John Walker's Electronic House

For the longest time I have been trying to articulate my political position in the wake of the events of the last few years. This is not to say that it has changed – it has become more articulate, self-aware and educated, but still essentially stayed in the same place for as far back as I can remember. But as the broadest acceptable title for where I stand, “the left”, increasingly becomes a phrase I fear, what is going on?

‘The left’ now refers to the groups of people who will happily go on “Stop The War” marches co-run by extreme right-wing organisations, explaining that it wasn’t all run by anti-Semitic bodies, so it’s still ok. ‘The left’ now refers to the people who will endorse George Galloway simply because he disagrees with someone they disagree with, and in doing so accept his fondness for spending time with extreme right-wing dictators, and his endorsement of extreme right-wing groups, and his calls for violent actions against others. ‘The left’ runs around screaming “TONY BLIAR MORE LIKE!”, reducing painfully complicated situations down to black and white arguments wherein they label the perceived opponents as the ‘black’, and then seem to think that the ‘white’ requires no definition or identification beyond “not the same as the black”.

That’s not ‘the left’ that I used to think of when I heard the phrase. Perhaps the whole association with the extreme right is the immediate giveaway. And it scares me. Because as New Labour moves to the centre, and obviously the Conservatives keep rushing right, the Liberal Democrats still haven’t figured out what to do with their new-found leftist position, and those on the left who didn’t go with Labour are now acting out on the anger at the betrayal they feel. This anger pushes them to where my friend Martin describes as “around the back of insanity, where they meet up with the extreme rights”.

Articulating this, and the peculiar feeling of standing in the gap left over, looking around and wondering what happend, is pretty disorientating. Somehow the vocabulary of what was previously the left is now perceived to be nu-intolerance. Standing against oppression is only acceptable if it’s perpetrated by the Western world. Which is why it was so utterly bloody fantastic to read this by Nick Cohen:

I still fight oppression

There’s a peculiar thing about adventure game reviews. Aside from the tedious inevitability of the mainstream press attempting some widespread analysis of the entire genre, there comes alongside them the frothing insanity of the adventure gaming specialist press. These poor starving beings wander through their lives wraith-like, long gaunt faces, bony fingers clasping with a rigor mortis grip around any release that might feature some notion of pointing and clicking. Letting these people review adventure games is like letting junkies review heroin. However cut the purity might be, however poor quality, whatever diseases might worm through their bodies as a result of playing, dammit man, it’s a hit. Give it a 10.

Still Life review up on Eurogamer. What I’m really hoping for is a massive electronic war with Just Adventure. They’d all come rushing in, stabbing everyone with the spikey As they give everything.

In response to Jess Bates’ “Why Won’t Women Play?”

I believe that the very central problem when one considers the matter of men, women and gaming, is one of a dominant chauvinism within specific aspects of this medium. And I believe this to be a sad thing. I believe it to be the same sad thing that exists in cinema, sports, newspaper journalism and, very much, so on. Hell, anyone who labours under the belief that there is now any sense of equality between men and women, at least in the UK, is very much an intrinsic part of the problem they fail to identify. Let there be no need for any counter-argument after learning that women are still paid up to a third less than men for performing equivalent jobs. Society is, without doubt, still male-focused, and videogaming plays a large part in that.

Quickly, as obvious as it should already be, glance at James Bond. The recent films, in an effort to ‘update’ the franchise, make M female and the girls Bond fucks a bit less helpless. A pathetic misunderstanding of what was seen as sexist in the first place, and quite sinister in its belief that such changes would address matters. This is merely representative of the action movie, a genre that does not immediately appeal to the majority of women, but finds instant connection with large numbers of men. Much like action gaming.

It’s entirely possible that my position makes me immediately biased. Whenever men/women arguments are made, they are always thrown into confusion by the biological behaviour of one sixth of each gender. Five out of six women’s brains work using a near-equal balance of each lobe, while five out of six men’s brains tend to work more dominantly on one side. Five out of six women have a greater perception of space, while five out of six men are better able to focus on a specific target. So in general, we can generally be this general. Trouble is, one in six, or indeed 500 million men and 500 million women, think the other way. Finding myself in that number, I am immediately predisposed to find arguments that ignore me and my select company to be enormously frustrating.

It is my contention that Jess Bates has not written an argument about why women don’t play games, but why /Jess Bates/ doesn’t enjoy /action games/. And I agree with her. I really don’t like GTA: VC. I recognise quite how remarkably good it is, and indeed enjoy playing it at a mechanical level. But I can’t play in denial of what’s happening, and I find it so wantonly unpleasant that I have to stop. This isn’t prudishness, and in no way do I suggest or imply that there is anything wrong with enjoying it. It is simply that I, as a male gamer, find little entertainment in endless slaughter and machismo-based gaming.

Bates is absolutely right that many female avatars do not attract female gamers. High-heeled, scantily-clad pairs of giant breasts resting on top of large-thighed legs are hardly the source of connecting empathy for the average gaming girl. Guess what: dumb-minded, massively muscled thugs aren’t all that interesting to me, while they portray the majority of male leads. I can’t emotionally connect with Duke Nukem or Tommy Vercetti. I also don’t want to. Which probably goes some way to explaining why I far prefer to play female characters in games over male. I have a much greater chance of an empathic response to my experience if I don’t have to push aside my values before I can enter into it. Bates is right when she says that such characters do not appeal to large numbers of female gamers. But she is woefully wrong when she implies that such games are inherently wrong. They exist for the same reasons that Vin Diesel and Tom Clancy exist: lots of men want that sort of thing. I don’t get why, and stare bemused at them, but they do, and to suggest that this is wrong and exclusive is to absorb the very sexist attitude such an article should surely exist to reject.

I also wholeheartedly agree with her arguments for games to develop a deeper connection between their context, environment, and actions. Indeed, to apply the rather peculiar lecture on eyeballs, if someone has a strong spatial awareness, dominant over their ability to focus on specifics within that environment, it only makes sense that games with such an awareness will be more appealing. It is, however, utterly disingenuous to promote such thinking as an argument against current gaming. It’s a specific critique of the action genre, and only valid when one is attempting to explain why such games do not appeal to them. (Nevermind that the GTA series is possibly one of the greatest examples of providing a contextual justification for its actions, non-linear freedom, and a sense of a dominant environment. If there were ever a game that offers roleplay rather than submersion, it would be in this series, with the entry requirement not being to see yourself simulated in a digital world, but only the desire to embrace that particular character).

The trouble is, Bates isn’t arguing for a greater understanding of female gaming desires and an industry-based response. She is instead adopting the vocabulary of those she would wish to oppose. This is no rare response. When London was recently bombed, the headline of the Daily Express stated “show no mercy” – the very language of those who attacked. In response to our perceived opponent, the fastest and most appealing reaction is often to become them. It’s how revenge works. Bates’ article does not call for a constructive response to her desires, but instead is a destructive critique of what already exists. It is a criticism of men, and male values, and how they manifest in gaming. She neither recognises that it’s ok for men to want to play such games, and nor that many men may feel equally distant from these gaming norms for the same reasons she identifies for women. Write that way if you want I suppose, but don’t prefix it with a strap stating “A manifesto for change” if you’re only going to hit things with angry hammers.

Where Bates recognises fault, there is a refusal to recognise success. Lists of what is wrong with how women are portrayed are not accompanied by lists of how women could be portrayed. Examples of barely dressed, big-boobed female characters are lambasted, but no acknowledgement of stridently different and positive female characters are given (beyond a clumsy approval of Silent Hill 3). Ignoring all from Cate Archer to April Ryan to Beyond Good & Evil’s Jade to Planescape’s Anna to KotOR and Deus Ex:IW’s female avatars is dishonest. Pretending that all games are Postal, and not the astonishingly evocative and emotionally overwhelming Ico, is to rewrite reality for an argument’s sake. And nevermind everything from Worms to Roller Coaster Tycoon to Psychonauts to Zoo Keeper to Darwinia to Day of the Tentacle to Ratchet & Crank to Meteos to City of Heroes to Civilisation to Microsoft Flight Simulator to The Sims to Eve Online to Crazy Taxi to Descent to Mario Smash Tennis to Mutant Storm to IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles to Sonic the Hedgehog…

Yes, God, some games are sexist, but the selective nature of such arguments is preposterous. Yes, the games industry is male dominated, and makes many games specifically aimed at men, and indeed many of these involve the objectifcation of women, often in deeply unpleasant ways. Write about this, critique it, condemn it if you feel it appropriate, but, to borrow someone else’s argument, recognise the wider environment. Be “spacially aware”, and see things in their context when making such observations.

Bates is correct: if games do not accept new ideas, they will stagnate. This has been clearly demonstrated by the adventure gaming genre – an area of gaming previously the most accepted by women – that refused to change or evolve and has now become a wraith of its former self. I would also passionately agree with her that a desire for a greater connection between the action of a game, and the game’s environment, developing an all-consuming sense of context, is an ideal direction for games to /continue/ going in. Plus I can’t disagree when Bates notes, “In the end this isn’t really just about women and games.” Indeed, it’s barely about that. It does however read as if someone who doesn’t like action games is attempting to transpose these tastes onto half the world’s population – tastes I utterly agree with.

Some games are chauvinistic. Some films are chauvinistic. The majority of people in the movie industry are men. There are more dumb action films than any other type. I rarely see someone complaining that films are not possible for women to engage with. And just as I have no desire to watch generic action blockbusters often assumed to appeal to men, I find little to engage with in action-focused fight games, whether featuring ludicrously thin, huge-chested imposso-women, or ridiculously buff, huge-muscled imposso-men. Yet I find huge amounts to love within gaming, so much so that it is my hobby as well as my career.

This is not an act of denial – it’s the very opposite. This is not a pretense that there isn’t an issue – there is absolute recognition of that issue, and indeed a distaste for it. This is an appeal for the argument to be recognised in its context, and with appropriate recognition of all that lies either side. It’s also my banged out response to having read the article, and finding myself wanting to articulate why I have strong objections to what has been written. I’d hugely appreciate people pointing out the mistakes I’ve made, the important points I’ve missed, and the general continuation of the discussion.

.

EDIT: I wrote a rejected article on the matter a year or so ago – it was rejected because it was a confused mess, as I tried to argue that there was a serious problem, while encountering only evidence to the contrary throughout. Here are a couple of bits from it that seem relevant:

How can the situation change, or improve? The most commonly suggested answer is for there to be more women working in games development. Gareth R. Schott and Kirsty R. Horrell mention in their paper ‘Girl Gamers and their Relationship with the Gaming Culture’, “Male designers who have developed games have traditionally preserved male dominance within the gaming industry based on their own tastes and cultural assumptions.” To combat that, one would imagine girl game designers need to break into the boy’s playground. But Brunel University lecturer Tanya Krzywinska argues that it is not that simple.

“I don’t believe more women working in the industry would have more than peripheral effect precisely because the game industry is market driven and, like the movie industry, has now established formal and generic patterns that will prove hard to break in an industrial sense.”

…

Of course, most games featuring female characters in lead roles are still inevitably violent. Is there a difference, or are we just trans-gendering the lead for the sake of trying to appeal to a wider audience?

“The correlation between fighting and empowerment is one that troubles critics who see fighting as a masculinist trait par excellence and girl-fight-action as another mode of playing women as the object of gaze. In these games, however, fighting is not simply offered up for the contemplative ‘gaze’, as we might say of cat fights in sexploitation films… Rather it is an activity that is absolutely central to the /doing/ and being-in-the-world component of the games.”

More of Tanya Krzywinska’s thoughts on Buffy can be found here: www.slayage.tv

So, I want to tell you about my life. I’ll pick, oh, let’s say Thursday, and talk you through it.

I get up at about 7.30am, and jump in the shower. Coffee is made, thrown in a travel mug, and I get in the car. DVDs are dropped back at the rental shop (because I don’t want to be barred from both video stores in Bath), and then I drive for twenty minutes around a town I’ve lived in or near for three years trying to find a route through the crazyman one way logic problem of Bath’s streets until I can get to the road with the Odeon on it. (Anyone who lives in Bath now thinks: ‘Um, you just drive onto it.’ Those people are witches). I manage it just in time to pick up Kieron, and then we drive to Stansted airport.

We don’t fly anywhere, that’s not why we go there. We just go there to have games presented to us before getting into a coach and being driven to a mystery location containing a giant stately home in the beautiful green countryside. Here we have an incredibly nice buffet lunch with barbecued meats of every variety. We drink green orange juice and red or blue water, and sit with the very most strange of games journalists, who all fawn over Kieron, asking if they can just, just maybe, touch his hand so their lame foot may be healed.

We meet with Craig, and then after lunch are surprised by a large group of men and women dressed in combats, faces, arms and chests smeared in camo, who run into the room and tell us all to put combats on. They then shout at us until we all go outside, in our correct groups, as designated by the number on the caps we’re forced to wear, and not the colour of the cap. Red is human, yellow is biomek, black is mutant. As you’re probably well aware.

Outside, we are then shouted at by incredibly cute girls putting on cross voices.

Divided up, Kieron (human) goes off with the number 5s, while as 2s, Craig (human) and I (mutant) go in the other direction.

At this point, it’s probably quite important to point out how some people are Cap People, and other people are not. For instance, me:

Variously described as “handsome” (thank goodness for Jim), “a Serbian war criminal” (cheers Stu) and “The right-wing nutcase we always knew you were” (from dearest, dearest Alec, who just keeps finding that joke funny, bless him), I think it’s safe to say that I’m… not a Cap Person.

Craig, however:

is clearly of the Cap People. The natural smile, and long, girly hair, means that he looks as pretty as a peach in anything.

And Kieron:

Well, he’s grateful for the chance to go outside and spend time with the grown ups.

So Craig and I will go to the quad bikes and inflatable outdoor indoor quasar first of all.

When we are done there, terrfied by the shouting, insane, shouting, shouting German man

and the woefully over-confident guy from Boomtown, we move on to the hovercrafts.

Hovercraft? Witchcraft, more like. More difficult to steer than my Fiat Punto, and with a thumb-twitch cut-off cord, they are quite impossible to control, and Craig is a demon, spawned upon this earth in the approximate form of a human. Here we also drive things called ‘Argos’, which devastatingly is pronounced “Arr-goes”, and not like the laminated halls of plastic misery-queues. (I’m sorry, Greek who?). These are not controlled by the two metal levers that must be pulled up and down willynilly while the ludicrous six-wheeled metal crate lurches about in its own choice of direction, which is inevitably through the thick trunks of trees.

This rubbish finished, we move on to pure, sweet joy – vehicles formed from the very tears of metallic angels: Little buggies that go everso, everso fast.

A fool might think it enough for us to just drive these beasts at hairy speeds around the large grass track. Sad fool. The only way for this experience to be complete is for two teams of enemy races to be armed with semi-automatic paintball guns, who must fire their little balls of emulsion-based death at you as you hurtle past their cowardly nests.

All finished, we head back to the vast, astonishing house/hotel, and are told that the cheating human scum cheated their way to a cheat-based victory, and then Kieron and I drive back via our own unique and patented route. This involves my ignoring Kieron’s correct suggestion of which way to get onto the M25, and immediately realising that we’re facing the wrong circumference of a big, slow circle. No matter, we just drive the nine miles to the next junction and turn around. Of course, we don’t drive those nine miles, but instead move at a speed only slightly faster than if we just allow the surface of the earth to pass beneath our wheels, because everyone, and I mean everyone, wants to get a big old nice slow gawp of the burned out winnebago that’s blocking all three lanes of the motorway in the other direction. So we don’t turn back and join the carpark on the other side of the barrier, but instead take a scenic route through the countryside, taking us back to the same junction where I made that one stupid decision one hour previously. Hours later I drop Kieron off in Bristol, and then get home, watch a couple of episodes of Scrubs, and get myself to bed.

That’s pretty much a Thursday for me. It normally means I really can’t wait for the weekend for all this crazy work to be over.

(Full-sized pictures, with a load others, here)

“Hello misses.”

Hello indeed. This glorious legend represents the very first spoken words in RPG-lite Restricted Area, (should you be playing as one of the two available female characters). Typos are not the be-all and end-all of civilisation (that honour goes to incorrectly used apostrophes), but their inclusion is never a good sign. Opening with one – that achieves ‘omen’ status.

Well, it would seem that I am over on Eurogamer. Lovely news.

Because, in all I do, I am just a shallow shadowy imitation of Kieron Gillen, I thought I’d copy his promotional ways with the above.

Huge thanks to Landlord Hicks for having linked me to the Mirror Mask trailer:

I saw it for the first time last night, not recognising the name (despite having perused the illustrated script in Waterstones, gooey-eyed staring at the art of Dave McKean), and not knowing what to expect. Some ghastly hyperbole about the Wizard of Oz immediately worried me, but then the pictures appeared. It was Dave McKean’s illustrations, but moving, alive. I sat stock-still, shivers filling my neck and back, my jaw stupidly open throughout, and by the end a fat tear had spilled from each eye. At a trailer.

In the company I keep, names like Neil Gaimen are well worn and too easy. But for me, a person who hasn’t read Sandman, he’s something new, and someone I’ve only explored in his utterly wonderful children’s books. The Wolves In The Walls is how all children’s books should be written. The ad bumph says it all:

“Lucy is sure there are Wolves living in the walls of her house, but her family doesn’t believe her.

Then one day, the wolves come out…”

Gaimen’s understanding of glee, that the macabre delights, and the brilliant use of jam to replace blood, is fantastic. But what made me fall in love with the book was the striking nature of the McKean’s illustrations. A combination of hand drawn cartoons photographic collage, and… something that might be pastel, but I’m not sure, creates something completely other. As I write, Kieron’s firing off names of other McKean/Gaimen books I should already have read – the joy is, I still have them to read.

So yes, I’m Mr New To All This, but that only strengthens the grip this Mirror Mask promo has on me. McKean’s vision is imagination in pictures. Imagination is often lazily translated into “unusual” or “not reality”. Imagination is reality and unreality combined, history and potential given no constrictions and set free. And that’s what this trailer shows. If the film is this good, it will be all-consumingly wondrous. If it’s not, and I mean this, then I still have the trailer.

That this is coming from the last remaining tendrils of the Jim Henson company is wonderful. It may be their bowing out. There’s a reason why Muppet movies always make me cry like an idiot: because Henson understood imagination. Not “ways to make kids think”, but ways to paint the screen with wonder. The Labyrinth may suffer from Bowie’s haircut and ominous lycra bulges, but it remains visually beautiful. It was care and love and passion focused into creative energy. As his wretched offspring prostitute their father’s work for every last cent they can strangle out, there does seem to be some of Henson’s magic left in the parts that haven’t been sold to Disney or whoever else wrote the biggest cheque.

Imagination means so much to anyone worth knowing. It’s the dividing line between ‘adults’ and ‘grown ups’. Anyone who allows themselves the notion of having finished their journey to the point where they feel secure to say that they have ‘grown up’ has shed their imagination. They’ve lost sight of the joys of impossible potential and unreal desires. As the education system drains the last vestiges of imaginative teaching and teaching imagination from its curricula, and society condemns the dreamer, seeing something so utterly, compellingly beautiful as this little film advert has wrapped my heart in blankets.

I’m often asked to justify my love for the PC game The Longest Journey. Those who play it as a result of my endless promotion quickly discover the terrible point-n-click puzzles, and often become infuriated with my deception. I’ve tried so many times to articulate what it is about the game that raises it above such niggles, that makes it so very special and worthy of such tireless celebration. It’s the above. It’s that love of imagination, and the desire to fall into its deep volcano. The article linked just above is one stab I’ve had at attempting to explain this.

Today has been Anxiety Day.

It’s been a while since I’ve had one this intense – obviously with anxiety disorder (it’s so great to have a disorder – if you don’t have one, you really do, you’ve just not identified it yet) there’s the general lunatic worrying accompanying every waking moment – but today has been a day when it’s all bubbled over the surface.

It’s been an odd week. Lots of stuff. The reaction to that shooting really upset me as well – especially seeing the hateful comments even here. While I’ve had really valuable conversations with people about why they believe the policemen’s actions to be justified, those have been with people of the decency and intelligence to not dismiss a human life away because he didn’t react perfectly in a moment of panic. Watching a nation compromise reality down until a baggy coat is a valid death warrant depresses me greatly. Hearing the vocabulary of the nation take on the vocabulary of those who attack is devastating. The Sun’s headline yesterday (below) really hurt me – such a vicious, hateful and utterly despicable comment to make even were the dead man a terrorist. That he was not I hope will hasten Rebecka Wade’s long-necessary resignation. The headline from the Express, however, is the one that’s worried me far more. The words “[they shall] be shown no mercy” are the words of Al Quaeda. And there they are, on the front pages of our newspapers. As the police shoot to kill those who intend to kill, our vocabulary becomes that of those from whom we wish to distinguish ourselves. I wish that ours was a response of mercy. I wish our papers proudly boasted, “They shall be shown mercy.”

Anxiety Day (back there again) makes every conversation ludicrous. No matter the subject, I can’t say anything without deciding that it’s been misinterpreted, and then apologising for the possible misinterpretation, which of course didn’t happen. Which then confuses the person to whom I’m talking no end, and leaves me trying to explain what I meant, which is very much like trying to untangle a spilled pool of wool with an angry cat. I become so entangled in what I’ve said, what I’ve not said, what I think the other person might think I’ve said, what I’m sure I should have said that would have made it understood and if I say it now maybe it will be so I do but out loud it turns out to be possibly the stupidest thing I could possibly say and now I have to try and explain why I said that and what it was I thought they might have thought I said in the first place and how I then thought that that meant that they thought that I thought that they thought I had said the opposite of what I meant and so I say again what I originally meant but it still doesn’t make sense because it’s the product of anxiety and not rational thought that can be articulated out loud to someone else and so I apologise for it and worry about how I’m going to say all of that…

That’s the inside of my head.

Apologies and thank you if you’re one of those who has encountered me today.

The page the BBC have stopped linking to now.

“As [the suspect] got onto the train I looked at his face, he looked sort of left and right, but he basically looked like a cornered rabbit, a cornered fox. He looked absolutely petrified and then he sort of tripped, but they were hotly pursuing him, [they] couldn’t have been any more than two or three feet behind him at this time and he half tripped and was half pushed to the floor and the policeman nearest to me had the black automatic pistol in his left hand. He held it down to the guy and unloaded five shots into him.”

“Everyone who was on the platform was just running from one end of the platform down to the exit as quickly as possible.”

Q&A: Stockwell shooting

Scotland Yard has admitted that a man shot dead by police hunting the bombers behind Thursday’s London attacks was unconnected to the incidents.

Botherer Blog correspondents Gordon Nocareera and James Hardly look at the implications.

Q: Will this have an effect on attempts to foster good community relations?

It has been speculated in some places that the police’s shooting at innocent people can do some damage to positive community relations. Some people have expressed concern about the decision to shoot at the vaguely Asian looking man, with Muslim leaders implying that a “shoot-to-kill-foreigners” policy can have detrimental effects on public relations. Of course, this doesn’t take into account the effect a killing has on the size of a community, reducing the real-term numbers of individuals with which poor relations can be had.

Q: What impact will it have on the way the police investigate into the bombings?

Of course, primarily it makes the hunt for the bombers easier, as there is now one less person to choose from. The situation is now more tense than in previous years, with the recent suicide bombings calling for a review of the more traditional “Ask questions, have a trial, shoot later” policy.

Q: Are we sure police officers were responsible for the shooting, and what is their policy in such cases?

While the police did chase the unarmed innocent man onto the tube train, cornering him and piling onto him to ensure he was incapacitated, it’s not clear which one it was that did the shooting. For a number of years the police have been looking at which tactics can be used in the eventuality of suicide bombers operating in the UK, and it is a very difficult thing to cope with, but sitting on people before emptying a gun into their head has so far proven to prevent any repeat offenses, guilty or innocent.

Q: Does the shooting represent a setback for Prime Minister Tony Blair?

Tony Blair is content to let the police cover the story up without his help, allowing them to investigate themselves in the traditional manner. Mr Blair has asked that the public remain scared, and added that if any members of the public see any policemen acting suspiciously, to alert the nearest someone else.

Men’s toilet in Boston Tea Party Bristol, second cubicle: