The Posturings of Potheel

Videogames have existed for over a quarter of a century now, and boy have they grown from the days of bleepy-bloopy score attacks. Now instead of a pixelated plumber murdering mushrooms and trampling tortoises we have jarhead trigger happy gung-ho space marines, wizards, goblins, zombies by the bucketload and enough badly told, po-faced stories to make even the most patient person baulk with pressure. Despite this, the videogame industry is now bigger than either the music industry or the film industry, a staggering achievement especially when considering the mismanagement of the medium by greedy executives over the lifetime of the industry and the disasters which have occurred such as the crash of ‘83.

The videogames industry is now at an impasse. It has reached a point where it is too large to ‘fail’ as such, there is now a market that is well established and who will continue to buy games irregardless of quality. However the question of quality is not relevant to this article and so will not be analysed. Needless to say videogames that range in quality from excellent to abysmal exist and always will do. These games are rated by the restrictions of the ratings system that the games media have imposed. Games are defined by graphics, sound, story, gameplay and so forth. But are these ratings restrictive?

Take for example the question of Grand Theft Auto. Grand theft Auto is no doubt a name that many of you know from the mainstream media, those Conservative nincompoops who cluck their tongues at the slightest hint of adult content in the medium. ‘The Murder Simulator’, it was dubbed. It heralded the downfall of decency and the ultimate destruction of the minds of our youths. I don’t know about you, but this author has certainly not witnessed the murder by claw hammer of prostitutes constitued en masse by frenzied teenagers or anything of the like. Asides from being amusing this is irrelevant however, as Grand Theft Auto enters the discussion because of the message that it spreads to the industry. In 2001 Rockstar Games produced Grand Theft Auto 3 and the world was impressed. What they had seen was the birth of the sandbox game. However although the game was very innovative it suffered from the merciless rating system, for although it accrued impressive scores it did not achieve the critical acclaim several years later that its successor, Grand theft Auto 4 would. GTA 4 was an excellent game on its own merits. However it did not advance the open ended world in the slightest. Nor did Vice City or San Andreas. Every game that followed on from GTA 3 in the series failed to innovate to the same degree as the original.

In the same sphere we must also consider Bioware. Bioware are a company who have produced consistently excellent and well-crafted games, however, in their repetoire have they produced anything that is significantly innovative since the first Knights of the Old Republic? The only things that are changed inbetween Bioware games were the combat systems. Or consider Valve. They pioneered the interactive scipted set-piece instead of the cutscene, yet have their games changed since then. Epic Games churn out Unreals and Gears of War, Infinity Ward churn out Call of Duty, EA churn out sports franchises along with 2K and THQ etc. The industry is dominated by sequels, there are no new IPs on display and any true attempts at innovation are brushed aside.

Flower, Ico, Shadow of the Collosus, Okami, Psychonauts, Grim Fandango, Perimeter, System Shock 2, Mount and Blade and others are all well known names in the games industry. They are all innovative games that have failed commercially. They are both the formulas that the videogames industry attempts to mimic whilst also simultaneously being the reason that titles which differentiate from the status quo are shunned by publishers. They allowed the industry to advance whilst also being allowed to sink without trace of their achievements.

Thus we have seen that quality is separate of innovation and that the two do not necessarily coexist peacefully. Now I will attempt to answer as to how the industry might move forwards.

Quality is synonymous with fun. Fun is what holds the videogame industry back.  Fun is both what defines the videogames industry whilst also being the factor that restricts its movement. Think of it in this way, think of silent movies. Silent movies were considered all well and good by the audiences that watched them. They watched every movies of every genre that exists today. They watched such auteurs as Chaplin, Keaton and the Marx brothers at the top of their games. Throughout the period technology was advancing and so picture quality improved, sound was eventually introduced as was colour, thus the experience changed entirely. Silent movies were no longer silent, they were movies. Now consider the games industry in the same light. At the moment we are advancing our technology to the point that we can achieve a similar evolution. What was key to the advancement of cinema was the abandoning of its roots. Silent cinema was considered by many at the time as an inferior substitute to the theatre, tickets were a similar price, films were shorter and more incoherent. It was like watching an strange silent play, this was the case however as the film industry at the time couldn’t do things that the play did or could only do the same. The industry truly came into its own with the movies such as King Kong. The play could do many things, but it could bring you to an ancient island in the pacific populated by giant gorillas and dinosaurs whilst making a detour at the Empire State Building.

This is where the games industry gains one over the film industry. As can be seen, the film industry mimicked the stage industry and eventually gained enough confidence in itself to move onwards. The games industry is nearing this point in its relationship with the film industry. It has emulated it consistently, but now it has found an advantage over it. Movie games pale in comparison to the movie, but truly special games such as Freedom Force are a blast. This game for example allows you to craft your own universe of comic book superheroes, something that a movie would never allow you to do. The key word: interactivity. In a movie you watch the journey of the character as filmed and imagined by someone else, in the game you craft a path of your own. Games are far more involving experiences than movies and it is interactivity that is the key to advancement in the industry. It is here that the notion of fun also comes to a head. What is fun is defined by tradition. We find fun in familiar activities: shooting nazis, jumping on mushrooms or playing a sports game which mimics a real life sport. What we desire is escapism within the limits set by the real world. Enemies must die, goals must be beaten. These are boundaries that are also encountered by the film medium, however the film medium has advanced to the point that it contains innovative experiences that are rewarded, well watched and copied, for example is the Michael Haneke film, the White Ribbon. This film is not fun but is engaging in other ways. If videogames are to evolve beyond their characterisation as toys by the majority of the adult public then they must learn to entertain in ways that are not restricted by the notions of fun. Children require constant fun to keep them going, adults do not, they need reassurance among other things. As soon as games can cater to other needs they will evolve from the rather simplistic position that they exist in at the moment.

If they do this then the previously mentioned media frenzy will dissipate. Conservative adults tut with disdain at the notion of being able to murder a protistute with a claw hammer. This is indeed possible in the Grand Theft Auto series, however not once is they player required to undertake such an action. To perform this action requires considerable input from the player, all that the main character does is what he is told to do by the player. This revelation would shock the media more, however they would not be interested.  An act of violence in a movie has less significance than an act of violence in a videogame merely because violence has existed for longer in films than videogames. Videogames need to be able to portray violence, sex and the like in a less cartoonish and childish manner than is currently the case in order for videogames to be properly accepted as a proper medium for adult entertainment.

So, to come to a conclusion of some manner, the videogame industry needs to evolve before it can be accepted as a true entertainment medium. What we have seen is an industry driven by technology, now that technology will soon be at an equal level, soon it will be driven by true creatives. Innovation, combined with quality is needed to as a catalyst to drive the industry forwards.

Then those  judgemental bastards in the media, Keith Vaz and Jack Thompson will get what’s coming to them!

Welcome esteemed readers, welcome to the greatest media circus that has ever been witnessed upon earth. Welcome to the Credit Crunch, the greatest disaster of modern times! Gaze with terror at its vicious fangs! Cower in fear before its potential ability to bankrupt! Most importantly, buy more newspapers so we can continue our amoral doom-mongering!

This my friends, is the ‘credit crunch’. A media circus that has almost become a parody of itself in its scale and absurdity. Ever since Northern Rock folded all that we have heard is the constant baying, howlings of terror from the media. Where will our money go? Not, *gasp*, to the PUBLIC SECTOR? *Cue gratuitous shivering*. The Media can be split into two camps on the issue:

Firstly there is the Conservative media, every country in the world has its representative, over here in our Rupert Murdoch controlled world we have the Times, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail. The Yanks have Fox News and the like. Each of these papers cowers in a collective corner, supposedly hiding themselves from the McCarthy era spectre of ‘Socialism’. They seem to believe that the nationalisation of some areas of the banking sector will lead to a full blown Communist Revolution. Namely, they have seen what happens to greedy fatcats living at the expense of their workers a la RBS. They have seen a world where they ight occupy a slightly devolved position in the world, and like the greedy bigoted children that they are they have clung on to every last foothold, fighting for purchase on the slippery floorboards of privelidge that separate them from the great unwashed masses. Naturally the noise that they have created over the matter only exposes their immaturity, but also their stupidity. To even comprehend for even a moment that anything akin to the Great Depression will come about again is both naive and vain. What we are experiencing is the first economic downturn since the early nineties, this is our ‘Great’ Depression.

The second camp are almost as odious, save that they are the monsters, the underdogs and so at least on the outside a little more likeable.  These are the actual Socialists, the Communists, the Anarchists of the world who have witnesses the first great test of endurance for the leaders of the modern world financially. These are the people who have declared the fall of Capitalism, as though Capitalism is an artificial structure which can be toppled as opposed to an external existentialist expression of human greed into a form pleasing to the senses, They claim to have sensed the fall of the Western World, they of course, are false. These are simply no more than oppportunists, filth who will cling to any hope of fame. Capitalism is not dead, nor will it die until the human race itself is extinct. These people revel in the image that the conservative media has granted them. They love being the bogeymen of the conscientuous right-thinking man, of the centralist, of the socialist, of the moral.

These people need to have their show shut down. Even though Capitalism is immortal, it can still be hurt. It is a system buitl on bonds of trust, once these dissapear we have nothing but a beautiful veneer. So I plea to you, conservatives, shut the hell up. Socialists, grow up.

I hope that you appreciated this incoherent rant, I shan’t make another at least for a week.

In the words of the esteemed Guardian columnist and general all round grouch Charlie Brooker, what is the point in people? Now I personally am hardly gregarious but nor am I misanthropic, I inhabit some strange border space, close enough to one side that I cannot function without people but close enough to the other that I find them generally annoying.

Now I have friends (regardless of what you cynics may believe) but I rarely see them.  These borderlands that I inhabit are very lonely needless to say, I am not so much unique as a half-breed.

When it comes down to it though, what is the point in people?

I watch them at work, wandering through the shopfloor like headless chickens, they ask me questions “Do you have this one book I’m looking for, now I haven’t seen it in 40 years, but I think that you have it, do you? Its blue and incredibly obscure, probably not even in print anymore, do you have it? No?! Why ever not?! You call yourself a bookseller when you can’t instantly find one incredibly obscure blue book with your eyes closed and as I talk to you!!!? GOOD DAY TO YOU!” And vice versa. These are the same people who hopeless grind their insignificant lives away on the treadstone of eternity, spending their brief seconds on this earth shitting, eating shit and looking for shit. Life is shit and so therefore revolves around shit. This is the philosophy that I have come to espouse, that I have adopted and applied to my own life. If life is shit then I do things that only I want to do and concurrently life ceases to be shit. Spontanaeity is a wonderful thing, if I see a hill and fancy climbing it, then I do it there and then regardless of whatever conditions may impede my progress. It involves snatching yourself from the jaws of fate and applying a doctrine of positivism to everyday activities. In essence I am now a hippy, although in practice I do posess a certain level of inner peace that has allowed me to survive this ordeal.

I really have far too much time on my hands,

Until next time I feel inclined to type my good followers, until next time.

Although this may seem something of a random topic to many of the esteemed readers who frequent this site, it is indeed a subject that is very close to the heart of this anonymous blogger. Indeed the question of Scottish Independence is of supreme importance to all of those in Scotland and also (perhaps to a lesser extent) the rest of the UK.

The problem lies with the perception that the country has of itself. In our visitor ads we brand ourselves as ‘the best small country in the world’. In recent years (or to be more precise, the years following Braveheart) the question of Scottish pride and independence has come to a head in Scotland. The Nationalists, led by their odious frontman Wee Eck, constantly and consistently brag on about how Scotland invented the world and raise issues that must only be met with incredulity, such as when Wee Eck announced in a public statement that he would wish to meet the newly inaugrated President of Yankee-land and discuss whether or not the issue or Scottish Independence figured greatly on the President’s agenda. Of course this is all poppycock; Scottish Independence is an issue that barely figures in the mind of an Englishman, let alone the most powerful man in the world.

This problem, of bloated statements about the importance of Scotland within the context of Europe and the wider world, and the impossibly optimistic predeictions about the state of the Scottish economy if it were to be separated from the UK trading zone. The fact of the matter is that Scotland does not need independence. We have a gloriously bloody past, filled with achievement and defeat, we took a course of our own through the troubled waters of medieval Europe and never once succumbed to conquest. This is what we were, however it is not what we are. The same people that are romanticised and the same country that those lovers of independence seek to lionise and enshrine do not exist anymore and it is not reasonable to expect there return. The question that must allso be asked is whether a return is desirable; we have a pretty good deal here and now: a)we are a quarter of one of the most powerful countries in the world b)we get a pretty sweet deal tax wise c)we have a devolved parliament, we can make our own decisions on our own issues.

The reinstatement of the parliament was not a folly as some have described it, but rather it was a glorious gift. The biggest mistake that Queen Anne made in 1707 was to allow the abolition of the Scottish Parliament, after all it was just as qualified an institution as the English parliament, it also would have dispelled the notion that the UK was simply an extension of England (as so many foreigners seem to believe). Regardless of this the situation is coming to a head, with a referendum to be held this year or next. Despite what may be considered convincing arguments in its favour, you can be rest assured that independence is not a desirable solution to the problems within Scotland at the minute.

Long live the Union!

Christmas. The name is a byword for decadence and consumer-fuelled, heartless marketing directives aimed at squeezing every penny out of us over the course of one long and brutal month. Yet in this festival is ther not something more? Is there a shred of sanity left in the horrible homogenisation of rituals, practices and beliefs? Apparently not.

Every festival around the world has roots that go back thousands of years, nothing is invented, only reimagined and/or added to. Take for instance the British festival of Guy Fawkes Night; founded 400 years ago in the spirit of communal bloodlust, the festival has lasted to the present day, the sole non-religious festival left in the UK. The festival itself is comprised of a  hotchpotch of half-remembered Celtic beliefs and 19th century Romanticism, yet in itself is rather compelling, and is far more authentic than any Christmas celebration in existence. What is left of Christmas? Santa? Baby Jesus? Presents? Well I’ve somethin’ to tell ya folks, it’s all a lie.

Santa; supposedly the spirit of St Nicholas who, making use of the world’s most effective surveillance system, tracks down your children and judges them according to his Manichean beliefs. Once he has done so he uses teams of midget slave-labourers to lavish presents upon complete strangers and punishes those who are not deserving, like the perverted, animal-abusing alcoholic that he is.

Baby Jesus; was not born on Christmas day. This was just the Celtic festival Imbolc (roughly celebrated at this time) adapted by Catholic priests in the UK and Ireland to become less ‘pagan’ and more adherent to Church custom. The belief that Jesus was born on December 25th is merely that, a belief. There is no hard evidence to prove that he was born on this day, and so to all you people out there, there is no true meaning of Christmas, Christmas doesn’t really exist (like Mother’s Day, an invention brough to you courtesy of Hallmark)

Presents; I’m not even going to bother covering this one, the stupidity is so immense that it cannot be properly described by anything other than a full blown compendium of dissecting works, each tailored to different areas of the myth. Suffice it to say that we give presents because our esteemed system of Capitalism that has served us so proudly over the past four centuries without the slightest moral or practical failing *ahem* wants you to. Christmas is the only lifeline that Capitalism has in the lean winter months, hence the recent 2.5% VAT reduction in the UK.

So you get the general picture; Christmas is a sham. Yes it does get people together, and if enough people believe, then doesn’t that make it a true festival? The answer to that is a hearty no. It doesn’t take a fat bearded man, a slighly embarresed looking pine tree sentenced to death by starvation while wearing the very picture of decadence, gilt and pomp and a few half-heartedly sung tunes to get people together.

There was a time without Christmas, when we spent our winter months with some semblance of sanity. Isn’t it time to return there?

“Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.”  - Richard Armour

This little quotation has brought to light the main predicament with politics today, image vs substance. Lets take to light some of the recent developments in modern world politics to enrich everyone’s knowledge of the subject:

Now what is possibly the greatest example of the image vs substance problem occurred with the McCain presidential campaign this year. Now McCain, a man who I have no small amount of respect for, betrayed himself, his vision and his followers when this year, he took one Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate. Now this man, someone who made it very clear that he was different to the Bush administration and who was willing to stand aside from some of the nutjobs in his party, looked as though he might make a difference in the Republican party. He looked as though he was the man to shake off the image of backward beer-swiggin’ farmers and self-righteous, racist, gun-toting priests and lawyers that the party has so suffered from under Bush. And lo her tried, but inevitably failed. This failure became apparent when he voted in the most extremist and backward of all American politicians, a walking-talking charicature of the right-wing, Sarah Palin. Mooseburgers and bullshit ensued, with the ‘lipstick pitbull’ savaging her own reputation and that of McCain with her ineptitude. Her appointment as the vice-presidential candidate was poor strategising, planning and just plain stoopid, this choice was image over substance, and look where the campaign ended up. I supported Obama all the way, but mainly because of the incompetance displayed here. It was rather depressing. Now although this story is rather depressing, that of a man driven against his values and beliefs to comply with those of his party, but the debate is not over.

The opposit of this has occurred in the UK this very year. Our esteemed Prime Minister, the imperturbable Gordon Brown, has proven to the voters, along with his spectacularly-eyebrowed Chancellor, Alaistair Darling, thaat what you see is not necessarliy what you get. Earlier on in the year there was a great doubt about Brown’s ability to lead the Labour Party into the next election, opinion polls reached terrible lows and he was unpopular even among his own appointed cabinet. Then came the credit crunch, at this point Brown was able to give the country a boost that only he with his decade behind the financial wheel of the country could achieve. As a result he has gained enormous popularity (compared to that previously) and has set the country on a steady course. Brown has proven through his actions more than anything else that substance should always triumph over style.

And so the essence of the argument comes to the fore; it is through our words that we promote image while through our actions we prove our substance. Now someone like myself, a man of far too many words, is effective at promoting our own self-images through speech and text. With an expressive vocabulary and effective turn-of phrase this is really not a great feat. Whilst I say this there is no doubt a firefighter saving a child dfrom a fire, proving himself to be far more worthy than I. Saying this, I don’t expect all politicians to be Superman, hell no, that’d just make the gme boring. What I’d like is a greneral shift in focus from the media-culture to that of the wider world. Things like the Darfur crisis need solved quickly, they are the only ones among us with the power to change something, yet they never exercise it.

Metropolis needs saved, but Superman is posing to himself in the mirror.

A term has been cycled round the historical community as of late, as awareness of a certain trend has come to the fore; Hitler porn. This is where gross levels of academic thinking and  history channel broadcast time are dedicated  to WW2.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve studied WW2 in depth and I find it fascinating, but I do find that in all the thousands of years of human history there have been hundreds, if not thousands of significant events, yet we still stick to this one.

I do hope that in the future historians will realise this, and seeing the public’s pitiful awareness of their own identity and culture which is expressed so vividly through the history of each country that they will make programs and do studies into other things. History shouldn’t be determined by what is popular, but by what was important. Now that we have spent 30 years having a collective blowjob  over  WW2 maybe  we should consider other things, for example a  study into the culinary habits of Scythian kings, rather than why Hitler took a dump on the morning of 18 October 1942 (he ate some bad eggs)…

We need to broaden our horizons rather than focus them.

The Media. never has there existed such a powerful entity since the beginning of organised government. It defines and shapes what we see and think of the world around us and has an unrivalled impact in swaying our opinions in their favour. Orwell wrotes in his masterpiece “1984″ of the sports, gossip and pornography that the state issued in national newspapers used to control the minds of the populace. that was in 1948, and look at the situation now. The only difference is that in our countries that allowed the ‘All-American’ practice of ‘free speech’ (try saying anything negative about religion in the current media climate), the newspapers are controlled by something even worse, the private individual. Thus, for example, here in the Uk we are subjected to the views of Rupert Murdoch through Sky news, the Times, the Sunday Times and the Sun among others.

This deplorable state of affairs has led to the common man or women having little interest in politics, science or the arts and an inability to allow themselves to overcome the social predjudices that are placed in their way by society and reinforced by the tabloids. The broadsheets are at the opposite end of this scale, many being far too precociously elite to appeal to anyone save the self-delusional and the afore mentioned anal film critics.

More regulation is needed to liberate the media from these shackles that have been placed around its ankles by masters that laugh behind spectacles of gold. The internet was, is and shall soon cease to be a place for the declaration of truly free thought, for it is only when we are completely anonymous can we be free.

I despise the media.

What is the point of celebrity culture? What impact do these quasi-mystical beings that we revere have on our lives? As Alan Moore said in Watchmen “All we see of the stars are their old photographs” We are the discarded many who only exist as intransigent beings in their godly reality. Unable to give them satisfaction they resist only with their own kind, in a mystical world, where nothing works by the conventional rules and where dreams are conjured to keep us spellbound, in thralldom, to work for them, to feed them the jewels and other riches that their extravagant lifestyles require.

They are the modern pantheon, the Greeks and Romans had their own as now do we. They reside on their own Mount Olympus and manufacture images in their liking that we might fawn over them all the more. The film industry’s cult with its stars has developed over time, particularly with the sexing up of society, for then they were able to flaunt their toned abs and perfect breasts so that we drooled in ecstasy all the more. Why do we worship these people? Why do their deaths mean more to us than the death of a man whose life’s work was to improve the situation in the Middle East? Why do we clamour at the gates of the Academy Awards and ignore (in comparison) the Nobel Awards (which recieve only specialist media culture). In what way are they superior to us? Because they pretend to lead lives that they don’t? Because they are who we want to be? If so then why don’t their actions dictate the mob at their doors, smashing through to take what is rightfully theirs? These conmen and women are the bane of civilised thought, they exist only to cheat and steal.

But by god do I love them.

So recently I signed up for my student newspaper, titled remarkably enough “Student”. I signed on as a film critic and I saw and reviewed “Death Race” which was ok. What struck me though, reading the reviews section of an unnamed broadsheet later on was how negative reviewing sections usually are. now I’m an avid Empire reader, I’ve seen far more than my fair share of reviews, but generally they are ok. The world of critics is divided into two sections; the Addicts and the Anals.

Now the Addicts are an easy bunch to spot, read any paper that costs less than 50p and they are virtually guarenteed. They also occur if the magazine doesn’t specifically deal with film, but dabbles occassionally. These are the people who are addicted to the sound of their own voices and the smell of their own gas. Every film to them is a cause for orgasmic celebration and so every film recieves a glowing review. These are the people who have no credibility.

The Anals are the second group. These gloomy souls usually inhabit the darker recesses of the broadsheets and hate every film in existence. Every film recieves a terrible review, with only arthouse flicks that redefine the genre in their own fashion garnering any kind of positive focus. Stuffy and anal (as their name suggests) these people are also to be avoided, their peculiar brand of pessimism catches like the plague.

I try in my reviews to walk the line inbetween these two groups, and hopefully I’ll succeed, if your’re interested then read the paper at www.studentnewspaper.org. It is the extremism that these two groups of people represent that are killing the genre, nothing else.

You would think that after more than a century of existence that the situation would have improved somewhat…