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"It's not enough to hope that games might be redeemed as fine art or to be played by people of all ages and backgrounds. Instead, video games' cultural future depends on a rich, diverse, magical ecosystem of weird games of all shapes, sizes, and purposes helping multitudes of people pursue a variety of goals and passions. It's not that games need to "rise to the level" of books and films and the like, but that they need to spread like those media into all the nooks and crannies of human activity. The more deliberately creators populate such an ecosystem, the harder it will become for games to become pawns in the debates of others."
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"His base is too good, and I don’t have the choke. He proceeds to take a more dominant position, scores points, and my body is burning from the effort. The choke he applies toward the end of the match is almost a formality, since I’m far too tired to do much more than hang on. Second place. Second place because I’m learning the triangle choke, not learning Jiu Jitsu. Chipp never wins tournaments." A fantastic piece of writing, about beat-em-ups and combat sports, and the mindset you get into as you play both. I'm not a combat sports man, but it nails some of the inside of your brain when you've played a lot of beat-em-ups, for sure.
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"But to my eye, GIF is the most popular animation and short film format that's ever existed. It works on smartphones in millions of people's pockets, on giant displays in museums, in web browsers on a newspaper website. It finds liberation in constraints, in the same way that fewer characters in our tweets and texts freed us to communicate more liberally with one another. And it invites participation, in a medium that's both fun and accessible, as the pop music of moving images, giving us animations that are totally disposable and completely timeless."
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"My wife and I talk about this. We talk about the protocol of the fertility clinic. We talk about her support group, and failure to produce. We talk about adoption, which is expensive and ambiguous. We talk about giving up on the process and living our lives without the ghosts of unconceived children (the most adorable ghosts there are). We talk, and talk, and wait." Powerful, sad, brave writing from Paul Ford. Sometimes, you wish things were nice for the good people in the world.
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"I needed to get up to speed with doing recursive node structures so I coded up a project that would put a dot on the screen. When you tapped this dot, it would create a bunch of orbiting child-dots. These children could also be tapped, creating even more child nodes. This prototype took less than a day to create and I naively thought we would be done with the whole thing in a week, max. Silly me."
Marvellous, dense post from Robert on designing Planetary: lots of show-everything, material exploration, and plussing. What detail looks like.
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"Years later, when recounting his conversations with Beckett (which he did often), André the Giant revealed that they rarely talked about anything besides cricket."
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"In this scenario one sunny day you're working on low-level NoSQL projects at the Gootch or wherever, and you get an email from Facebook and you go for the interview and Zuckerberg is talking about scaling PHP and suddenly pauses, gets this look in his eye, pulls his hoodie over his head and says “You have sixty seconds. You should be running.” Because engineers, as we are often reminded, are the ultimate prey."
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"A problem with the human mind – your human mind – is that it's a horrific kludge that will fail when you most need it not to. The Ugh Field failure mode is one of those really annoying failures. The idea is simple: if a person receives constant negative conditioning via unhappy thoughts whenever their mind goes into a certain zone of thought, they will begin to develop a psychological flinch mechanism around the thought. The "Unhappy Thing" – the source of negative thoughts – is typically some part of your model of the world that relates to bad things being likely to happen to you."
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"Designers get handed a tool kit that has as many tools as a good swiss army knife, and the maps reflect these tools. Millions of people use them to make appointments across town, find restaurants, and drive home for the holidays.
But what if, instead of a swiss army knife, we used a box of crayons? Or charcoal and newsprint? Or play-doh? What would those maps look like? What could they tell us about the world?"
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"One thing that I learned during the launch of the original Macintosh in 1984 was that the press usually oversimplifies everything, and it can't deal with the reality that there are many people playing critical roles on significant projects. A few people always get too much credit, while most people get too little, that's just the way it has always worked. But luckily, it's 2011 and I can use the service that I helped to create to clarify things." This is Good And Proper. (Also it's good management).
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How ads used to be made. Some beautiful photographs here.
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Useful notes on the modern way of deploying Rails applications with Bundler and Capistrano.
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'"The expectation is slightly weird here, that you can do this stuff without killing yourself," added McNamara. "Well, you can't, whether it's in London or New York or wherever; you're competing against the best people in the world at what they do, and you just have to be prepared to do what you have to do to compete against those people."'
This is what McNamara considers responding to controversy. I'm furious that men like this are allowed to manage other human beings.
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"This is an atlas, then, made by that other nature, seen through other eyes. But those eyes have been following me, unseen and without permission, and thus I consider provoking breach a necessary act." This is good.
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"csvkit is a library of utilities for working with CSV, the king of tabular file formats." Ooh.
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"Synapse is an app for Mac and Windows that allows you to easily use your Kinect to control Ableton Live, Quartz Composer, Max/MSP, and any other application that can receive OSC events. It sends joint positions and hit events via OSC, and also sends the depth image into Quartz Composer. In a way, this allows you to use your whole body as an instrument." Oooh. OSC into anything; really nice, dead simple, and exactly the sort of thing I've been considering poking.
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" I think Zemeckis and Gale knew all the timely accoutrements signifying "the present" in Back To The Future would inevitably look like 1985 within just a couple of years; in fact, they were banking on it. Zemeckis and Gale were trying to create an archetypical representation of 1985 just like they did for 1955, with its soda fountains, social repression, and subjugated black people. In this way, Back To The Future only gets better the further we get from the '80s. Everything that defines Marty McFly—how he walks, talks, acts, and dresses—acts as instantly recognizable shorthand for the year he comes from." This is great.
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"Let’s own the work that goes live, understand and explain why it is as it is, and work on the skills we need to make sure more good design actually makes it over the line. Otherwise, what’s the point?" Yes.
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"Unsurprisingly, having recognizable cartoon characters on the boxes caused kids to rate a cereal as better tasting, affecting their subjective assessment of it."
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"[Mayo is] making a dummy RFID-reader surface for us to mount on a subway turnstile, as well as a companion piece for the MetroCard vending machine. The challenge here is to avoid imposing our own designerly tastes on these artifacts; if we want them to be convincing at that all-important subliminal level, we have to try and imagine them as an extension of the MTA’s existing graphic vocabulary.
And that, in turn, means capturing a certain kind of municipal badness in the design of type and signage: inapposite font selection, clumsy kerning and so on. It’s an odd and demanding kind of discipline — especially for us, with our marked preference for the Vignelliesque."
Realism channeled through suitably ropey implementation.
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This is beyond brilliant. Not because it's More Hard Fun From The Maker Of QWOP, but because it's actually easier than QWOP, and it tickles exactly the same part of my brain that bouldering itself tickled, and it makes brilliant use of finger-gymnastics and the keyboard, and it's marvellous, really. I just want to go home and play it all night.
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"Deep craft is more than knowledge. It is a set of knowings. Knowing what is likely to work and what not to work. Knowing what methods to use, what principles are likely to succeed, what parameter values to use in a given technique. Knowing whom to talk to down the corridor to get things working, how to fix things that go wrong, what to ignore, what theories to look to. This sort of craft-knowing takes science for granted and mere knowledge for granted. And it derives collectively from a shared culture of beliefs, an unspoken culture of common experience." Craft / scenius / place / knowledge. The W Brian Arthur sounds great, and Matt's point – that building strength in a sector is building culture, and that requires investment in something that won't see immediate returns (rather than "five-year plans" and "strategies") is acute. Very good stuff.
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"Jennifer Brook, who makes artists’ books and iPad apps, speaking earlier this year: “Craftspeople are technologists, and technologists are craftspeople; the only difference is the velocity of the material they choose to work.” Humbly, I would add a further qualification, a further dimension. Celerity, or “proper velocity”, is velocity which takes the effects of relativity into account: the observer is travelling too; we are all travelling in time. The material has its own celerity." Oh, gosh, that's marvellous. Both parts.
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Nice lo-fi sound effect tool.
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Totally marvellous: photographs of New Zealand arcades in the eighties. Lovely they're online, as well as in the world, and must get around to that essay at some point.
Blog All Dog-Eared Pages: In Praise of Shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki
16 February 2011
Matt Jones lent me this essay by Junichiro Tanizaki after I wrote about the soft, shadow displays of the Kindle over at the Berg website (and also, earlier, about patina).
In Praise Of Shadows is about several things: architecture, culture, and light. Tanizaki meanders around the topic of “shadows”, and the way soft, subtle, darkness is such an important part of Japanese culture. He ruminates on toilets, and lacquerware, on Noh, and on tradition.
It’s a rambling tour, but one with much to recommend it. Tanizaki was writing in 1933; he describes himself as “old”, but was 47 when he wrote the essay. Perhaps his affection for tradition made him feel older than he was. It’s also an interesting piece of writing, given its focus on the gap between West and East, and the Westernisation of Japanese society that was perceived as progress. It takes on an interesting resonance when you consider its place between two world wars.
Very much recommended – it’s a very brief read, and nice to read someone very comfortable with meandering in such a loosely structured manner. Thanks, Matt.
And now: some quotations that stood out.
p.14 – on how simple cultural artefacts reflect and influence so much of a culture:
To take a trivial example near at hand: I wrote a magazine article recently comparing the writing brush with the fountain pen, and in the course of it I remarked that if the device had been invented by the ancient Chinese or Japanese it would surely have a tufted end like our writing brush. The ink would not have been this bluish color but rather black, something like India ink, and it would have been made to seep down from the handle into the brush. And since we would have then found it inconvenient to write on Western paper, something near Japanese paper – even under mass production, if you will – would have been most in demand. Foreign ink and pen would not be as popular as they are; the talk of discarding our system of writing for Roman letters would be less noisy; people would still feel an affection for the old system. But more than that: our thought and our literature might not be imitating the West as they are, but might have pushed forward into new regions quite on their own. An insignificant little piece of writing equipment, when one thinks of it, has had a vast, almost boundless influence on our culture.
p.17 – on recording, and how the arts change to accommodate media:
Japanese music is above all a music of reticence, of atmosphere. When recorded, or amplified by a loudspeaker, the greater part of its charm is lost. In conversation, too, we prefer the soft voice, the understatement. Most important of all are the pauses. Yet the phonograph and radio render these moments of silence utterly lifeless. And so we distort the arts themselves to curry favor for them with the machines.
p.20 – on darkness and dirt:
I suppose I shall sound terrible defensive if I say that Westerners attempt to expose every speck of grime and eradicate it, while we Orientals carefully preserve and even idealize it. Yet for better or for worse we do love things that bear the mars of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them. Living in these old houses among these old objects is in some mysterious way a source of peace and repose.
p.32 – on old paintings, found in the dark alcoves of temples:
The lack of clarity, far from disturbing us, seems to rather suit the painting perfectly. For the painting here is nothing more than another delicate surface upon which the faint, frail light can ply; it performs precisely the same function as the sand-textured wall. This is why we attach such importance to age and patina. A new painting, even one done in ink monochrome or subtle pastels, can quite destroy the shadows of an alcove, unless it is selected with the greatest care.
p.58 – on the Miyako hotel, furnished in a Western style:
Light is not used for reading or writing or sewing but for dispelling the shadows in the farthest corners, and this runs against the basic idea of the Japanese room. Something is salvaged when a person turns off the lights at home to save money, but at inns and restaurants there is inevitably too much light in the halls, on the stairs, in the doorway, the gate, the garden. The rooms and the water and stones outside become flat and shallow.
p.62 – on age:
There are those who say that when civilization progresses a bit further transportation facilities will move into the skies and under the ground, and that our streets will again be quiet, but I know perfectly well that when that day comes some new device for torturing the old will be invented.
Hacking on making art: my talk from Culture Hack Day
05 February 2011
My lightning talk from Culture Hack Day is now online as a video.
The lightning talks were meant to offer a provocation to the audience. I chose to point at the value of technology in creating art and cultural artefacts. Hack days are so often focused on repurposing and remixing; I think that hacking on culture should, in part, be about creating it as well.
What followed is an eight-minute whistle-stop tour through some art that interests and excites me, and a consideration of how technology might be used within that sort of work. I rather enjoyed this: nice to think outside some of my usual boxes, and focus on some more personal interests.
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Lovely trailer from BBC America for Law & Order UK. Sadly, it illustrates roughly what the British trying to make American-style procedural drama looks like. Lots of slamming things down. And tea. (Although: they don't know what "knackers" means, clearly.)
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"The iPad is an intensely personal device. In its design intent it is, truly, much more like a "big iPhone" than a "small laptop". The iPad isn't something you pass around. It's not really designed to be a "resource" that many people take advantage of. It's designed to be owned, configured to your taste, invested in and curated." On the assumptions built into devices, and what understanding them requires.
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"Ships will subscribe to the service through a third party, and receive the latest copy of the book when they dock at port. They tear out each page, and apply the relevant changes to their paper maps with a pencil and transfer paper. They’re paper map diffs, if you like." Awesome. And, as Tom said, it's a beautiful book.
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"Here at the Cow Clicker ranch, we've learned an important lesson about cow clicking: people don't just want one chance to click a cow every six hours. They want as many opportunities as possible to click a cow every six hours." And then Ian launches the API. And Connect. And everything else. And wins again.
Media from 2010
03 January 2011
In 2009, I kept a textfile in ~/Documents to track all the books I read. In previous years, I’d forgotten what I’d read, and didn’t want to lose track.
At the end of the year, I was disappointed in how tiny the list was. This was mainly in down to 2009 being a rubbish year (as years go). But still: for someone who loves books, it wasn’t enough.
This year, I repeated the exercise, but with a file called media-2010.txt. The goal was to track everything I consumed, whether or not I liked it or not. My thinking was simple: I wanted to read more, but by tracking movies, TV shows, exhibitions, and games, I hoped that I could at least see what I was doing when I wasn’t reading.
This isn’t the full list, but it’s the picks of it for this year.
Films
The best film I saw in 2010 was Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet. His The Beat That My Heart Skipped was already a firm favourite, so I was hugely enthusiastic for this, and really wasn’t disappointed. Superficially, it’s a prison drama, but there’s so much more going onto it than that, and it segues between life inside the prison, trips outside, and fantasy sequences with little fanfare. An early, pivotal scene of violence is brutal and truly unpleasant; it’s intended to stick with you throughout the movie, as it’s a hinge the plot sits upon. But outside that, violence is more a threat than a depiction, perhaps making the memory of that horrendous scene more notable.
It’s intense, nerve-wracking, and the promise of redemption dangled like a carrot in front of characters with many good reasons not to take it. Marvellous performances, wonderful moviemaking.
But: it really came out in 2009.
The best film I saw that was released in 2010 was Winter’s Bone; a cold slice of Ozarks-Noir. Which, of course, isn’t a genre, but the easiest way to describe this quest for a missing patriarch. Jennifer Lawrence’s performance is incredible, and I hope she’s rewarded. It’s not an easy movie by any means – the mountains are as much part of the scenery as they are written into the faces of much of the supporting cast – and you’ll never feel warm whilst watching it. It’s not a quest for redemption; just for survival. By the end of the film, it’s clear that all the characters are fighting to survive in their own ways. Great. (And: whilst Lawrence is the obvious stand-out, I loved John Hawkes’ nuanced performance as Teardrop).
I saw a lot, though, and enjoyed most things. I had a great time with Inception, primarily because I really like heist movies – put the team together, execute the job – and Nolan’s imaginative, clockwork plot played out as an excellent genre movie. It’s not necessarily clever, but it is intricate, and its execution is marvellous. Also, the suits are really good.
On the TV, I mainly enjoyed shows from America. The big discovery for me was Community, which is more inventive than many sitcoms I’ve seen a while. And I loved Rubicon for its intelligent take on intelligence work, even if it had a few too many plots for its own good, making its cancellation even more frustrating for fans. But what an actor’s show: Michael Cristofer’s Spangler is as devious as he is distracted, and Arliss Howard’s Ingram turned out to be exactly the sociopath you suspected he might be – an inventive sociopath, nontheless.
Books
Lots of alternate history this year.
Christopher Priest’s The Separation was a real stand-out – a tangly, bifurcated take on WWII, with two narratives of which only one can be true – though he refuses to commit to which. Twins, acting, impersonation, the negotiations of international politics; it’s a cracking read, and really shouldn’t have been buried on the SF shelf.
Similarly, Keith Roberts’ Pavane, a short-story sequence imagining England in the late 20th Century when ruled by a Holy Roman Empire was a real find. It’s a book heavily rooted in place: primarily around Dorset, Bournemouth, Dartmoor, that neck of the woods. In it, his characters enact a dance over fifty years – one that, initially, seems random, but structure eventually emerges. I also really liked the stuff about semaphore.
The biggest thing I read – spread throughout the year – was James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy. The books stand alone well, if you don’t want to read the lot, and by the end, I think I can comfortably say that the very first (American Tabloid) is the best. They’re dense, knotted, slang-laden tales of politics and corruption, bad cops and good bagmen, surveillance and assassination, race and communism; the dark side of the sixties (and thus, the late fifties and early seventies – the lead-in and the results) explored through what might be true, might be history, might be a kind of alternate history. I was entranced, even when I squirmed through his machine-gun prose, the character’s casual racism (LA in the sixties as the black militant groups start to exert influence is not the most… sensitive setting), and the squicky violence. Though I like American Tabloid the first, Blood’s A Rover – 2009′s final installment – contains the clearest signs of redemption for many of the characters, and, in Don Crutchfield, one of Ellroy’s quietest protagonists.
Art
I think my favourite exhibitions of the year were the Irving Penn portraits at the NPG, and the Eadward Muybridge at Tate Britain.
The Penn was a lovely retrospective, showing an artist exploring portraiture and challenging its constraints. So much consistently inventive work throughout his career; so many brilliant portraits.
The Muybridge was a fascinating portrait of a man exploring photography itself. His time-and-motion images are rightly seminal, but what I wasn’t aware of was his landscape work – lugging huge photographic plates up the Californian hills, as an early landscape photographer. My favourite work in the exhibition were the gigantic, 360º panoramas of a pre-Earthquake San Francisco. An eccentric, then, but what an intrepid explorer of a nascent medium.
Oh, and special note to River Sounding at Somerset House; on a beautiful summer day, the thrumming, shaking bass of the Thames in its damp cellars was sensational.
Theatre
More trips to the theatre than in a long while, albeit still not many by the standard of the other sections of the list. One obvious stand out: The Old Vic’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. Great to see this revived: in many ways, it’s one of his “straightest” plays, and manages to shift from a brilliant – if somehwat obvious opening – into a more thoughtful, considerate piece. It helped that Toby Stephens was utterly brilliant.
Music
One gig really stood out. Rival Schools at Hoxton Bar And Grill was a highlight. The post-hardcore group, almost on hiatus, return nine years after their first record with a second. And, with a falling star, comes a smaller venue: it sold out in an hour, was packed, and everybody knew the words to everything. And yet: so exciting to see such a polished, experience group of musicians still on top of the game, still playful – noodling around Beatles songs and metal covers between tracks – and playing to the audience perfectly.
And, of course, The Hold Steady in the summer played another of their great live sets: they’re fine enough on record, but are easily one of my favourite live acts: so much enthusiasm and energy, and, as ever, a ninety minute set with no duff moments.
Last.fm isn’t a representative example of what I enjoyed this year, strangely. Highlights from the CD stack: The Roots’ How I Got Over, the incredible My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the Glasser and Warpaint albums, Scuba’s Triangulation, and many more besides.
My favourite moment in pop, though, was Nicki Minaj’s verse on Kanye’s Monster. For me, it’s one of the weaker tracks on MBDTF – until those ninety seconds, which are just something else. Seriously: best moment of the year.
Games
It’s hard to get away from Mass Effect 2, for me. My head tells me it’s exactly what I shouldn’t like – big, overarching, technical, lots of Up Front Story-Telling. It’s a bit too genre-heavy. And yet: my heart swelled as I played it. The gamer in me didn’t like the episodic structure, but the adult in me did: it played out like a series of Battlestar Galactica, broken near-perfectly into about 20-odd 45 minute chunks, advancing side-stories and main plot in turns. The shooting is now competent enough to not be hateful; the writing is great (when it’s not being a bit crap), and oh, the characters. Garrus, Thane, Legion, and especially Mordin; very strong. I know many people who didn’t get on with it, and I respect that: their problems were rarely mechanical, and usually about the universe, the characters, it not clicking. I think that’s OK – much better to dislike something because it’s not to your taste than because it’s entirely unlovable. Well done, Bioware.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2, as well as being a total mouthful to say, was a surprise hit for me, and featured my favourite piece of gaming interface design last year: the way it utilises the back/select button. Public servers feature teamwork, almost no abuse, and very little voice chat, simply because of that button. It marks targets you’ve seen, and the little icon above them becomes visible for your whole team. As a result: everyone marks targets for everyone else. They get points for the mark, you get points for the kill, and so you mark targets for them. We don’t need to talk, or try to get people to play the team game, or argue with idiots, because we’ve got the back button. Couple that with the ability to respawn on squadmates, rather than way back at base, and BFBC2 works teamplay into its very mechanics without being complex or nerdy. The Vietnam expansion has brought people back, but the main game is still played to a high, social standard. The only team-game with public serves this good is TF2, in my tiny, humble opinion. And: the sound-design is phenomenal.
Red Dead Redemption was totally captivating for the twenty-or-so hours I explored its landscape, sidequests, and primary plot. It was lovely to see a genre so rarely explored in games done pretty well, although I do hope that some of the topics it explored – journey-as-narrative, most notably – can be explored without the brute force of a Rockstar budget and (alleged) Rockstar San Diego working practices.
Super Meat Boy is brilliant. Totally the sort of game my head likes. If you’ve not played it, you should. It’s got the tightest controls I’ve ever seen on a 360, brilliant level design, hilarious replays, and it manages to be the best kind of “old-school” fun. It’s nearly caused me to break a few controllers, but that’s part of the charm.
What else? Halo Reach, for starters. Halo is such an acquired taste, in my opinion; a real gamer’s game. After not caring much for 3, I ended up adoring Reach; a fine single-player campaign, tight, subtle multiplayer, and the rush that is Firefight. So much Firefight; so many grunts exploding in confetti. In some ways, it’s the top of the list – the most gamey-game I played this year. But it’s polish on something that was great to begin with, and not for everyone. If you’ve played it and liked it, you already know.
I didn’t play enough Super Street Fighter IV after giving so much time to the original, non-super variant last year. No matter; it’s not going away any time soon. And my unfinished pile is still high – right now, I’m enjoying Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and the majestic Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, and they’re going to see me well into 2011.
That was a few things I liked in 2010; by no means all. Next year: more.