Dreams of Falling

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.

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

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.

Three Month Giant Gonzo S/Mashup

An SLRC Update:

For those actually worried by my April fools post, I haven’t left videogame blogging to pursue a career as a writer for Garden Gnomes – I’ve just been busy with an exciting secret project which, in a few days I’ll hopefully reveal a bit more about. Until then, I decided that in the finest tradition of Gonzo Journalism’s slap-dash and often ‘straight from the tape’ aesthetic I would cannibalize all of my half-finished and pre-maturely aborted gonzo articles into One Giant S/Mashup piece and mix it all together with some other random words and pieces of text I accrued along the way. It is as follows, with minimal edits from the originals. Warning: Your Mileage May Seriously Vary.

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January 1^st:

It’s seems like an extremely Thompson-esque thing to do, starting a blog post after being up for two days. New Years was last night, and more than a few drinks were had by all – our psych-out, early river-side fake-out countdowns are probably famous to anyone out on the water last night for a cruise. So now, I’m going to start my next Gonzo project – I’m going to play some games in a state of high exhaustion and blog about it. But first, I have to make sure my animal charges haven’t died overnight. You just never know with New Year’s.

Note: I think I either played some Far Cry 2 or went to sleep instead.

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Early-Mid January - ‘Offline Live blogging/Gonzo Playing Gears of War’. Following is a running commentary for approximately the first half of the game and is closely related to my epic tweet-powered GoW2 marathon which seemed to draw quite a crowd at the time:

• "Tip: to curbstomp an enemy: Press X"
• Who is this motherly narrator figure and WHAT IS SHE DOING IN MY GoW?!!?!
• Woah. Wimminz in my Gears of War 2. WHAT IS THIS?! (/irony FYI)
• Yes, put the story inside the game. Not in custcenes. Thanks @cliffyb
• Awww, Dom is so upset. I can tell because he is angry. Grrr!
• Uh oh... Title screen in 2nd act. Damn, it's another Holywood trick in a game. LLLAME
• Seriously, I'm not even watching these cutscenes they are so crap
• Oh man, you give me back control for 20 seconds, its all talk, and then hit me with ANOTHER cutscene? What is WITH this game?!
• Into the second level – A turret mission: being killed was the calmest part of the level. Tank just cruised on over the edge… reminded me of certain scripted things from FC2…
• Underground level. Guy we rescue (Carmine) I thought was dead, as I was standing over his body. In an attempt to pick him up/interact DID A BARREL ROLL over his body! D= Not what I meant to do and totally broke sentiment of the moment.
• With no sound on GoW2 becomes an ironic satire of videogames.
• Examples: “King Raven and Delta Six are KIA” over a scene of burning rubble. My response: “Oh are they? Oh well. LOL”
• Examples: Coletrain’s American Football move-filled entrance. “Nobody plays this game better than me!” LOOK SEE! It’s aware that it’s a videogame! (Lets just pretend that it’s post-modernistically self-aware)
• Example: The Locust reaching for a grenade planted on his back takes on Marx brothers visual humour that had me laughing out loud.
• Example: Fenix “Where’s your squad”. Cole “Here’s my squad LOL” (Dangles some bling – actually COG tags) (Unsaid: Cole is the ONLY squad Cole needs!)
• My wounded limping towards Dom, without sound, highlighted the weirdness of it. I’m gimping along
• “I can’t believe they did that to Tai… he… he survives everything doesn’t he?” – (This is GoW teaching us that people really die… *cough*Far Cry 2 did it better, a LOT better*cough*. See Hocking’s Masterpiece)
• “You hear that? Could that be a heartbeat?” IUNNO LOL, no sound!
• Wow, a malfunctioning AI. How original… >_>
• When you die, you don’t get told “You are dead. Game over” it’s “Objective Failed”. Oh, so if I could complete the objective while dead that’s fine? I guess that could be construed as saying something about the disposability of the soldiers in GoW2… but somehow I doubt that it was intentional…
• I got a 5sec video showing me how I died… being swept away. I swear I thought it was going to be another intentional thing & cutscene.
• Wow, flamethrower AI can be DUMB. Shoot me from 100m away? Yeah… good luck!
• “There are no greater warriors anywhere!” – The Queen. “We’ll see about that Bitch.” – Marcus or Dom.

Fuck. This. Shit - Gears of War 2 is not a game for me. I like games that don’t make me feel like I’m losing brain cells as I play. I like games that aspire to some level of moral, ethical or – hell – I’d even take mental engagement with the player over the brain-dead way that GoW2 hits the player over the head with story. Hey dummie! This story is important, so we’re going to make you listen to it, says the game. I like games that say something, and say it well.

I subscribe to the belief that ‘everything about you says something about you’ and that this applies to both people and videogames. So even if a game like Gears2 largely doesn’t set out to make epic, meaningful statements about Life, The Universe and Everything, that does not preclude it from saying something anyway. Every product, every thought, every action by a person (and a game is a result of actions from people) is a result of a combination of different ways of viewing the world, different ideologies and beliefs.

…

I should add that I’m really only playing it because I have it. I’m playing out of convenience and because I am mind-killingly bored, at home alone and trying to pretend I’m not desperately waiting for someone to talk to me. I’m also trying not to think about what the Sydney Morning Herald described the other day as their prediction of a massive increase in the number of out of work young job seekers. Hint: That’d be me.

Another reason Gears of War 2 isn’t for me is that I’m not the kind of person that likes cussing. It’s not classy and I don’t pull it off very well, so I generally steer clear. I’m not CliffyB’s target audience – I’m not HARDCORE enough… or am I? Michael Abbott described me on the holiday confab podcast as “a bit of a harcore gamer”. Oh really? Well, if I’m so hardcore, then I can beat Gears2 in one evening, right? RIGHT? This is the tale of what happened when I tried and the lessons I learned along the way.

And I’m beating it by accident. A lot of things are inconceivably over-the top or inexplicably contrived. “It’s bulletproof for a reason!” is followed shortly by the window being shot open. The spiritual dimension should not be missed too – “everything happens for a reason” says a COG soldier. Yeah, because some idiot scripted it with the intention of MOAR BANGS = MOAR AWESOME! The game only has one speed – FASTER and if I thought the music of Spore was a bit one note, GoW2’s is even more.

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Mid-Late January:

The best thing about Gonzo is that it’s unexpected. Like the Spanish inquisition, it thrives on the everyday turning into Monty Python’s Flying Circus or going belly up like a bloated fish floating upside down in a fish tank. Example; my last Gonzo piece – who would have thought that missing a train and spending 54 minutes waiting in the cool midnight air would be so conducive to good gonzo?

After the aforementioned post, which started me in a direction towards one of a few games (Bioshock, Spore, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, or Fallout 3), it was maybe a little inevitable that I wouldn’t even play any of those games at all in the time between then and now. Which is true with the exception of Spore – I haven’t touched them – but I went so far as to bring them all down to the Xbox in the living room to play in the two weeks I had the house to myself from late December to early Januay.

But it’s hard to get motivated to repeat an experience, even a good one, when it comes to a media experience like a movie or a game. I have a tendency to go rifling through the filing cabinets of my memory mentally searching through the list of previously fun activities I have at hand when stimulated by boredom. I’ll get to the point of mental assent that the thing I’m thinking of doing/watching/playing is good and will be entertaining… but then I balk when I remember the number of times I’ve put something on only to lose interest because it’s something I’ve already experienced.

And I’ve done it again, blown my lead in on something irrelevant to what I want to talk about – Dynasty Warriors 6 (count ‘em!) for Xbox 360. It’s interesting that I keep doing that though because while HST flourished in his obscure tangents, with them being some of the best bits of his books (or the best bits of one of them anyway – “On the Campaign Trail in ‘72”) does tangential writing actively work against the blog format? That would be a bit sad if true.

Er… back to Dynasty Warriors! But before I get there, today I read a really thoughtful post by Kieron Gillen on Rock, Paper, Shotgun which was part eulogy for an ended television program and part manifesto against anger and an overly critical attitude in games writing. And it made me stop and think before I started writing this bit of the post, because originally I was going to criticize Dynasty Warriors 6 (I still can’t get over how many of them there are!) for a whole bunch of things like:

• Ridiculous voice acting.
• Ridiculous story-telling, plot and dialogue.
• Atrociously ‘period inappropriate’ music, and
• The occasional degenerate strategy or frustratingly unexplained mission objective.

But then I threw my hands up in the air and said “You know what, even though it doesn’t excuse the very real flaws, the bit of the game that matters most is still the original and still the best”. It’s like the idea that is Dynasty Warriors – fighting epic battles involving tens of thousands of soldiers and their commanders – is still just sheer brilliance and awesome. And the game is also a fantastic example of the case for iteration and sequels in videogame design. Just a few weeks before I received DW6 as birthday present (Note: A present from a fellow blogger no less! Thanks Dan!) I played the fifth iteration on Playstation 2 with a friend and while we enjoyed it immensely, I do not think I could go back.

It also tickles the same parts of my brain as WoW, in that a lot of it is an often repetitive but generally pleasurable grind. Unlocking characters has been a part of the game since the beginning and I’ve only completed one character’s story mode campaign.

In DW6 not all characters are created equal – my first character was Sima Yi who was an absolute dandy and a shoe-in for a topic in Denis at Vorpal Bunny Ranch’s Fanny Friday series.

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January/February: LBJeffries Asked for suggestions for “The Best pieces of New Games Writing from 2008” to which I was only too happy to oblige. I made them all into this list, and then some.

Planetside – The 1%

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Simmer

The Great War

My Name is Nico and I’m a law abider

Paul Ferenc’s Pistol

Frank Bilders is Dead

The Cliffsters Badass plan to fix New Games Journo

3-2-1 Action Half-Life

Alien Swarm The Longest 30 Yards

Fear and Longing in Paris

Replaying SWAT 4

The Joy of Coop

Towards an elitist critic future

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February:

BG&E Music Analysis:

· Hillyan suite (In Two halves)

o ¾ time sig

o Marimba

o Flute (ethnic flute?)

o African percussion

o Single violin

o String melody

· Second movement of Hyllian suite:

o Piano riff comes in replacing Marimba?

o Whispered words / vocal percussion

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February 12^th:

An Audiosurf quote from ‘2008 and The Indie Renaissance’:

“When Audiosurf-creator Dylan Fitterer climbed up on stage to receive his award, he was already hurtling towards riches. His audio-visualiser game hybrid was to be the top seller on Steam that month, even out-selling Valve's own recently released titles. In the same month Fitterer had been exulted by his gathered peers in San Francisco, and found financial security in a game he'd made with just a bit of help from friends. It was a fine achievement for any programmer: to have made a popular independent game, and have received a money hat too.” – Jim Rossignol

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February 24^th – Note: I obviously never bothered to finish the list:

Why does Audiosurf have block collection sound effects?

Aren’t the blocks supposed to represent the music?

• Ten Best Dance Remixes I know for Audiosurf
• The 2x FRANKMUSIK remixes

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Early March:

I’m a fan of violence – when it serves a purpose.

I’m a fan of violence when it’s presented in a way that doesn’t cheapen the act, or glorify it by over stylizing it.

- The watchmen & violence

- Far Cry 2 and violence

- Violence when grounded: when it takes a moment to let you think about what’s just happened, what you’ve just done.

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March 7th: In a document called 'Taxonomy of Videogame Posts.doc':

Every video game blog post ever written:

• The Review
• The Half-Baked theory (probably reading too much into XYZ game or game aspect)
• Something about storytelling in games – (are they, can they, how, etc)
• Are games art (LOL!)

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March 16^th: In a word document called ‘Why do we want to say what is and isn’t a game.doc’

• Excluding games (i.e. flower, Spore, the Wii, etc as ‘toys’ rather than games)
• Meaningless definitions and distinctions?
• Including all things as games: inclusive is the alternative I guess, but is that useful? Is that going to end up diluting what we call games to the point of being un-usable/un-useful?

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Mid-Late March:

When going gets tough

Tough Spartans reach for weapon

Covenant defeat

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V.Late March

It’s probably a bad sign when you finish the first day of a new job and go home feeling depressed. It’s not the pay – although the pay is, to put it mildly, shithouse. It’s not even the fact that, after expenses, I end up with virtually nothing in my pocket to spend. The worst thing is the feeling it gives me, like I’ve given up on a chance at a better job. Like my potential, all my university training and developed skill, is going completely to waste. It’s a kick in the teeth to the dream that I can do what I love, do what I have dreamed of doing since as long as I can remember. It’s really hard to remember it’s temporary.

The other thing about this new job that sucks is that, working only weekends, it means that the only time my friends ever all get together is when I’m working. Okay, so I don’t finish too late to go join them after, but will I want to after a hard evening’s work?

Note: After bashing this out I got the hell over it and the following weekend hung out with my friends after work. Yay for happy endings!

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So in contrast to L.B. Jeffries output, which is largely consistently and consistently excellent, mine is erratic and strange. Never mind.

I hope this was at least mildly interesting for you - it feels a bit like self-archaeology. I've also got a whole series of posts brewing in the slow-cook pot about songs that really 'make the game', which could be a while off yet, but be sure it's coming. Thanks for sticking with me readers - I've got a job now (not a great one) so at least I have cash and my personal situation is a bit stabilised. The upside of my job being so mediocre is that I have all this free time still! One day I'll trade my hours for dollars as a 9-5 wage slave, but not just yet... Till next time!

Suddenly: GONZO

This post was entirely written on a mobile phone in the early hours of this morning then meticulously copied over to PC by hand.

§1

There are few places colder and sadder than Strathfield station at 12:30 in the morning. I’m listening to electronic music and plotting ways of killing a friend, out of some deep irrational, simmering hatred that finds its was to the surface after a vodka and red bull.

* a paragraph is missing here. It was accidentally deleted. I said something about being the whitest dude on the station, and explained that I was working on this post, writing on my Nokia phone to take my mind off my predicament. *

§2

Because I’m typing this on my phone, I just lost the last two paragraphs, but that’s ok. I’ll pretend they’re still in here and you can guess what was in there.

…So can a 3D space in a videogame ever be proper Gonzo?

§3

I’m tempted to think not, but only because I can’t see how a method of storytelling that relies so much on the reader trying to imagine the outlandish and the plainly ridiculous… (I failed to finish this sentence, the slow type speed broke my train of thought)

Could a narrative be told then in a game that is Gonzo in style? The best games clearly ‘show not tell’ their stories which would render the florid descriptions of scenes crafted to highlight the insane, pointless. Could we visually highlight the crazy, or must we rely imperfectly on a narrator?

§4

Oh man, Metronomy just came on my iPod and it stirs up a feeling of regret; i missed their concert just the other day because i didn’t have anyone to go with. (note: Spencer Greenwood was considering it) That’s partly why I’m pissed at my mate (note: not Spencer), because he wasn’t there to go with me to see them. But also it’s because of a girl (Shhh! Don’t tell!).

What makes a situation Gonzo worthy? L.B. Jeffries pointed out that it’s not the drugs that makes Gonzo, that was just what HST just used to get in the groove or the flow or something. The drug culture (freaks) however, and identifying with its ethos, was however and the clash of cultures was often the source of most of his anecdotes. Having the head political wizard of the McGovern campaign (note: Frank Mankiewicz) waiting for Thompson in the bushes outside his hotel to club him over the head in retribution for something Hunter had done was very much an invasionary possession of the poor fellow by some demon of drug-taking.

§5

Editing on a nokia phone isn’t easy so getting it right the first time is important. Thankfully it’s impossible to write faster than a few words per minute, so the pace of writing is in my favour at least. The train is also so empty by this time, being ten minutes good of 1am. That’s also ok, it’s just me and a sleeping old guy who has shifted in his sleep once the whole trip. I accidentally the whole trip. And the whole ticket collector, who checked my ticket in a lovely way, wishing me a lovely trip. There’s an ad campaign running at the moment “a lot goes into a forgettable trip”, and the slogan could be applied to game design. The unforgettable games are often the worst ones, or the worst experiences.

When I was a fair bit yo9unger I hired Playstation games based on what was supposed to be good. Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid, both, were atrocious for someone of my age, experience and skill. It didn’t make sense to me to run from zombies and hide from the guards at the bottom of the elevator. Games are bout killing and doing stuff, not running away and hiding, surely! A slight variation on the basic idea and we get ‘hiding’ as the main game verb, and just so with Gonzo – an injection of personality into reportage.

And in that same way, we get blogging on a phone – a slight variation on the theme and a product of a very particular situation. Short and sweet, take it or leave it. FIN.

Gonzo Pt 2 - Return of the Shark

I’ve torn up two other introductions to this piece already, so this is as good a start as any. I’m mildly drunk as I’m writing this (gonzo) and feeling rather quite ill – but I think it’s more to do with my intolerance to lactose than to any real level of alcohol poisoning. Then again, what do I know, I’m feeling very stupid and ignorant right now which is probably less of a delusion than the regular brand of self satisfaction. I could probably power a small car off that thing – like that episode in the Simpsons with the inventor who is so proud of his Green Cred that he invented a car to run of his own satisfaction. Yeah, I could be that guy, but not right now because my stomach is reminding me that I’m mortal and my throat has a minty taste in it that is making me feel like retching.

And I’ve blown my lead on 2:44 am post-drinking un-wellness. Thompson would be proud. And honest to goodness, after finishing that sentence I just rushed off to the bathroom in a fit of nausea.

So – videogames. Sexy, Sexy Leigh Alexander mentioned over twitter just the other day how tired she was of talking about, writing about, thinking about, even playing videogames. And I must confess to a brief spell of the same – except that I’m not over writing about them, which has become more and more fun as I’ve gone along, while still somewhat being less excited about playing them (or some of them at least). Probably a fair bit to do with how much fun it is to write in the Gonzo style, and while done poorly it is massively self-indulgent, when good it’s great. In this follow up to my first (moderately well received) Gonzo piece I had thought to go deep gonzo in some serious game from the recent past. L.B. Jeffries (Hey L.B., we need to drink together some time!) of the Banana Pepper Martini’s blog and the moving pixels blog, gently directed me in the direction of Braid which I would be more than happy to do except I don’t want to spend the money (This is not a hint for someone to buy the game and gift it to me – that has already happened far too often in times past and I really don’t think that sort of thing should be encouraged. Or at least I should not be encouraged in that manner – it’ll just delay the onset of the ruthless urgency to find gainful employment that I know has to come soon).

My next thought was Fallout 3. But that’s almost too easy a target for batshit insanity, so I thought I’d pass. Also I don’t really like Fallout 3, so any excuse will do. I also briefly considered Bioshock, because it’s a pretty decent game (I also owe Michael Abbott a game review for it – but that’s neither here nor there) and seemed to possess enough of the requisite chin-strokey seriousness that a gonzo style dive piece would benefit from in its subject. It’s certainly long enough to generate some hilarious anecdotes that I’m sure could benefit enormously from a bit of hyper-inflation and dramatic retelling from the first person. However, like Fallout 3, I didn’t really enjoy Bioshock all that much – certainly not to the same extent as many, many fellow game bloggers. Actually, on second thoughts, maybe that’s a decent enough reason in itself – perhaps it’s a way for me to get into the game from a different perspective, or to vilify it and explain why as I seem to recall it didn’t manage to live up to the hype for me. How much was hype affecting me the first time I played it? I’d hazard a guess quite a fair lot actually. Hype, as a target in itself, is probably more than well overdue of a seriously trippin’ expose piece.

But maybe not right now. The third game I thought of and which I’m probably most inclined to actually pursue is Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time. Yes, the classic game which just received a rather iffy reboot/sequel recently, because it seems to me that game has been praised quite a bit and often without much of a clear articulation of what’s so great about it… but then, that’s not even really the point of a gonzo piece is it? It’s not supposed to praise a game, nor to analyse (unless you had a marvelous experience with it and there’s a great story to tell). It’s more about mulling over and relating to a reader as intimate a sense of the experience as can possibly be rendered unto text. It’s a skill I feel I’m getting a little better at and even if I’m not noticeably improving, like I said, it’s still hella fun. There’s a reason Thompson stuck to it like some suitably sticky metaphor.

So my last idea was to do something on Spore, that procedural wunderkind that sprung from the mental loins of Will Wright. Spore is crazy. Sharkbite & Powershot crazy. The amount of soft-core Sporn creatures out there is truly staggering, but unless I want to feel the wrath of the EA Banhammer I think I’ll stay away from them. But I do think that making a landshark and walking around eating other procedural monstrosities could be fun, if only for a while. And the procedural music in Spore is pretty awesome too – there’s a post in me about that, somewhere. Actually, if it had come out early enough, and if I’d played it, it could seriously have gone into my thesis for an extra 1,000 words over my limit, just because it’s so close to this imaginary ‘ideal’ that I had for videogame music. The fact that the music in particular didn’t exactly make massive waves in the industry is not a very encouraging sign. Still, if a company wants to hire’s me (even freelance/contractor style) I’d be happy to write you a paper on why the music was so good. Hell I’ll probably end up doing that for free before long, David Carlton just finished Spore and was looking for more posts on the game. And I’m a sucker for any guaranteed readers something’ll get me.

Which is all a long winded way of saying that I don’t really know what game exactly I’ll be putting on my wizard hat and cloak for, this coming week. Be sure that when this author does, however, it’ll probably be somewhat slapdash, substandard and of questionable literary merit.

Yeap, I’m pretty sure it was the milk that did it earlier because that lacteeze tablet I took has worked like a charm. Now I think I can go to bed and sleep until I wake up. Bloody hell it feels good not to have chills from suppressing the urge to retch.

Going Gonzo

So I’m trying to write a bit Gonzo – more Hunter S. Thomspon than Muppet – after being inspired by reading Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 which, I might add, is a cracking read. Absurdist humour has always tickled my funny bone in the best way (Q: How long’s a piece of string? A: A bowl of soup this colour) and Thompson at the height of his powers does absurd the best. But it’s actually harder than it looks and even he doesn’t get it right all the time. When he does though, as in describing his wanting to put together an Outrage like releasing 50,000 bats into the Democratic convention centre on the night of Hubert Humphrey’s presidential nomination, which he declines on the grounds that getting the nomination would be punishment enough, Thompson lights up the page like the fourth of July

So it strikes me that Gonzo works best when you’ve actually got something worth writing about – like picking up some hitchhikers who also happen to be part of the Freak Kingdom on the road to Washington just before dawn. In this my own personal Post-University purgatory I don’t have nearly as much to write about that’s actually interesting. So instead, it occurs to me that Thompson has another fall-back in his writing; talking about stuff that really freaks him the fuck out. And there’s a lot of that going round in my world right now.

For starters, to make any kind of objective evaluation of my own chances of procuring employment within my chosen industry (videogames), a highly competitive career path to be sure, I’m much too close to myself to make any kind of objective and rational evaluation of my prospects. People I talk to on twitter say, ‘Quit worrying, idiot, you’re smart enough to get any job’, which is a lovely sentiment and I appreciate the vote of confidence, but they’re not the one trying to overcome a lifetime of stay-at-home complacency and inaction when it comes to employment… and I don’t exactly have an abundance of funds when it comes to cash.

Which reminds me of another thing Thompson loves – short paragraphs. And elipses… I thought that particular habit like nail-biting, dropping them in like pennies in a Christmas pudding, was a more modern practice but apparently not. He also likes to let his sentences run on for a really long time, much longer than normal. In case you missed it, I did it in the first paragraph and it seems to have spectacularly backfired, but that’s what you get for trying to write in the style of a Pro like Thompson. It’s also a tendency that I’ve worked quite hard to circumvent in my own writing (academic at least) since it was pointed out to me earlier in the year that while my sentences made sense to me and managed to articulate complicated points, they were usually impossible to read for anyone else. It kind of annoys me that Thompson does it so well and without making them convoluted and confusing. Overall though, I think my problem was I used commas too much and needed to just stop my sentences more often. It might actually be a good thing that I trained myself out of the habit because now I can do it deliberately and, dare I tempt fate and say, somewhat more properly.

So where was I? (That’s another thing Thompson does endlessly – go off topic and then reign it in again as if he was talking to you on the telephone) Something about breaking into the games industry. Thinking about it, how does anyone ‘break into’ any industry? The obvious answer is that some kind of training is supposed to provide with the foot-in-the-door that you need, but thinking about my soon to be graduated from Music degree… I don’t exactly have a massive stable of bankable skills and I’ve been thinking long and hard recently about how the hell I can convert those skills into finances. I thought about doing some freelance writing; it is supposedly my strength, after all, unless I’m deluding myself; but I have this sneaky suspicion that when I am not being exceedingly lazy and posting at 1 in the morning, I’m capable of producing some solid copy. But hey, words are cheap, right, so what’s my other skill? I can edit and proofread and there’s always (well not at this time of the year, but in a few months time) a market for students that have papers due that could seriously benefit from a quick once-over. I could charge $50 for 20 pages and that would at least pay for my board for the week and stop my parents making me homeless before the new year – I’ve currently paid up till the Saturday before New Years day and I have about $33 left in my bank account[1]. I have another $35 in my wallet, but I suspect that unless I somehow arrange to not leave the house before NYE that I’ll need some of that just to get around.

My God, living is so expensive. Whoever came up with the capitalist idea of actually contributing to society ought to go and jump in front of the nearest locomotive. I write a bloomin' videogame blog that aims to elevate the medium above the general level of “Hey, fuck you, my mum is a classy lady” Xbox live discourse which, I occasionally suspect, may be a noble yet Sisyphean effort. I mean, who even reads me? And who would want to after this ridiculously long-winded and self indulgent… tangent? I can’t blame you for turning off half-way through this piece, it’s really nothing but a blatant rip-off of L.B. Jeffries attempts at emulating the style of Lester Bangs in aid of game criticism. At least he had a point in his writing about games, what have I got? Certainly nothing about game criticism just a pointless whinge about how life is so hard for a middle class white kid who’s house-bound with nothing but the internet and a boxed set of Futurama DVD’s for entertainment.

You know, people I know have said “I would give anything to be able to do nothing, like you”, but what I think they fail to understand is the absolutely soul crippling effect that doing nothing all day has on you. When you do nothing, you become nothing (or you feel like you become nothing) and it’s bloody depressing. Exercise is actually a good cure and I’ve started jogging in the evenings just for something to get my heart racing a bit. Anyway, what friends of mine should understand, before wishing nothing upon yourself, is that it’s really not that great. Sure, it was fantastic to take time off after finishing that thesis I spent the whole year working on but that got old really fast, like in a day or two. I should have actually seen it coming – it always happens and I guess it’s probably inevitable that we put on the rose tinted glasses in the middle of high stress periods. But I could certainly have done a bit more to prepare.

Erm… so let’s bring this to a close. I don’t think I’ll edit this, just whack it up and put it out there – do the authentic Gonzo thing even though I don’t really have a deadline to meet. Feels more raw that way, and hopefully I’ll learn something from it. Might go self medicate or something. Okay, so I lied, I edited it but it really didn’t need much. Maybe I’m a better writer than I think. I should approach some vain Official Australian Xbox magazine or something and get them to feed me games to review and play if only to take my mind off my impending bankruptcy.

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[1]

Okay, so I have a trust fund that my parents set up for me as a kid with a couple grand in it but using that to pay my parents to continue to live under their roof seems either hilariously ironic and appropriate or just pointless, not really sure which.

Frank Bilders is Dead

The water was cool and refreshing on my hot skin. I was dirty and sweaty, my clothes stained with grime and blood, some my own, some other peoples. It felt bad to be this clean and refreshed after what I'd just done, and to add to my feeling of guilt it was all premeditated.

Frank Bilders is now dead. I killed him with his own sidearm – a somewhat tarnished .50 caliber desert eagle pistol. I tell you this detail not because it’s important (although the image of that weapon will be forever stamped in my mind) but to distract from the painful sense of culpability I feel for his murder.

I mean, I knew Frank stood a good chance of getting hurt but I had hoped that something with the missions execution would go lethally awry, saving me from having to get any more blood on my hands. Every time we work together the man seemed to take another bullet wound. ‘Heh, just another scar to add to the collection’, he would say. Always focused on the job at hand, was Frank. ‘There’s some bugger out there who cut me out of a deal, and I want him dead’, he’d say in his Northern Irish swagger. No need for a reason, or context - Frank wanted something done, and you were going to do it for him.

When the time came, and he was lying on the ground writhing in pain, the situation hadn’t really forced my hand. I had plenty of syrettes, there was time and I could have saved him, but I wanted him out of the way. So instead of his healing his wounds with medicine I took out his own gun and shot him in the mouth. I hesitated, mind you– I very nearly couldn’t pull it off. But I did, and his body is now lying on a road somewhere in Sefapane, gathering flies and a layer of the all pervasive red dust. And I’m swimming up the river. Getting clean. Getting refreshed. There is no music, no victory anthem. Just the water and the noise my body makes as I move through it.

And Frank Bilders is dead.