People who write games should be engaging with literary culture as much as they engage with games culture.

I’ve spoken to a number of game writers and developers who’ve expressed, in one way or another, that games should be treated with the same critical weight as more established cultural-capital-letters like Literature, Art, Cinema. It’s an old and pretty boring argument; games are art, games aren’t art, art is urinals, urinals are games, etc.

I'm on the side of games. I fully believe they are an interesting, important medium. What really frustrates me about this though is that when you ask those game writers to talk to you about literature, they’re pretty unwilling to go outside of their particular niche. Rarely do they stray outside of science fiction and fantasy. They seldom go to live readings and they almost certainly don’t read literary journals.

This is a massive generalisation, both of gaming culture and the routes into literary culture, but I have been struck nevertheless by the gaping hole between the two camps. There wouldn’t necessarily be anything wrong with this if it weren’t for two important things:

1: Gaming culture is going through a seismic shift in identity and the nerdy young male hegemony is being shattered by the inclusion of new audiences. Unless games writers widen their literary nets to engage with a new set of audiences they will lose them.

2: These are writers we’re talking about. It would be pretty unthinkable for a novelist or short story writer not to be engaged with a wide variety of literature, and it is entirely arrogant for a games writer to demand acceptance from a literary culture when they themselves refuse to properly engage with that culture.

Writing has up until now been an ancillary part of game design, normally done by the developers themselves who most likely haven’t had much in the way of writing practice, but a new wave of writers/developers is putting greater importance on quality of writing. Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy from Cardboard Computer and Dan Pinchbeck from The Chinese Room are each pushing the boundaries when it comes to games writing, and all of them have shown an engagement with the wider literary culture, from 20^th century avant-garde theatre to 19^th century Romantic novels.

Games writers who think they can survive on mediocre writing need to up their game, because developers like these are increasing in number. You need to read wide and read deep. Read outside of your medium and outside of your comfort zone.

You need to get reading now because there are better writers coming your way.  

Poetry in Advertising

By now you’ll have seen enough Christmas adverts to make you stick a fork in your eye. Maybe there’s one in particular which has you reaching for sharp objects. Maybe it’s the one with all the rhyming, windows and Big Macs.  

Moaning about Christmas adverts is picking low-hanging fruit, but there’s something particularly annoying about this one. Now, I like poetry. I think poetry can be fun. I think that it can do great and important things. So naturally I might've been annoyed that the emotional effect of poetry was being manipulated, whored out to sell me chips and coke. It turns out this is a little naïve, verse has been used in advertising since its inception. Rhythm, rhyme and cadence are the bread and butter of most copywriters, the basic idea being that if something rhymes then it’s easier to remember. It's been a rule from bards singing Beowulf to ‘A Mars a day helps you rest and play’. And yet while it may be an old technique, there's no denying that poetry in advertising has seen something of a rise in recent years.  



The 2009 advert for Cathedral City, for example, is pretty similar to the recent lot of McDonald’s adverts.  Just as in Cathedral City, where you’ve got a list of different people all united by a shared love of cheese, so too in McDonalds you’ve got a strong impression of social get-togetherness; shots of families, couples, old-people all sat behind glass windows. Here it’s not really the food being sold but a place for everyone to share, from children to the eldery, all of them to come together like a massive family dotted around a sparkly greenhouse. And the verse, mostly consisting of couplets, gives a solid backbone to both of these visions. It rocks back and forth, pleasingly rhyming, connecting A to B, C to D. 

Adverts are adverts. To criticise McDonalds for trying to convince me that the whole town is sat around in the warmth laughing over camera phones would be to have a go at it for trying to make me eat there. Of course it wants people to eat there. And if Cathedral City cheddar creates that sense of connection then I have no problem with it. I like cheese. I have friends who like cheese. If cheese is what brings people together then who’s to say there can’t be a poem about it. 

It isn’t the poetry itself that annoys me. What irritates me is the way these adverts equate the everyday public with simple rhyme. The ‘clocking off cabbies’, those returning from ‘pantomime clapping’, the poetry of their lives is meant to come across as simple, no-thrills, down to earth. Now you might argue that it succeeds, that it gets past the snobby aura a lot of poetry entails and gives us the ‘language really used by men’. And I’d agree with you in part, but I’d also argue that it can come across as massively patronising. It reduces the targeted audience to dumbed-down, unassuming rhyme. 

The line from McDonalds, ‘And behind all this glass, made of fire-blasted sand/ is a door you’ll adore when it’s pushed by your hand’, is the most tenuously put-together line ever, and it’s designed to be like that. It’s childish, it’s silly, but so what? Poetry in adverts are supposed to be cheesy, you might say. They're supposed to be easy to understand. If you want to see proper poems go read a book. Yet in the same year as the Cathedral City advert, Waitrose also used a poem. But this time there was no simple verse, for this upper-market chain it was John Keats that sold the wares.

 
The use of Keats can be seen as cynical for a range of reasons, but it’s the connection between an upper-middle-class supermarket and classic poetry which really stands out.  It seems to say that there’s one type of poetry for one market and one for another. It makes it painfully clear that there’re demographics to aim for, and that Keats rests more easily in one than another. No doubt it’s a view that makes sense from a marketing perspective, but I believe it’s a view that circumscribes poetry around class barriers and stereotypes both audiences and literature. 

I’m not arguing that all adverts need a resident romantic poet, nor that there is anything inherently wrong with playful verse. What annoyed me in the McDonalds advert, and what i'm arguing against, is the view that poetry needs to be associated with social demographics, that the lines between these groups can be so lazily drawn, and that the type of verse you experience should come down to how much you can spend on a hot meal. 

Video Game Music

You’re sat on the top deck of the bus with your raincoat on, and you’ve unbuttoned the front to get to your phone, tucked in your pocket, and you’ve plugged in your headphones and you’ve sat back to look out the window at all the chicken shops moving past. You’re listening to your music and your mind wanders. You’re five years old again sat in the back of your parent’s car, pretending there’s a giant running alongside the horizon, jumping over sheep and pylons and hills, all of it in time to the music.

And you wait for the moment the doors open and you set your foot down on Turnpike Lane at exactly the same time the beat or chord change or start or end of the song comes. Suddenly you’re starring in your own film that would look SO GOOD if you could ever make this into a film, but it’s better than a film because you’re actually there moving around, passing through the barriers, standing on the escalator, each advertisement for face-cream passing you in time to the beat and if there was an explosion now it wouldn’t be like watching it on a screen. You’d be Thor, you’d be Tarantino. You’d have involvement, immersion. Christ, you’d be the actor and the camera all rolled into one.

If you play games, and you should play games, maybe you’ve played Hotline Miami. It’s intoxicating, it’s extremely violent, but the game is actually much smarter than it lets on. It’s clever in the way it riles you up one moment then undermines those feeling the next. You’ll spend minutes improvising some adrenaline-fuelled murda-tactic, the game's music constantly edging you on, and then the second you’re done, when only corpses remain, the music stops and you have to retrace your bloody path back out of the building in silence. It feels hollow, like eating a Big Mac. And although a lot can and has been said about the game’s treatment of violence, it’s the music which leaves the biggest impression. 

Because what a soundtrack. It’s genuinely good. Not just good in the let's-go-see-a-full-orchestra-perform-the-halo-theme kinda thing, which is really cinematic and everything, but this is better than cinema, better than film. It’s the moment you step onto Turnpike Lane station with something loud and fast in your ears and the rhythm is your rhythm, your steps are the steps of the song. You’re not going to start dancing but it’s the same psychological neck-of-the-woods. 

Rhythm is such an important part of Hotline Miami; the rhythm of dying then trying again and again until you’ve finished the level, so it’s no coincidence that the music has such a strong beat. The rhythm is imposed on your environment, and it gets your imagination all fired up. How you clean out the building is your decision, if you go left you’ll fight in one room, go right and you fight in another. One way is a dog, the other a guy with a shotgun. So although the music stays the same, it feels different each time because of the choices you make. Each time you play the game the music helps make a new flow of events, a new narrative. You might not be deciding between Count Vronsky and Count Karenina, but on some level you’re making your own story.

Or maybe you’ve played another game, something on the opposite end of the violence spectrum, something like Proteus. This is a game where your sole objective is to wander around a pixelated island. You explore the land through four different seasons and that’s pretty much it. You look at the trees, you chase a group of chickens, you wait for night to fall. Beneath this derivative description again lies a well-designed and affecting experience, and again what really lies at the root of these things is the music. 

Here the music of the game isn’t imposed on the environment, instead it’s the environment which imposes itself on the music. Different things have different sounds, so if it rains or if you decide to follow a frog for a while, the music will change to reflect that. Sure the result might be a sort-of chiptune Peter and the Wolf that ends up sounding somewhere between the music of the spheres and a stoned teenager twinkling on a casio keyboard, but it does an amazing job of making you feel immersed in the game. You make decisions, you choose to chase some flies or stand still and watch the sunset. Your movements in the game shape the experience you have, only now the soundtrack changes as well.  

The landscape in Proteus is procedurally generated, which means that it’s different each time you play. With the choice of movement and the element of procedural chance, it seems like there may be a near infinite combination of experiences, a Borgesian library of Babel where all combinations of letters exist to create every possible story. But there are still limitations. There are always limitations. Music needs rules or it becomes noise. Playing Proteus gives you a sense of being able to shape how the whole piece plays out, but it is still a sense. There is still direction. The different seasons each have their own rhythm, and you pass from one season to the other, led towards a circle of glowing lights, just as springs leads to summer, as day leads to night.

This agency; the connection between your choices and the music you hear, the idea of composing your own story, there is always a level where this is an illusion. When you're walking through Turnpike Lane you create a narrative, and listening to different music or seeing different sights will push you towards different narratives, yet the stories you make still have limitations, they are still being led. Proteus leads you to the next season. Hotline Miami leads you to silence after everyone is dead. On the bus you reach your work, and on the underground you walk along tunnels, channelled along a single path that directs you up, past the screens advertising face-cream and through the barriers, out into the world again. 

Thoughts on Felina

Since watching the final episode of Breaking Bad I’ve been left feeling a little odd.

I enjoyed it, really enjoyed it, but I’ve had to check several times whether I actually did enjoy it, whether or not I simply willed myself into liking it. After the final credits rolled I was left with a strange sense of numb completion, with the episode somehow managing to be both satisfying, seemingly neat, yet at the same time cold and uncertain. Sure, there were moments of definite catharsis; Jesse’s revenge on Todd, Jesse’s escape in the car, basically all the Jesse parts, but overall the episode was of a very different tone to most of the series.  

The first thing to say is that throughout the episode Walter White acts like a ghost.  He drifts through Albuquerque, he lurks in the dark of the Schwartz’s home, he appears in his estranged wife’s kitchen and watches his son through two sets of windows. Returning from New Hampshire, Walt seems to move and act like a shadow, removed from the action yet able to ventriloquise previous voices. He speaks as Heisenberg for the Schwartz household, as the naive dilettante in his fake-business pitch to Lydia. His own voice when we hear it is calm, affirming that what he did, he did for himself. It’s a clear psychological end-point on his journey, yet it’s spoken as if outside the story, already in the past tense as he concludes: “I liked it. I was good at it. I was alive.”    

Alongside this ghost-like characterisation is an emphasis on machinery. Walt’s final violent showdown doesn't funnel rage but rather a looping mechanism which continues to click back and forth even after all the main players have died or left. When Walt himself finally dies he does so touching the empty apparatus of his previous career as if it were a lover. These moments are in turn brutal and tender, yet at the same time mechanical and inhuman.

And this is why I think the ending excelled.

The seemingly neat conclusions visited over the hour hide a cavern of uncertainty and moral ambiguity. We’re given precise, almost perfunctory moments of resolution; meeting Skyler, watching Walt Junior for a final time, saving Jesse, and yet these moments refuse to reboil the tensions which have bubbled over again and again during the five seasons. There are the outlines of resolution, shapes of closure, but it seems to be an act of shadows; well-made rooms for narrative full-stops, but empty, stripped of all furniture.      

‘Ozymandias’ was the climax. The death of Hank, the family knife-fight, they were the moments of definite human climax. Felina’s genius was in showing an inhuman climax; an episode where all the structures of resolution were present and correct, but what those moments contain is only the ghosts of former passions already dead.  

In the end Walt dies with a smile on his face, surrounded by scientific equipment, and the idea of that is both deeply comforting and icily distant.  

Books and Dust

As the axe prepares to fall, I speak to Nicola Dellow, a postgraduate library student at UCL, about the cuts being made to library services.

Could you please sum-up the recent nationwide cuts made to libraries?

Public library services are being cut up and down the country as local councils attempt to keep to the budget cuts put in effect by the current government.

Do you feel these cuts are justified?

Of course not, I wouldn’t be a very good library school student if I did. I think it is completely tragic to be honest, as libraries have such a positive effect on a community. What I find most appalling is the cuts to outreach library programmes, such as mobile libraries and visits to the housebound. Many housebound users have little contact with the outside world and enjoy the chance to have a chat with a friendly member of staff and have books brought to them.

What are the long-term implications?

If public libraries shut, I do not think they will re-open in a better economic climate. I think this is why there have been so many campaigns to save libraries, initiated or endorsed by such a wide range of people. Education and literacy levels are likely to be affected and there is every chance that there will be a de-professionalisation of librarians working in the public sphere. 

Do libraries still have a useful role in today's culture given the ease of information access provided by the internet?

Of course. I think that both libraries and librarians have suffered in the past through stereotypes represented in the media. It is important to realise that libraries are not just about the physical space, but the services they can provide. The internet has not stopped parents taking their children to ‘rhyme-time’ at their local library, as a chance to learn and socialise with other children. It has not necessarily made people turn to online forums for book groups instead of attending them at the library to experience debate and the opportunity to meet new people. Public libraries essentially provide a democratic space for all members of the public.  

There is so much information available on the internet, but not all of it is relevant and search engines have certain limitations. At a library, it is likely that you will come into contact with someone who really knows about information retrieval, who can help you find relevant information from any number of sources.

Do the rise in e-book sales signal a natural evolution away from physical texts, or are such claims greatly exaggerated?

This is a tough one. The codex has had enduring popularity for centuries and it is a trusted form. I think that the e-book reader, like the codex, is a format for information retrieval and everyone has a personal preference about the ways in which they read. In a society where our working and private lives are increasingly exposed to computers, smartphones and other kinds of technology, then it is natural to want to carry 100 books around on an e-reader. However I think that the relatively slow uptake signals scepticism about storage capability and the chance of e-books reconfiguring as technology progresses, in the same way that early computer games cannot be played on today’s consoles. I certainly don’t think that in a decade’s time, book binders will be out of business.

In your opinion do such changes, both in terms of cuts to library services and the introduction of new technology, affect the types of books we read?

I don’t think changes to technology affect the types of books we read, but I do think they change the ways in which we read. I am not sure how it has the potential to affect the types of books we read, as e-books have the same diversity of genre as printed books.

I think that cuts to library services will really affect those who cannot afford to buy books and DVDs from internet sellers, or are unwilling to take a chance on ordering something that they cannot really browse first. In a public library, you can borrow material that you may not usually invest in and can read all sorts of books knowing that you can bring them back. I think that cuts to library resources will mean that people may be more careful about their reading choices because there is likely to be a monetary investment.

What do you make of Michael Goves' '50 book challenge'?

I think it is somewhat hypocritical to propose this figure when the government you are part of is essentially cutting the resources that will allow children access to reading material. This aim fails to account for any individual reading habits, such as pace. I think that Anthony Browne’s response in The Guardian has it spot on really; it is about the experience of reading, not the quest to complete a certain number of books within a year. 

Immersive Theatre

(Originally written for IdeasTap.)

Leaning in the dark, I touch the tip of my shoe against an empty bottle on the floor and calculate the series of events that would be set into motion if I rolled the glass under the feet of Banquo’s ghost.

I would never do it – I’d be an idiot if I did – but I’m still stood there with the bottle and eyeing up his legs...

Down the dark vaults of Clerkenwell House of Detention, Belt Up Theatre are putting on Macbeth, the cells of this 19th-century prison transformed into the mind of Shakespeare’s Scottish king.

Belt Up specialise in immersive, site-specific performance; immersive being a large umbrella-of-a-term that encompasses everything from one-on-one interaction to large-scale promenade theatre. This type of performance promises its audience something different from a traditional stage-play; the chance for direct bodily involvement in the action of the piece.

But being lowered into the bathwater is one thing; feeling like you’re able to splash around is another. Immersive theatre, more so than a platform for sensory play, has the potential to explore something else: the audience’s desire for involvement and a frustration of that desire.

As its popularity has risen, audiences have grown accustomed to the styles of immersive performance and purchase their ticket with certain sensory expectations. In her blog, playwright Sarah Grochola compares last year’s You Me Bum Bum Train, in which each audience member is made the protagonist in a range of disjointed scenes, to the act of shoe shopping.

This year’s One-on-One festival at the BAC catered for the personal tastes of its audience by setting up the event as a series of “menus”, with performances based on flavours such as “reflective” or “dreamy”. We consume this style of performance with eager bellies, but who serves us our dinner?

For a character, the opportunity to escape the traditional stage is a potential movement towards independence: autonomy. Now don’t get me wrong, the world is over-populated enough without an infinity of fictional stomachs to fill and I’m not saying we should give them the vote, but breaking from the walls of a traditional stage could, to some degree, present a chance for self-authorship.

And yet what tends to happen is the very opposite. Characters are often reduced to tableaux; figures that blend into the architecture of the site and serve only to compliment the aesthetic atmosphere of the piece. It would seem that, crushed under the boots of the newly empowered audience, characters run the risk of being reduced to facilitators for sensory experience.

The real power of immersive theatre is the conflict that crops up when there is a clash between audience and character; both parties detached from the traditional rule-book, both hungry for action, yet both unsure where the power lies.

The real question is how should emerging companies work with this uncertainty? It would be unfair to describe Belt Up’s Macbeth as tableaux, but at the same time, the unwillingness to sever the audience from Shakespeare’s text seems to be a missed opportunity.

Should audiences disrupt these narratives, and what happens when characters fight back? Maybe if I roll that bottle just slightly forward…

A Quick Pint With Fran

Fran Copeman is a 25 year old painter and illustrator. She’s exhibited both locally in London and internationally, in Italy, Germany and Manchester. Her work, mixing hyper-realism and abstraction, often depicts disfigured and restricted bodies sunk in a thick painted landscape. I met her outside the John Snow in Soho for a pint.

How was the toilet?

Piss off. Actually, appropriate word. Why the fuck do we pay for water? It just goes straight through you.

What inspires you?

Shall we wait for this environmental services truck to pass?

 A dustbin truck moves past the pavement edge where Tom and Fran are sitting.

Okay.

Well.

Generally I’m interesting in relationships and our relationships with each other. Obviously that gets much more complicated when you’re living in such a busy place, y’know?

No. What do you mean when you say relationships?

I mean the way I react with my external world, simple as. I had an early project, crudely called ‘The City’, I was reading Walter Benjamin and all that, but the idea of the city is still an important metaphor of me.

Do you work a lot in metaphors then?

Yeah definitely. I wouldn’t work in a completely representational way – I mean I do often use the human figure but that’s because it’s a form that I can identify with.

Is that identification important?

All I can say from my personal experiences of exhibiting is that I haven’t seen a single recent piece that has been ‘essentially’ conceptual. There’s always been a narrative or something which gives the audience the ability to see what the artist is doing without having to read a manual. Which is nice.

But your figures aren’t representational?

Well apart from the idea.

Is that idea frustration? It seems to be something you frequently work with.

When I left university I wanted a lot of things, but that all turned to shit really – a lot of people seem frustrated like that at the moment. I was also interested in frustrating the aesthetics of the piece to the point of distortion, and that got me looking at what makes something look distorted; ugly.

Why ugly?

It’s always a nicer challenge to make something that isn’t pretty.

Do you consider your work to be ugly?

Yes, it’s pretty ugly, but the image itself I find quite beautiful because of the detail created by the restriction.

What’s the process of getting that restriction?

Basically tying people up and getting them to break out of things.

Right.

Like with rope. Mainly on the face and hands.

Okay.

That’s where the most gesturing happens. Basically it started off as me imitating artists I admire, like Robert Longo who was active in the 80’s during the yuppie era. I did nick his style a bit but it’s mine now. (Laughs) History repeats itself anyways. We all forget things.

Fran drinks.

Is there a political element to your work?

I suppose the way you feel is based on a lifestyle created for you, which is politically created. Maybe if you lived on the top of a hill on Mars then you wouldn’t have that problem; you wouldn’t have inter…interwhatsitcalled?

Intercourse?

Yeah, that. None of that. Fran finishes her drink. I was watching a film and they were saying that women make up the majority of the population.

Your subjects are often women, or yourself.

People say they look androgynous. I really only use females because they’re normally the people I have at hand. I’d probably feel more on-edge getting a man to do it. Well, especially the type of man I’d be looking for…getting him to go crazy in front of the camera like that. At the moment it’s just androgynous me. I think it looks strong though. A bang is heard from across the road.
I’d like to just stand up and punch someone in the face. That would make me feel strong.

Why don’t you?

What?

Punch someone in the face.

Could do.

Are your paintings about people not being able to do that?

Yes, well, no. It’s the fine line; a specific place where someone has seen their restriction and is now at the point where they’re trying to break out of it. My hope is that they’re at a point of rebellion.

What are they rebelling against?

I don’t know, it’ll sound convoluted. I guess their limited channels of expression. Here, look, there’s a big environmental services truck coming.

The same dustbin truck from earlier slowly drives past.

How do you feel about trucks?

That wheel is as big as my body.

The sound of an engine is heard, low and guttural.

Words by Thomas McMullan.
Find out more about Fran and her work on her blog.

(via @MintMagazineUK)