Artifact Fetish

May 7, 2009 in Gaming, Modern Life

braidBraid – Jonathan Blow

It’s inevitable: it’s all going digital. How soon I’m not so sure, but that’s just a detail. However, legal and financial wrangling aside (a little hobby horse of mine), there is something I’m going to miss about having an object to hold and cherish. This really struck home the other night when I was playing Jonathan Blow’s Braid which recently came out on PC (long after its Xbox release). I fell for it in no time and felt it was so seamlessly created, such a complete package, that it just cried out to be lavishly wrapped up in a bespoke, tactile package. The reality is that it came in cold hard bits that for one reason or another I find much harder to cherish. There’s definitely a risk of sounding exactly like vinyl lovers do when talking about CDs and banging on about the artwork and that’s something I’m keen to avoid, so I’m not going to wax nostalgic about the way PC games used to be packaged because let’s face it they were packaged like crap. Needlessly huge and cumbersome boxes gave way to impersonal plastic DVD boxes with ever diminishing manuals; the closest we get to object fetish now is brushed aluminium ‘Steelbooks’ – which I suppose is nice but it seems like too little too late. When Braid whispered in my ear about reification, images came to mind of folded card embossed with patterns, a rainbow of matte colours, a notable absence of child-like, techno-hip, jumbo fonts yelling the title out and a distinct lack of bullet-pointed product feature list on the back.

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Both Personal & Political

March 8, 2009 in Comics

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Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China & Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea – Guy Delisle

In contrast to fly-on-the-wall documentaries, Delisle is ever-present in these books as in many ways they are as much as about him as they are the places he is staying. He’s working in the Far East for animation studios outsourcing their work, and the frustrations of dealing with language barriers, intepreters and foreign customs heavily pepper the narrative, as does the loneliness and boredom of being away from home in hotel rooms for long periods.

The two books differ in that Shenzhen is a more personal affair, focusing on his dealings with everyday people, his experiences as a foreigner in a strange land and the general insanity that the loneliness of such a position brings. Hardly anyone speaks English and he will sometimes go whole days without saying a word. Pyongyang on the other hand rarely sees him without an interpreter-chaperone and as a book has much more commentary on the bizarreness of the political landscape and the all-pervasive propaganda that shrouds the society. While Delisle clearly has preconceptions about North Korea – he brings Orwell’s 1984 with him in a fit of rebellion – he still manages to avoid a heavy-handed agenda, holding back from the scything critique about the realities of life for average citizens that I was expecting. Rather than painting things in a bad and uncompromising light, he paints them in a strange, quaint, bizarre and weirdly charming light, and each story still contains those beautiful, special, quiet moments that you get when travelling. Delisle himself has commented that these are by no means journalistic in nature as he feels there is too much of his own opinion in them.

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should i? Or should I not?

March 4, 2009 in Modern Life | 3 comments

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The Wider Implications of Humble Spell-checking

We all know auto-correct from word processors: “should i?” becomes “Should I?” without me doing a thing. So should I bother writing a capital I at all when a lower-case one will do fine?

Now at this point in time there’s plenty of programs that still don’t auto-correct you, so you do still need to know your grammar, but less and less is handwritten. Calculators – in one form or another – are pretty much ubiquitous these days too, and people rely on these more and more to do even their basic maths for them. Adobe Dreamweaver is another example in which the software will do all the coding for you, so why bother learning it?

Even if we do know how to do something initially, continual use of machine automation makes us lazy and our knowledge becomes dusty and rusty. I’m not sure we would actually lose the knowledge entirely, but I can see issues like that arising in the near future as we become increasingly computerised. However, this poses the question of why bother to properly learn something in the first place if you not actually going to use it?

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Do Not Touch It!!

February 19, 2009 in Gaming

sevenminsmall Seven Minutes – Tuuka Virtanen

Seven Minutes is a little gem of a game brought to my attention by the Gamers With Jobs. This article will spoil the game completely so seriously download and play it first. (Go on, it’s only seven minutes long!)

The premise is simple though bizarre: a giant, ethereal, disembodied, three-eyed head yells at you not to touch the blue fire. Naturally you touch it. The head then tells you that your world will end in the titular seven minutes and that you shouldn’t leave the room. Naturally you leave the room. What follows is a tricky but delightful 2D platform-game in which the Head continues to taunt you, reminding you that your journey is pointless as you’re going to die soon, and my, isn’t the time going fast?

After ignoring the head’s commands we find out it has been telling us the truth the whole time: at the end the head re-appears to tell us "There is nothing. NOTHING." And that’s it. Game over. We still know nothing about the seemingly omnipotent being and its quasi-nihilistic ravings, but strangely that’s ok. The charm is in how much is left to the imagination, the stylish design, tidy execution, how little time you have to get bored, and the quiet chuckle of the anti-climax.

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Stand Alone vs. Complex

February 15, 2009 in Animé

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Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex – 1st Gig

The conceit of dividing a series up into two types of episodes is novel and intriguing, especially when the two categories neatly play on the title of the series: ‘Stand Alone’ (self-contained episodes) & ‘Complex’ (part of the over-arching Laughing Man case). However, clever though this may seem, it’s not at all uncommon for animé series to contain such a mix. The main difference with its employment in this particular instance is that the category each episode belongs to is spelled out to you after the intro, which spoils the surprise to some extent: from the beginning you know whether the episode has some bearing on the larger plot or not.

It’s easy to see such stand alone episodes as disposable and wish that the entire series dealt with the over-arching story; however, the seemingly throw-away stories in between are actually quite important. While acting as essential pacing elements in a long series, they also contain a significant amount of character development and simple context, especially if there is a re-imagined universe to explore. Having to wait for the next instalment of the grander scheme creates expectation and anticipation and heightens the satisfaction when that next episode finally arrives. I suspect it is also preferable to the authors drawing out the main plot to fill twenty-six episodes. One criticism I would offer with regard to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is that I felt the distribution of Complex episodes was not even enough, they are bunched up together. Before the climactic finale, there’s really only five Complex episodes (four, five and six, nine and eleven), and the rest of the series is largely spent waiting, hoping for some more. One or two more episodes similar to episode nine – which took place entirely in an internet chat room on the topic of the Laughing Man – would have gone down a treat as it satisfied as much as it intrigued and tantalised.

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A Large Nut

February 7, 2009 in Music

Antonio Forcione

Antonio Forcione @ RNCM, Manchester

As a prog-man, I’m used to terrible song names, but those of last night’s Italian acoustic guitarist were particular note-worthy: Spanish Breeze, Indian Café, Brasilico, Knock on Wood, Tears of Joy and so on. As you’d guess there were many different influences in his music and it was definitely an evening of ‘world-jazz fusion’ and the quartet of (from left to right) guitar, cello, double-bass and percussion would be right at home on Later with Jools Holland. But fusion’s ok right? You mix some styles together and add your own twist, what’s wrong with that? When done properly, it’s not a problem; however, Forcione would only dip his toe in each style. Rather than a subtle, tasteful, integrated fusion of styles across his work, Forcione proceeded to commit a series of rather heavy-handed pastiches, often borrowing the most obvious musical clichés only to drop them as he moved into the groove-based solo platform.

It takes years of working with something, making mistakes, and learning past the obvious before that influence will mature in you and become a genuine fusion within your musical style. It shouldn’t be a bolt-on addition to your current armoury of techniques to be picked up and dropped when necessary. The problem is that simply trying your hand at each region’s music, one at a time, will only gain you the most superficial of knowledge about it, and the unfortunate result however is that many tunes simply come across as ‘the Indian-style number’ or ‘the Spanish one’ and are rather gimicky.

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