Tired of posterous' cumbersome nature, I decided to move to a more manageable blog host. Go here: http://voorface.wordpress.com/.

I'll still use this place for little things, or as a Stasi-like dossier on all my activities, but the main action will be on wordpress from now on.

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A while ago I made fun of a Kindle for looking like a clipboard and said they would never catch on. Even though Kindles (and most other E-books and iPads too) still look like space clipboards, I think I was wrong to dismiss them out of hand. After reading an article by the literary agent Nathan Bransford on the Huffington Post, warning against the knee-jerk scepticism that treated the arrival of the E-book reader, I thought about it for about five minutes and came up with what I think will be the rough life story of the device:

1. (Right now) Raised eyebrows and not-quite-sure acceptance coupled with derision.
2. (Six months later) Mostly considered acceptable, much embracing of new technology, a few breathlessly overstated predictions. Naysayers still grumble, but less forcefully.
3. (Undefined time later) Becomes so acceptable that it is invisible. Old technology (books) have not been totally replaced, of course, because there are a lot of books around already and it would be senseless to get rid of them. Printed-paper books are still produced, but fewer than before. New ways of presenting texts have been discovered, new authors who specialise in writing E-books become popular and create new genres and reach new milestones etc.
4. (Undefined time a bit later than that) It becomes painfully obvious (and is impossible to ignore in the way we are now) that the people of wealthy nations are wasting  an extreme amount of energy on frivolous gadgets that need to be recharged every few hours or constantly left on stand-by. E-books become unpopular along with other, similar gadgets. At this point, either E-books that don’t waste energy are produced or paper books are found to waste less energy. Which ever one wins the energy-saving competition becomes dominant.

I don’t think that, right now, it’s at all obvious which technology will, in the future, take less energy to create and run. Right now, I can only assume, despite requiring trees to be cut down, paper books win. But the technological development of gadgets like the E-book is so rapid that who knows what they will be like 10, 20, 30 years down the road.

There are other issues with electronic book readers, of course. Most worryingly, the ability for 3^rd parties to change texts after the point of sale, or to even get rid of them completely. Also, regarding energy, we have problems with energy right now and it’s not a problem that’s going to go away. The only way electronic goods manufacturers will make their products energy efficient is if they are forced to do so. It’s not good enough for consumers to just tell them they have to because they will just lie to us.

 Another problem would be that if all text is distributed electronically, then the only way authors will get paid is if there is an authoritarian regime of control. That, or state subsidised culture. I’ll end it there before I propose enough future outcomes for my own sci-fi series.

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There was an article in the Guardian’s smug section yesterday where the journalist said he didn’t like videogames and had only ever played one videogame in his life (and would actually prefer to read Martin Amis; a damning indictment, indeed). Then he decided that he did like videogames because the history of videogames is like that of cinema’s and indie games exist now so therefore we are at an interesting moment and videogames are worth playing.

I assume that anyone reading this is familiar – and by now tired – with this argument. The idea that “videogames = cinema” has been widely discredited and I’m glad that people aren’t talking as much about Citizen Kane as they were six months ago. I think most people are aware that the medium is the message and one can’t just plonk the history of one media onto the other and expect it to make sense. But even though the history of videogames is completely different to the history of cinema, not to mention the differences between what cinema and videogames can do, I do think there are some interesting parallels to be made, some comparisons that show what videogames don’t do or do best.

Comparing videogames to cinema is usually done to ligitimise the former. Of course, this is a waste of time. Cinema was considered both an exciting opportunity for new artistic endeavours and a coarse corrupter of society from the very beginning. The moment something has complete social acceptance is the moment no one cares.

So, briefly, let’s look at the history of these two media. Films, we know, started off silent and were a lot shorter. After a few experiments, the first things to be filmed tended either to be plays or technological advancements like the steam train. In a way, this period can be put in parallel to videogames. The first videogames were often simple simulations of tennis or versions of board games like draughts. So the new technology is used to simulate what is already being done elsewhere. When silent films make way for talkies is where, I think, the comparison between film and videogames begins to fall apart. I want to stay with silent films for a bit and look at why this happens.

 The most obvious correlation between the two media in their early periods was that they were both “silent”. Silent from human voices, that is. Silent films would most often be shown in a cinema that had a live orchestra playing along and early videogames didn’t have the processing power to mimic the human voice. Mario’s Italian accent, for example, wasn’t featured in a game until Super Mario 64. [1] During the silent era of cinema, and for most of videogame history until the Playstation, actions had to speak louder than words (except when words – real text – were used, of course. You see how quickly these comparisons become muddled). Look at the youtube video above. Buster Keaton and Mario jumping around. The similarities are obvious. The fun of watching/playing comes from the movement of the actor/player character through the environment. There is a key difference, though. In movie action sequences the audience wants the character to die and are pleased when he doesn’t. The possibility of the character dying is exciting. Deep down, it’s what they want to see happen and it rarely does. In videogames the most frustrating thing in the world can be your character dying. It’s the last thing you want to happen and it happens often.

Despite this key difference an action sequence like from a Buster Keaton silent film has something in common with a Mario game that it doesn’t have in common with a “talkie” movie. To explain this I have to offer you my pet theory. People, when talking about movies or videogames or whatever, often evoke dreams as a comparison, a metaphor. Hollywood is the “dream factory”, after all. I think there is an analogy to be made between entertainment media and dreams, but I’m not sure that it’s appropriate for movies. Firstly, let me repeat what I said earlier, that “the medium is the message”. Ultimately films are about films, fiction is about fiction and videogames are about videogames. They’re about other things too, of course, but mainly they are about all the things they could have done, but didn’t do, in their medium. People say “that’s great cinema” or “this is great music” or “this is just bad poetry” or “this is a bad videogame”.

That doesn’t mean we can’t say that one medium reminds us of dreams. Of course we can. We can say it reminds us of oranges if it does. But movies are, to me, more like false memories than dreams.

Memory is a notoriously inaccurate record of events. It is not static. It is constantly changing and is very unreliable. Every time you access a memory you change it. It’s a living thing. That doesn’t sound very much like a movie, does it? Nevertheless I think movies are like memory. In videogames the audience is a player who controls movement in some way. It can be as minor as clicking a “next” button, but the point is it is up to the player when to click “next”. In a movie, the “player” is onscreen and the audience watches passively. In a dream the dreamer sees things from her own eyes and can often control what is happening. If she doesn’t like something in the dream she may try to “run away”. With memory, even if the memory is inaccurate, there is one “true” version of events. Even if we are unsure, we try to come to a decision about what exactly happened. This is how false memories are created. We are compelled to make a decision and in doing so we create something new and - compared to the reality we experienced – something inaccurate. Movies are as static as we want our memories to be. Many people tend to get very annoyed – irrationally annoyed – if a movie turns out to be all “just a dream” or if the version of events a movie presents to them is deliberately unreliable.

Another thing about memory is that we often remember ourselves in the third person. We don’t tend to see our memories through our own eyes. In a dream both points of view can occur and more often than not we do see things in a dream as if we were seeing them right now. Movie audiences very often identify with the protagonist, who is almost always shown in the third person. The reason why I say that films are like false memories, rather than just memories is because of tense. Movies are always in the present tense. Memories are usually in the past tense, “I did this” or “Then that happened”. To use an extreme example of the creation of a false memory, think about someone in therapy being coerced into accessing a “past life”. They might say something like “I’m in an opulent throne room and I’m wearing beautiful clothes. I’m the Queen of Sheba and I’m very important”. No, you’re not. But the point is that it’s in the present tense. They “remember” it like a movie.

This is why films aren’t like dreams. Dreams often mutate, they can change at any moment and can be changed by the dreamer. They feel like they are really happening. Everything becomes more important when it is happening to you.

But isn’t that how people describe watching a film? That they forget their surroundings and feel like they are in the movie? The reason why it’s exciting when Neo jumps an impossible distance isn’t just because you’re right there with him, it’s because you are him. Of course, you don’t truly believe you are him, just like you never truly forget that you are in a cinema or sitting on your sofa, but, if you can suspend your disbelief, it does feel like it. But wait a moment. If you are him, then why can’t you control him? I think perhaps it is more accurate to say that you were him. The events have happened, they are unchangeable, but you are remembering them for the first time. [2] This is the paradox of cinema.

How does this apply to my comparison between silent films and early videogames? [3] Well, remember that I said that silent films have something in common with “silent” videogames that they don’t with “talkies”? I think this is because silent films are, although still like memories, more like dreams than (non-silent) movies are. Without the human voice, and when words are only captions, the present tense of films becomes heightened, movement is fore grounded and events become dream-like. That videogames need a player makes them very much like dreams and completely different from (non-silent) movies. In this sense silent films exist somewhere between videogames and (non-silent) movies. They are “set in stone” like memory, but the role of the audience as the “player” is more pronounced. Movies right now – especially Hollywood movies – are all about the plot. [4] The plot is considered so important that any possible enjoyment of the film will be spoiled if any details of the plot are known by the viewer before seeing the movie. This doesn’t say very much about the quality of Hollywood cinema if the pleasure of watching can be so easily destroyed by such a tiny thing. It seems that people think that if you get rid of the surprise then there’s nothing left. [5] Silent films are, on the other hand, mostly about action; a certain type of action that demands audience participation. The audience have to invent much of the plot - or, rather, fill in the blanks - themselves. There are many films post the silent era that allow room in the plot for the audience to move, but it is becoming less and less popular, especially in Hollywood [6]. Filmmakers that understand that cinema is like memory – like Alain Robbe-Grillet or Jean Rollin – allow for ambiguities in the plot and demand the audience become involved in the creation of the film. They recognise that a film without an audience is nothing and they make it possible for the audience to become more like a participant rather than a passive viewer.

Silent films treat the audience more like a player than later cinema does. This probably isn’t surprising, as much of later cinema didn’t – doesn’t – take place in the cinema. Films used to be shown exclusively to groups of people watching together and they would cheer, boo at or laugh along with the action onscreen, behaviour that is actively discouraged at most cinemas today. The change in audience participation with movies is, strangely, most obvious in the films that were made during the transition from silent to talkie. Think about a Marx bros. film. There are those big silences after gags that make the film seem half asleep. But that’s because you’re watching it on your own. They were designed to be seen by a cinema audience, an audience that would fill the gaps with laughter.

The potential for letting the audience fill in the gaps (whether the gaps in the plot or the gaps after jokes) in films is why I say they are like false memories. Memory and dreams are both creative acts, it’s just that memory doesn’t feel creative. Cinema loses out to videogames when it forgets that an audience can be a player, that the audience’s imagination can be the most important storytelling tool. This difference between the two media - that one is like memory and the other is like a dream - is one of the many, many reasons that definitive comparisons between the two can be so futile. Saying, like Jacques Peretti does in the Guardian article I mentioned at the beginning, that videogames are in their “John Cassavetes period”, is meaningless. You may as well say that videogames are in their Kevin Keegan period. It’s a tortured metaphor that doesn’t help us better understand either media. What we need is an understanding of how different the history and application of videogames is to that of other media like films. What I think we would need to acknowledge is that the category “videogames” is far too large to make any meaningful generalisations and that making smaller subcategories only compounds the problem. Six months ago I told you that I couldn’t care less if videogames are considered art. In an upcoming post I will lay out why that term is unhelpful when used to describe videogames particularly.

[1] Well, actually Mario had a voice in an educational game before Super Mario 64. But I don’t care.

[2] Or for the 100^th time. Remembering isn’t “spoiled” by knowing the outcome of events.

[3] Earlier. Broadly speaking I mean pre-fifth generation.

[4] A rather large generalisation, I know, but who would deny it?

[5] Of course, people complain about “spoilers” for videogames too now, but I think this is just a meme that will – hopefully – go away.

[6] A bi-product of this is the growing length of all Hollywood films, even popcorn blockbusters. Look at the marathon length of one of the most popular films right now, Avatar. It feels it needs to explain everything, but why? We’re used, in the post-modern era, to treating everything as appropriate for critical analysis. And it’s true; nothing is “unworthy” of analysis. Even dumb films like Avatar have a “deeper meaning”, of course they do. Avatar, in fact, is designed to have one. It’s just that the deeper meaning isn’t very deep.

The videos in this post are from a series called  Between Silent Film and New Media by Manuel Garin. In August, after I did my first post here, I intended to do a post focused solely on these videos, but it fell by the wayside. To see the rest, visit: http://www.gameplaygag.com/

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The BBC's strategic principles

my response: These principles, to me, smack of middle-management jargon. They verge on meaningless PR-speak. For example, the phrase  "being efficient and offering better value for money" could be copied into any proposal in any business in the UK or, to be more precise, the US. The BBC can't offer "better value for money" because it is not selling a product, it is providing a service. If "being efficient" means what it has meant before, ie cost-cutting at the expense of quality, then I don't think it is the right thing for the BBC to do at all. Unless, that is, the BBC wants to undermine what makes it valueable.

Should the BBC have any other strategic principles?

my response: Yes, stop listening to the populist press that wants to destroy you.

Proposed principle: Putting Quality First

my response: Less marketisation, less middle-management bureaurocracy, more trust in programme makers and audience.

Offering you something special

Proposed principle: Making the licence fee work harder

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List of films that most frequently use the word "fuck"

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Doesn't this video of a man negotiating this perilous gorge path look like it could be from an episode in Half Life 2?
http://www.wimp.com/scariestpath/

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There was supposed to be more posts between this one and the previous two, but my hard drive died a painful death and I was in mourning. I will most likely rewrite some of the posts I lost before entering them here, but until then I thought I’d share this picture:

Is that what a Kindle looks like? Really?! Haha! Do people really think holding this glorified clipboard is the hip new thing? Explain to me how this is a “portable” device? Does it have arm straps?

I’ve never been interested in reading books off of an electronic device and haven’t allowed myself to be caught up in any of the marketing hype surround the Kindle and other devices, so reading the Guardian article that this photo is from is my first experience of seeing someone read from such a machine. My main reason for ambivalence is simple. I already read enough text off of a back-lit screen and it hurts my eyes. Reading off of a computer screen is like staring into a light - what am I saying? - it is staring into a light. After a while it becomes uncomfortable and I find I read quicker and less attentively off of a back lit screen than I do off of paper. Errors that I don’t notice when reading a screen become very obvious when the text is printed out. Also, the Kindle and similar devices seem to exist only as attempts to copy already existing book technology. If the technology already exists, and is a lot cheaper, then what’s the point? The idea of reading books off of a screen isn’t really appealing to me, let alone exchanging a small, pocket-sized paperback with something the size of a bathroom mirror. That ebooks provide unscrupulous creeps like Amazon the opportunity to class buying a book electronically not as ownership of a book, but as a licence to read it, and deny the owner – excuse me, licensor – the rights available even under out-of-date copyright laws.

So, to make sure I understand this, not only is Kindle an inferior piece of technology compared to a paper book, but the people who pay money to read books on these expensive machines have none of the rights that people buying the same content in book form do. To make it any more unattractive they would have to get rid of any of the joys of book cover design and make it some ugly, nondescript colour like, I don’t know, grey. Oh.

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As movies and videogames continue to assimilate each other it’s becoming common to see the Hollywood concept of “movitation” embedded into player characters. In a way, of course, it has always been there. Mario (then called Jumpman) is after Donkey Kong because the ape kidnapped his lover, Princess Peach (then called Lady). That relationship and the motivation it contains was of course inspired by King Kong and Popeye, but it is simple enough not to be intrusive; it is there to set the scene. Compare that with Gears of War 2. This is a very simple game. Shoot badguys, chainsaw badguys, stamp on badguy’s face. The badguys are an alien race and the goodguys are enormous humans. So the motivation is obvious; save humanity. Fine. But then, perhaps because it is a sequal, an extra level of emotional motivation is deemed neccessary.  Now the supporting NPC (or player 2 in co-op) needs to be looking for his wife. This Not Without My Anus motivation is a familiar one in Hollywood and it is just as mawkishly executed in Gears 2. Gears of War is a big-dumb-fun game, so why do the big-dumb heroes need to be on an emotional quest (“It’s my wife, man!”) to provide this asinine level of motivation to a flimsy, but functional, plot? The saving grace of these profoundly stupid and obnoxiously macho videogames is that they are simple and simply fun. Adding the melodrama just makes the player unable to suspend her intelligence, makes the player ask herself, incredulously, “Am I supposed to care?”. It all climaxes in a crass spectacle involving the discovery of the NPC’s half-dead wife and her euthenasia at the hands of her husband.

Perhaps you were expecting a “spoiler” warning to go before that plot reveal. But the plot line is the spoiler. It spoils an enjoyably dumb game by adding an extra layer of dumbness that really makes it too much. The player already has to deal with the machismo, the hideous mud and gray wash of the graphics, the durr-brain fanbase and the usual xenophobic baggage that comes with all wargames. I would never bother with a Hollywood film of this sort, but I can suspend my ambivilance for a game if it is fun. My feeling with Gears of War 2 is: I’m already playing a stupid game, I don’t want to be forced to watch a stupid movie at the same time.

So when does a plot device stop being a tool and starts to take over? I could cope with the warring armies/save humanity plot device, so why can’t I stomach the passionate mission to save a loved one? I think it’s because it doesn’t ring true and insults the player’s intelligence. Why does a killing machine need to be driven, or excused, by such mawkish emotion? It sounds like a joke.

Watch the trailer above for the game Shadow Complex, made by the same company behind the Gears games. It looks like a parody, doesn’t it? The protagonist starts off anti-violence, railing against his father (who else?), who replies - echoing Alexander Haig’s justification for interventionist war - “Some day you’re gonna find something worth fighting for”. Of course, “fighting” means killing, and the moment after the protagonist watches, shocked, footage of his wife beaten and abducted by a soldier, we see him firing an enormous chaingun and blowing shit up.

Games work well when they use plot as a componant, a scene. To use videogame programming language, plot is like a sprite over an object; a representation of player movement. Just look at Resident Evil. The plots in these games are pretty dumb and are deliberately built on B-movie genre conventions. That’s why they work. They provide a structure to hang the game on, to provide an area to provoke a response from the player, in this case fear. Movies do this as well, it’s why genre work can be successful, but games do it better because they require more involvement from the viewer, making her a player. This involvement means the Hollywood tactic of beating the viewer over the head with a message or emotional response is not necessary.  

Hollywood is a cultural dead-end. Games that waste their time following Hollywood’s strict and lonely path will find themselves chasing a ghost. Worse, they will be dull.

Halloween is a famous example of a small budget film making a huge impact on American cinema, becoming a big success and creating a horor sub-genre; the slasher. In the film, a pitiless, inhuman antagonist attacks various teens for apparently no reason. All we know about him is that as a child he killed his babysitter, was sent to an institution, and Laurie Strode - the main character – is the sister of his first victim. He is simply the idea of fear made real and that is why the film is effective. Halloween was remade a couple of years ago by Rob Zombie. This remake is why I’m bringing Halloween up. The Zombie version doubled the length of the original, adding a long prologue on the antagonist’s life before becoming a serial killer, giving him a big, cumbersome motivation for being a murderer. Needless to say, Zombie’s remake flops at horror and explains away anything powerful about the idea of Michael Myers the monolithic, inhuman killer. Film and game plots should be about ideas and images, not vehicles for pop-psychology. These simplistic explanations for behavior have nothing to do with how humans really act and are insulting to audiences. Let the players meet characters half way without banging their heads against clunky backstory. The answer to “What’s my motivation?” is "Don't be so sure anyone gives a toss”.

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Videogames are outselling movies and have been for a while. With Nintendo’s marketing of the Wii and the DS, videogames are now considered, despite spurious controversies over violence, a universal form of entertainment. Now that videogames are more popular and more lucrative than their entertainment competitors, there is even more demand for videogames to be thought of - like film, painting, sculpture, music – as Art.

Why do gamers want videogames to be called Art? Videogames as we understand them today are around 40 years old. Films are over a hundred. Art was invented in the 18^th century. If we look at the timeline of film, we can see that it went from a novelty, to crass entertainment, to being explored as a form of Art in no time at all. It is cinema history that people have in mind when they talk about videogames as Art. Music doesn’t have the same trajectory. It starts being considered as Art at the invention of Art. This music is classical music. Folk music doesn’t count because it is the music of the lower classes. Pop and jazz had the same position in the 20^th century. Too popular, too poor; not Art. We now consider pop music and jazz to be Art. Well, some of it. The Beatles are called Art, Miles Davis is called Art. Is Britney Spears Art? No, probably not. Not unless an artist uses her image to make Art, like Andy Warhol did to Marilyn Monroe. This has already happened to videogames in the art world, where videogames are used as a medium by people like Cory Arcangel, so aren’t videogames already Art? No. The definition of Art is what ever the artist calls Art equals Art. This is not a new idea. In fact, it is older than videogames. What gamers want is Citizen Kane. They want popular prestige. They have a romantic view of Art that is stuck in the 19^th century. Art as a higher calling. Art as the fullest expression of life. They want videogames to be entered into the pantheon.

But why do they want this? If they really knew what Art was, would they want videogames to be Art? Do they want the inflated prices and exclusivity of the Art market? I doubt it. They think that Art doesn’t have to be about that, that it’s not just about the market. They’re wrong. Art is inseparable from the market because it was created for the market. Before the invention of Art, the cultural activities that are now associated with it – painting, sculpture etc – were not considered separate from what is now called “crafts”; pottery, embroidery etc. The creation of Art made painting and sculpture special. Objects made more valuable merely because they were created by a “genius”. A replacement of religion reserved for the ruling classes. Art still, give or take, occupies that position today. Despite many museums and galleries being free and open to the public, the attendence is still predominantly middle class. The only people who can afford to buy Art are rich.

Even though videogames and the computers that play them are expensive, they are no where near as expensive as works of Art. Again we see the affinity with film. Hollywood blockbusters cost obscene amounts of money and the big videogame developers are catching them up in terms of budget, but the end product is (while being overpriced) affordable*. Although videogames have become more populist since the Wii, it is still a mostly middle class world. Indie games, by being cheaper or even free, broaden things, but of course are still limited to the most privileged group of the world; those than can afford computers.

There are some ways that the Art world is similar to the videogame industry. Both are largely misunderstood by the general public and both have been the subject of tabloid trolling. Unlike Hollywood, the Art and videogame businesses have been – and still sometimes are – incorrectly described as “recession-proof”.

Despite this, the videogame industry is in much the same position as the film industry. High profile films and games are expensive to make and are easily pirated. There are games that are as formulaic and trite as any Hollywood blockbuster and there are games as self indulgent and obtuse as any arty flick.

Being in an industry similar in structure to the movie industry, gamers feel that videogames should be treated with the same respect that “classic” films are. This is what they mean by “art”. They are using the term “art” to loosely refer to artistic practices, as in the old, pre-capitalist sense of the word, but they’re keeping the silly ideas about importance, prestige and genius that exist in the modern definition of Art. The problem is the concept of genius is as stupid as the concept of Art as a higher calling. Gamers should avoid making the mistakes of aficionados of other media, pushing pop music/jazz/film/etc into “art” and finding it an empty room.

Look at comics. In the past, comics were demonised in the exact same way as videogames are now. Called juvenile, a waste of time and potential and accused of corrupting people the ruling classes consider inferior like the working class or children. In the 80’s a number of comic artists wanted to change that reputation. The comic that represents that effort is Watchmen. This comic was an attempt to make people realize that comics can be “art” and “art” in this instance means “Citizen Kane”. It wanted to show that comics aren’t limited to being only about “kid’s stuff”. What it spawned was less sophisticated. Instead of making people open to the idea that comics can be limitless in their potential for expression, it ended up being the daddy to a load of copycats, each more goonishly “grim” and “dark” than the last.

It’s obvious that gamers don’t mean “Art” when they say they want videogames to be treated as Art. But the other, wishy-washy definition is no better. Thankfully, videogames will never be Art. They’re just too popular. I don’t doubt that videogames will continue to be used as media in Art works, but just as comics are not Art, just as anything that is not called Art by an artist is not Art, so videogames will remain not-Art.

Videogames reaching for the Serious Business prestige of Citizen Kane is more worrying. Have you seen that film? Did you think it was that great? Did you wonder why it is constantly described by such a large amount of people as “the best film of all time”? The reason it has so much prestige is because it was crowned king and the king is unquestionable. Needless to say, this kind of attitude does not encourage creativity. The canon selection is arbitrary and not a good judge of quality. Surely F For Fake is a better film than Citizen Kane? But that’s the point. With canons, it is not up for discussion. The winners are decided from on high by our cultural leaders and we must accept their superiority. The prestige that gamers want for videogames comes with this stifling attitude. Better let the canonisers believe that videogames are beneath them and leave the rest of us to enjoy their creativity and potential.

*That is, affordable to middle class people.

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