Does Gaming need Better Adverseries?

The settling of EMA Vs. Brown pretty much drew a line under the latest chapter in the history of videogames detractors whith a pretty ringing victory on the part of games, gamers and game makers. Infact if you visit known advocates websites like the Perants Television Council you can see most of their gaming material stops at mid 2010ish when things weren't quite so witheringly bad for them. Those who wish to destory gaming have been roundly decimated. But im not sure running unopposed is the best thing for gaming.

Ok let me explian; there are important debates to be had about content, the control of content and its effects that have simply been destoryed by those on the "Anti-Gaming" side. The problem gaming has had is that the calibur of those challenging it, even when they sometimes might be touching on a valid point, has been so very very low. Even our lawmakers see people like the PTC as a bunch of out of touch fun-police and figures like Jack Thompson, Fox News and various religious groups have made their camp look not only wrong but baseline INSANE. There is no healthy back and forth between two sides with valid points, there has been a lot of good work in self examination on the gaming side but i think a group of well informed and well... sane gaming sceptics would be a good thing for all of us.

*Ahem* The law trying to ban the sale of 'violent' videogames had a tiny crumb of the real issue at its heart; perants are not limiting young people's access to games in the same way they do movies or TV due to a lack of understanding. Games are rated appropriately for age and i agree that trying to class them like pornogrpahy whilst Movies are still self regulated is a farce but the issue of 12 and 13 year old kids playing slightly things like MW3 for hours on end is troubling. The content of games is rated for 18+ because they are better able to contextualise the content and process some of the worst excesses of the chest beating homicidal militaristic overtones in a proper way.
I don't think many games are appropriate for 12-13 year olds. As a gamer it troubles me that they would be playing them at length without prenatal supervision. Yes these games can seem silly to an adult, they are able to recognise where things deviate from reality and have already formed informed opinions on many issues. We need to recognise that whilst games are not outright dangerous, exposing pre-teens to this content is FAR from desireable. Things like the glorification of the miliraty, guns and violence are unsettling. We need to look at the content of our games and who is consuming it, Media is meant to have content that is unsettling, challening and uncomfortable. It is essential and banning that would destory human expression but it has to be for the appropriate audience. 
 
The solution is simple. Don't get little jonny GTA87 for christmas. Yes its violent, but it is a satire of violence MEANT FOR ADULTS. Again here in the UK we DO have a legally binding ratings system, it just gets largely ignored. As an industry and as a community we need someone out there to point these things out wothout trying to form a mob. We DO need to educate perants more on content apropriateness but there is no-one out there willing to point out our flaws in a rational manor.

Gaming has become so used to fighting attempts to overly limit it, censor it and outright destroy it the industry and community has become hard-wired to react to gaming criticism in a nuclear fashion. Our opponents have for so long been so out of touch with reality and wanted to act out of fear of the unknown, religious extremism or outright spite. Those who are on the 'other side' have been incapable of debate because they lack a grasp of the most basic meaning of what it is to play a game. They simply don't undersntand gaming enough to understand the real issues. In order for gaming to grow we do NEED a healthly debate.

Quick! Hide The Porn!

 

Wellity wellity well well Mr. Cameron. It seems your greater good, "Songs of Praise", father knows best, moral guardian, high church, pious Ass-hat tendencies have caught up with. What became of hip Dave? Hug a hoodie and all that. Hey look at me i have my top button undone I'm just like you! No, I'm going to meet with a political Christian pressure group and morally blackmail you into excepting ultra draconian censoring of the Internet. I think you have have just lose sever generations with this one 'Dave'.

The Dry Facts; 
Via The Guardian; Because facts make by dick itchtm"Subscribers to four of the UK's biggest Internet service providers will have to "opt in" if they want to view sexually explicit websites, as part of government-sponsored curbs on online pornography.

The measures will be unveiled on Tuesday as David Cameron hosts No 10 meeting with the Mothers' Union, a Christian charity. At the government's request the group's chief executive, Reg Bailey, led a review in tandem with Department of Education staff into the commercialisation and sexualisation of children. The Bailey report earlier this year produced a raft of proposals to shield children from sexualised imagery.
The prime minister is expected to announce other moves in line with the review, such as restrictions on aggressive advertising campaigns and certain types of images on billboards.

There will also be a website, Parentport, which parents can use to complain about television programmes, advertisements, products or services which they believe are inappropriate for children.
The site, which will direct complaints to the regulator dealing with that specific area"- I'm sorry Fuck the dry facts! fuck them in their gaping anus! A plague of a thousand raining wet cocks on the dry facts. "Mothers Union", the entire name is a euphemism and emotional blackmail, their a christian pressure group designed to push a Puritan agenda on the masses behind "Won't somebody please think of the children!!". I'm makes me want to puke a fat one, it really does. This is the same shit that we shake out head at the god dammed Tea Party for for fucks sake!
 

The issues;

Well the most pressing issue i think above the tone, the intent and every other layer of bullshit is there will be a central authority deciding what is and what isn't "Pornography" online. This basically means there will be someone not only charged with keeping track of the endlessly shifting Internet but they will be adjudicating basically all the information that has ever been created and put online into two piles; "Porn" and "Not Porn".

Feasibility; 

Keeping track of every website on every country on earth is impossible. This in its self creates two distinct possible problems, both equally worrying;
1. The system will have to rely on websites own labeling system meaning sites wrongly labeled or more likely not labeled at all or trying to prevent harm their traffic by being labeled will simply not be blocked. This makes the system pointless.
2. There will actually be someone going through the Internet tagging it. This is simply impossible and will make the system unworkable. The Internet is big. Bigly big. Vast. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to the Internet.

Both systems fail in actually delivering any kind of result to the given motive. The measure sets out to make it impossible for children to access pornography accidentally or otherwise, it CAN'T deliver this in any way. Therefore its justification is baseless. Putting aside all other issues of centralisation and dangerious superiority complexes this simply won't work. I'll say it again;

THIS WILL NOT WORK... YOU DICKBAG... GO STICK YOUR HEAD IN A PIG.

Ethics; 

If this system is put in place it will bring censorship under the guise of morality and father knows best. This is what the UK government has been vocally and heavily criticising China, Iran and a whole host of others for for decades. Their justification is also pornography. Its is a mindset that leads to one group deciding what is acceptable for another.

This will not only effect children; No one wants to be seen to "Opt-in" to porn by their partner, it puts moral pressure on these people to accept censorship. Not only that but a system that has a list of issues as vast as the Internet it's self. This is the moral ideals of a minority thrust onto someone else. This is unacceptable.

Fuckwittery; 

Nevermind the core issue of defining pornography on something as vast as the internet. Is it simple nudity? No because great works of art would all under it; is it simply eroticism? Well banning everything slightly erotic is just as dangerous as banning all nudity. You CAN'T define it with a system like this. Its not that you just can't define it accurately you simply can't even get close to getting close to the issue. The issues combine here, is it justifiable to attempt censor on this scale when it won't even function at all? Why do it?

And what about Extreme Violence? Will gore and mutilation videos still be acceptable for children? People put executions online will this simply fall under the "A-OK" category? Will pedants turn their own purchased filters off to find the web open to their children in different ways?

As someone who really understands the Internet (hell i practically live here) i implore you, this is a MISTAKE. Its... its beyond stupid. Its beyond unworkable. Its beyond words how wrong you have got this. Its beyond comprehension HOW you could have misunderstood the Internet so badly and so utterly and completely. I... I've run out of words... just stop.

We are Forever Blowing Bubbles

The future is a tricky place. Apart from being a fucking cock tease with its never materializing flying cars, jet-packs and nubile Lucy-Lu love bots its dammed... unpredictable. Shocking revelation i know but at a fundamental level it is and people seem to forget that.

This is why speculating on a 'sure thing' is such a bad idea. Investors do it in all walks of life but recently they have had a nasty habit of pumping the fuck out of social gaming companies and driving up hype. There seems this special type of investor that thinks that because something is making money now and has gone up in the past it MUST just keep going. They makes these decisions without the scantest knowledge of the sector they are investing in and assume that as long as something keeps going up then everything will always be fine. (these types of investor seem to also run Activision) You would think people would have learned what a bubble looks like after that whole kerfuffle in the 20s, the lie of the bull market and all, but i suppose not. And a bubble we have. The signs have been there for a while, as i mentioned previously EA threw their money down a Playfish shaped whole, never to be re-coped, but everyone seems a bit to baffled to say anything about it. We seem to have a "New World" mentality in the gaming press post-Wii assuming that everything will not go as before but ass long time gamers i think we can use old assurances and a dash of other sectors to make some educated guesses.

Take the dot.com boom for example, a lot of clueless investors throw their money behind Internet companies because they   seem to be magic money makers. Many of the paper millionaires we saw were just that and the value of most of these companies, and consequently their shares, dropped to a big fat sum of zero. Social and in a slightly different way mobile games have also done this; massive investment in something that is seen as a new, bottomless money spinner. The games journalist is in a sticky situation here; if you go with this line then you risk looking entrenched, embittered and irrelevant. If you go the other route and tout the rise of the social gaming you risk a snap-back from the traditional audience if all goes tits up. No one quite likes shoving your own words in your face like the forum dwellers. I think the main fear is one of looking closed off and insular, from one generation ago there has been an audience explosion in multiple places and at first many reacted with pretty irrational fear. But i think many should be able to see the underlying problems with the social gaming boom.

All it takes is a small shift in usership or advertising confidence and a million dollar prized cow can turn out to be a dog-turd. This isn't even going into mismanagement, small companies that make it big quick have a nasty habit on not being able to deal with it or making terrible decisions. Recently Zynga has decided to hoover up a sum total of 15 companies with its new found (if ethically and creatively dubious) wealth. Fast, forward to today and profits have fallen 90%, news with has been delayed since June due to the "Tough market conditions" leaving me with the tentative feeling that the news has been released over a more favorable range to their original numbers.

Woof Woof.

The shit will only really hit the fan when said investors get a whiff that their particular horse in this race might be horribly overvalued. When investor pull out in the sector starts i have a feeling it may not stop, speculators (especially when it comes to the fast world of tech) are ruthlessly fickle and jumpy as coked-up Meerkats. Here's hoping that a lot of good people don't get squeezed out of the industry all together as many social games have served as a foot in the door for new talent.

Season of the Nerd

Something has happened, and is still happening, in the mainstream entertainment industry; the Nerds have taken over. Take a look at cinema in particular; Super-hero movies, the return of many genre movies and tongue in cheek b movies and comic-book licences a plenty. Hell a Batman film caused an uproar when it was NOT nominated for best picture.

Of course all of this has been going on for a while but the quantity and most importantly the quality of much "Geek cinema" has improved dramatically so much so that a "Thor" movie can make a decent profit and get in the high 70s on aggregation sites. There have been a few financial 'bombs' (at least as seen by the studio) on the part of some very good movies, see; the sublime Scott Pilgrim and its much lower than expected takings, and on the part of some terrible movies, see; The Green Lantern but on the whole the studios appetite seems undamaged for movies aimed squarely at the 12-30 something 'geek'  male audience. The thing that wets the studio's appetite is that a move like "Thor", if they pitch it right, will appeal to anyone from the age of 10 right up to mid 40s nerds and almost every age group in between not to mention parents and grand-parents who take their kids to see it. Your 10-15 audience will want to see it because it looks awesome and is rated low enough for all involved to be comfortable with them viewing it, plus it has a dude with a giant hammer and explosions and junk. Your 15-18 audience will want to see it for mainly the same reasons but will feel comfortable going on their own because the movie is not seen as "just for kids". Your 18-30s will feel comfortable for the same reason but might also be existing fans of the on-going comic and have the time and disposable income to want to see it possibly multiple times. Your 30-40s age-group might have been a fan of the older comics and so the licence has geek nostalgia appeal to them.

You can please many demographics without really compromising your movie simply because so many people see no barrier to them viewing it as long as you make the appeal broad enough. Now this brings up issues of movies that started out intending to be one rating being brutally edited or stunted to fit a lower one (see Red Riding Hood, that movie wanted to be WAY more sexy/freaky than it was ever allowed to be and suffered dearly for it) but fortunately this seems to to happen too often in the Super Hero genre.

But how did we get here? The main reason i see is the continued quality of Marvel Studios offerings since Iron Man. They have not been the sole contributor to the rise but their steady efforts since 2008 have really underpinned the whole genre with an air of quality, consistency and class. 5 years before things had looked a little rockier with their properties; 2003's hulk seemed almost embarrassed to be a super hero movie instead pulling a bait-and-switch with a movie about daddy issues. The idea that having a movie hold up based on a "Big green dude tear shit up" still didn't quite sit right in the collective consciousness of the good folks over and Universal. The result was a critical and commercial flop and contributed to the, in retrospect excellent, idea of Marvel taking their toys back.  2008's hulk was widely seen as an apology for the earlier effort and sent a clear sign that marvel was both serious about keeping their own properties and dead serious about the idea of a unified universe.


There has also been a glimmer of big concept Sci-Fi peeping its head above water; inception and the ajustment beuro seem to be actively harking back to the grand ideas of the 1960s sci-fi writers to deliver pretty amazing ideas. The asthetic also seems to be grounded in this era, rich colours and swave locals. Heres to hoping we see some of the great work of Phillip K Dick make it to the sceen without all the pandering that has been layered on it before. If Hunter Thompson's Rum Dairy can make it then why not a well crafted "The Man in the High Castle"?

The place we stand now is pretty exciting, The Avengers Movie is gearing up and we see something that a decade ago would have been laked out of the building; a straight faced translation of large scale interconnected comic book continuity put into a fully blown blockbuster. The future seems set on an even brighter horizon; the return of actual ideas to hollywood.

Hipsters of the World Unite; My Antidote to Modern Ultra Mainstream Gaming.

So before i launch into what the game industry is doing wrong lets look at some areas that are doing something right for a change.

No im not talking about some pretencions 2D bobble headed platformer that claims to be some art masterpiece but is really just Mario bros stapled to Dostoevsky pretending to be really clever. No I'm talking about real 3D games, games that can rival the AAA industry in their scope, range and prowess (and surpass them many times over in their ambition). And they are more often than not coming from Eastern Europe; 


Let us start with my personal favorite; 


S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

The STALKER series by rights shouldn't work, the original game sat in development for 7 years with various BETAs and iterations (none of which functioned) with many of the dev team leaving to found 4A games (we shall come to them later) before development on the 1st game had ended. But it does work, oh boy it does. A FPS hybrid set in 2012 in an alternative sci-fi universe of the Chernobyl Exclusion zone the mix on ingredients that combine to make the gooey goodness of the STALKER cake are kind fo hard to explain  to someone who hasn't played/seen them but its an amalgam between many different genres and sub-genres. The main advantage of STALKER is more to do with the FEEL of the game than anything, the atmosphere and setting are engrossing to say the very least. The word Immersion does not do this game justice

But there are a few things i can pick out off the top of my head The gunplay is pretty spectacular with a grounding in more tactical games. Bullets obey gravity, axis and generally behave like bullets and weapons have a relatively realistic degree of accuracy (or should i say inaccuracy) and a real weight to them. The setting is both horribly grounded in the zones reality and filled with pretty out there sci-fi concepts that make it both more intriguing and more dangerous and the games structure, somewhere between open world choices and modular level design, gives the game a "lose yet structured" feel. 


All three games; STALKER; Shadow of Chernobyl, STALKER Clear Sky and STALKER; Call of Pripyat are all worth a look but Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat are particularly special games.

Without a Face; Anonymous Pt 1.

Most sources of media fail when it comes to reporting on the Internet. It's not really their fault its just that many in 'journalism' as a profession or under the "Writer" umbrella come from a arts and humanities background and are ill at ease with the nuances of the modern online world. Reporting on everything from facebook to Piracy (we will come to piracy later in detail) sometimes sees the points made be just a little bit... off. 

But there is one story, or movement, or entity that even the Internet its self seems unable to pin down. The group that many refer to an "Anonymous". Where do we Start? There is just to much context that needs to be seen for it to make any sense and so much this is self Mythologised by the 'group' it's self and even larger amounts of erroneous speculation, misinformation, half-truths and uninformed opinions out there for any journalist researching the subject to really cut through the bullshit. But this is just what i will attempt to do, swing by mighty axe of plus 5 against bullshit and rend the mighty ogre of conjecture to rescue the scantily clad maiden of truth and take her back to my castle of understanding- I've taken this metaphor too far but you get the idea. Onward! On my might steed of... courier... text... (OK ill get on with it now.)

But First a History Lesson;

Let me take you back. Way back. Back into time. To a land before  1999 to be precise. The place; japan. The subject; a forum format known as an image-board. "2Channel" or "2ch.net" and it's sister site "2Chan" was (and still is) a popular Japanese web based forum; "One of the most distinctive features of 2ch is the complete freedom of anonymous posting." If i may shamelessly copy and paste Wikipedia. This is where the original idea of an anonymous posting structure came from. Anonymity. This is the core ideal underpinning the place, the environment that spawned "Anonymous" and its free-speech/free expression ideals. A place known as 4Chan.

The name 4Chan strikes fear into the heart of many and bafflement into the hearts of many more. It's antics and contributions to Internet culture are pretty legendary (and suffer from the same self-mythologising flaws as "Anonymous"). But it is really just an imageboard formed by a Christopher 'moot' Poole. The idea is almost identical to 2Channel; a system of image and text based posts that can be made by anyone without having to be identified to any use. 4Chan was not an instant sensation but steadily grew a reputation for being one of the frontiers of the Internet especially its "Random" board given the address /b/. /b/ has become almost legendary in its status for creating Internet culture and "Memes" (that a whole other article) and for conducting what were known as "Raids" basically attacks or pranks on other Internet sites that served a purpose, be it their own amusement or some other point to be made. The first Raids will be covered in part 2 but to know what anonymous is you must first realise where it came from.

There is a lot of histrionics involved when it comes to the history of 4chan but it is important to note that the essential crux of it is there was a big load of bored teens and twenty somethings posting on a board anonymously. That is kind of it, no hacker superconciousness and no molevelant will.

In part 2; /b/ordem and /b/attles

"Real Music"

I realized in my last post i made a reference to 'real music', a word that is almost totally devoid of meaning in most cases and is a byword to many of slightly superior opinionated types clinging to their respective eras or tastes, and this largely is true. But there is another sense, a sense that chart music has lost its way more than ever at the moment and there is very little chance of an act emerging unchewed-up by the machine that would aim to make them famous in the first place.

Take for Example Ed Sheeran; a man that seems heavily influenced by Damien Rice (and  everyone i know thinks is their little secret despite having a no.1 single). Fair enough not a bad thing to be influenced by, his style has up until now been very acoustic and very heart-felt. He is no doubt a very talented individual.  But his new single seems pretty heavily 'steered' in the more Bruno Mars/ urban direction. There are different versions of the song but this seems to be the 'official' version of the single and it production is almost slick enough to slip on. Im not against good production but it seems a little sad that now he is being pushed as "The next big thing" his sound is suddenly more rap and hip-hop than it was before simply to help it be camouflaged in the charts. Now im not an industry insider and i don't really know what is goin on but this is just one example of a wider homogenization that i realize has been going on for decades but now seems almost total.

Not to sound like a dinosaur but there was a time when a man who stood on one leg and played the flute could be number one. Now lady Ga-Ga is considered out there, a bland pop-star with manufactured controversy and an almost robotic regurgitation of past styles into some ungodly mish-mash of "Throw-it-against-the-wall-and-hope-i-look-cool". It feels somehow false, beneath it all lady gaga is simply... boring. Her music is boring, all i have heard her talk about in interviews is who designed what and how much she "loves all the fans" in that super plastic LA fashion. She is boring. She is mediocre.  all this mystique, window dressing and bullshit is meant to jangle keys in-front of you to make sure you don't notice. She is the ultimate expression of how the industry has run out of ideas.

Gaga here, with her concept album highlighting the very real problem of motorbike related birth deformities.

The music industry is still in disarray over how badly file-sharing is kicking their collective market models in the arse but this is a seperate issue for another day. All we have now is an emerging market of very similar dub-step and a chart full of nothing but purposely manufactured club bangers. Perhaps i am just a hipster doucebag elitist but it would seem to me that music need a good kick up the arse stylistically that simply seems impossible in the current situation. So yes i do believe some music has more merit than others but thats mainly because it does. I'm an opinionated man in a world full of things a disprove of. Objectivity and pandering be dammed.

Queens of the Stone Age

Well that was all rather long winded and slightly odd. We take a break from our scheduled viewing  to bring you some awesome. Namely some Queens of the Mother-Fucking Stone Age. Now i am a massive fan but watching their recent Glastonbury show i had forgotten just how balls-to-the-wall cool they are. With most of the bands at glasto this year either being ultra-established long runners like U2 or upstarts that are basically just a slightly shit indie band with a synth turned up. With this in mind seeing their blistering set was pretty jarring. QOTSA are real rock-stars where there really are few this year (Dave Ghrol Gets a free pass for being Dave Ghrol)

Listening to the crowd noise you can hear the QOTSA audience has a distinctly manly flavor, i guess this where they were all taking shelter from Beyonce. I would make a snide remark about them being on at the same time as Beyonce but to be honest she put on one HELL of a show and god knows how she dances and sings like that for that length of time, she does have at least a respectable number of ok songs and failing that just puts in the effort. Much of what surrounds her music is the usual industry guff but as a person and as a performer she is pretty dammed good. 

I guess will never see i QOTSA themed Glee episode, but i hope it would feature 30 minutes of someone just continually punching the little auto-tuned pounces in the face. Ok maybe not, Josh Homme is kind of big and the glee kids are kind of soft and breakable but you get the idea. In a world of pretty prescribed pop hits old fashioned hard-rock bands don't seem to have a place on the regular menu, there has been this slow decline in something that at one time seemed everywhere at once, the rock-band of old is an almost dead breed in the charts. They manage to be big enough to recognize but still be staunchly an alliterative to those who need it. Paradoxically despite being on one of the biggest stages in one of the biggest slots at one of the biggest festivals they are remain feeling underground. They totally aren't but they FEEL like they could be.

The re-release of the first album has caused a real buzz in some circles i was really not expecting, there seems to be a real ground-swell around the band and their music again. Despite not having a new album or even an EP or single to promote since really 2007 the band are still invited back to the big festivals. Hopefully their sixth album currently in the works can grab hold of the agenda and grab what has become the most prescribed musical agenda to date on the mass-market by the balls and hi-jack it for a second. Giving the n-dubz chart scene a real nuke up the rectum, if only for a fleeting moment. Just for one second, one tiny second i would like it feel like real music is winning again.

Part 3; Ben Affleck and other Mutations of my Mind.

Many many many many people hold this unrealistic, simplistic idea of relationships. Yes you. I'm, talking to you Mr. Jenkins from Surrey. Don't think you can hide or pretend. You should be ashamed! The rest of you are just as bad. Walking around doe-eyed looking for you 'one true love'. Of course we can hardly be blamed for this, we are pumped with expectations of relationships from childhood. Disney is a great proponent of this idea (and has actually managed some exquisite self-parody of late with "Enchanted". Mmmmm Amy Adams...) so are many lite-hearted family films but this light escapism is nothing compared to the crushing damage that is caused by one entire genre of film. The Rom-Com. 99% of Romantic Comedies are BUILT around this idea and go to great lengths to spin it in the audiences mind.

 On one of my insomniac excursions into late-night viewing led me to an **angry sigh** Ben Afflek romp entitled Forces of nature. That would usually be enough for me to go into "DO NOT WANT" mode and get the fuck out of there but i was curios to see where the movie was going. Mr. Afflek plays a man on the way to his wedding who ends up in a plane crash for.... some reason and meets a Girl (Sandra Bollock [hurr hurr]) who is what a hack film producer would call "Quirky". They have some miss-adventures, she gets him into a bit of trouble, there is some nice scenery on a train and they begin to bond. This is the point where i think i know where the movie is going "Well played movie" i thought "You are doing a slightly different angle on the whole thing". The man here has decided to marry the first woman he fell in love with and might just be finding out that there could be hundreds of compatible women out there that he could love or that might even make him happier and he would be being cruel just to settle for someone who his mistook for being 'destined' for and live a life of "What if" just because of the pressure he feels under. 

The second act is.... actually not bad, it's not great but you get the feeling the movie might be going a "We live in the 21st century, we are adults who make our own choices" route. But there keep being moments where it cuts back to his fiance with a weird blue filter and her looking all mopey and said. The film is obviously trying to make us feel sorry for her. The whole thing looks like it is going on in some other movie but if set of alarm bells for me and sure enough the third act rolls and just smacks the audience in the face. "NO" it says "we're not going the route we seemed to be setting up!". Some bullshit about a bagel shop, a kid and a husband come out of nowhere and the film basically takes a great big steamy dump all over its self ending in Affleck's character deciding that re loves again his mopey faience simply by looking into her eyes for a second. That's right folks, this film just decides that Affleck should blindly marry because... the universe wants him to? Oh and there is a hurricane. Well i guess for of a storm since all it does it blow some peoples hats about and knock over a marque and some other hi-larious hijinks **rolls eyes**

Think they look like a good screen couple? Well fuck you! He defied the gods of fate and now we are going to drop a hurricane on him!

Now the storytelling issue of setting up a relationship for an entire film then pushing a "nope" button and having it totally just end in a wet fart of nothing aside the film typifies the message of most rom-coms. Namely the "You will find you true love and everyone else will make you miserable and is not meant to be" school of romance. The issue seems so pronounced in this case because the second act of the film felt like it might actually going a mildly thought provoking route. Afflecks character nearly learned something, the universe almost worked as it does in real life. You feel a spark of would could have been and then feel the utter failure when they snap back into "Traditional Rom-Com" mode. In the end he learns nothing, his journey comes to nothing, he is with the one he is 'supposed' to love rather than the one you saw him develop a relationship with and it nails home what is wrong with the format and much it falls sort of reality. Why does the happen? Well many writers in Hollywood hold the idea of a more 'traditioanl' view of romance. i.e. they have wives and children and want to instill the idea of "one man, one woman, no buts" at every turn simply because they missed the boat on the whole "Unconventional relationships" thing becoming basically the convention.


Romantic 'Comedy' is overwhelmingly a genre squarely aimed at the female demographic. Decades of this type of shit have taken their toll, I'm sure you might unironically here "But is he THE ONE?". No he isn't, because there is no such thing as "THE ONE" (**insert matrix reference here**) and the unrealistic idea that a relationship will just fall into place if it is 'destined' and not having to work at and WANT a relationship with some one if you want it to work is toxic. The person you are with might very well make you happy for the rest of your life if you both decide to work at it, there are legions of women out there who will positively BURN though men because they have an overly idealised image of romance. You know what i take it back, he might well be the one but if you don't get your head out of your arse you certainly won't be. I'm sure this isn't just a female problem, so this goes for anyone; no body is perfect. A relationship is about finding common ground, putting aside differences and working at it. And Working at it. And working at it some more. It is callous to get rid of someone just because you think it "should be perfect of prefect if he/she is THE ONE".

There is a lot more to be said on this subject but I'm leaving it here for now simply for the issue of WALL OF TEXT. But ill be back! And with more tangents! 


In Part 4; Mormon Abstinence Vampire Porn!



Oh and go give someone a hug, everyone needs a hug.

Relationships Part 2; The part where he Rants at you

That part.

So yeah, relationships are fucking everywhere. We are bombarded with them and wallow in our own inadiquecy before them. There are the real ones you know, the people whos idealised facade you mainly see that you secretly know has a good chance of not actually being a facade and them being genuinely happy. Our image of these relationships is in turn warped by all the fictional ones or idelaised ones we are bombarded with. One man, one Woman, in the whole universe there is one person out there for you. This is how it works, you will search for this person and may or may not find them (don't worry if you don't find them im sure you will become some endering silver haird novelist or some other varient on the "content but alone" formula) but chances are fate will bring you together. Who would have thought it? It must be fate to feel like this. There is a path set in stone by the unyeilding power of love and by god you are going to tread it. You going to read the fuck out of it and be disgustingly happy for the rest of your days.


And If you fuck it up its totally over. Your in doomed romance territory looking wistfully of a hilltop or some shit, destined to regret not being that bit more perfect or that bit more like they wanted you to be. You have commited a cardinal sin, you have both defied and missed out on fate and since it was a 'destined' deal you must really have scewred the pooch. You are so bad at relationships you have bent the universe to the point that fatr has said "Well fuck this" and taken a piss on you for being such a terrible human being. You deserve this and you will never find love again. One shot and you blew it.

Sometimes, you can only express things with Ponies.

Of course this is all unfathomable shite. You may be able to enjoy the company of many different people and some of those people would be very compatible people with you if you gave it a shot. If it fails to work out try and get out with some degree of dignity (this will be useful later), use what you have learned from the whole affair nd grow past it. Let go of the needless bad feelings and keep the ones you learn from. You are an adult and life is waht you choose to make of it and if you're not then you have even more reason not to blame yourself, there is still plenty of time to grow.

Desipte my tone im not really a cynic, more posing as one as not to look like a gulable fool. Relationships can work out, im not going to give you the movie speech of "Long shot... Percentages.... blah blah affirming blah". You are proably reading this thinking i've just gone through a rough break-up. You would be wrong. Im just a haunted man who can outrun his ghosts (to quote what im listening to) and like all good givers of advice it is more "Aspirational" for me as well than anything. I guess you would call me a hopeless romantic, the well meaning sensitive loner type. I did do some soul searching a few months back, what i leanred is that i am a well meaning person, sometimes to a fault, i have a lot to learn. One thing i have learned is that relationships are truely two sided. They have to be strong on both sides to work, it takes one side to end, two to maintain if you follow me jibbering. Seems obvious but it would suprise you. I learned that i can try as hard as possible, make the utterly perfect moves and have hings fall apart through no fault of my own. Yep folks, shocker, i think it was the other sides fault! (oh my!) To be honest circumstances have consipred to make me look like a saint, if you know the circumstances (which you never will) you would probably agree. I know i sound like a self righteous prick but i can but tell the truth.

If you are having trouble following this then it is understandable, i barely do. Relationships are like that, they are hard to put into words and events tkae on a life of their own. Which is why the fiction we are pumped full of about them is so damaging.

Coming up in Part 3. Blame Ben Affleck!

'Relationship Syndrome' and other slightly pretencious things i could put as a title.

I was going to put the finishing touches to my three part epic about 'Anonymous', its roots, its implications, my (partial) past involvement in the 'Project Cahnology' thing you have probably never heard of and then segway neatly into my sweeping history/deconstruction/education about Scientology, its terms, its baffling celebrity involvement and general balls-out headfuckery that can borderline on the DMT trip insane and make you need to stare blankly out of a window for a few hours whilst you digest what this means for you world view. And then i was going to do a little dance.

But fuck that, I'm going to moan about not getting laid. If i sound like a destitute man's Yahtzee or Charlie Brooker who in turn are a tame world weary hipster ercho of Hunter Thompson or Bill Hicks then you realise that my natural writing style is basically nicked wholesale from them, or at least shares a 'common ancestor'. Writing is like evolution in that it mercilessly copies what is successful and runs the fuck away with it waving its arms about. The "Writing snide bullshit from a dark room" sub genre has gained a sizable nice and thus is able to speciate from the mass market copy like a Galapagos Finch who eats nothing but hope and shits slightly superior cynicism. 

But (as i do best) i digress. This is how my hands tend to want to write and im so very Meta i might even post a screnncap of me typing thing with screenwipe and The Escapist open knowingly below.

See im so fucking Meta i shit the 4th wall. In this world of post everying its hard to fight off some kind of eggistential crysis (hurr derp) and muster up the courage to leave the house nevermind find someone who is willing to put up with you and your miss-spent, frujstrated intelectialising. Im sat here doing what every other midly knowing, witty internet jerk-off is doing and being all derrivative in my bitterness, rage and doing it in a sickeneningly self concious way, whithh broken spell check no less! But this is how i want to relate, im mad as hell and... i have nothing better to be doing right now. Im kind of the totally fake anti-blogger, reveling in my total obscurity yet putting material out there anyway. Im tht underground, anti-capitalist band who are signed to a major label expect without the money. My distain for the bloggosphere in all its wretched "Look at me! Look at ME! I only matter when people are looking!" is underpinned by ar urge to simply he heard and apreciated in that way. If im shouting into the void then im doing it in the same vain hope the others are.

But anyway, since ive turned this into a stealth peice that is really about writing i'd better swing it round and justify it being about relationships so i  don't get bitching comments. I don't get comments anyway but what the hell. The internet has rules. I can but obey. Comming up in part 2. I get the fuck on with it!

Push button, make toast. Push button, kill man. Part 2.

Games are exciting, invigorating and fun. Many Games can also become mundane to those who play a great deal of them. In part 1 i talked about the difference between game-mechanics and actual actions and the misinterpretation this brings on. In this section I'm going to tackle one of the biggest criticisms leveled at games. Desensitization.

The word is banded about a huge amount in many forms of media. The idea is psychology is that exposure to viewed violence makes the viewer more comfortable with violence making violent acts seem less extreme to the viewer. Now i could debate the idea of catharsis, that is a violent games providing a safe violent release, but I'm not psychologist. I am however a videogames enthusiast and i can talk from my own extensive experience. What seems scary to many watching footage of games is that what they see as disturbing we see as entertainment. To the uninitiated outside observer barbarism is not only routine but desirable but the reality is that the player related VERY differently to playing a game than actually performing an action. It's hard to explain to those who don't really game but the experience is different to what non-players assume.

Now I'm not saying that videogames don't have an affect, games that deliberately set out to offend  should be weeded out, in a clever way, some games will be 'offensive' to some people simply because they are misinterpreted. There is also the issue of exposure to children, when experiments were done on the effects of watching violence children's developing minds were especially susceptible. Games have a ratings system for a reason and young children should be protected from ultra-violent content no matter what media. Lets just say be smart people. If everyone calms the fuck down and is sensible everything will be all fine and dandy. I don't want this to turn into a deconstruction of the critics of the industry (that will come at another point) but many who make claims about the dangers of vidoegames don't even bother to go as far as watching footage, most of out critics rely on third-hand reports or simply dismiss the industry off-hand

But this is a little off track. "Videogame violence" is a phrase that has come to mean sanitised or almost cartoony violence.  This is how even the OTT violence that seen in games like "Deadspace 2" is experienced by the player, there is a detachment from the violence that means at many levels it doesn't feel like violence. As an industry gaming does not set out to train people to be violent. You could argue that games should be MORE graphic, showing the consequences of violence and making the payer more connected to the actions he performs is a vital part of enhancing the emotional impact games can have and immersing us in their world. Shooting people in the face should not feel as comfortable as it does and much of the limiting side of the coin, I'm talking about your mum again, i feel is stunting many gamers relationship with their actions, most notably firearms.

But we will have to wait for part three to expand on this and some of it's more interesting implications in the areas of player relationships and moral choice.

Push button, make toast. Push button, kill man. Part 1.

Hello my name is scrumpmonkey and today i killed a man. I also made some delightful toast. The thing is both actions were relatively the same. Ok, ok I'll back up. I didn't really kill someone i was playing me some TF2 but i did kill a representation of a person without any hesitation, thought or ambiguity.

The thing is with most modern games the act of digital murder is indistinguishable from the act of say, truing on a digital microwave to ruin a scientist's lunch. They are both game mechanics and they both require identical button presses for the player. If you own a modern system or are into any variant of FPS, TPS, Action games, military RTS, Tactical shooters etc etc. you will likely kill many people at a time without a single thought.

This of course troubles your mum. Not your mum obviously because she's too busy with me (we'll talk later, maybe get some ice-cream, play some catch.) but thousands of self-proclaimed moral voices. The idea that someone could be slaughtering an entire legion of digital people deeply troubles them. But why should you feel uncomfortable? You could replace the people with toast and the bullets with jam and you have pretty much the same experience .Moral panic about games shows first and foremost a total misunderstanding of game mechanics.

If yo mama took a break from being so fat and actually got into some video games she would realise that the thought-process involved has more to do with applying yourself to the rules of a game world than the conscious act of killing, we have an urge to beat the game not to beat in real-live heads. For long-time players the guns and soldiers are just a mask to identifying and best exploiting the underlying game mechanics. It can feel as simply as making toast. Because it is not killing a man, it is pushing a button.

Socially Awkward; a Quick Follow up.

I almost forgot this technicolour hell vision of the future of PC gaming Microsoft conjured up. Who knew the distopian future would be so... colourful? When we are all working in the off world Microsoft mines spending our meager credits on avatar clothing just know i fucking called it

Perhaps they don't realise that people bought i-pods because their Friends bough i-pods? This is how trends come about, the reason people play facebook games is because those games are on facebook.A lot of people are on facebook, it's a simple equation. The audience came before the games did. GFWL has no existing mass of people, people play facebook games because they are bored and on facebook. People don't actively seek out shit like farmville it's just THERE and that's why it can get away with being so shite. Their audience would just be looking up pictures of amusing cats or typing "Im bored" into google if they weren't playing frontier-ville or whatever sudo-game Zynga have recently excreted. People mainly play social games because they are already plugged into the social network they exist in. They are something sprung on a captive audience, in this distopian PC-Gaming future there is no hook to get people to use this GFWL mutation. The service has to be forced on begrudging people as it is, many PC gamers actively AVOID anything with GFWL because on many people's PCs (including my own) the service simply won't let them play the games they paid for. But microsoft seems to want to jump on the choo-hoo trian stright to Zynga-Ville with all that delicous microtransaction money.

As Kutz once said "The Horror... The Horror..."

Socially Awkward

The games industry has been getting a little jittery of late. Or should i say the 'AAA industry' since modern gaming has become so heavily splintered. Something has been growing in the dark recesses of the Internet that seems to make all their traditional models of revenue seem out of touch. Something entirely new. Something called Social Gaming. At it was expanding at an alarming rate. Analysts have lined up to instill the virtues of social gaming, there have even been words like "the future of gaming" used. It certainly makes a butt-load of money but i think many both on the inside and the outside of the games industry misunderstand exactly what's going on or how it is effecting the industry.

Social games have grown significantly in a very short space of time but their growth at this pace is unsustainable. EA recently payed over the odds to buy social gaming company "Playfish" and will probably never see a return on that investment. The company had already peaked in terms of price. Social games are not some magic money-printing bullet and projections of their expected profits may be unrealistic.

The great envy tinged with fear at which established players like Activision and EA look at the social gaming sector might not be justified. Even recently there have been murmurings that the 'traditional' companies are getting left behind as we charge into the grand future of gaming. But how much can we really project the future of the industry? Or even if we can is the vision of gaming's future companies like Zynga provide really desirable?

A young man clings to the back of a great, towering stone monster. His grip weakens with every passing moment as the great shape tries to throw him off. These serene ancient beings have been wondering harmlessly for eons untold but his intent is to kill all of them to bring back the soul of someone he loves. It may cost his humanity but his grief is such that he is willing to endure the trails and pay the great price. 

3 miles away someone just bought an in browser cartoon cow for £3.50. 
 
Going from a crafted narrative, characters and world that are capable of affecting the player to something that requires loose-change to progress is not what i would call progression. At this point in the history of the medium where we are on the verge of some really great experiences that may rival the best of film for narrative and character and surpass it for immersion, having the creative efforts of an entire industry shift focus from crafting involving experiences to making browser interfaces that try and hoover money from you would be simply depressing. 

The second problem is one of quality. Social games, facebook games especially, are utterly devoid of new ideas. Every time there is a facebook hit we see hundreds of clones, the social game arena is filled with clones desperately trying to emulate each other success. This problem exists is most areas of gaming to the extent to which it is pervasive in the social games arena in  is pretty astounding. The ideas of the market leaders themselves are also gimped versions of earlier, superior titles. Management sim knock-offs like farmville have lesser gameplay chops than many titles of 15 years ago. Mafia Wars rips off a much older tradition of text-based mobster adventures that have existed for around a decade. Copying game-mechanics is also nothing new but the lack of any addition to outdated formulas is also a trope of the Social game genre. There is no hunger for ideas, no spark of creation. There are only colour-vomit graphics and microtransactions.


This is partly caused by the issue of the intent of social games. traditional games aim to succeed through the improvement of their mechanics and giving enough reason to a consumer to buy it. The best games aim simply to be the best games they can be with the main intent of many involved being enjoyment of their Audience. Social games, at their worst, are openly exploitative towards the player. Their intention is not to be a good game (or i would argue sometimes not even a game at all) their intention is to provide just enough content to entice the maximum amount of money from the player. Their progression is not based on traditional ideas of mission completion or Exp, their progression is geared towards the maximum investment of capital. They border on a miss-use of game mechanics to force as many people as possible 


Words like "Advertainment" and "new revenue models" probably make a marketing executive somewhere need to change their shorts but all it means to you is that the focus of many in this emerging industry is shifting towards the monetisation of EVERY aspect of your games. I don't mind saying i have an almost visceral reaction to the ideas that games could and in the eyes of some should be an extension of your accounting/marketing model. In the eyes of Zynga you are not a customer but a cash-cow to be exploited at even available opportunity. Many stereotype the 'core' gamer as a giant, sweaty man-child greedily keeping the industry to himself but the picture is more that long time games enthusiasts are the ones who are most open to new ideas, new experiences and actively seek out the best content. Social gamers are being taken for a ride with stunted, 'addictive' games short-changing them in terms of experience. The founding principles of the industry deserve more than the vision of ultimate monistisation social games provide.

Shouting into the void.

Writing on the Internet is an exercise in futility. Or rather 99.9% of the time it is. I'm not sure where i plucked the phase from but "Shouting into the void" seems pretty apt. To be honest any combination of loud talking and emptiness would work, "yelling at the dark", "screaming at the blackness", "exclaiming into the night". The point is a lot  of urgent and frantic typing gets done that fades into the almost infinite amount of space out there on the web. There are billions of them. Feverishly typed words online that will simply never be read. Not that that bothers many of those writing them, they just type more. WITH BIGGER CAPS LOCK. AND MORE BOLD TEXT. WITH EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!! as if they can overcome the lack of notice with sheer volume and break through. The Internet is crammed full of it and 99.9% of it isn't worth reading, mediocrity is mediocre for a reason. There is just so much of it. 



But the existence of even the rubbish stuff alone is mildly exciting. Spend enough time on the Internet and soon enough you begin to sense a little bit of its sheer vastness. During your daily browsing take the time to stop and realise that your chain of random curiosities (What is the capital city of Canada? How much cake does it take to choke an Elephant? Why oh god why did the 80s happen? you know, the usual) has led you somewhere that might feel out of the way, one of the many backwaters of the online world. These places are off the beaten track of the likes of google, Bing or any other tool we used to filter and make sense of the mind-scrambling amount of data out there on the web and break it neatly into bite-sized chunks of amusing cats and personal abuse (see; YouTube comments section). 

These places excite me because they feel out of the way, tucked just out of view where only maybe a few people might have seen them or maybe no-one has bothered to look at them for year. They can sometimes be very personal, blogs with pictures of loved ones, a site with pictures of holidays with Friend. They feel like stumbling unexpectedly into someones bedroom or realising the book you found was someones diary who you have never heard of and will most likely  never meet. They convey the depth and breath of human experience and show us something of the true nature of the web. The void is not empty, its full and getting fuller all the time. This is why it is so very hard to be heard above this torrent of just... stuff. It's humbling really, thinking about how what you see is just 10000000th of what there really is out there since as more people get online, the online world begins to reflect the worlds of all those billions of people.

The Internet sort of hits you like that sometimes. With these backwaters you can guess at it's unimaginably massive structure from the cup-cake sized slice you can see for yourself (Kudos for the reference). It's kind of like plugging the whole world into your head via an Ethernet cable and seeing yourself in relationship to it. But I'm getting off track here.

To Paraphrase a great book; The Internet is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the stairs to the fridge , but that's just peanuts to The Internet. YouTube, Google, Amazon compared to the whole are just tiny dots upon tiny dots floating in the ether of cyberspace*. So you can excuse me for doubting the real effectiveness of the place for ordinary people to truly be heard. 

A Forlorn and Empty Blog **Crickets** ....... **Tumbleweed**

Phew. That was a lot to go through to inform you that I'm a little skeptical about the whole idea of the "Blog-o-sphere" and its impact. But i guess it was all necessary to see where i was coming from. This isn't a cynical article about how shit most of the Internet is, how you might as well end it all now because no one cares about what you have to say, you were adopted and your parents and the dog secretly hate you. Not at all. I'm not an embittered person venting from a dark room (i have a light on for one). The Internet is just fucking HUGE. 


And this leads me to where you are, in (for now) one of the many backwaters of the Internet listening to me attempt to shout into  the void. And maybe, just maybe if I'm lucky it will whisper back. 


John Sweeney is off to re-read Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy for the 100th time

Hello World

Since the dawn of the Internet man has been called to endlessly prattle on it. Here we are going to endlessly prattle about it (amongst other things) for that double internety goodness. There is a lot to be done on this blog so be aware that the formatting is still in flux as i am still getting used to the limitations and nuances of blogger and  many other pages and maybe some addons of my own will appear.This project will hopefully develop into a fully fledged site but in the meantime this seems like the most convenient platform to try and send my little world-lings out into the big wide world of the Internet. 

John Sweeney would call himself a freelance writer and journalist but that would make him sound like a deadbeat.