/11 Parable’ by LB Jeffries

LB Jeffries piece on the old LucasArts TIE Fighter game talks about its renewed relevance in a post 9/11 world. It was another important moment because it was another case where games writing took itself seriously and went, I’m okay with this. It employed a kind of poststructuralist approach by viewing the game with modern eyes, and in our context, rather than its original one, which is kind of what the rest of the art world has been used to doing for forty-odd years.

August 15^th, 2009 – ‘What’s Good For IBM...is as good as it gets for America’ by Zachary Karabell

A piece in Newsweek about IBM and the shift in it’s global workforce out of America and into other emerging markets brought everyone that read it up to speed on that post-American-Empire thing once again. The important point from the story is that “This is the new world of global business, one in which the U.S. becomes simply a market among markets, and not even the most interesting one.” And that’s both pretty important and a pretty interesting change. I’ll bet my bottom dollar that’ll be a factor in 2010.

August 5^th, 2009 – ‘Garbage In’ by Diana Holden

This year saw the “pacific garbage patch” explode into the public’s consciousness (or mine at least) with a number of high profile pieces (including one on the ABC programme catalyst back home in Australia) about the large area of the pacific ocean that attracts rubbish and that is now filled with floating debris. Looking at the scale of some of the world’s biggest garbage dumps (including the pacific garbage patch) is an important thing to do, and the accompanying pictures with the story are quite impacting. Waste, managing increasingly scarce resources and the attendant economic effects were (and are going to be) big and important issues in the coming year and decade.

September 13^th, 2009 – ‘We still have the same disease’ by Margaret Wente

But I’m not making a list of the issues, but a list of the most important pieces of writing about the issues. Here’s economist Nassim Taleb writing on the one year anniversary of the Lehman Bros collapse about the economy, and saying rather unfortunately that ‘We still have the same disease'

September 14^th, 2009 – Redactor Agonistes by Daniel Menaker

A fascinating essay on the book publishing business, with some estimations about reader numbers and explanation of why books that get published get published. The money quote: ‘Genuine literary discernment is often a liability in editors. And it should be -- at least when it is unaccompanied by a broader, more popular sensibility it should be.’ I wouldn’t mind turning some writing into a book one day, so this was eye opener for me. It also echoed sentiments more commonly seen in the newspaper industry (such as the piece linked earlier) with the feeling that, if not dying away, then certainly the nature of the industry is undergoing some fundamental changes.

7^th September, 2009 – ‘Douglas Coupland: the writer who sees into the future’ by Decca Aitkenhead

This interview with author Douglas Coupland, who I have never read anything of before this interview, is important because while it’s ostensibly about promoting his novel ‘Generation-A’ Coupland is more interested in talking about pig picture ideas, the future, and a whole bunch of interesting peccadillo’s of his personality. It’s also important for me because Coupland sounds like the kind of non-traditional thinker I aspire to – for example, Coupland says he can never throw away his art objects “because an object is interesting because it's the crystallisation of a good idea. And I like being surrounded by good ideas.”

24^th September 2009 – ‘Diary’ by Roy Mayall

If I recall correctly, the person who originally posted the link to this expose of the UK’s Royal Mail compared it to a real life version of The Wire. It’s another striking example of corporations valuing profit over people, and it’s another important piece of writing from 2009.

24^th September, 2009 – ‘Lost Vegas’ by Pete Samson

In a combination of news and personal interest story, UK’s The Sun does a story on the people living in the sewers under Las Vegas. This is exactly who and what our society is producing; these are the kinds of people The West creates, even if it isn’t immediately visible.

September 24^th, 2009 – ‘Mobile money in the poor world’

A story in The Economist (which has now been gated behind a subscription) was about the importance of mobile phones in developing countries and some of the possible technologies, including micro transactions of money via SMS, which the mobile phone is enabling in third world countries. One of the things that 2009 saw time and again (as in the earlier Myspace/Facebook piece) was proof that technology is neither neutral, nor was being on the very cutting edge necessary for development.

September 25^th, 2009 – ‘One more go: Why Halo makes me want to lay down and die’ by Margaret Robertson

The end of the short lived tenure of Offworld as its own separate blog from the main Boing Boing posts was marked by Margaret Robertson’s important piece, a discussion of the eternal quality of the original Halo. It was also important as a demarcation of the Offworld that so many had such high hopes for.

September 2^nd, 2009 – ‘A Virtual Life. An Actual Death’ by Mark Steven Meadows and Peter Ludlow

This piece looked back over the real-world and second life death of one rather prescient internet user and commenter who you’ve almost definitely never heard of before. The focus of the story, a woman known as Carmen Hermosillo who, before her death in 2008, was intimately acquainted with many of the peaks and pitfalls of virtual life is looked, examining her life both real and virtual, as a progenitor for many of the issues facing an increasing number of people coming to terms with virtual existence online. It sounds dramatic, and it is, but the authors note that, “The thing that killed Carmen was the thing she spent her entire online life warning us about.”

October 2009 – ‘The Story Behind the Story’ by Mark Bowden

In ‘The Story Behind the Story’, Bowden takes an in depth look at how news gathering in the US has become increasingly politicised, as the work traditionally done by proper journalists gets outsourced to amateur and professional political groups. It’s viewed through the lens of the media’s obsession with a pair of clips of then-supreme court -justice-to-be Sonya Sotamayer. The decline – and let’s be honest, it’s been nothing but a decline – in print journalism revenues and staff means that the quality of reporting and, perhaps more importantly, fact checking and context gets lost in the race to the juiciest ‘sound bites’. An important dissection of another overarching trend of 2009.

October 2009 – ‘They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?’ by Susannah Breslin

In an inspired move, ‘They Shoot Porn Starts Don’t They?’ made a website that looks and reads like a magazine article, but remains its own thing entirely. Breslin spent some time in California’s San Fernando Valley looking at the effects of the US economic downturn on the porn industry and the result is as touchingly personal as it is insightful and revelatory. Avoiding clichéd depictions of the actresses and actors themselves, it shows the good and the bad in this most definitely not recession proof industry.

June 9^th, 2009 to October 11^th, 2009 – ‘Alice and Kev’ by Robin Burkinshaw

One of the most important things in games writing that happened this year was the beginning – or perhaps the more important part was actually the ending – of the blog/story/comic/tale of Alice and Kev. Its incredible popularity demonstrates that not only are people willing to read non-traditional essay writing and stories about games, but that they are actually hungry for them.

October 12^th, 2009 – ‘Why Snark Works’

In this short review/summary of David Denby’s book ‘Snark’ the unknown author of the ‘A Grammar’ tumblr blog makes some observations about ‘Why Snark Works’ and what it does to online communities – essentially, it works more effectively and efficiently to weed out those that are not ‘in’ on the jokes, explicating the culture of a website better than any list of beliefs or aspirations could ever do. Important reading because of the prevalence of snark in almost every online context.

October 14^th, 2009 – ‘Off White’ by Tony Martin

Martin’s website ‘The Scriveners Fancy’ is ostensibly a comedy website, but as with just about everything he does, it more-often-than-not comes with an edge of intelligent commentary, and his witty and biting reaction to the Hey, Hey, It’s Saturday ‘Blackface Skit’ is an important read for Australia.

October 20^th 2009 – ‘Nearly universal literacy is a defining characteristic of today’s modern civilization; nearly universal authorship will shape tomorrow's’ by Denis G. Pelli & Charles Bigelow

This short piece at Seed magazine discusses how, if current trends in Twitter take-up and usage continue universal authorship could soon become as ubiquitous as universal literacy…

November 5^th, 2009 – ‘Neutral on Neutrality’ by Scott McClellan

…and then, soon after the aforementioned piece, I read this one examining Marshall McLuhan’s ideas and their applicability to Christians interested in using media in evangelism. Echoing the sentiments of Danah Boyd’s piece on technological utopianism and Facebook/Myspace class issues, McClellan notes that technology is not a wholly neutral thing which, in light of the above Seed magazine piece, leads me to wonder about the effects these Twitter/Facebook/Myspace universal authorship technologies will have on society in the future. What (if any) effect will the technology of Twitter have on our ability and interest in communicating with each other? These are the important questions.

November 11^th, 2009 – ‘SPIEGEL Interview with Umberto Eco

'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die' by By Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris

Umberto Eco is another of those thinkers often appreciated for his diversity and eclecticism – in this interview with the German magazine Spiegel Online they even go so far as to reference him as a ‘polymath’. Eco talks about all sorts of things in this interview, with the stand out being the assertion that “We like lists because we don’t want to die” which is an interesting way of looking at things.

November 18^th, 2009 – ‘pueraria lobata’ by Rob Holmes

More questioning of conventional wisdom here in an interesting breakdown of the idea of ‘introduced species’ of plants. Holmes argues that by declaring any species of plant ‘introduced’ is a social construct that draws an artificial line in time as though nature were a static thing to be preserved. Which is rather artificial when you think about it, and the piece references a Slate article that details “scientific push-back against the making of binary distinctions between ‘native’ and ‘invasive’ plants”. After all, as human beings we are part of nature ourselves.

November 27^th, 2009 - ‘Here’s Kamahl!’ by Andy Quan

Peril Magazine is an Australian arts and culture journal that aims to provide insight and commentary on Asian-Australian arts and culture. Here they interviewed the preeminent Australian performer Kamahl about how Australia is (or isn’t) dealing well with issues of racism. It’s important in the wake of the Hey, Hey, It’s Saturday ‘Blackface Skit’ controversy and the event is discussed.

April 7^th, 2009 – ‘The Dark Side of Dubai’ by Johann Hari

I read this piece right at the very end of the year – in November no less – and it seemed to make perfect sense to read it at that time, so I’m placing it here, our of order. In November/December the world was worrying about Dubai defaulting on as much as $50 billion dollars worth of debt, and this piece seemed to fit right in with the general mood about the place and its possible future – according to Hari’s time there and interviews with members of it’s migrant labour force, Dubai is a town build on cheap, almost slave labour and rife with class divisions.

December 1^st, 2009 – ‘Somali sea gangs lure investors at pirate lair’ by Mohamed Ahmed

Reuters ran an investigative piece on the sea gangs of Somalia and their cooperative investments scheme. The rise and rise of Somali pirates was another important thing that worried the western world in 2009 and accompanying it was the concept of the ‘failed state’.

December 14^th, 2009 – ‘The future of the Australian Liberal Party’ by Peter Hartcher

Australia has not been unaffected by the oft identified widening Left/Right divisions in politics, and here Sydney Morning Herald political editor Peter Hartcher discusses what the recent elevation of Tony Abbott to the Liberal leadership means for the future of the party, and by inference, the Australian political landscape.

December 20^th, 2009 – ‘Crash State’ by Geoff Manaugh

BLDGBLG runs the terrifically important think-piece about the future of the state of California and, more generally a post-bankruptcy metropolis looks like. Manaugh presents two alternative futures for a bankrupt major city, each just as likely as the other, and wonders what we can do to influence the future towards the more palatable one.

December 19^th, 2009 – ‘David Simon’ interviewed by Jesse Pearson

Vice Magazine interviews David Simon, creator of HBO’s critically acclaimed TV series The Wire, widely acknowledged as being the most interesting/important television series of the past year, even the past decade. In the long and informal interview, Simon talks about his creative process and the beliefs and ideologies that inform his work.

December 22^nd, 2009 – ‘How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room’ by Mark Lynas

Lynas was there, attached to a political delegation at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit and he tells frankly of a China that decided to flex its political muscle. He dissects why it derailed what many had hoped would be a cut-and-dry worldwide agreement on the need for change.

And that was the year in important writing as I saw it, linked it and recommended it to friends and colleagues. I should thank everyone who linked me to these important artifacts from 2009 - there are probably too many to name, but a large portion of the credit can be given ascribed to Christopher J. Hyde and his fantastically eclectic blog '25 Times a Second'.

The Between

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:03:00 +0000

Margaret Robertson in the Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA conference:

Now, this same instinct [The One Right Answer Fallacy] is starting to be felt when thinking about writing about games, as well as in making them. Should games writing be subjective and experiential? Yes. Should it be…objective, analytical and based on a sound understanding of a century of critical theory? Yes. Should it be voyeuristic like good sports writing? Yes. Can you ever write meaningfully about a game you haven't played or finished? Yes. The biggest thing wrong with game writing at the moment is how polarised the ecology is. Academic writers find game journalists hyperbolic and hysterical, game journalists find (if they ever encounter it, which they rarely do) academic writing pompous and impenetrably self-referential. And, sadly, between there's not a whole lot else.

My most recent news of late is that, as of February 2010, I’ll be starting a PhD to study The Between kind of writing and what it’s doing (or could be doing) for game discourse. I'm invested in the project because I not only want to know how The Between blogs like fit into the picture Robertson is painting; not because I'm content with finding and promoting The Between kind of writing and its authors; I want to BE in that space also. I hope it’s somewhere not far from where Permanent Death resides and I'm hoping to do some more similar projects in the not-too-distant future.

One last reminder that the ‘Fly Ben to GDC 2010’ effort looks set to finish up on December 16^th, so if you’ve been holding off on donating but still planning to do so at some stage, now’s the time.

Permanent Death - The Complete Saga

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:31:00 +0000

After some delay I am now proud to announce that the complete Permanent Death saga is available for download. This definitive PDF version of the story, novel, machinima, whatever you want to call it, is something I am immensely proud of. I feel it eclipses both the scope and quality of anything I’ve ever produced before.

The story is 391 pages long and features hundreds of full colour screenshots from Far Cry 2, one of the most beautiful games of recent times. It chronicles my progress from the beginning of the game all the way to the end of my single in-game life some 20 play hours later. Permanent Death represents a large portion of a year of my life, and an obsession with a game that captured my imagination in a way that I struggle to articulate.

Permanent Death is a free download, however if you decide that it is worth something to you in a monetary sense, then I would only ask that you donate something small to the ongoing efforts to fly me to GDC in March 2010 which you can read more about here.

Thank you for reading SLRC and Permanent Death.

Download Permanent Death here. (104mb)

Tough Love: Left 4 Criticism

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:47:00 +0000

Left 4 Dead 2 came out and I all but dropped every other game for it. Was it worth the not insignificant cash outlay to obtain, plus the effort to get the uncensored international version? I think so. Does that mean it’s immune to the infinite gaze of The Critic? I think not.

The first thing I noticed about the new introductory video for Left 4 Dead 2 was that it did not do the same job as the one present in the first game. That video introduced not only the characters of the game to new players, but also began the process of familiarisation with the game mechanics. Virtually every important aspect of the game for a new player to get accustomed to is demonstrated in those first few minutes. The individual weapons; the need to melee infected away from players; what each special infected does; how tanks attack, and what to do to stay away from witches – these are all subtly introduced to players through the intro video. Even pulling up survivors that have fallen off buildings is covered. In contrast, the L4D2 video, while full of sound and fury, introduces the new aspects of the game not nearly as well and doesn’t cover some of the more critical additions.

In fact, the crux of my criticism of the newest incarnation of Left 4 Dead boils down to the fact that, in many cases, it just isn’t up to the usual valve standard of passively and actively teaching players about the game. For the longest time I ignored melee weapons because when I first used them (on the opening level of Dead Centre, naturally) I couldn’t work out how to best use them while avoiding taking damage from zombies – so I went back to what I knew how to use, which was pistols.

In this, the very first level of the first campaign, players don’t start with a primary weapon, so any choice to use a melee weapon comes at the expense of a pistol and any way of, say, shooting a smoker off of a target barring actual physical attack on either the smoker or the ensnared player. By forcing a choice of pistol or a melee weapon on players, valve do not make it easy for new players to best learn how to use melee weapons. It took another player using melee weapons to great effect in versus mode for me to fully appreciate the value of melee weapons. It’s wasn’t completely obvious to me, because at first it would seem the advantage to a melee weapon is in not having to worry about ammo, but pistols already have unlimited ammo, so the real advantage actually lies in not having a timer on melee attacks. Add to that the crucial addition that it also kills infected rather than simply push them back and you've got a real reason to drop that shiny 1-hit-KO desert eagle for a cricket bat or machete.

Another aspect that wasn’t introduced well was the special ammo types, being the incendiary and explosive rounds. The way they work currently they use up the slot shared by a medkit or defibrillator in a player’s inventory, which invites comparisons to the important role played by the medkit. Health is worth its weight in gold in Left 4 Dead, particularly in competitive game modes, so when first presented with an offensive item to replace the spot of heath; my immediate reaction was “Why in the hell would I want that?” By placing it in the same inventory slot as the medkit, Valve are saying this could be worth the health you are forgoing if used right, which is both counter intuitive and runs counter to my own experience, in which it has never been the case.

While I similarly rejected adrenaline initially for its low health boost compared to pills, it’s come to be my preferred item for that slot. Similar to the above case however, there is just nothing outside of a loading screen tip and perhaps a brief onscreen mention that explains the primary benefit of adrenaline, in that it gives you not only a movement speed boost but increases the speed of all your actions by a significant percentage. Used judiciously, an adrenaline shot can be the difference between life and group death, particularly in one of the new crescendo events. Many of these require that an object be reached and switched off to stop the ravening hordes and for these events adrenaline is a significant boon - but again, that’s never satisfactorily explained, and it is left up to players to learn through trial and error or by observing other players (often in many cases only by having it used against them).

Another example of the reliance on ‘trial and error’ for teaching players is seen in the game's treatment of the new weapons – looking at them all it’s impossible to tell which ones are “better” than others, so players have to try them all until they find which ones work best. In the original game it was quite clear which weapons were better, as there was a very limited selection of them and the “tier 2” weapons as they came to be known were clearly improved versions of the starting weapons available at the start of every level. Perhaps this clarity in weapon hierarchy was merely a result of the simplicity of the original game, but simplicity can be a virtue. Faced with too many choices, from experience, I know that people tend to stick with what they know.

A similar level of “decision overload” occurred to me when first playing Left 4 Dead 2 as the amount of on screen activity, coupled with the engorged dismemberment and plethora of viscera, resulted in a visual overload. The signal to noise ratio needed getting used to, coming from the decidedly clean and sparse levels of the original game. This could go either way, as either praise or criticism, and I’ve certainly acclimated to the new levels of visual activity by now. But still, even for as big a fan of the original as I, it was quite the learning curve.

Lastly on my list of gripes, and my major concern, is the four new characters. This is entering the realms of personal preference and taste, but to me it seems that Nick, Ellis, Rochelle and Coach aren’t as memorable as the original quartet. Perhaps it’s because they are less obvious archetypes. Coach seems the closest to a recognisable archetype and for his larger-than-life personality he remains my personal favourite. Nick and Ellis both feel too similar – Nick, I know from the pre-release publicity, is ostensibly a conman but he’s much too nice and average. That aspect of his character is struggling to shine through, however and the only quote of his that has stood out for me is most revealing of that aspect of his character.

In a game recently I heard him admonish someone for shooting him, saying “You did not just shoot the man in the three-thousand dollar suit!” Nick needs to be talking about his suit way more, and Ellis needs something to give his character a similar focus. Valve has said that they wanted him to be “southern” and innocent and naive, while avoiding representing him as a stereotypical hick. While this effort is laudable for wanting to portray southern American culture in a mature light, I wonder if the character suffers for it.

Perhaps Nick’s character too suffers for being in a game as devoted to cooperation as Left 4 Dead 2. Thinking on it, it's possible that a sharkskin-suited conman could still be an appropriate character for L4D, as he could easily be cast as The Reluctant Help, much like Francis in the original. Francis was a grouch, but he was a lovable grouch, and it was always communicated that his character had your back. But how does one pull off “the lovable conman?” I guess what I’m suggesting is that Nick is not wisecracking enough for it; he’s not even sarcastic enough.

I’m probably being a little unfair on Valve here, but I think it’s actually a bit of a shame that they used up their most memorable characters on the first Left 4 Dead game. Unless L4D2 is surpassed by a third game in another year’s time (yeah right) I hazard a guess most will still be playing the second game and not the first come this same season in 2010.

It might seem from all the above like I preferred the first game to the second, having tragically fallen into the “I liked their old stuff better than their new stuff” cliché, but that’s not quite accurate. I really like Left 4 Dead 2, but it’s a functional kind of like. It’s the same kind of like as one gets for Season 2 of The Wire – it’s great that there’s more of it, but it’s not exactly what I wanted. I don’t like it for quite the same reasons I liked the original (with one notable exception, but more on that another time).

The new explicitly linked campaign narratives also fail to live up to the ‘memorability’ test, and while there are a great number of excellent set-pieces very little left me saying ‘this is like nothing I’ve ever seen before’. And that was how I felt about every single campaign of the original on first playing. Take that with a grain of salt perhaps if only to offset the nostalgia and originality of the underlying mechanics, but even so I feel the decision to explicitly link the new campaigns chronologically was unnecessary. Like all well told stories, there will be gaps in which not much happens, and they get omitted. With everything now spelt out from beginning to end and the dots all lined up and connected for us, I feel like it was a misstep.

I’m still pleased with the L4D2 campaigns, but there was something uniquely fascinating in trying to piece together the story of everything happening around you – and even to you – in the original game. This sense of a mystery to uncover has been diminished in the sequel, and that goes hand-in-glove with a lessened sense that the graffiti on the walls of safehouses is part of uncovering the mystery. I’ve looked deliberately at a number of them, but from what I have seen they have retained little of the charm of the original – notably absent are any of the pithy one-liners such as “I miss the internet” from the first game, gone too are the scribbled out notes that tell tales of ongoing discovery by previous survivors.

Still! It’s early days for the game and some of these issues may yet get ironed out. Heck, play versus for long enough and half of these complaints disappear simply because you’ll see all the tricks, all the tactics clever players have already devised and you won’t need teaching. The issue of memorable characters however remains my biggest worry. The new quartet has a lot to live up to, and perhaps that’s the biggest problem – the previous ones were so good. So good in fact, they spawned memes. How can Coach, Rochelle, Nick and Ellis possibly live up to that?

Digital Archaeology; OR, A personal history of embarrasing comments

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:43:00 +0000

So I had this weird idea the other week. I wanted to go back and look at (read: poke fun at) some of the really old comments I’d left on Michael Abbott’s blog The Brainy Gamer. Follow the digital paper trail, as it were - do some digital archaeology. It’s interesting because it’s a piece of my personal history as a games-writer of varying description and it’s there for all to see.

I got my start at forming and articulating something resembling a cogent opinion on things related to games in those early, heady comment threads back in late 2007. Going back through them, the seeds of the author I've grown into are all present in those comments and it’s revealing to see those beginnings and following the threads back to the present day.

As an exercise in seeing what posts by Michael captured my attention enough to provoke a response, it can also somewhat acts as a tour guide for those that weren’t around at the very beginning of The Brainy Gamer. For a long, long time I read every single thing that Michael Abbott posted on TBG and while I still pay very close attention to everything he posts, I get the feeling it’s become increasingly difficult for him to come up with a steady stream of posts that, to my mind at least, for a while captured the essence of games criticism and discussion. He wasn't just capturing the zeitgeist, he was the zeitgeist. Being on sabbatical and having the time to devote to the blog probably played a big part in what I have come to think of as ‘the golden era’ of The Brainy Gamer. Every post was new ground, every idea was fresh, yet fully formed.

Anyway, onto the somewhat awkward comments that I posted on The Brainy Gamer in the heady days of late 2007 – here displayed in chronological order, from first to last, every single comment I ever posted on a Brainy Gamer post in 2007 (yes, I checked them all) copied and pasted, including time stamp. Please consider following the links back to the original post to see other gems and the original post that inspired me so.

A post called ‘Girls Play Games’ wasn’t the first post I ever read at TBG, but it was the first I ever commented on and here’s what I said,

Ben Abraham said...

Brilliantly put! I'm so tired of other guys who think that they have some God given right to comment away on issues that (lets face it guys) we really have very little of anything new to say about.

Lets toss the discussion over to some people who actually have some knowledge or experience in the area of girl gamers.

Thank you for such a well-rounded informative post!

October 16, 2007 at 02:04 AM

It’s an interesting comment from myself, and looking back on some more recent events I wonder if I shouldn’t have just stopped there and quit while I was ahead. Note that the hyperlink on my name links to my (now very long abandoned) Myspace music page. At this point SLRC was just a twinkle in my eye. Another interesting thing to turn up in the comments section of this article is a link to an Iris Network Directory of women videogame bloggers. It seems crazy to me that I didn’t know this existed until I found it again here, despite it once being in the very same comments thread as myself.

Moving on – the next post I commented on was ‘In praise of empathy and good teaching’ which was a look at Half-Life 2 and how Valve subtly teach the player about the game world without a tutorial. A million-and-one people have made this point since, but Michael was one of the first, making it all the way back in 2007. To call him a game criticism pioneer doesn’t even come close to doing him justice. In the comments,

Ben Abraham said...

Wow...

This is a really insightful analysis of an element of HL2 I've never really thought about before... If you don't mind, I'm bookmarking this article for reference in my honours thesis next year.

October 20, 2007 at 03:58 AM

It didn’t get directly references in the thesis I completed almost 10 days shy of one year to the date of that comment, but it was at the very least played a part in shaping my thinking about games. The next post to attract the dubious honour of a comment from Ben Abraham was ‘Zelda, Meet John Ford’ which introduced readers to Abbott’s love of cinema and the western. Here’s how I responded.

Ben Abraham said...

Yeah, bad idea. Wouldn't want games to become too much like a movie now would we? :P Now... who mentioned something like that just recently...?

Now, if you WERE going to turn a movie into a game, you'd have to pick a David Lean film. I mean, Lawrence of Arabia or Dr Zhivago MMO anyone? I'd love to faction grind the Arabs to get them to attack Aquaba!!! Now THAT'S EPIC! :p

October 31, 2007 at 06:33 AM

My comment, in hindsight, feels like someone else speaking out from across the ages – am I really advocating that games should be more like movies? And if so, in what regard? I hazard a guess that it was in regards to videogames treatment of serious fare, which, FYI, many games still aren’t all that crash hot on. However we’ve seen a bit of movement in that direction from the indie game sector, so don’t colour me completely disappointed. Also – I’d still totally play any videogame that managed to capture the essence of a David Lean epic.

The next post to receive my attention was ‘Are game reviews culturally biased?’ to which I deigned to respond to someone called ‘Simon’ who posted a comment before me.

Ben Abraham said...

Hi Simon and Michael,

Simon said:

"The only thing a reviewer can be certain of and speak with any genuine authority on is how a game affects him/her and him/her alone."

This we know to be true, because we agree that opinions and tastes are subjective - BUT if we accept this, then reject the entire notion of a review (and particularly score based reviews) entirely, as any score the reviewer would give are entirely different from a score you would give.

Okay, I see the point that we find reviewers that share similar tastes to us, but the key is that they are *similar* not the same, so again, any judgment that the review would pass wouldn't automagically be at all relevant to us.

That said, there is obviously a place for review if for no other reason than because people want it - they don't want to trust the publisher / developer that their game is more worth their $120 (and yes, here in Australia that is the RRP of a new release Xbox 360 title), so we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water.

November 06, 2007 at 07:15 PM

Look, look! The SLRC URL finally makes its appearance in the hyperlink on my name! I doubt I had anything useful to say as yet, since my first ever post worth reading was the April ’08 entry into the Blogs of the Round Table, but still. The seeds were well and truly sown. The comment also displays my early reliance on the subjective nature of experience as a focal point for much of my thinking and writing, a trend that continues to this day. New Games Journalism didn’t know it yet, but I was coming for it and I wanted it bad.

My next Brainy Gamer comment was on a post Abbott wrote about the ultimately forgettable Blacksite: Area 51. In a post called ‘Blacksite: Where's my subversion?’ Abbott asks where the much touted ‘subversive’ part of the game was to be found, and laments its notable absence. I weigh in with my two cents,

Ben Abraham said...

Gamasutra had an interview with the guys from Army of Two just a little while before the Blacksite interview came out. THAT game has my hopes for the kind of politically aware shooter that you have in mind. Although I fear it could easily go the same way... I desperately hope not. We've got enough shooters, how about some morally interesting/challenging ones?!

Thanks for they update on Blacksite, as well. I was as intrigued as you, but I know I'm probably never going to get the chance to play it. Now I know I don't have to.

November 16, 2007 at 10:07 PM

And as far as prescient statements go, that one was pretty spot on – I never played Blacksite and Army of Two came and went without getting my dollars. I did however go looking for a video of Blacksite on Youtube and it really did look like it belonged in 2007.

In ‘Face time with Mass Effect’ Abbott notes that he wants to try and experience the game sans-pre-release hype. He also notes that his theatre background makes him particularly interested in how the acting and dialogue is handled. I added,

Ben Abraham said...

Michael said

"My training is in the theatre, so I come to video games with a strong predilection for vivid characters and well-told stories."

And yet... you don't think games should become more like movies. Okay, fair call that telling a good story doesn't automatically make it a movie, but I still think that it's interesting.

Don't get me wrong though, the more I think about it and the more I read about it, the less and less I want games to try and become cinematic. I also think that comparing them to movies, and analysing them in cinematic terms does games a disservice, so I guess I'm just playing Devils advocate here.

It's an interesting question that George poses too... how to tell a story with a lousy actor. I guess there's plenty of other ways to do it in film, though - camera angles and stuff. Hmmm. I dunno. Just thinking out loud.

Happy holiday season (as it apparently is for you Northern Hemisphere folks).

Cheers,
- Ben.

November 23, 2007 at 07:19 AM

What was I smoking in November of 2007? Did I really want games to become more cinematic? Did I even know what that implied? Or was I perhaps envisioning something like the more recent Call of Duty games or Uncharted 2 with their sweeping set pieces and roller-coaster ride experience? It’s quite amazing how much my taste in games has changed since November 23, 2007. That’s almost two years yet it feels like no time at all. At least I was showing signs of progress towards seeing that games are not like movies.

The next comment was on a post interestingly titled ‘Mass Effect: The game that wanted to be a movie’. Now what would Ben-Abraham-who-wants-games-to-be-movies have to say about this, given his predilection for cinematic game experiences? Funnily enough, nothing about the actual merit of Mass Effect’s cinematic approach, rather I chose to read far, far too deeply into the relationship between blank, unresponsive on screen avatars and blank, unresponsive gamers. Quoth myself,

Ben Abraham said...

Try this for a second. Think about how the camera and Shepherds actions, about what Duncan mentioned, lack any "reaction shots" and how everyone stands there passively swaying a bit - doesn't that seem to mirror *very* closely what we the actual PLAYERS are doing? That seems significant to me.

I wonder if this could possibly be why we can generally accept this kind of action from 'our avatar' - because we are doing essentially the same thing.

Think about it, we never really let out an audible gasp when a 'shocking plot twist'(TM) is revealed in a game, do we? Or maybe you have, but I know I've never had this kind of experience. I'm not really sure what kind of an implication this would have on the cinematic/non-cinematic debate, but maybe it represents a different type of engagement with the medium from film. (Seems self-evident perhaps, but then again, plenty of game designers seem to be arguing the opposite) For example, movies can make us jump in our seats and they can make us cry, which no video or computer game has ever done to me before.

*sigh* It could come down to simply being in the same room as a 50 other people all sharing the same/a similar experience, but I think that I could go on forever about this and I've got to end my comment somewhere... might as well be here.

Oh, and also, thanks a bunch Michael for taking the time (just about ever time) to answer and respond to our comments! Not every blogger does so, and it sets you apart! Here's hoping you never get swamped with a billion commenters... then again... you might like that. :)

November 25, 2007 at 07:34 AM

I certainly ask readers of my comment to ‘think about it’ a lot. I wonder what that said about me at the time. Think about it.

No really – please do. I assert that I’d “never really let out an audible gasp when a 'shocking plot twist' [was] revealed”, which was probably true at the time. But have I since? I rather like to think that I very well may have, but whether that’s to do with games actually improving or my choice to engage with games improving I have no idea. It’s certainly something that writing the Permanent Death story has forced me to think about – is Far Cry 2 the greatest game ever or is it just because I made it that way with my own efforts and attentions? And does it even matter? Also: note to self, if I ever use “maybe you have, but I haven’t” again in a sentence take it as a sign that I should probably stop talking from inexperience.

All these questions must remain unanswered for the time being, because it’s time to move onto the next comment, which as it turns out is about “listening to artists talk about their work”. In ‘That one big idea’ Abbott highlights how Super Mario Galaxy creator Yoshiaki Koizumi talks about one simple idea influencing the game in a profound way.

Ben Abraham said...

Wow. What a simple idea. And yet, so profound. If you think about it, the concept of a "flat" world is pretty foreign and artificial to us, as we ourselves inhabit a spherical world, and there are no walls to run into.

Neat stuff Michael, thanks for posting.

December 05, 2007 at 08:17 AM

The flat/round distinction is an interesting one and I wish I had a Wii to play Super Mario Galaxy on and experience first hand.

Next on our merry trip through time we come to a post about the general lack of original stories in games. In the plainly enough titled ‘we need new stories’ Abbott suggests some non-standard stories that game makers could use to avoid the Space Marine / Fantasy / Apocalypse tropes. Mostly it just boils down to games exploring stories about people other than hulking space men, but the comments thread takes off, running long and deep.

Ben Abraham said...

This is a long argument, so I'll try and keep mine input short,

I agree with Chris and Michael. If game dev's want their games to be taken seriously as an art form, then geeze, they bloody well had better get cracking on working to expand what their audiences expect from games. And the only way that I can see that happening is to make some mistakes while they experiment and do things exactly like Michael said.

I also wonder as to why you have made the arbitrary distinction between 'indie' developers and 'propper' developers, Simon. I just don't get it. Sure there are differences in team size, budget, etcetera, but they are both making games, right?

To bring it back to the original argument, that we should be encouraging the game development community to try telling some different stories, I would only like to say that I wholeheartedly agree that the current imbalance in storytelling is detrimental, but it probably will straighten itself out. I'm not an expert on art history, but I believe that with most new media forms, like film and television (and dare I include novels too? Perhaps turn of the 19th century Sci-Fi pulp novels, ala Jules Verne) that one success tends to send off a frenzy of copying and imitation. However I thing that, over time, it evens out. Here's to hoping that the gaming community matures as well (as we certainly are doing) and wakes up to the situation.

Up until recently Rock Paper Shotgun were saying on their 'Hey, developers!' page that the "Chance of the next annoinced MMO not having Elves: 3.062%" or something similar. :)

December 11, 2007 at 08:33 PM

Who is this contentious Simon fellow and where ever did he go? I’m presuming it’s not the same Simon as Simon Ferrari, but if it was that would be cool (let me know, eh Simon?). There was never a hyperlink in said persons’ name, so it’s entirely possible we may never know. I’m a bit yucked out by all those spelling mistakes; sadly I don’t think I’ll ever completely get beyond making those. Other things of note in the above comment: My love for Rock, Paper, Shotgun remains unabated to this day, in addition to being still just as interested in making future predictions based on past experience.

Next we actually have another comment on the same post – I would hazard a guess that it was one of the very first lengthy comments conversations on The Brainy Gamer. Somehow, everyone else gives up before I do and I pipe up at the end of it all with this comment,

Ben Abraham said...

Gosh this post is getting a lot of comments. And it's getting one more.

As to what Chris Stubbs said about emotion driving the games of the future, I can't help but wonder if current attitudes towards emotion are rather underdeveloped in the industry. Emotion is not simply an action/reaction response. We generally are quite unable to predict how one person will emotionally respond to something. Case in point being music. While we can make distinctions about the 'mood' of a piece, i.e. whether it is upbeat, sobmre, etc, we have no definite way of knowing how a person will emotionally respond to that mood, other than by projecting based on how we respond (a rather hit and miss kind of method).

The relatively young field of music therapy has established a general pattern, however, that if music 'meets us where we are at' emotionally, then once it has our attention, it can take us in to new places. The primary way that this is applied in music therapy is to calm down over excited patients, many of who have mental disabilities prohibiting normal verbal communication.

How would one apply this idea to gaming? I would propose that a game that wants to 'emotionally' reach me, would need to be able to somehow establish where I am 'at' before I could be taken anywhere, emotionally. At the moment, I think we have to put ourselves into the position that the game is assuming we are going to be in, and I would like to see that change.

Example 1: Valve's player monitoring stuff - they have the technology built in to examine how well or not we are playing a game - why not do things like dynamically change the pacing of the game according to our performance. Change the music, lighting or other aspects, depending on time of day. And that's not taking into account any kind of actual biofeedback systems such as pulse rate monitoring or anything. We can do so much better!

December 14, 2007 at 09:05 AM

Wow, I’m bringing music therapy into a discussion about emotion in games? Way to go 2007 self. Notice how my staunch belief in the subjective nature of experience rears its head once again. In hindsight, I can kind of see an unmentioned third approach to engaging player emotions – that the player chooses to engage and makes it so. Is it enough, however, to reach the theoretical heights of complete emotional involvement? Probably not, but either way I don’t think it happens without it, so it’s a bit of a conundrum.

The same day as the above, I also commented on a piece called ‘In search of narrative, character, and empathy’ which was an announcement that Michael was going to replay A Mind Forever Voyaging and Planescape Torment and write about them Game Diary style. I fondly recall both series. My own comment was this innocuous request for clarification,

Ben Abraham said...

I'm sorry, I wasn't entirely clear on this, are you actually going to go back and play these games? If so, sounds good! I look forward to hearing what you've got to say about games that I've never played before! :)

Growing up gamer in the 90's, I never played anything pre... maybe.. '98? At least, not in the sense of playing them the minute they came out.

December 14, 2007 at 08:41 AM

Which is true – I didn’t really play very many games, and certainly never on Day 1 of their release. The ‘Vintage Game Club’ that Michael would later establish in 2008 would do similar things with classic games of yesteryear, and I participated in a number of the first few playthroughs.

We’re coming up on the end of the 2007 year and the end of our little retrospective. On December 19 Abbott started writing about Planescape Torment. Picking up on something about NPC characters, I added this gem of a comment…

Ben Abraham said...

What about Murray from Monkey Island 3? He is still my favorite, lovable disembodied head from any videogame! :D

December 19, 2007 at 09:00 AM

It’s true. Murray remains my favourite, lovable disembodied head from a videogame.

Next, on ‘Day Three’ of his Planescape playthrough, Michael Abbott decided he wanted to slow down his playing, take more time and be a little more thorough. In response, I quoted Radiohead. As you do.

Ben Abraham said...

To quote the chorus of a song by a famous British rock band,

"Hey man,
slow down.
Slow down.
Idiot slow down,
Slow down."

Enjoy your leisurely stroll through Planescape.

December 22, 2007 at 09:03 PM

I was very much in the grips of a swooning addiction to the delicious ear noise of Radiohead. This is another thing I may possibly never get over. Also of note is Abbott’s philosophy that games are best enjoyed at a leisurely pace, with the slow motif would coming back with his memorable use of the ‘Chew your food’ metaphor a year later.

The second last comment I would make in 2007 was on a post called ‘A plea for journalistic integrity’, which was a discussion of the tragic death of Zoe Garcia. If you recall, Garcia was killed when her older brothers allegedly tried out “Mortal Kombat” moves on the girl and abused her until she died. Amongst this is a discussion of how games had, and have, become easy targets for meadia beat-ups, and I posted this comment:

Ben Abraham said...

I really think that gaming is *just* about at the tipping point where so many people now play and have first hand experience of video games that, surely, public opinion will recognise this kind of story as exactly you have said it to be, a sensationalist, headline grabbing story, and that sooner rather than later, prominent media outlets are going to be left with egg on their face. Most people know better than this, and it is only destroying the media's credibility in the public eye.

So, don't get too worried about it - we'll get there.

December 26, 2007 at 11:56 PM

I’m beginning to think that we experienced the tipping point for this phenomenon in Australia perhaps just a week or so ago. Melbourne’s The Age Newspaper ran a sensationalist story about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and the leaked footage of a terrorist attack level. The piece was clear sensationalism at its disgusting best, and yet the comments thread on the article was full of commenter’s ridiculing the piece as exactly that. I can’t see this sort of level of awareness going backwards anytime soon, so I think we may be on the downhill run to wider game acceptance. Of course, game literacy and experience will get us only so far, but it’s certainly a start. Like I said in 2007, “we’ll get there”. Hey, that was another of those prediction things.

Last post for the year of 2007 was this, on Abbott’s “Don’t trust the skull: Final Thoughts on Planescape Torment”:

Ben Abraham said...

Spoiler warning might be a good idea. Then again... it is such an ancient game.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'm intrigued by the game, especially its Momento like elements (I thought that was one of the most convincing movie twists of all time!) I think that your experience with the interface is a similar sentiment to one expressed by Leigh Alexander when she talked about 'going soft' in terms of difficulty in the Castlevania series of games. She found incredibly hard one particular reissue of an older one.

Is PST abandonware yet?

December 31, 2007 at 02:40 AM

No, Planescape Torment is most definitely not abandonware, younger self, it’s apparently about to be re-released by Interplay for about $15.

That was the year of 2007 according to Ben Abraham and his comments on The Brainy Gamer blog. Was it good for you too? This little retrospective-meets-introspection thing was good fun for me and If you’re trying to read (too much) into it you might care to make a prediction about the future of SLRC. From this navel-gaze of a post and the general quiet here in recent weeks, you would not be far wrong to wonder if I was contemplating something rather final.

In case that’s too much ambiguity for you, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with respect to SLRC. I guess it rather depends on what happens before the end of the year.

Also, you patient readers deserve an update on the Permanent Death novel-thing – I swear, it’s still coming and hopefully soon.

So, about that PDF...

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:08:00 +0000

Oh hey, you’re still here? Woah, would you look at that date. How can it be the 26^th already? Hmm, wasn’t that final Permanent Death thing supposed to be out by now?

Why, yes, yes it was. And it very nearly was too… except that I decided it would be cooler and a much better package overall if (drum roll please) I waited for Clint Hocking to finish writing a short foreword/endorsement of the PD story that he said he probably would, maybe someday, when he’s not busy lecturing all around the world.

So yes, Permanent Death is late and there’s something you can do about it. If you follow this link, it will take you to the twitter homepage with a pre-set message for you to send to Clint. This way, he’ll know just how many people care about a) the ending to his game, and b) how many people want to read his foreword. So do that, follow the link and maybe, just maybe, when he’s on his next flight to his next speaking engagement as part of the Click Nothing 2009 Tour, just maybe he’ll get out his laptop and write something cool.

And that means, you all get Permanent Death. If you want it that is.

Permanent Death, Interstitial: End of the Line

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:56:00 +0000

I have (in the real world) reached the conclusion of the Permanent Death story. All is on track for the release of the final PDF on October 23. In the mean time, here is an excerpt from George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia", in which he talks about the experience of being shot. I found it singularly illuminating.

“Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and blinding flash of light all around me, and I felt a tremendous shock – no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing. The sand-bags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me. All this happened in a space of time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense.
…not being in pain, I felt a vague satisfaction. This ought to please my wife, I thought; she had always wanted me to be wounded, which would save me from being killed when the great battle came. It was only now that it occurred to me to wonder where I was hit, and how badly; I could feel nothing, but I was conscious that the bullet had struck me somewhere in the front of the body. When I tried to speak I found that I had no voice, only a faint squeak, but at the second attempt I managed to ask where I was hit. In the throat, they said.

…As soon as I knew that the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted that I was done for. I have never heard of a man or animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it. The blood was dribbling out the corner of my mouth. ‘The artery is gone,’ I thought. I wondered how long you last when your carotid artery is cut; not many minutes, presumably. Everything was very blurry. There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And that too was interesting – I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well. I had time to feel this vividly. The stupid mischance of it infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale corner of the trenches thanks to a moment’s carelessness!

…It may be, though, that if you were really dying your thoughts would be quite different."

- George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, from p.177 onwards.

Permanent Death, Episode 10: Plausible Deniability

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 06:32:00 +0000

The sky was a glary white colour and rain spattered the ground in thick, uneven drops. Holding my map up to the sky to keep the face of it dry, I planned my route.

The mission the APR commander Tambossa had given me was to blow the Mertens-Segolo pipeline – the one that pumps water out of the lake and into a neighbouring country. Greaves seemed to have reservations about cutting off the water supply to a neighbouring country. That could just be because he is getting kickbacks from the company, but I have no way of knowing. Still, it wouldn’t surprise me. Tambossa has more gold on his chest than many small African nations and Greaves, his mercenary advisor, seems to equally enjoy the spoils of war.

Even after taking a bus to the south-western corner of the map the morning’s glare is still hanging around, as is the rain. Perhaps it came with me from Pala.

Going inside a safe-house I slept out the rain and the sunshine that followed it. Leaving at dusk, I stepped out into a dusky, orange haze.

A guard post is across from me, separated by a small valley and about 100 yards. I approach from the east as the darkness lengthens and get off a couple of dart rifle shots before drawing the attention of the soldiers. A number of explosives went off in the ensuing fight and before long the whole checkpoint was going up in smoke.

I walked down the path to the Taemoco Diamond mine where I was to get the explosives powerful enough to sever the pipeline. Starting with the guard in the tower, I made use of my dart rifle again before swapping to the always handy shotgun.

It was getting a lot of use, however, so while in the middle of fighting my way down some stairs it promptly jammed and I had to hammer the stuck cartridge loose.

Grenades and Molotov’s were applied to the problem of soldiers and when the coast was clear I picked up the explosives and fielded a call from Andre. I had noted his failure to call when I first picked up the mission. He wanted to meet, so I obliged, trekking through the bush to another nondescript safehouse.

Andre’s plan (he’s always got a plan) was to really mess the pipeline up by busting the emergency stop valves or something so that when the real damage was done to the pipe it would rupture and overflow more than just the water that was already in the pipe. Or something like that anyway.

I made my way to the pump control shed by climbing up onto the overhead pipe itself, sneakily taking the guards out with my dart rifle from a safe distance. Getting inside the small shed and blowing up the controls alerted a mortar crew on a nearby island, and I had to run to get away. Only by crouching in the jungle did I lose his attentions, his eyes like a hawk. How he could see enough of anything in the dark to land a range-finding mortar clean next to me, I’ll never know.

Off to the main pipeline, I approached using stealth. Taking down the first guard I saw, I attracted a number of others, one of which decided to throw a grenade into the bush I was using for cover. Seeing it coming plain at my face, I sprinted to get away and it exploded quite close behind me.

Having lost my cover by diving into the open ground of the road, the soldiers proceeded to try and add ventilation to my body with their bullets. Needless to say, I hurriedly got back into the cover of the bushes and returned the favour.

Strangely enough, the guards never rushed my position and instead chose to pepper me with near misses and wild shots from an inordinate distance. I’m not sure if they were trying to stay close to guard the pipeline, fearful of an attack from multiple directions by multiple assailants, or if they just weren’t sure where I was because my weapon was silenced.

Either way, they stood around in a big, unmissable line so much like soccer players defending a penalty shootout. Except I wasn’t kicking a ball at them, and they weren’t falling to the ground from simple groin injuries.

Eventually there was only the sniper on the tower left – and I’d saved my last dart rifle shot for him. I aimed and pulled the trigger only to have the rifle mis-fire and jam. I duck back behind cover and batter at the rifle to eject the cartridge. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to re-use a dart that has already gotten stuck in the chamber already, but I give it a shot, making sure not to miss. I don’t.

With no one else around I gather up some supplies and plant the explosive on the pipe, standing back to watch the sparks fly. It goes off with a happy bang and my mission is complete. Andre calls from the mine, saying that he can see the water rushing in to fill up the diamond pit.

I dive off the side and into the water and realise just a second too late that I have done something incredibly stupid. Even falling into water from high enough can kill, and there are also rocks at the bottom of the cliff. A sinking feeling comes over me but the fall blessedly isn’t long enough to either kill me or leave me in suspense for long. I make it safely, but it was close. Damn close.

I take a boat down the newly formed creek – formed by my own actions with the pipeline, no less, and it is a little bit empowering to know that I can have such an effect on the environment.

At the mine I spot the soldiers attacking Andre and quietly take some out with my dart rifle.

I swim over to his side of the diamond mine as the centre of the pit is now completely flooded. Using my silenced MP5 to take out the rest of the soldiers, I hear some moans of pain and purple smoke – Andre is down. I’ve been waiting for just a moment like this to have a plausible reason to take him out, so I reach for his side arm and place it against his head.

But then I hesitate. This isn’t the way I want this to happen.

Instead, I put some morphine into him and get him on his feet again. He thanks me and goes back to his usual jocular self. Still the feeling of wrongness persists, and I realise that I still need to kill Andre. I tell myself that now I’ve placed a gun against his head he won’t forget it. I can’t turn my back on him so he needs to be eliminated.

It feels wrong, but I pull the trigger, aimed square at his head. Further wrongness – the shot doesn’t kill him, and instead he just limps lamely away from me, a desperate and pitiable thing. The second shot succeeds where the first failed and Andre lands awkwardly, face down into the dirt and grass.

It still feels very wrong to me, which is appropriate I suppose, since there’s nothing right about death, but I didn’t want it to be like this. I feel annoyed that it was such a lame ending to his life – no epic battle, no blaze of glory. Just another meaningless death in a meaningless place.

To make myself feel a bit better, I blow up my jeep on the way back to the bus depot, reprising my earlier premature memorial to Andre’s death.

It makes me feel better.

Interview: Justin Keverne of 'Groping the Elephant'

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 06:57:00 +0000

Justin Keverne is a gentlemen currently residing in the United Kingdom and a fellow blogger about games. He recently interviewed me about my Permanent Death experiment. I agreed to answer his questions on the condition that I get to ask some of my own, mainly to do with blogging about games, cultural differences between the UK and North America, as well as some more general questions. Here are his responses in full:

1) What is it like living in the UK and writing about games?

I can’t say I’ve known anything else so there’s not a great deal I can compare it too. Living in the UK can be frustrating at times, a lot of Publishers forget that people outside the US play their games, and so they make a big deal of release dates, or special offers that are simply inaccurate or unavailable to me. I doubt I have to explain that aspect of it to you as by all accounts the situation in Australia is even worse.

As for the writing about games aspect, well its part of who I am, I don’t think that would change wherever I lived. I’m not sure how much of it is influenced directly by my living in the UK. Actually no, on reflection I think not being in the US does have an effect; when almost everything you play is created by somebody in another country you can sometimes feel a little safer picking holes in it. As a Designer looking for a professional job I’m torn between being overly critical and playing things safe in case I end up interviewing for a job with a company I torn into. Since most companies are not in the UK I think I’m maybe liable to grant myself more freedom when discussing their games.

2) What sort of cultural acceptance is there of games, and games writing, in the UK?

Well everybody knows what video games are which something, I suppose. I’d imagine everybody under forty here has played a video game at some point and has some pleasant memories of them.

Because of the Spectrum ZX and BBC Micro, there was a huge home computer gaming, and amateur game development, scene in the early eighties; the heyday of the 16K era.

I don’t think it would be a lie to say that most people with high level positions in the tech sector probably started their careers copying code for games out of magazines and manually typing them into their Spectrums and BBC Micros. After that it was the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST. Growing up I had the latter and it was not uncommon for significant portions of large retail shops to be dedicated to shelves and shelves of Amiga, and Atari games. Moving into the PC era, the UK used to be at the forefront of development, with companies like Bullfrog and Core Design. Games, gaming and game development, are a huge part of the cultural history of the UK though I doubt many people are actually aware of it anymore.

Gaming magazines have been a stable of UK culture for years, growing up there was a running conflict between the magazines for the Amiga and the Atari, Amiga Power, ST Format and other magazines with similar titles. Then there’s PCZone which has been running since 1993, a number of successful writers in the UK have cut their teeth on such magazines, including Charlie Brooker (Writer of Big Brother Zombie cross over Dead Set) who wrote for PCZone in its early years.

Television dedicated to video games were also very popular and successful throughout the 90s, with people like Peter Molyneux appearing on Bad Influence and Games Master. There was also the superb, if utter mental Bits, which featured three women discussing and reviewing video games, Aleks Krotoski who now writes for The Guardian newspaper, and the BBC started her career there. At one time Games Master had a cultural cachet approaching that of something like Top Gear. [While US readers may not get this reference, I’m sure fellow Oz readers will. Top Gear is fantastic – Ed]

Recently though such shows have started to disappear, they’ve become increasingly marginalized until the only place you can find them is on select satellite channels, usually those described as being “For men”.

I’ve mentioned The Guardian and that is maybe one of the few serious newspapers to include intelligent and mature commentary on video games, from the likes of Charlie Booker, Aleks Krotoski and Kieron Gillen. You can find video game reviews in almost every newspaper and “men’s magazine” (FHM, Maxim etc) but they are usually extremely poorly written and styled as pure reviews. The Guardian actually includes editorials and more critical pieces dedicated to games and gaming culture.

I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a huge history of talking about games and treating them as another part of our culture that is being lost. A lot of the really smart games writers who have been around since the Amiga and Atari years are starting to move on to different things and the quality of new writing about games seems to have decreased dramatically.

I think that’s in no small way due to the fact the UK has lost the position it once had, the death of Bullfrog and the relative failure of the studios that formed out of it was a big blow to the UK game development scene.

It’s tragic really when one of the most known gaming franchises in the world, Grand Theft Auto is created in Scotland and most people don’t realize. The UK still has some incredible talent but I think a lot of it overlooked as the big Publishers have mostly abandoned their offices in London for continental Europe and New York.

Anyway, I’m not bitter at all... Ahem.

3) What kind of cultural differences do you think there are between the US and UK games press?

That history with the Spectrum through to the Amiga and the PC, has given a lot of the more established UK games journalists a distinct home computer bias and it can be clear in their work. The SNES was never as big here as it was in the US and other countries and the associated love for Zelda and Mario doesn’t seem as strong.

Also as a culture the English in particular (Can’t speak for Scots or Welsh) have an overriding sense of wry cynicism, I think it’s probably a post-colonial attitude. We used to own most of the world and now we don’t and as a culture I think we’re still a little bitter about that and can act like we’ve seen it all and done it all before and that nothing is new to us.

What I’m basically saying is I think UK, and specifically English, gaming press are a jaded and hard to impress bunch, who still long for the days when the UK ruled the gaming world with the likes of Bullfrog, Core Design and Psygnosis.

That’s a general attitude I feel is shared by UK gaming press and it’s one I can’t help but share. I didn’t really think I was so nationalistic in my tastes but I have realised that as much as I respect Garnett Lee I find it difficult to pay attention to a ListenUP podcast if John Davison is not on it. In fact I think John and Garnett are a good example of the differences between US and UK press. Garnet seems easy to impress and loves almost everything, where as John is cynical, cautious and only really impressed by something that’s significantly new or different.

4) Do you think UK game design differs significantly from US game design?

I think the ingrained cultural cynicism pushes UK designers to try and do things differently. I also think there’s a tendency to focus on ensuring a game has a strong central fantasy, being a hero in Fable, exploring ancient tombs in Tomb Raider or cyber punk paramilitaries in Syndicate. I think the aesthetic idea usually comes first and then a game is built to create that sensation and fulfil that fantasy.

I’d say in comparison US game design has a strong focus on iteration and refining an idea over time.

Also the attitude to sex and a humorous approach to sex and sexual activity is something shared by most people in the UK, we grew up with Benny Hill after all, and that can clearly be seen in most games developed here.

In terms of the pure creativity I think UK developers have a tendency to look to literature and subjects outside the field of gaming for their inspiration. A lot of that is probably because they learn programming as a hobby growing up with their Spectrums and Ataris so what formal education most UK designers have was not focused on games at all, they have degrees in Chemistry and Engineering instead of Computer Science.

I think US develops rely more on movies and television for their inspiration. I’m not trying to make a judgement call here as I think both approaches are valid, and after all I still think Halo is fantastic even if it is basically ripping off most of Aliens.

5) Do you feel more of an identification with UK writers than with US writers?

That previously described home computer bias is certainly something I share having grown up gaming on an Atari ST, as is the cultural cynicism. Also I find the type of references used by UK games journalists are ones I’m more likely to have some awareness of, using Football as a metaphor is something I can understand more than using Baseball.

That’s a general attitude element that I share, however on a person level I actually find myself identifying with the folks from Rebel FM more than anybody. Anthony Gallegos in particular seems to share a lot of my tastes on games, and it probably helps we are both sexually frustrated Star Wars geeks. I also appreciate his frank honesty which I think can be rare in games journalism.

6) Do you think there is a hierarchy in videogame critics blogging? If so, what does it look like, where would you place yourself, and why?

I think there probably is and I’m not sure I’m particular happy about that. I think there’s a hierarchy based on who you know, who you link to and who links to you, and I think that can be problematic. There are some really intelligent writers around who I didn’t know about until very recently, Alex Raymond, Simon Ferrari and several others, and I think the way blogs are set up can be rather incestuous, with discussion staying within that circle of linkage.

I also think it’s too easy for the “cult of personality” to take over and people are praised for who they are more than what they write. I think Michael Abbott is a prime example of this, I really do think he’s probably one of the nicest human beings I’ve had the fortunate to talk to. At the same time I think some of what he writes can feel obvious and of little interest to me, on the other hand some of it is also borderline profound, so it’s swings and roundabouts. However I see a lot of people treating his work as sacrosanct as if he can say no wrong, or that his opinion somehow carries more weight than others. His recent post about Scribblenauts and Bowser’s Inside Story seemed to have provoked ire disproportional to its content because I feel a lot of people somehow expected something else from him. Personally I agree with him on this particular issue, but I fear readers have been using his work as validation of their own opinions and that can be damaging to the discussion of video games.

Furthermore I think disproportional worth is given to the opinions of professional game designers... Oh wow I really am bitter aren’t I, jeez. [No, not really. Angry, maybe…– Ed]

What I mean by that is that from my own perspective I disagree with EVERY game designer I’ve ever heard speak, I mean EVERY ONE. The designer I share the most opinions with is Warren Spector but even he has said some things that just make me shake my head. As for Raph Koster and Will Wright, well suffice to say I don’t agree with pretty much anything Raph says and Will scares me with his intellect but his opinions on stories in games make me laugh derisively. I’m not saying these people haven’t earned some respect, but I do think with such individuals everybody needs to be careful to avoid the “cult of personality”, which isn’t helped by some designers apparent unwillingness to discuss ideas with those they don’t consider their peers.

Yeah I can do the CLINT HOCKING joke as much as anybody else, but I am eternally grateful for his willingness to actually discuss his design philosophy and defend it when necessary. I agree with him on a lot of things, and it’s great to actually debate with him on the parts I don’t.

Discussion of video games needs to take place in an arena where opinions are judged on content and insight not on whose idea it was, and any form of hierarchy can all too easily lead to the unjustified assignment of worth to an opinion even when it’s patently dumb. Everybody has stupid ideas and if our barometer for worth is the individual not the idea we could easily let those occasional stupid ideas be given worth they haven’t earned.

7) What do you like about English weather?

In all seriousness I actually really like rain, I have a strange tendency to actively go out in it and stand staring up and the sky getting soaking wet. It’s such a wonderfully tactile experience having weather you can touch. Sadly we don’t get too much torrential rain, it’s usually just drizzle (Is that a colloquialism?) [We call it drizzle in Oz too – Ed] and mist.

I think what all English like about the weather, and the simply reason we do discuss it so much, is that it’s unpredictable and rarely the same two days in a row. It’s an easy discussion to have as there’s always something to say about the weather when you live here.

8) What is a gerund, and why did your people invent them?

I actually had to check Google for that so I’m really not the right person to ask.

9) Do you tell people that “I’m famous on the net” as a videogame writer? Why/Why not?

No.

I suppose you want something more than that, well I don’t and I probably never would because I consider that a lie. I don’t think I am famous on the net, and I also don’t think I’m a video game writer. I’m a designer and everything I write is an extension of that, some of what I’ve written might have a critical bent but it’s always written, at least from my perspective as a design piece.

I’ve discussed the representation of the mentally ill in Batman: Arkham Asylum but I also made a point of providing an example of how I’d have modified the design. I make no bones about saying clearly that I want to be a professional game designer. It’s a position I’ve interviewed for twice and been unsuccessful but I still call myself a designer if anybody asks what I do. Of course you could argue that’s just as much a lie as saying I’m a video game writer. Either way I hardly think I’m famous.

10) Do you talk about games with your real life friends? If you don’t, would you want to if you could?

All the time, it can actually be a problem. I tend to play a lot of Co-Op with my housemate, or just sit and watch him play something in single or multi player, and I will usually give him a running commentary: “This is a stupidly designed level, why the hell does the enemy spawn there, if they moved it there it’d have a better angle on us as we came through here and let also allow us to see it before we rounded the corner and got insta-killed...”

I can also get very angry as bad game design and I’m sure sometimes he’d rather I just shut up. It also helps that at least three of my friends all have professional game development jobs, two as Programmers and one as a Designer.

11) Tell me what’s so good about this Thief game.

I could use all these phrases like cascading failure states, intentional play, emergent behaviour, shared authorship and a dozen others, but I’ll refrain. All of those statements are accurate but the main reason the Thief games, and in fact everything created by Looking Glass Studios is worthy of attention is that they are intelligent games made by very intelligent people that neither try and hide that fact nor talk down to their players. They expect players to be willing to engage with the world and the design and will reward those players who are.

Playing System Shock 2 and Thief made me smarter, it contained ideas and concepts that I didn’t fully understand but which were presented in such a way as to make me want to go away and find out what they were. Irrational and Ion Storm did the same and 2K Marin, 2K Boston and 2K Australia are continuing that tradition.

Also I adore Looking Glass Studios because they were always willing to discuss the philosophy behind the games they made, there are Post-mortems of Thief: The Dark Project and System Shock 2 available on Gamasutra and the proceedings for the last few years of GDCs are full of presentations by Looking Glass Studios alumni.

For a more specific description of why I adore Thief and System Shock 2, I’ve already written about them on Groping The Elephant: Thief II – The Metal Age; System Shock 2.

Writing those two pieces was pure joy, without doubt the easiest things I’ve ever written. I could write twice as much again and still not say everything I wanted to. If Thief or System Shock 2 is selected for the name Vintage Game Club game I think my head will explode; which is why I’m trying to stay quiet about how excited I really am. [Thief was chosen for the VGC game #8 – Ed.]

See not all UK gamers are jaded and cynical... No wait actually I am as Looking Glass Studios no longer exist and I still blame Eidos even if it was really the fault of the gamers who didn’t realise how much good gaming they were missing.

12) Are you having a nice day?

I am now. Work was once again tiring beyond my capacity to cope with it; I am not designed for manual labour. I also had to come home to my housemate and his girlfriend arguing again which is “nice”. But at least he’s just picked up Halo 3: ODST (Which was part of the reason for the argument), so I’ve been watching him play that this evening.

After finishing off these I’m going to watch the latest GameTrailers TV episode, and then spend most of the night either playing Resident Evil 5 (Just picked it up on PC), or Thief Gold.

Thanks for answering my alternately serious and frivolous questions.

Permanent Death, Episode 9: Bridges, Bombs and Broadcasters

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 09:42:00 +0000

I’m back with the UFLL. Voorhees and his boss want me to kill an arms dealer called Yabek. Voorhees tells me, “I hear that’s a speciality of yours”. Andre calls me up and asks to meet near Sepoko.

On the way out of town, I stop in to see the doctor and pick up some passports to swap with for some malaria pills. After catching the bus up north, I get in a car and am promptly attacked by a bunch of soldiers in jeeps.

I swap my jalopy for one up with a grenade launcher on the turret. It is a silly move and I later end up nearly blowing myself up with it.

Further up the road, I get attacked by an RPG from a nearby hill and swerve off the road to avoid it. I look back over my shoulder in time to see the explosion.

I reach the safe-house and go inside to meet Andre, who wants me to go get a fuse for a 1000 pound bomb he plans to use to drop a bridge on Yabek the arms dealer. As one does.

I picked up a clean new rifle from the weapons crate inside the house, trading it for my dirty and soon to become prone to jamming AR16. Some of soldiers had followed me to the safe-house and had set up an ambush at the front door. As in literally at the front door.

To get to the crash site and the detonator for Andre’s bomb I had to pass through the checkpoint that had previously fired an RPG at me and after sniping the Rocketeer and checkpoint guards, I took down some more soldiers at another safehouse.

Creeping up to the crash-site, I took out one sniper from distance and used my flare gun to start a pair of fires on both sides of a group of soldiers.

Swapping to my SAW for closer combat, I lobbed two grenades into the group. Two distinct explosions followed by two distinct cries of pain were heard, but I’d seen three in the initial group. Peering over the lip of the rocky-outcropping, I spot the last of the trio standing surrounded by flame and destruction.

I put him down with a quick burst, but he’s not done yet and, getting up he limps away, the flames lapping at his heels.

I stand transfixed in horror as I watch the poor injured man’s fate initially believing that the fire would eventually claim him. However he made it to a burnt patch where the fire was dying down and I had to finish him off with anther quick burst.

The thought of the unknown soldier dying from the flames really shook me up and I wondered why. Really, why should it, and why now? I’ve killed men by fire before. Yet it remained a strange and affecting moment, perhaps a result of some combination of visual verisimilitude and emergent situation. It is exciting to be affected like this by a game.

I picked up the warhead from the middle of the crash site and got a call from Andre – it was time to meet him on the bridge. On the way I picked up a number of Reuben’s recordings with The Jackal.

The quickest way to the bridge was to pass back through the RPG checkpoint from before. I blew up a whole bunch of cars and the enemies using them as cover by putting a grenade under one of them.

I took a bus back to Pala and arrived in the dead of the night. I then drove to the arms dealer and picked up some stealth weaponry to make the most of working in the dark. Taking a boat up the eastern tributary, I made good progress.

On the way, I passed close enough to reach out and touch another patrol boat heading in the opposite direction. It couldn’t identify me as either friend or foe in the gloom and I was past them before they could call out. They followed me a ways down river but by the time they caught up to where I’d beached my swamp boat I was safely hidden in long grass up the bank.

They did a few lazy circles scanning the bushes for me, but eventually gave up and went back to patrolling. It was another moment of intoxicating, unexpected verisimilitude to real-world behaviour.

After watching the boat retreat up the river, I walked up the road to a safe-house on the track to the bridge pausing to stare at two water buffalo by the side of the road.

Spotting two soldiers up ahead I crept up to the edge of the clearing around the safe-house and opened fire with my silenced MP5.

One soldier on the opposing side of the campfire from me wasn’t killed by my initial burst and in the time it took to take down his friends had pulled himself up onto his knees and had drawn his side-arm.

I shot him again and he went down, falling half-into the fire. There’s no predicting which kills are in Far Cry 2 are going to leave a mark in your memory, but this was another one. Perhaps it was the way he collapsed into the fire looked unsettlingly real. It’s certainly been one for affecting moments.

I reached the bridge at the end of the road and spotted Andre down the far end, a truck with the bomb in the back parked over barge below.

I delicately hand over the warhead/fuse. “No sudden moves” he adds, quite unnecessarily I feel. He then tells me to run for it and I realise that he’s armed it – just like that, and no warning. I’m too busy sprinting for my life to get a good look at the best of the fireworks and it kind of annoys me actually – it was a lot of hard work getting that fuse and I expect to be able to enjoy the show.

APR goons swarm towards us like we’ve just stepped on an ant’s nest, since we’ve just put their favourite arms dealer out of action, but they’re easily put down. Kind of suspicious how quickly they arrived – did they let us blow up Yabek’s barge? Was he becoming too greedy even for the APR?

I take a hang-glide and a boat ride to end up back in Pala, searching for more clues.

Tambossa is the only one who will even see me now. I’ve used up all my usefulness to the UFLL with the last job apparently. The APR commander’s formal army attitude puts me on edge and he tells me he knows I’ve been ‘working with the enemy’. Of course he knows, however he must still have some use for me or he’d have had me shot as soon as I stepped into Pala.

This time he and Greaves want me to stop a DJ from speaking anti-APR propaganda on the radio. The problem until now has been that his transmitter was portable and as soon as they could pin him down he’d pack up and leave again. They’ve just spotted him again, however, and now it’s my job to shut him up.

Andre calls me about the job and asks to meet near Sepoko and since it’s near the drop-off for the passports Doctor Obua gave me the day before (and which have since been in the water with me and possibly ruined; I haven’t checked) I decide to detour to meet him. Taking a boat down the western river, I didn’t get far before I felt a wave of illness pass over me and as I tossed back a pill I noticed it was the last in the container. Good thing I’m on my way to get some more.

I’m met with little to no resistance and find Andre in the safe house. I don’t quite know how he got there so fast – he must have gone direct from where I’d left him near the bridge. But as for how he knew where I’d be doing next, I’ll never know. I guess there’s a reason he’s the near-mythical Andre Hypollite.

Andre tells me that, better than just kicking the DJ off the air, I should get him to read something that will incite the local militia into attacking some official that’s in the country. Before I can get the DJ’s altered message on-air, however, I need to get some UFLL censor’s finger off the button that kills the signal. So off to the ranger station it is, and still in the early hours of the morning, I approach and quietly take out a number of guards. I manage to sneak my way underneath the target’s building and shoot him in the head from below. His body goes limp, sliding out of the chair he was sitting in and onto the floor.

I start some fires to act as a diversion while I extricate myself from the ranger station.

Heading over to the phone card shop (as Doctor Obua described it to me) I’m finally delivering the passports. I take out the soldiers peppering the façade of the building and another soldier ends up wounded on the ground, crawling away to lean against a rock. What is it with me and wounded soldiers today? I hate leaving survivors (particularly when they still have a sidearm) and I equally hate killing these soft targets. Like the man in the fire earlier, it kind of wrenches at me as I pull the trigger.

Wanting to put some distance between myself and this latest fight, I quickly hand over the passports, the civilian giving me a look as he gets up.

I leave for my new target – the DJ Lord Haw-Haw. What a stupid name. I’m looking forward to getting a chance to shut this guy up as I’ve been hearing him talk over and over on the radio ever since I came to this country. The sun comes up on the way and I change my load-out, opting for a shiny new super powerful, super automatic shotgun.

To get to the DJ I have to go through a small cluster of buildings pock-marked with soldiers. I charge into the place with my fat Land Rover and charge up the front stairs, blowing up something flammable in the process.

Soon, everything is on fire and obscured by the smoke.

It quickly clears, and it is plain that most soldiers were unfazed by the blaze and are already pressing the attack. To top it off, a jeep appears behind and two or more soldiers begin shooting into my back. I’m now surrounded, and only by popping three syrettes in a row can I stay on my feet. I make it over to a rock formation to the west and take a breather.

With a full magazine and a lungful of air (as opposed to lead) I take down soldiers one at a time from a position of relative safety behind a large rock. I even manage to catch one with my flare gun at 100 paces!

Heading south towards the DJ and his transmitter, a RPG-wielding lookout launches a rocket toward me. I get a dart off but miss and I notice as the rocket is coming in that I’m surrounded by potent explosives.

I high-tail it, sure that I’m not going to make it far enough away, but luckily the rocket ‘packs it in on the surface’ and doesn't hit near enough to do more than singe my eyebrows.

I steady for my second shot and score a hit as he launches off another rocket still aimed at me – however it goes haywire, presumably from the guidance system, as it does a few loops around the hut from which it was fired.

The DJ is no problem once I show him my machete and he spits an ineffectual “Fuck you!” after me as I strode out of his bush-studio.

I threw a grenade under his transmitter to shut him up.

Andre calls and I go to his aid, driving a jeep over three soldiers as they stand in the road shooting. More turn up but I was by then getting the hang of my shotgun so it was no hassle.

I clear out another safe-house on the way to the bus-station and what should happen but more wounded soldiers I fail to kill in my initial shots. Two wounded soldiers survive my attack to get up onto their knees.

Whether it’s from the visceral joy of firing my new toy or I’m just getting inured to euthanizing wounded soldiers, I fail to hesitate on these two.

Back on the road, about 100 metres from the bus station I come across this grisly scene.

There appear to be no survivors.

Permanent Death, Episode 8: Finding Frank & Assisting Andre

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:51:00 +0000

FOREWARD to Episode 8: For those in the know – that is, anyone who has played Far Cry 2 to the end at least once – the section of the game I am in middle of is very, very time consuming. It feels like it stretched out for hours. Which is probably accurate because I takes hours to get beyond just doing more and more missions for the two factions.

I couldn’t find where I read it, but Clint Hocking, Creative Director for the game has mentioned that some portions of the game were at least three times as long as intended. I am fairly sure this portion of the game is one of those sections, as it drags on forever with mission after mission leading you seemingly never closer to The Jackal. Even the war itself hardly seems to move.

Along with the plodding pace comes a certain endurance race approach to playing the game and with that so does the story. The Permanent Death story between the first few missions after arriving in Port Soleo and the eventual final faction mission adopts a kind of holding pattern. I do missions, I kill people, I see the sights, but nothing really changes and I don’t really take any serious risks. I wondered whether to even bother with conveying the details of this chunk of the game; it certainly doesn’t reflect the sense that death is an ever present threat, although I suppose it still is. It just doesn’t feel like it.

Long story short, I’m getting bored and worn down by the game and I think a lot of players are by this point. However, for the sake of the tale, I press on.

---

I’m sick of this waiting. I’m tired of getting nowhere in my search for The Jackal, so I decide to bust straight into the UFLL and demand to see Mbantuwe for some answers.

As I approach, however, I notice that the familiar guard on the door is talking on the phone and doesn’t seem all that keen on letting me in. My hand hovers uneasily near the holster of his sidearm and I wait for him to finish his call. After putting away his phone, the nameless guard tells me that the UFLL bosses are too busy for me right now and I consider just shooting my way in.

But I resist temptation, knowing that in town and surrounded by several dozen soldiers I would probably not escape with my life. I really do want to finish this. So I temper my annoyance and listen to him tell me about some foreigner, some expat mercenary, who the APR has captive at the small hut-village of Sediko.

It turns out that the foreigner is one Frank Bilders and reports of his demise, it would seem, have been exaggerated. I knew him by reputation and I fought hard the urge to address him with a “Frank Bilders, I presume” but he beat me to it, telling me to get out separately and to meet up later at what passes for a bar in this country.

Checking my map back on the road, I hurry back to Pala, hoping my little detour had given the UFLL bosses time to un-busy themselves. The guard – the same one as before – lets me in to see the bosses. Voorhees slides a manila folder across the table at me and menaces like a gorilla. I’ll be honest; I wasn’t really paying attention and I only remember that I was to go kill a guy at the Polytechnic research station.

Andre, however, had other plans. He wanted that guy to instruct a pilot via radio to drop some cargo in an easy to collect location, and I was going to force him to do that at gunpoint. Or machete point, as it may have been. Before he could do that, I had to go get some map to specify where to drop the cargo.

So I took a drive up to the border-town of Sepoko, and on the way I crossed the notorious unnamed bridge north-east of the airfield, losing my transportation to a vigilant rocketeer with a clear shot.

I stopped at a safe-house on the way to my destination and then blew through a couple of checkpoints. Upon reaching the outskirts of Sepoko I started taking some long distance fire from the East but I didn’t figure they would be close enough to actually hit me and I thought even less that they’d be crazy enough to follow me.

It was a dangerous assumption because a short while later, after having to bail out of my vehicle under the withering fire of close-to-medium range AK47 fire and sporadic but deadly accurate sniper rounds from the town, I was also being fired upon from behind. Add to that a crazy jeep driver roaring up beside me and jamming his truck between a tree and the cliff-face and I’m juggling quite a few plates.

I start a few fires, put down some soldiers and thank my lucky stars the soldier firing an RPG at me from inside the complex can’t aim to save his own life and instead managed to keep firing into the junk and detritus between us. The scope on my Assault Rifle made it easy to take him out from a safe distance and I approach the complex using what little cover the fire has left.

Inside I swap to my SAW and do quite a bit of spraying and praying, making my way to the building containing the map Andre wanted. It doesn’t really seem all that different from the map I use to get around – couldn’t I have just lent him my copy? I resign myself for the time being to the task at hand and take my frustrations out on the nameless soldiers that seem intent on announcing their position and movements to me while I creep around behind them.

Andre calls to check up on my progress, and I inform him that I have his precious map. He sounds pleased on the phone and tells me to head to Polytechnic and persuade the radio operator to notify the pilot where to drop his cargo. I hot-foot it to the Polytechnic compound, parking my jeep under a shady tree.

I spy with my little eye, some soldiers lounging out the front. I decide to light a fire under them. When it burns down I move in closer, picking them off one at a time using gaps between buildings and the open windows until there doesn’t appear to be anybody left. I hear the radio operator calling out to anyone still alive.

Inside the building is incredibly gloomy for such a bright day outside, and as he spots me I rush him with my machete, thrusting it against his neck before he has a chance to draw his fat, gleaming side arm. I hand him the instructions to give the pilot and taps out the message and pushes send.

Now I’m stuck with a living, breathing dude who I have no use for, and who has a large and deadly pistol on his belt. A large and deadly pistol that he is probably itching to turn on me the second I give him a chance. Then I remember that the original mandate was essentially the assassination of this bloke, and his services were just for André’s, and hopefully by inference, my benefit too.

However I’m mentally unprepared for this kill and it throws my game, I forget to use my flare pistol – what has been my calling card for a while now – and I instead put a SAW round into his skull at high velocity. I track his limp body as it flops to the ground, mesmerised. Andre calls and tells me the plane is on its way.

I go outside and watch its lumbering progress across the sky and only later notice the detail that it already had its landing gear out. I consider how short the air-strip is and hope it doesn’t run out of runway.

The quickest way to the airport is a swim across the river, up the other side and past the safe-house. A small gap between the otherwise impassable mountains exists on the north-eastern face but it’s time saving nature is offset by having to run a notoriously dangerous roadblock. I get lucky, however, and skirt round behind some buildings and, oh joy of joys, I get far enough away that they don’t give a proper chase.

Well, except for a patrol jeep, but he was coming from the opposite direction.

I end up in a position with a view looking west across the runway to where I can see the fight between Andre and some assorted soldiers.

I don’t know where he stashed the cargo from the plane, but I assume it’s nearby and after beating off the soldiers Andre tells me to go.

Back to Pala I go and the same UFLL doorman is there to greet me. I go inside, still no closer to The Jackal.

Post Script: Justin Keverne recently interviewed me about the Permanent Death story, asking some really great questions. You can read it here.

Permanent Death: An Announcement

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:59:00 +0000

So today is the 23^rd of September, 11 months on from the day that Far Cry 2 was released upon an unsuspecting Australia and the world. It’s fitting then that I have an announcement to make about the Permanent Death saga.

On the 23^rd of October, one year to the day that Far Cry 2 was unleashed, I will be making available the entire Permanent Death story in beautiful, full-colour PDF for your reading and perusing pleasure. For a good idea of the quality of the end product, here is a short teaser containing the first couple of pages up to the end of the first chapter (around about Episode 3 on the blog). The overall effect is something akin to a graphic novel, but is also quite obviously influenced by machinima.

The PDF will be completely free, however if you find that its multiple hundred pages of full size screenshots and artfully arranged text are worth something to you I only ask that you please consider donating something. There will be absolutely no obligation to donate, or any recommended amount - just whatever you can afford and whatever you think it's worth. It will be licensed under a creative commons, non-commercial, attribution license, so you will be free to share it with any others that may appreciate it.

While there haven’t been any new episodes posted to the blog, I’ve been charging ahead in the story and am up to Episode 10 (and still alive, to boot). I will begin posting again later this week, and will hopefully finish the game/story in time to reach the end by the planned date. Mark October 23^rd in your calendars.

As an aside; sometime within the next day or two, the SLRC lifetime page views will tick over to a staggering 40,000. A sincere Thank You to everyone who’s read, commented and linked to SLRC in the nearly 2 years it's been around. Here’s to plenty more.

SLRC Does Midnight Launches

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:52:00 +0000

Every so often I get the urge to go outside. Most of the time, however, I ignore it and go back to working at my PC, but other times I just can't shake that wanderlust and so I need to go somewhere.

On Monday night I certainly went somewhere. Specifically, I went to the official Australian midnight launch of Halo 3: ODST at my own local Westfield. Umm... because Penrith is the Australian Hub of Halo game playing, I can only assume.

I thought my experience at the event was worth some kind of retelling so I wrote it up as a piece for Kotaku AU. If you can stand the wonky back-and-forth between present and past tense I think it's a pretty cool story, and I really did get the feeling of camaraderie with some of the other gamers in line.

I see it like this - if us massive, unrepentant gamer nerds can't be ourselves when we're standing in line with 200 other excitable dudes (and a couple lasses) just like us, then where can we be? I'm totally rockin' for more midnight launches from this experience, if only to meet other strange and wonderful gamers like I did on Monday night.

Gamers are Good People.

Assassins Creed Official Soundtrack - A Review

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 04:45:00 +0000

If you’ve only recently joined SLRC, since the start of the Permanent Death story perhaps, you might not know that SLRC started life as a music and videogame blog. We don’t do reviews very often here at SLRC (conveniently, if you ever wish to see that change, feel free to commission me) but today sees a reprisal of an earlier trend in reviewing the music for a videogames – this time it’s Ubisoft’s 2007 title Assassins Creed that gets a thorough once-over.

As a brief aside, this will be my last post for a few weeks as I’m taking a break and dropping off the grid for a few days. I’ll probably be back in late September or early October and will hopefully be recharged and ready to take on the rest of the Permanent Death saga. Enjoy!

The album sets the tone at the opening, introducing in the first track solo voices singing in Arabic over arab-esque scales, as well as chanting monks drenched in reverb evoking cavernous Middle Ages cathedrals. Vocals are an important part of the sonic palette of the Assassins Creed soundtrack and provide a sonic element that aims to capture the unique historical period of the game.

The listener is treated to sparing splashes of flutes and piano melodies underpinned by Arabic style light drum percussion. The major feature of the track ‘Flight through Jerusalem’ is a lament sung almost operatically, and placed in a middle distance giving the sense of being heard from across a city – perhaps the singer is crying out over the rooftops at dawn or dusk. A Middle Eastern guitar-type instrument and a string section carry much of the underlying harmonic content of the song.

The following few tracks on this admittedly rather short album – totaling up to around 40 minutes of music – re-introduce more traditional orchestral instruments to contrast with their ethnic co-players; timpani, drums, tambourines, string and brass section stabs, all make appearances in the first third of the album.

The aptly named ‘Spirit of Damascus’ piece uses what sounds like a background of giant steel-works percussion and the metallic timbre works is stark contrast to the fore-grounded Middle Eastern guitar. The mix and meeting of uncommonly related instruments as heard here mirrors musically what would have been a ‘cultural melting pot’ in the particular area of the middle east Assassins Creed is set in. The meeting of Christian and Islam; West and East, would have produced both clashes and unique opportunities for art and expression. That, and a lot of fighting, obviously.

The piece trails off, and ends far too quickly for such a beautiful track, with a synth bed that evokes the monkish chants on previous tunes. The following track, ‘Trouble in Jerusalem’ (a much longer piece at 4minutes) reprises the steel-percussion of ‘Damascus’ and adds Bootmen-style stompy percussion. A synthetic almost sub-audible bass acts as a powerful counterpoint to the breathy, cloistered monk-ish whisperings in (presumably) Latin on the track ‘Acre Underworld’. The use of harsh-cuts and sample loops that remind one of a broken record at the beginning gives the track a uniquely ‘electronic’ feel, utilizing an effect that cannot be easily replicated without modern technology. It is also possibly the first most prominent artificial sound on the album, or at the least, the fist piece that leans more towards using artificial and created sounds than organic or acoustic ones.

The composer, Jesper Kyd, is a great employer of non-acoustic instrumentation, and electronic instruments and synths alternately shimmer and glisten and stutter throughout the album. The most stand-out use is on the track ‘Access the Animus’, a supremely long piece clocking in at nine minutes and which contains a plethora of razor sharp glass-like samples. Additionally, some kind of synth or sample has been manipulated to sound unnervingly like a leopard or jaguar's roar – appropriate imagery for a piece entitled ‘Access the Animus’ with its title a homonym for “Animism”, a philosophical, religious or spiritual belief common in many non-urbanised, non-westernised civilizations, often accompanied by a reverence for animals (particularly large and powerful ones such as big cats). Admittedly it’s a tenuous connection, but it’s also one I can’t help to make – it really sounds like a jaguar or other big cat to my ear. In addition to being one of the longest pieces, ‘Access the Animus’ also marks the mid-point of the album.

The short piece ‘Dunes of Death’ makes use of metallic percussion and flute or pan-pie sound-alike instruments and also brings back a few splashes of melody on the piano.

A big feature of this album is that many of the towns have specific themes or sound-palettes. For example, Jerusalem-themed tracks almost always employ monks and male choirs, appropriate imagery for the cities strong religious significance to both Christianity and Islam. Compare and contrast with the piece ‘Masyaf in Danger’ which uses none of the same vocal elements, using only a light sprinkling of female synth voices.

The third from last track, ‘Mediation Begins’, has at it’s core Arabic percussion, a steel-stringed Arabic guitar-like instrument, and a melody played on a pipe-flute instrument all sounding so much like a group of street performers. The band fades in and at first the scene could be any of a thousand street corners in the Middle East, however a bed of synth and reverb-soaked synthetic sounds soon appears to underpin the group. The effect, and it is one that is used in many of the pieces, is the juxtaposition of normal surface appearances with underlying tensions and fears – another musical metaphor perhaps for the cultural tensions of the historical period.

‘Meditation of the Assassin’ has almost no organic or instrument sounds. The return of the nearly sub-audible bass from earlier in the album along with ominous whispers and out-of-place, non-harmonic dissonant electronic noises gives the piece a strong sinister feel. The brief appearance of wind chimes is far from reassuring and only further adds to the eeriness of the piece. A quiet Arabic guitar struggles vainly against the overpowering bass towards the middle and end. The final song ‘The Bureau’ is a bit of an anti-climax for an album sprinkled with such a number of great moments.

Overall, the album hangs together quite well, however it is dominated somewhat unflattering by the 9-minute long track ‘Access the Animus’ which, despite covering a variety of rhythmic and instrumental feels throughout its duration, still feels like it drags too long. Add to this the fact that some of the more intriguing pieces are overly short and the album is left feeling lopsided and uneven. It does, thankfully, avoid the common pitfall of other videogame soundtracks and avoids any awkward song transitions or strange stops and starts.

Ultimately, however, if the listener does not have the same level of positive associations with the music generated through playing the actual game of Assassins Creed as I acknowledge I have, I think it would ultimately prove a largely unsatisfying listening experience.

The Assassins Creed Official Soundtrack, is composed by Jesper Kyd and has a running time of 40:37.

Permanent Death, Episode 7: A Mysterious Packet

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:51:00 +0000

CIA Special Analyst Perry Gerling was part of the African Attaché, and as such regularly received reports from a number of field operatives. One particular operative was late in reporting and he grew anxious waiting.

After several days of silence, he was about to consider reporting the field agent as missing when a package arrived on his desk in a yellowed envelope. It looked like it had travelled half-way round the world in someone’s back pocket. Inside was a long telegram (2 pages) from his field agent and a series of surveillance photographs.

Gerling pulled out the surveillance photographs and leafed through them.

It was clear that Singh was regularly getting his hands dirty, but as to whether he was still on-the-job was another matter. He grabbed a pen and a pad from his top drawer and scribbled a note for a return message. "Maintain distance and surveillance. END OF TELEGRAM." He wondered whether Washington would notice the expenses being racked up by his special surveillance project but he Gerling thought it was worth the risk. Washington still didn't know that Singh had - potentially, he was quick to add to no one in particular - gone rogue. He looked over a few more of the photos.

Yes it was going to be worth the extra hassle of justifying the diverted resources if it mean he could give a definitive answer to Washington. Singh would show his hand sooner or later, he knew that much from experience.

"This just won't do." He said, tossing aside the photographs and rocking back in his chair. At this rate, he considered, he was likely to get a posting back Stateside some time around the turn of the next decade.

At least one agent was still taking orders.

Permanent Death, Interstitial: Suicide

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:03:00 +0000

I have a confession to make. I’m considering suicide.

No, not in real life, don’t be ridiculous, I have everything to live for. But I must admit that after however many times through Far Cry 2 that it’s been I’m struggling to come up with the will to keep playing, much less to feverishly muster the kind of creative energy necessary to whip an oddly paced and narratively boring experience into something worthy of your attention. (Because you’re worth it)

It’s weird, though, to think about killing oneself. How does one go about doing so? I’ll admit that my mind on occasion wandered, somewhat morbidly, to considering what would happen if I jumped in front of that rapidly approaching train. Or if I climbed over that railing and began the lengthy plunge to the ground from a great height. Or if I just let my car drift across the lane and into the path of that oncoming truck.

It’s a kind of morbid fascination that I think we all share – and one that sees its most common outworking in the rubbernecking we do when we drive past that fatal accident on the highway. We drive slow and stare because we are imagining that it is out body lying twisted and crushed in the metal, bleeding to death. We wonder what that would feel like. What it will look like when it’s all over – does it really go dark and quiet like Hollywood would have us believe?

In Far Cry 2, I know exactly how it will look – The Face of Death is a menu screen. I have the benefit of knowing what it look’s like in advance, and that it is a real let down. I sincerely hope with all my might that the real thing is much more eventful.

One way in which Far Cry 2 actually is like real life is that I have no idea how it will happen, however in contemplating my virtual ‘suicide’ it has made me realise that it is entirely within my power to avoid the same fate as Nels. By deliberately choosing to make it an awesomely spectacular moment of singular glory and brio I could avoid the ignoble end of death-via-automobile. I’m not sure I could bear that ending after investing as much of my time as I have in this strange exercise. But unless I want to off myself I guess I’m stuck leaving myself open to the possibility.

Okay, you can relax now. I’m not going to kill off Qurbani Singh without reason. Even if that would suit the story better.

An Open Letter To Nels Anderson; or, Morality Needs to F*** Right Off

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 09:13:00 +0000

Note from the author: I recently read a post by Nels Anderson on ‘Moral Development’ which has some comments on how different conceptions of morality can apply to games. I was distracted the first time I started reading it, and ended up deviating away to the Wikipedia page to read about ‘Kohlberg’s stages of moral development’. I finally went back to read the rest of the post weeks later and it got me so fired up in the passionate sense that I started writing a comment before realising that it would benefit from being posted here as an open letter instead. So here’s my response to Nel’s post:

…plumbing the depths… ‘who the fuck are these people?’… Neo-Nazi’s of the Fourth Reich… deep in the Kalahari… the Continued Survival of The American Dream…

Dear Nels,

I started writing this because I wanted to say to you that I thought your post about moral development in games was a fascinating read and I wanted to thank you for bringing it to our collective attention.

My fingers were rattling with a heat and fury, and I greatly desired to fire-off a vitriolic screed about very, very many games in some kind of Press Release from ‘The Institute of Freak Power Gaming’ saying how positively Neolithic it is that any game feature an incarnation of the dreaded good<–>evil slider system. But that wasn’t going to be enough. No, my friend, the situation calls for going much, much, deeper.

If a game is a conversation between the player and the developer, who the fuck are these people to tell me that I’m “evil” or “good” based upon… what? Their own standards for good behaviour… or maybe some arbitrary guidelines about proper conduct? In the immortal words of the pissed-off, progressively liberal Oz hip-hop collective know to the police as ‘The Herd’; “Fuck that!”

We know better than them, Nels. We know that in the real world there are no rules like this – the rules are what we write them to be, and doubly so for a made up simulation running on a computer! I don’t mean this in a neo-Nazi, Fourth Reich kind of way, but in a passionate anarchistic, newly enlightened devotee of ‘Kohlberg and his stages’ sense. Count me among the greats in my newly acquired desire to reach Kohlbergian enlightenment.

It takes some seriously sick and twisted fishhead logic to try and apply contemporary morality as reflected in our western legal system to a post-nuclear-winter future; a future that has been blown back to the stone ages, yet remains conveniently modern in it’s application of morality.

Have these people never seen The Gods Must Be Crazy? Even the idea of theft as crime or some kind of associated ‘negative action’ is contemporary! When your community has got shit-all to live on and you’re eating the scum that grows on the walls of your cave, you don’t really have anything worth stealing. Morality? What the fuck is that – they’re too busy trying to stay alive to give a damn about some ‘Karma points’ bullshit.

When that kid got hit on the head by the coke-bottle in the middle of the Kalahari, he had no idea he was about to witness the birth of theft in his tribe. When some crunched-on by middle-management Bethsoft code-monkey programmed in the bits that say a coke bottle can be ‘owned’ by a Non Player Character, some Deity higher up the food chain knew that they were inventing the concept of theft on a global scale. Did they even consider the idea that theft in this society would be different from our own? “Possession is 9/10ths of the Law” is the old saying, and I consider the Wasteland the perfect place to institute that final 1/10^th. Theft is abstract and Bethesda codified it in ones and zeroes.

I haven’t actually played Zeno Clash, but it sounds like the antidote to this kind of straight-faced craziness – at least it wears it’s weirdness openly. I wager it’s one of the few sensible and serious games to say “Morality means whatever you want it to”. One of the others is Far Cry 2. Does Zeno Clash give you ‘negative Karma’ for kneeing people in the face? Does Far Cry 2 slap us on the wrist when we’re defoliating swaths of the jungle for personal gain and a return on investment that includes safe-house upgrades? Hocking know’s we’re no fools – we are no babes in swaddling cloth to be told “bad boy!” and given a slap on the wrist for being caught with our hands in the proverbial cookie jar. And we are well able to tell that we are doing some seriously weird things and unnatural things in the name of Continued Survival and The American Dream.

You an me Nels, we need to show these Neanderthal’s that these “Karmic” games are the truly strange and the people who make them are more twisted than Richard Nixon’s underpants on August 9, 1979. We need to start our version of Fight Club. Rather than fighting in basements and parking lots we’re fighting on the blogs and the podcasts. Hit me Nels – hard as you can! Let us fish-punch the good & the bad out the glass windows on the thirty-third floor of whatever building these atavistic bastards call Their Office. If they want to keep making games for the man-children with neck-beards and mushroom kingdom tattoos then We Are Going To Have Something To Say about it.

Yours Sincerely As Always,

Ben.

P.S. I am coming to Vancouver one day. Get the beers ready – we are going hunting.

Permanent Death, Interstitial - Music on Mute

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 14:32:00 +0000

While chatting to some of my blogger friends the other day, some happened to mention that they liked to play Far Cry 2 without the music – either for added realism or some other reason. Since I’m experimenting already with permanent death, I thought I’d give it a shot and see how it changes the experience. I can now confirm that it is… different.

I had always enjoyed the music for Far Cry 2, but even I must admit that after hundreds of hours of exposure to it my ear had grown weary and stopped noticing it. However, as soon as I turned it off the lack was entirely apparent and I realised just how much I had relied on the music to provide much of the game’s pacing.

When you get close to enemies, even if you don’t know they are there, the music often adds a layer of tension to the mix and if you’re experienced at playing the game you will probably pick up on this subtle change and prepare yourself. With the music gone, being ambushed can become truly a surprise…

The first time this happened to me, it was indeed a surprise - but it was also less tense than it would have been with the addition of music. I was unconsciously waiting for it to ramp up and provide me with an emotional guide as to how I should be acting and responding. Lacking this musical signpost, I spent a lot of the early time in an emotional plateau – never feeling particularly bothered by the enemy soldiers.

I became more brazen – I found myself charging through the middle of a series of checkpoints in pursuit of a weapons convoy and was hit by a sudden fear. I was apprehended by a feeling that I had dangerously over-stretched myself and that I could be only seconds from death.

I came away from the encounter unscathed, but the tempo of the Far Cry 2 experience had changed. I started ramping my concentration levels up and down much faster– snapping from the baseline ‘pseudo-boredom’ of driving through beautiful scenery, to full-on attention which would then be paid to the effort of staying alive. Or perhaps that was what I was already doing when I had the music on and it just became more transparent without the music.

I suspect not – for without music to tell me that the fight wasn’t over, I had to judge for myself. and it subsequently felt like I entered a great many more discreet conflicts. In one instance I had just finished clearing a camp of soldiers and was searching around for some diamonds, when more turned up and I had to break off the search, bare seconds passing between the first and second encounter. If the music was there, it might well have stayed at that same level across the whole period because it often takes a reasonable period of time to 'calm down'.

Whatever the case may be, I’m still convinced that the people responsible for the music of Far Cry 2 have done a singularly excellent job in creating a score, and implementing a system, that has held up for a hundred hours or more, in my case. If I keep it off for a little bit longer I hope Jeff Wesevich won’t take it personally.

Permanent Death, Episode 6 - Return of the Dead

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 02:26:00 +0000

Qurbani Sing slouched onto the camp bed with a groan. Turning his face toward his companion, he paused before sighing. “How in the hell did I end up here, friend?” he asked.

The friend was Hakim Echebbi, a thirty-something Algerian man who looked like he could more than handle himself in a scrap – just so long as he doesn’t have to do too much running. A stint in the Navy as a naval counter-terrorist expert gave Echebbi a hardness of spirit that it seemed his body was fighting not to betray, the first signs being a slight paunchiness around the middle.

“I have no idea how you came to this place, Sikh,” he says drily, before continuing in a more light-hearted tone, “But here I am minding my own business – running a nice little operation in fact – when all of a sudden I hear everything has blow up in the north.” He turns to face Sigh and says with a wry smile. “And now it’s all ballsed up. I guess I really do have nothing better to do than save your sorry behind.” Standing up and crossing the room he leans on a weapons crate. “So why don’t you tell me how you got from… wherever you were before here, I suppose.”

Sing sat up in the canvas stretcher bed and tried to recall how he came to be in this house, on the side of a cliff in the middle of a jungle.

“It was sunny and hot when I left Sefapane – Greaves paid me to go meet some guy and help him get a boat-load of the Jackal’s guns into town. The idea was that we didn’t wan the APR and UFLL boys to stop killing each other long enough to turn on the rest of us.”

“Smart plan,” Hakim added.

“I know, right? What kind of stupid idea is that?” He laughed. “Anyway, I got to the boat and you’ll never guess who the captain is – Andre Hipolite!”

“No fuckin’ way!” Hakim interjects, astonished, “I thought that guy was dead!”

“Me too”, Qurbani replies before continuing. “So there we are, just the two of us and enough guns for, well, more than enough to ensure this war keeps on for years. And we’ve barely gone 100 metres when soldiers appear from out of nowhere – I didn’t even figure out whose side they were on. Then all of a sudden I’m seeing mortar smoke on the roof of the barge and all around there this whistling, rushing noise.

“I look up and I’m staring at a rocket heading right for me –so I’m pretty certain I’m dead, right? I mean, there’s no way the barge can survive more than a couple of rounds from a mortar and this rocket. But it does, yet each time we're hit the engine blows and I’ve got to stop shooting at these bastards swarming around us in attack boats to grab a wrench and some tape and patch the bloody thing up.

“I’ve eaten enough lead to make a paperweight by now, but at least the engine’s running so I try and get to the front of the ship to see if I can’t take out the rocketeer. I didn’t see the incoming rocket until the last second so I barely had time to duck out of the way, but in the process I hurt myself pretty bad.

“I scrambled up to the top of the deck and crouched around behind the bridge – I was barely hanging on by a thread. I think something must have landed on my hand in the explosion because the little finger on my left hand was at this weird angle and I had to snap it back into place.

“I managed to pop a syrette with my good hand and that made me feel a little better. Somehow we managed to fight the rest off and got the barge into the port. My left hand is never going to be the same again. In town I talked to Doctor Obua – you were there, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember, but what’d he tell you? I was too busy watching the street – you should have seen the soldiers move when they heard they were all getting new AK’s and PKM’s! It was like those civilians when the aid workers were handing out travel passes.” Hakim chuckled to himself at the irony of the reversal.

Singh continued. “Ostensibly I was there to warn him about the weapons, but when he sees that I’ve got malaria the Doctor says to me, in his thick accent, ‘You must know that medicine is in short supply, but there are other altruists like yourself. If you return here when it is calm I would be happy to introduce you.’ I nearly laughed – me, an altruist?!”

“Hahaha, that’s pretty crazy,” Hakim adds, “was he serious, do you think? Didn’t he hear about what you did to that priest up north, bailing on him like that?”

“I don’t know – shit all news came out of the north after all.” Qurbani shrugged. “Anyway, I didn’t have time to ask because that was just as the fight was breaking out and you were pushing me out the back door.”

“Yeah, again, sorry about that mate. Couldn’t be helped – if they found you in there with us we were all dead.”

For a moment no one spoke and the silence stretched awkwardly.

“It’s okay.” Qurbani offered. “I would have done the same. Good thing I heard about that shortcut over the north wall though – if I had to run through the middle of town I don’t think I would have made it.”

“Yeah I stacked those crates up against that low roof just for this kind of situation. Glad you made use of them.” Hakim relaxed.

“Me too. I made it out to the river just north of Soleo, so who do you think just then decides to ring me up and tell me he's in trouble?”

“I think I can guess.” Hakim suggests.

Qurbani nods and continues, “So Andre says he’s now being chased in the barge. The idiot probably planned to keep it and re-sell it rather than scuttle it in the lake like he damn well should have. So now he’s being chased all the way down to the Marina and he decides that I’m the person to go to for help. Well, I figured I might as well try despite the fact that he might be dead by the time I get there.

“But when I did, the tough guy was still alive and putting up a bit of a fight. There were about 15 guys trying to get onto that bridge, but Andre kept firing out through the front window. He couldn’t have had many rounds left though – he was chewing through them like candy.

“So I took some of them out from afar and cleaned up his mess. He was grateful and told me he was just going to scuttle the barge after all so it was all a bit of a waste, in the end. Still, the man was grateful and he owes me now.”

“That could be useful – supposedly he’s got a lot of contacts, Andre.” Hakim suggested. “Maybe he’ll be able to give you a lead on the Jackal?”

“Maybe. I left the Marina pretty much straight away after that and headed up here. I needed somewhere safe to rest and recover. Which reminds me – how did you even find me out here?” Qurbani asked, intrigued.

“It was pretty easy, man – I went to Mike’s at the Marina and they said you’d just left. From there, I followed the sounds of gunfire and the trail of bodies. Hell - you’re not that hard to find y’know.”

Qurbani laughed. “Right you are, friend. I should be more careful in future.”

“Don’t worry about it. I got your back for now – you rest up.” Hakim paced over to the door. “I’ll be around if you get into any trouble, ok?”

“Thanks, Echebbi. Here’s to never having to see each other - ever again.” Qurbani took a swig from a nearby water bottle as Hakim departed the safe house, whistling as he went.

Permanent Death, Episode 5 - This Idiotic War

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 06:40:00 +0000

I woke up in a safe house and went outside, heading west to Pala. I passed a guard post along the way and got into to bit of a scrap, losing my vehicle to enough stray weapons fire to put it out of action. I picked up a new one at a safehouse, also picking up some more diamonds and a tape recording of Reuben’s interview with the Jackal before I make my way back to Pala.

In town, I go to pick up the only mission available to me. It’s for the UFLL, as apparently the APR has given up on me. Gakumba meets with me alone – which is strange considering he’s always had some other mercenary there as a witness before. It’s unsettling, but his diamonds are good and I’ve still got no other leads on The Jackal.

His mission is a dangerous one as the UFLL leader wants me to assassinate his counterpart in the APR and further destabilize the conflict. It would appear that he is feeling the strain from my work for the UFLL and is retreating to a house above the Goka falls. If I take him out then the other side can consolidate power here in the north and maybe I can finally make a start on tracking down the Jackal once and for all. As it is now I can’t hardly drive 100 metres up the road without some mob of trigger-happy yahoo’s deciding to shoot first and ask questions later. Maybe if the UFLL actually gains control I will be able to more around a bit more freely. The guard on the way out looks at me with shifty eyes. I know something is up.

Before I head out of town, however, I visit Father Maliya for a third time. I’m running a little bit low on pills, but I’m not quite dry yet. I accept the fake passports he gives me, figuring if I get a chance I’ll drop them off in exchange for some malaria meds. But I’m not going to go out of my way – not unless I get desperate. I check my map on the way out. Unfortunately for these civilians, it doesn’t look like they’re exactly on the way. I’ll probably wait till I’m out in the desert somewhere and toss the papers.

Arriving at the north-eastern most bus-station, I get in a car and, eschewing the roads for fear of running into a patrol, drive through the fringes of the desert until I reach the fort, where I rejoin the road. Passing through a checkpoint with a minimum of fuss, I reach the small foot-track leading to Goka falls. There is a sign in the middle of the scrub. An odd spot for it, to say the least.

I started up the track, crouching low and staying underneath the waist-high palm fronds to stay out of view. I had no idea how well many guards would be protecting Tambossa so I kept my silenced MP5 at the ready. Reaching the point where the track doubled back, I could hear a guard whistling as he stood overlooking the path I’d just come up. I cut short his whistling and the body rolled away, becoming hidden in the long grass. I continued on and, pausing at the crest of the hill, noticed just how bright an evening it was. The full moon was bright enough to be casting shadows from the trees overhead and in this light I wouldn’t be able to remain hidden for long.

I had gone all of 10 metres when I had to make a mad dive for cover off to one side - a guard was walking up the path towards me and had I been a second slower would have spotted me instantly. Thankfully, he wasn’t paying much attention and his body dropped to the ground with a dull thud, laying smack-bang in the middle of the path with no cover between it and my position. I ground my teeth and skirted off the right, taking up position behind a large moss covered rock.

I could now see both the dead guard on the path and what I presumed to be the building that contained Tambossa inside it. The chatter of the guards increased, betraying a note of tension and I surmised that the body on the path had been discovered. Ignoring it for the moment, I whipped out my monocle and peered towards the hut. To my great surprise, I spotted Tambossa staring back out at me from an open window! It was too great an opportunity to pass up and, with his guards rushing about in a panic now, I took aim and fired.

Suddenly, soldiers were all around me shouting and firing in my direction. Shards of the rock I was crouched behind sprayed my face and chest. The sound of weapons fire behind meant that, with a sinking feeling like a punch in the gut, the penny dropped. My attack was just meant to be a feint – the spearhead of the major UFLL push – and I was now caught in the middle between the APR in front and the UFLL behind. I turned and ran, desperate to punch a hole through the advancing UFLL troops.

I took out three of four soldiers in quick succession, abandoning my stealthy MP5 for my PKM machine gun with its reassuring weight. Somewhat miraculously, I managed to take out most of the UFLL soldiers with my desperate attack. Behind their lines now, I spied a lone soldier guarding the track from behind and eliminated him.

I made it back to the Goka falls signpost, my mind still reeling from the betrayal. It took me a second to realise that it was my phone ringing that was causing my pockets to vibrate and I answered to hear Reuben the reporter’s voice on the other end. He said he needed to meet with me right away. Lacking a better plan, I agreed.

When I got to the lumber mill, Reuben told me that the UFLL was making their push and consolidating power in the north, just as I’d suspected. They were also, however, rounding up all the civilians and foreign nationals for goodness knows what reason. Reuben seemed to think that it wasn’t anything good, and I was inclined to agree. He gave me a choice – to meet with Michelle and Warren at Mike’s Bar and try to hold out there, or to hot-foot it to the church in Pala and help the civilians (including Father Maliya) escape. Pala sounded like a death-trap to me, knowing how many soldiers would be in the town already and if the APR was truly coming apart in the north, then I’ll bet they could count on a whole lot of defections.

In hindsight, the choice was an easy one to make. When I’d tossed out the civilian papers I’d already written them off in my mind as a lost cause, but I pretended to consider the other option. When I got to Mikes and heard the gunfire I wasted no time in attacking them from behind. As the last one went down from a long range shot he pulled out a flare gun and launched a flare high into the air above the bar.

Inside the bar, Michelle was visibly distressed and Warren and Nasreen had already taken up positions at boarded up windows around the bar. I helped Michelle push a heavy, 1950’s style Icebox in front of the door. No sooner had we done so than all the windows in the bar blew open as the soldiers now surrounding the bar opened fire. The withering force of the opening volley took down Michelle and Warren, but dust obscured Nasreen. I couldn’t tell how much longer she survived for but it couldn’t have been long. I crouched in a corner next to the bar. I tried valiantly to take some of them with us, throwing grenade after grenade and emptying a plethora of slugs and then shells out the open windows.

I don’t remember what it was that eventually brought me down, but the next thing I knew I was on the back of a truck, having been mistaken for dead. The next thing I remember after that was the pavement rushing up at me as I fell off the back of the truck, reopening fresh wounds. The sand and wind was howling and the best I could do was turn my back to the brunt of it and try to get off the road and die in peace. I blacked out again.

When I woke up it was because the pain was so intense, manifesting as a crimson sheen over my vision. I heard a voice say something like “stop squirming” and with a wrench the pain flared once more and subdued. To my intense surprise it was the Jackal to whom I now owed my continued survival. He sat next to me for a few minutes and gave me an update on the situation with the UFLL but at the sound of some jeeps pulling up outside he took off out a window.

Greeves came inside and told me the same stuff as the Jackal, the UFLL was consolidating its hold and everyone was getting out and heading south. He said he’d leave me a jeep if I promised to go back up north and murder the bastard that turned on me and my merc friends. He said Tambossa would be easy to find as he was giving a speech somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Weird place to hold a speech. I wonder if Greeves had anything to do with it.

Either way, it was only too easy to spot him when I reached a hill to the west of the convoy. It looked like they’d stopped on the road because of a broken down car or truck or something. It gave me an opportunity I was only too happy to take advantage of.

After spotting him with my monocle I only needed one shot.

And that was it – I was done with this whole mess and it was time to move on. The Jackal was obviously also heading south and I now felt a strange pull towards him - it wasn’t the same as before where I just wanted to find him and kill him. Now when I next met him it wouldn’t be enough to just end his life I wanted something more. I wanted to get understand – to get inside his head and see the world through his eyes. On the way south I passed the hut he had dragged me into and saved my life.

I had to fight my way south, as Greeves had told me to meet him in the small town of Sefapane once I’d sorted out Tambossa. As I drove into the town I couldn’t shake a slight feeling of déjà vu. Another crummy town and another shaky attempt at peace.

As I walked into the room to meet Greaves he was on the phone. I overhear him say something like “problem solved” as he sees me and hangs up. He then proceeds to explain what he wants me to do – help someone sail a ship of guns into Port Soleo under a UFLL flag and basically drop the match into the gas tank that is this conflict. “We’ll be back fighting this idiotic war in no time”, he tells me.

I believe him.

Permanent Death, Episode 4 - Chekhov's Diamonds

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:10:00 +0000

If you are just tuning in, I’m currently in the middle of an attempt to complete the 2008 game Far Cry 2 without getting killed and examining how the new found permanence of my characters death changes the experience.

Last we saw our intrepid hero, Qurbani Singh was somewhere in the deep, deep south where he had just avenged the death of his good friend Andre Hipolite (who wasn’t actually dead in his own universe so much as in Nels’ Anderson’s).

Since then, on his way to an assassinate mission Qurbani unlocked a safe house at dawn; ran over his first zebra and picked up a briefcase full of diamonds on the side of a cliff next to a burnt out car.

I must admit that the fear of dying has more or less completely disappeared by this point. The worry and hesitancy with which I approached the earlier missions has atrophied to the point where I am confident enough to take out an assassination target head on, using explosives. I’m regularly flirting with danger now, and it remains to be seen whether I will get burnt.

I was in a bit of an exploratory mood, so after swimming around and under a submerged house in the middle of the lake I wandered off down river and, passing through a checkpoint, spied a bridge overhead. I realised that in all the times I’d played the game, in quite possibly every game I had played, I’d seen the bridge but never actually visited it.

I went up and explored the bride as well as three other checkpoints along the ridge, all of which I had never even seen before. At one of these checkpoints a jeep charged through the jungle at me and ended up having a car accident. You just can’t scrip for the surreal.

Under the bridge I spotted some diamonds and in the process of their retrieval got myself stuck half-way up a cliff with no immediately visible safe route down. Escaping any real ill effects by sliding down the space between two walls, I pretended that Qurbani Singh had lost the seat of his pants in his daring escapade and therefore had to put up with the shame until he reached the next safe house and was able to change his pants. The safe house was conveniently located near another scenic water fall and it amazed me that I’d been able to spend so much time with this game and still not ever have traversed this particular, admittedly quite large, patch of jungle. I thought I’d been everywhere.

On my way back to Pala I spotted a hang-glider and wondered whether I could get all the way to Pala in one flight. It didn’t look that far on the map…

…but my short lived trip was ended by this tree branch and I ditched into the river.

After slogging back to Pala, I stumbled into the hotel, purely out of curiosity. Nothing much had changed and no one had yet bothered to clean up any of the mess. Admittedly, they all probably have better things to do than rebuilt a hotel while there’s a war raging. On the upside, my one time room has a lovely new skylight now.

I got patted down by a guard with a huge scar on his lip and headed upstairs to a meeting with the UFLL and Carbonell. This time I’m sent off to locate some buried treasure and send an SMS with its location. I take my diamond filled dossier and go.

Barely out the door, I stop for a second having noticed the green flashing light indicating a nearby briefcase of diamonds. On second thoughts, notice is not entirely accurate; perhaps ‘comprehend the possibility of its acquisition’ is a better description. I’ve known that particular briefcase has been there since my first play-through of the game as it shows up clearly on your diamond detector any time you are near the UFLL building, however given my new found brazen attitude I was suddenly very aware of how much more obtainable they now seemed.

Thinking back over it later, it made me consider the difficult time developers have in employing traditional narrative tricks and techniques to game narratives. Specifically, in all of my previous games I had for various reasons never once picked up this particular briefcase before. Why is that important? Well, in drama there is an axiom known as Chekhov’s Gun which says that "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it." (A suitably violent axiom for a game like Far Cry 2, wouldn’t you say?) In all of my previous games on varying difficulties, I had never even considered taking the diamonds because I didn’t want to break the peace treaty. 1-3 diamonds just never seemed worth the risk of getting shot to pieces before.

Why then, in all those earlier games, did the Diamonds exist? Chekhov’s Gun says that if no one is ever going to fire it, don’t put it ‘on stage’ since it is not necessary for the narrative. It’s clear, however, that a game designer has absolutely no way of knowing if a certain player is going to want to take the diamonds or not and so has no choice but to place them in the world and let whatever happens happen. If they were to remove the diamonds, then the player would be denied even the possibility of taking them.

I should also add that after I decided for the first time that I didn’t want to collect those diamonds in my very first game (having been effectively deterred by warnings from soldiers, etc) that until this most recent game I didn’t even consider taking the diamonds. I didn’t even decide each time to deliberately not collect them; I just didn’t even consider it as an option. According to Chekhov’s Gun, those diamonds should not even exist!

If all of the previous games where I ignored the diamonds were written as a story similar to the one you are now reading, the diamonds wouldn’t get a mention and you, the reader, would have no way of know they even existed – even though they clearly existed in the game each time.

So obviously games have a distinct disadvantage in storytelling when it comes to the ‘Chekhov’s Gun’ rule. The game, by having to show/render/populate the world with this diamond case, was resisting my own attempts to organise and tell a good story and obey the rule of Chekhov’s Gun.

Perhaps Chekhov’s gun simply doesn’t apply to games, I will freely acknowledge that I have no practical solution to this problem, and indeed, you might disagree with me that it even is a problem.

I think that, were Chekhov still around today, he would either be an obsessive, completionist player or he would stop believing his own rule. I can just imagine him saying about all 200+ briefcases that, “If they put it in the game, it needs to be collected!” But the problem as I see it is that when we as the player are forced into acting in a specific way like this (or face compromising the narrative integrity) then we are dominated by ‘the story’ and must obey it – even if it that ‘story’ makes for a really, really boring narrative! (Who after all really wants to read about a guy collecting 200-odd briefcases of diamonds? Where’s the story in that?)

Moving right along – Qurbani went to go meet Michelle at someplace called ‘lakeside’ which didn’t seem upon arrival to be in close proximity to any lakes. Taking a boat, I reached my stop (don’t worry – the soldier is just sleeping).

In the Safehouse, Michelle tells me to go and kill the king who’s gold the UFLL are after and to collect his signet ring so that the King’s son can skip the country and get access to the swiss bank accounts. I decide to take a slightly subtle approach to the fort where the king is hiding and slink up under the cover of darkness. I scout some snipers on the ramparts and take them out first, continuing my journey up to the fort along a track that brings my up to a back entrance to the fort.

On my way, I alert the guards and it’s on for young and old. Crouching at the corner of a wall, I wait for a soldier to appear, hearing his footsteps approaching. Even though I knew he was coming my reaction time was not quick enough to prevent him getting off a shotgun blast, the brunt of which slammed into the wall beside my head.

Inside the walls of the fort I made a dash for the tower in which the King was residing. Upon reaching him, I finished him off with a shot from my flare gun – leaving a trail of burnt corpses is becoming a bit of a trademark of mine.

I also noticed that he is a very fair skinned King compared to his son, a fact that I noticed when I gave his son the ring. Maybe his mother had a darker complexion? Or maybe he wasn’t really the king’s son! We may never know. I handed the ring over anyway.

Then it was time to go save Michelle and find the buried treasure. I took the sturdier of the two Jeeps the son-formerly-known-as-Prince left as a gift for me. I ended up parking it next to the hole down which I had to climb to reach the treasure to use as cover.

It came quite in handy and I had to revive Michelle after the fight. Tempting, so very, very tempting…

Back to Pala I went to start the second last mission for the UFLL, continuing my inexorably march to the scary part of the game where I would be without a buddy – the inter chapter section. For this mission, Greeves sent me into the jungle to blow up some pumps on a farm the APR were protecting so some multinational corporation could “mess with the ecosystem” as he put it.

When I caught up with Michelle, she sent me into a chemical plant and retrieve some super-defoliant. I started a lot of fires to get it.

I dropped the big canister off with Michelle at the airport – she had some harebrained scheme where she was going to spray the stuff all over the farm to deny the soldiers their cover. I couldn’t see how this could possibly work. I took a circuitous route from the airport in the south up to the farm in the central-east section of the map, stopping off to see this crashed Cesna 150.

I also had another minor car accident…

Followed by another…

I picked up some silenced weaponry at the armoury on the way and crept into the farm with a silenced MP5, Flare Gun and RPG. In hindsight, not exactly a super sensible load out but I wanted to try and destroy the pump from far, far away with an RPG. Unfortunately I had to get rather close to the pump before I landed a direct hit enough to disable it, just in time to hear Michelle’s light aircraft go flying overhead, defoliant streaming out the back.

I could practically taste the carcinogens and I wanted to hold my breath. The stuff must have been super-strong because it worked fast. As Michelle’s plane disappeared into the distance I heard the sound of far off anti-aircraft fire and hoped she was okay.

I quickly ran out of ammunition, my weapon load out coming back to bite me in the butt. I couldn’t find any loose on the ground even as the guards kept coming, so I swapped my MP5 for a rusty old Homeland shotgun (as you can see above). Thankfully, the thing was practically unstoppable.

Michelle called to let me know she had been shot down and that soldiers were closing in. I hurried to her and came upon her crashed plane first, with the sound of machine gun fire coming from a small depression to the south-west.

There looked to be just one soldier nearby and he had her in his sights. I fired a flare gun hoping to either distract him or perhaps score a lucky direct hit. I misjudged my aim and it bounced off the trunk of a fallen tree and landed in the grass, starting a fire perilously close to Michelle. I swapped to my grimy, mud-encrusted shotgun and prayed the slugs would fire. They did, and he went down.

Tired of being the Knight in Shining armour for the N-th time, I headed off to a safehouse for a nap.

That was Episode 4 of Permanent Death – thanks for sticking with it. I should mention that in the space between my last episode and this one another blogger has started a Perma-Death game and reached it’s conclusion. Elliott Richard’s tale can be read here. Also, if you somehow missed it, Far Cry 2’s lead creative director Clint Hocking wrote some lovely things about Permanent Death and you should absolutely go read it – that man is the future of gaming or I’ll eat my hat.

Permanent Death, Interstitial - Evolution of an Explosion

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 07:54:00 +0000

Permanent Death, Episode 3 - An Illustrated Guide To Explosions.

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Abraham) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:35:00 +0000

"Just keep staring mate and see what happens." - Soldier in Pala.

I went a little stir crazy after Episode 2 and decided to speed things up. So I did a bunch of missions and consequently blew a lot of stuff up. Here’s the first such explosion – a convoy of arms that was conveniently circling a bus station down south. I ran out of grenades and so I discovered that enough bullets will eventually stop a convoy in it’s tracks. Who woulda though it? When the engine died and started spewing thick black smoke I knew it was time to back off and it wasn't long before it blew sky high.

My second mission, to ambush another weapons convoy, went much smoother thanks in no small part to the liberal application of explosives. Here’s where I was camped in the bushes, with my jeep parked in the middle of the road, rigged and ready to blow.

But when my jeep exploded, rather than take the convoy with it, it just destroyed my means of transportation and left the target in tact! No way!

Some grenades soon relieved the driver and his payload of their atomic cohesion, prividing a much more acceptable level of destruction.

After that happy incident, I quickly made my way over to a cell phone tower and answered a call where the person on the other end was apparently the killer from the movie Scream. He wanted me to off some merc who just so happened to be standing in the middle of Pala’s cease fire zone. I chopped him a new face-hole and scampered for the border, soaking up my fair share of lead in the process. It was worth it though – 15 easy diamonds were all mine.

Later, after the heat had cooled I went in to see the APR boss. Apparently, thanks to me “APR is the shit now”. Alright mate, whatever you say.

His mission for me was to go and blow up a train carrying liquid petroleum or natural gas. I never found out which. Suffice to say, it went off with another acceptably large bang.

I went off on another mission, this time playing the field - the UFLL wanted me to blow up some compressor in a junkyard owned by the APR. On the way, I was harassed by this jeep – a perfect opportunity to try out my new RPG.

When I got to the junk yard I initially tried a stealth approach, using my silenced Makarov to take down lone guards. Once I left the cover of the long grass however, I was quickly spotted and chased by multiple soldiers from multiple directions. Having only my pistol, my trusty rifle and the aforementioned RPG, I alternated between emptying clips of my pistol into enemies and running to a safe distance to utilise my rifle’s scope. Beating a path to the middle of the junkyard, I finally put my RPG to a last final good use.

Back in Pala, a guard told me that the bosses were busy but that someone was being held captive at the old place used for cockfighting. I went there and rescued Flora Guillen.

Theoretically I could now take Michelle out of the picture, if I desired, but I hardly ever saw her anymore anyway since I was breezing through and ignoring her phone calls. I took another convoy ambush mission and this was the result.

Having unlocked a number of cool new weapons, I was still strapped for diamonds to actually buy them with, so I took another assassinate mission and, surprise, surprise; this guy was also hiding out in the middle of Pala. This time I would remember to pack my silenced Makarov.

Entering Pala it seemed quiet, there was one solitary guard on the whole street as I approached. It smelt like an ambush. It was also the dead of the night, so I brushed it off as merely being a naturally quiet night. I approached my target from behind, took aim… and square missed the mans head. He ran off, screaming into the night and a horde of soldiers poured into the streets. Cocky, I chased him down and unloaded a clip into his retreating form, only to expose myself to half-a-dozen soldiers. I rapidly retreated, finding my escape rapidly being cut off by yet more soldiers. It was going bad and fast. I was getting overwhelmed and I started getting distracted by the though that 'This was it'. I could be about to die. My faculties failed me and I collapsed, blood pooling the dirt.

Warren Clyde, was my saviour. He charged in, desert eagle and AK-47 blazing. He must have known I was going to pull something stupid, as he was obviously hanging around nearby. I’ll bet he came running as soon as the shooting started. How else can I explain away the almost divine timing that saw him turn up right at that very moment? A second later and it would have been lights out for Qurbani Singh.

Talking to him later in the safe house, I barely remembered the rest of the journey. Apparently he picked me up, dragged me out from the middle of Pala by himself and put me back on my feet at the jetty on the north-western side of town. He even covered my retreat as I got in a boat and puttered downstream to collapse on the camp bed of the nearest safe-house. When I asked him about it, thanking him profusely, he simply gave me a thumbs up and said “Don’t mention it, man”.

But then I told him some bad news – my malaria condition was getting worse and I was all out of pills. I needed to see the priest back in town and get him to fix me up. I won’t soon forget the look Warren gave me as I walked out the door. He wanted to say something, but he held his tongue. Perhaps that itself took more bravery.

The Priest was actually out of pills (again!) but he knew of a family that had some and sent me to courier them some fake passports so they could skip the country. That was fine by me – as far as I’m concerned, the less civilians around the better. I started a fire outside the house the civvies were hiding in to flush out the nearby troops. Looked like I arrived just in time too.

After handing over the passports, I stumped off to a nearby cell phone tower to try and get some reception. Another call, another target. I deicided to play it smart and try and take the guy out from a distance. He was hiding in the shanty town of Mokuba (you will remember it from Episode 2) so how hard could it be to hit him in there? Turns out; rather hard, and I had to abandon my vantage point to get close enough to score a kill. In a surreal turn of events, I scored the killing blow with my newest favourite toy – the flare pistol. The man catches fire as the burning flare thuds into his chest and he falls to the ground, expired.

The flare goes off, sending my target into the next life with a fitting bang.

Speaking of bangs – I heard recently that my good friend from another life, Andre Hyppolite, was recently killed in the bush out here. I set out to track him down, taking the bus to the South Eastern bus depot. His last known whereabouts were near a guard post and under the cover of darkness I approached. I drew my grenade launcher and took out the first two guards in one explosion. Another jeep roared up and I switched to my rifle to dispatch both the gunner and driver in quick succession. One last guard was done away with and my revenge for Andre was all but complete.

Climbing atop a rocky outcropping behind the guardpost, I surveyed the scene. To my delight, I spotted it. The very same jeep that reports say claimed Andre’s life. I took aim and blew that bastard away. It was a small and perhaps petty memorial - a strange choice of method to mark the passing of a life. Maybe it is a little perverse to declare that one person’s death is meaningful in the face of so many nameless, faceless others, but it meant something to me, however little.

That was Episode 3 of Permanent Death. Thanks for reading and if you too are playing along at home, feel free to keep us updated on how you’re going.

Just so there’s no confusion, my co-experimenter Nels Anderson’s in-game character died this week. He said to me via twitter, “I got kinda punked”. I hate to say this Nels, but Andre knew what he was getting into when he chose this life, and so did you. There is no getting punked, in Permanent Death - only Life and the promise of a swift end.