> jim rossignol

A couple of years ago we bought a house. Half a house, really, as it was the end of a 19th-century cottage. We’d been living there for a month or two when we found something peculiar in the letterbox. It was a sepia photograph of the house, which you can see below. (Click for full size.)

The print was in a cheap cardboard frame of the kind you might have used for class photographs in at school. There was no writing on it, no leaflet, nor any other explanation. It had almost certainly been delivered while I’d been in the house, so whoever had dropped it off clearly had no intention of explaining themselves. We put this mysterious gift above the fire and occasionally pointed it out - along with the accompanying tale of anonymity - to visitors.

Months later and my mother had come by. She - as is her inclination - went off to nearby second-hand bookshops, returning with random publications for us and the rest of my family. One of these included a book of photographs of the local area. Two of these photographs were of our house, and one of them was the photograph which had been put into our letterbox.

The caption read: “(c1903.) Here the photo-grapher has gathered a small group of ladies, and a dog, to stand still long enough for this superb picture to be constructed.”

That isn’t a dog. It’s a wheelbarrow.

Intrigued by this mistake, we began to discuss what this could mean. We soon realised that our house, being old and creaky, must be haunted by the ghost of a wheelbarrow. Perhaps the wheelbarrow was already dead when this picture was taken, and its appearance in the photograph is actually some kind of warning. The wheelbarrow could quite easily be the West Country equivalent of the black dog of legend.

Later, when clearing away the heavy undergrowth in the back garden, we found a standing stone. A gravestone. Who or what could be buried here?

The answer seemed clear: our house had been built on an ancient wheelbarrow burial ground.

I was fascinated to read Wired UK’s take on the Apple tablet, the rivals to the Kindle, and the race to create a digital magazine format, as featured in the latest issue of that magazine. Peter Kirwan’s article relates to the kind of topics I’ve touched on before on this blog, but it wasn’t so much the HTML vs other online design that really grasped me, but rather how a number of comments made in the article relate to the experiences I’ve had with something I haven’t talked much about on this site: the creation and success of Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has been my other project for the better part of three years, and I co-own it with three other writers. Our intention was to create a unique website - specifically one about PC gaming - which we’ve done fairly successfully. The site now sees roughly 400,000 visitors each month and largely pays for its own smooth running. Part of the reason for this is, I believe, the way in which we’ve identified a community and then managed it. We realised early on that the rush to create commercial blogs for the generalist gamer had left one particular format - the PC - out in the cold, despite the fact that the same format had dominated the early days of the web. PC gaming media had fragmented into community niches, or particular gaming genre sites, and there was no equivalent of, or supplement to, the kind of thing that magazines like PC Gamer were doing, which was to deliver a broad survey of what was going on in that space. We wanted to do precisely that, because it matched with our own diverse tastes. Secondly, much of the web is rude, thoughtless, or chauvinistic. That’s often true of Rock, Paper, Shotgun too, but we’ve gone much further than most other communities in actively cracking down on it. Rather than rely on a crowd-based system of voting comments and up and down, we’ve opted to curtail free speech and employ massive deletions. Create an atmosphere in which trolling and idiocy is not tolerated at all, and it starts to recede. All this left us with an excellent place for people did want to discuss the issues of PC gaming to start reading on a regular basis.

So anyway, the Wired article quotes Sara Ohrvall of Bonnier R&D, who says of web media consumption: “People become ‘rootless’ in their behaviour… They consume media in places where they happen to end up. This leaves consumers uncertain about whether they have read/listened to/viewed what’s relevant to them, or not.” She goes on saying that you “always link somewhere else, the story never ends.” It’s about curation, says the article. Magazines curate content for readers. Which is, of course, a lesser feature of news blogs and RSS feeds. They are an attempt at a different kind of curation, one that is similar to, but more fragmentary than, the kind magazines offered previously.

What has perhaps fallen by the wayside is the sense of a connected community that is built into the systems. Many of these sites aren’t engendering the kind of communities we’ve seen based around magazines, sometimes because they’re just news links that point elsewhere, and sometimes because they’re hostile environments, difficult for a newcomer to break into, or feel comfortable in. However, if they do manage to create a sense of community then that rootlessness begins to become less significant. Online readers begin to regard certain sites as bases from which to head out onto the web from. One of the most common bits of feedback I hear from RPS readers is that they’ll always have the site open in a tab, because they feel the need to check back and see what everyone is talking about, both in the editorial and the site comments. For my part, I use a number of sites I’m familiar with the explore the web from, returning to them later on. They’re my homepages in a very literal sense of the word.

Later in the Wired article the founder of The Wonderfactory, David Link, is quoted saying that new digital magazines designed for tablet-readers won’t link out much, because “they’ll want to keep the readers immersed in premium material.” They will, in effect, want to retain the “walled garden” that they’ve previously had with magazines. This seems to be me to be nonsense, and a recipe for disaster. Rock, Paper, Shotgun is a far better model for a web magazine: a stream of news punctuated by longer articles, embedded within a community which is reasonably well-policed. This new generation of digital magazines, if and when they happen, should regard themselves as home-pages, or bases from which their readers can make excursions into the web. They are somewhere to focus a particular interest, to provide relevant material, and signposts to exploration. They’re also a place to return to later on. The best example of how this works on RPS is our regular ‘The Sunday Papers’ feature, in which readers regularly return to RPS to comment on an article, rather than - or in addition to - commenting on the source site. Why do they do that? Because they’re coming back home to share their thoughts with the people who they know have a similar understanding of the world to themselves. They’re not going to do that with something that is all controlled editorial, and an unpoliced pure-news site will have similar issues. Sure, we have riotous arguments, but the common thread of the site is enough to keep things ticking over, and keep people feeling invested.

Magazines, paper magazines, can be translated into these e-reader formats, but that does not mean the transition is actually useful or that it won’t be pointless against the backdrop of what the web is already doing. Learning from how the smaller, consistently popular sites like RPS are operating is the only way print media can evolve to meet the demands of the future reader.

I sat down with the intention of writing about all the things that are going on in my working life right now, and then immediately realised that half of them are Top Secret and not for publication on the internet. That’s a shame because they’re really rather interesting. What I can say a little bit about is the new book, which I’ve now started working on in earnest, thanks to the labours of a splendid literary agent.

I’m aiming to expand on a few of the more interesting themes that I touched on in This Gaming Life, particularly those related to the social and psychological uses of gaming, and the role of boredom. For a while there I thought I was going to write a book on boredom, which itself is a fascinating topic. The word first turns up in print in 1852, in Dickens’ Bleak House, and then proliferates through English. What’s interesting is that similar words appeared in a number of European languages about that time, and etymological investigation shows that it is, linguistically at least, a fairly new concept. There are words for idleness, isolation, and derivations of disliking or hating something that go right back into Latin, but the specificity of boredom seems new. It’s as if it has evolved to fill a particular need, and as if modern life demanded it. We took boredom to peculiar heights in the 20th century, with some people even making an artform out of it (Warhol) or predicting that it was the whole of our future (Ballard), while the general public used it with increasing frequency to describe their experiences, or their state of mind. Boredom, punctuated by moments of extreme horror, is the Grim Meathook Future. Interestingly, the word “interesting” has also seen a correlating increase in its use.

Anyway, as I looked into boredom I realised that it’s the reactions to the condition that really what’s worth investigating. In This Gaming Life I basically posited that videogames are part of a complex response to boredom, but it’s worth taking that a little further, since videogames represent only one of a number of ways we might deal with boredom, or avoid it altogether. I’ve realised that I’m one of those people who is seldom bored when left to my own devices, and that’s because my behaviour is always to read, research, or play with something. When I’m trapped and unable to do these things is when boredom strikes, and how horrible it can be. The next book, then, explores wider, into realms of imaginative activity other than videogames, and gets to work on the rich tapestry of entertainments and distractions that we’ve created for ourselves. This week I’ve been constructing a piece that examines how a book, a film, and a videogame might all deal with the same topic, and how the technological differences between these formats changes both the experience as well as the subject that is being explored. Beyond that I’ve got some plans to look at how books, the moving image, and the interactive experience are all connected, and how the 20th century coughed them up to give us the culture we have today.

To take some samples from the text, it seems that book two will include such topics as: hippies and computers, the dream machine developed by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, the weather behind Frankenstein, the all-time total number of novels published, why I am jealous of the protagonist of The Truman Show, why a space programme could be replaced with an inner-space programme, and what World Of Warcraft players and cyborgs have in common. And more!

Anyway, more news on those secret projects soon, and maybe even some extracts from the book-in-progress.

I recently found myself chatting to PD Smith about Ridley Scott’s 1982 film, Blade Runner. Smith, who is writing a book about cities, had presumably been looking at it in research for his project. It would make sense, of course, because Blade Runner, of all the cinematic visions of the city, is one of the most powerful and compelling. It’s a fantastically complete vision of future Los Angeles. Consequently it’s so influential that I once read about an article about North American city planners in which a majority of planners admitted they took inspiration from the film - also admitting that they ultimately wanted Los Angeles to look like the vision presented by Scott’s designers and cinematographers.

I recall the film having quite a similar influence on me. Blade Runner was profoundly formative for me as a child/adolescent, partly because of the theme of mortality being so starkly laid out for an immature mind, but also because of the weird beauty in the city design. I can actually pinpoint the moment in which I fell in love with the idea of imaginary cities: where you see a canyon vista of the city from Deckard’s apartment, a green-tinted slice of the metropolis beyond. I desperately wanted to explore that. I wanted the videogames I played to actualise it, and set me free down there. They’re still working on that, I guess.

But there was something else going on in my response to that film. For a piece about the finitude of life it had an odd effect on my way of thinking. Repeated viewing made me realise that I - somehow - wanted to live lots of different lives, rather than one long life. “The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long,” indeed, but if I have to be a light, then think I want to be one of those fibre-optic plants, where the one light is channelled down a thousand different, parallel routes. Blade Runner didn’t make me want immortality, it made me want multiplicity. For me the story didn’t so much emphasize the brief intensity of the Replicant lives, as emphasize how they had lived other exciting events, off-screen, out there in the wider universe. It made clear how all the Replicants had experiences that would be inaccessible to all the others, because they’d never have time to sit down and write their memoirs.

This “what the fuck is going on off-screen” effect seems to occur a great number of films. Take Gangs Of New York, for example. The fight at the start of that film seems like the culmination of a story far more interesting than the one that the movie actually follows. I want to be able to hit a red button and get the story of the gang war between the preacher and Butcher Bill. The film that never was. (That’s one of the most appealing things about reading about history via Wikipedia. Whatever event or battle you end up reading about, you can explore back - and forward - through the related network of links.)

I also wonder if this desire for multiplicity - as deemed more attainable than immortality by my tiny brain - is one of the reasons I am so comfortable in my escapism today. I don’t think twice about sinking half my life into in the heaps of books I plough through, and in the TV, games and film that I devour. What other placebos for immortality are there? And how else am I going to get a glimpse of all those different lives I want to be living? Not by idling in Second Life, that’s for sure.

The paperback edition of This Gaming Life has been out in North America for a while, but it hits the warehouses of the UK and Europe next week.

TGL is a book about gamers and the games they play. It’s about the value of videogames, and about the stories I collected from three very different gaming cities: London, Reykjavik and Seoul.

Raph Koster, game designer and author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design, said: “This Gaming Life is a fascinating and eye-opening look into the real human impact of gaming culture. Traveling the globe and drawing anecdotes from many walks of life, Rossignol takes us beyond the media hype and into the lives of real people whose lives have been changed by gaming. The results may surprise you.”

Lots of other smart people said nice things about it too.

I’ve been having vivid dreams recently, and one of them was a review of GTA5. I woke up and wrote down the fragments I could remember to type up later. Here it is.

GTA5 was on a screen, a videogame trailer. It might even had had a YouTube frame. The game was once again set in the parallel New York city of GTA4, Liberty City. (A game I’ve been playing a great deal recently.) GTA5 was, said a spokesman on the evening news, the best example of a city yet seen in a videogame, and so RockStar chose to build on that, rather than create something entirely new. It would feature new interactions, and your actual mobile phone, somehow. Did the game ring you up in real life to give you missions? Maybe.

While my dream told me that what I was seeing was my own review of GTA5, it was also a news analysis show. It had that classic dream logic, whereby I was able to identify all the discussion and ideas as my own, but Kieron Gillen and Alan Yentob were saying the lines, as they sat in leather armchairs in a TV studio to discuss the game.

GTA5 would, I/they explained, feature apartments across the city into which your character could walk, and rather than entering the living cutscenes of the previous games, he’d face a kind of dynamic soap opera, which would resolve in a mission. Each of the apartments contained the characters of popular sitcom, Friends, but these were placeholders, so as not to spoil the game for viewers.

Crucially, said Alan Yentob, the game was “a mindbomb of satire”. While GTA4 might have piled on the vicious mocking and black humour, this was a crafted, calculated assault on American culture that would remap the gamers who played it. Kieron agreed, sipping white wine as he explained how the United States was already on the precipice of a revolution, and would now be pushed over by a videogame that had pinpointed and exploded every hypocrisy and falsity in its culture.

“The game is so excruciating,” said Alan Yentob, “that no-one could ignore this shit any longer.”

Here’s hoping, eh?

PC Gamer UK’s latest issue will be on the shelves on the 27th, and should arrive before then for subscribers. You might be interested in the Napoleon Total War cover feature, but there’s also a little feature by me. It looks like this:

And that clicks up to a larger size.

Beyond that dashing first spread is a beautifully arranged feature in which I talk about the futurism of Ray Kurzweil, the science fiction of Charles Stross, and the forward-thinking technical wizardry of Eskil Steenberg. All these people have something to say about the possible future of videogames, and I’ve tried to extract their most interesting implications.

…the future of games is one in which software will have to find solutions for the enormous problems that following the curve of increasing hardware sophistication has presented us with. “The examples of how things that used to be simple have now become hard are numerous. Dwarf Fortress and similar games give a hint to where games would be, if graphics and sounds didn’t stand in our way,” says Steenberg.

It is a futurist’s gaming feature, and something of a blue-sky gaming feature, detached from the normal constraints of worrying about contemporary gaming. It’s the kind of subject I’d love to extrapolate upwards into a book: “the next thirty years of gaming”. Until I do, you should go out and buy the magazine.

In this instance I only look at three future-invoking people, and cover a few subjects related to them: the effect of wireless bandwidth on gaming, the effect of AI on our experience of gaming, and the possibilities for AI and generative systems in the creation of games. There’s a fair bit to be said about that, of course, but it leads elsewhere - off into the strange realms of ubiquitous gaming that tantalises the imagination. A world where games are the dominant form of culture, and the dominant mode of expression. A medium in which human and artificial intelligences meet and play.

I’m rather pleased with how it all came together. And now I realise the subject is due another 50,000 words and a dozen more interviews. Oh, won’t someone commission me?

Sigh.

A comment within this Infrastructurist review of Christopher Steiner’s $20 Per Gallon got me thinking.

…we have to say that we kept imagining a conversation involving some combination of the agent, editor and publisher prior to the book being written that really stressed how important it was to make this a positive book–after all, everybody is sick of downers like Jim Kunstler talking about oil crashes. And since negative scary arguments apparently just make people retreat deeper into their cocoons of denial where their only sustenance is crime dramas and celebrity blogs, it’s important to keep. it. happy. We’re serious: HAPPY! Thus sentences like this one in the introduction: “The future will be exhilarating.”

The review of the book is an interesting one - discussing the road to $20 per gallon of fuel, and what changes that will bring in - and the topics covered link to my recent post here - but it was the reviewer’s comments about the positivity of the book that I want to briefly talk about.

I do rather feel that we’re juggling doom with optimism right now, and we keep dropping the optimism: it’s fucking slippery stuff. With proclamations like this one from the Ecological Society Of America, giving us fifteen years at best, we’re facing a huge spectrum of Grim Meathook Future downers. Hell, read through Jared Diamond’s Collapse and you’ll be hoarding tinned food and building a Mad Max battle-wagon in your garage. Look at any of these prediction sets closely, and anxiety will ignite. Hell, I have friends who aren’t planning for the future, and honestly don’t believe the human race will manage another hundred years. You can see why.

But that’s cowardly. It’s almost contemptible. The enforced editorial HAPPY that the Infrastructurist posits is actually much braver, whether or not it’s tied to sales, and whether or not it is, ultimately, cynical. It’s not retreating into denial, or shrugging toward inevitability, it’s saying: there is a future, for better or worse, let’s look at how it might work without predicting apocalypse. Being realistic doesn’t mean being a harbinger of darkness.

And the next few decades are going to bring in massive changes, and we need to grasp that change positively, optimistically, and energetically, or we’ll allow the horrors that usually take hold when people are in a bad place to come to pass. Gritting our teeth, swallowing our fear, side-stepping the emotional man-traps that tell us that the end of our own lives might as well coincide with the end of the world, and then coming up with a plan, is the only way forward. I’d rather be holding an optimists guide to the end of the world, when the time comes, than one written by someone who just assumes we’ll be screwed.

People like Steiner, who are quite pragmatically saying that ecologist-scaring tech like nuclear power *must* be allowed to flourish, might just be people who end up saving the planet. If that’s down to some upward editing on the part of their publishers, then, hey, I’m all for it.

Perhaps the tide is turning. All the metrics of our doom are in, and now it’s down to people to start making the adjustments required to sort out our ecologically damaged, expensive, food-shortaged future of over-population and consumerist collapse. The fact that people are getting on with it, in whatever format, can only be a good thing.

I’ve spent a large part of this week listening to Gas, an ambient-techno project by German electronic music producer, Wolfgang Voigt. I’ll come to the music in a moment, but I wanted to just point out something from Voight’s wikipedia entry, which is the range of aliases he has worked under when creating music. Here they are:

All, Auftrieb, Brom, C.K. Decker, Centrifugal Force, Crocker, Dextro NRG, Dieter Gorny, Digital, Dom, Doppel, Filter, Freiland, Fuchsbau, Gelb, Grungerman, Love Inc., M:I:5, Mike Ink, Mint, Panthel, Popacid, Riss, RX7, Split Inc., Strass, Studio 1, Tal, Vinyl Countdown, W.V., Wassermann, and X-Lvis.

That seems like an extraordinarily long list. It’s almost as if he were some science fiction universe spy, operating under internet-handle aliases, rather than those of real-world names. And so if you’ve listened to any of these acts, then you have listened to Voight. Gas, meanwhile, is this:

This wash of drones is one of the best Gas tracks, it is not typical. Most of his stuff rolls along on a repeated bass beat, which structures the ambient surge with a machinelike undertone. I couldn’t find a good example of it on YouTube, but you can get a better idea from this excerpt on wikimedia.

The friend who bought me the Gas collection, Nah Und Fern, observed that it was “really easy to imagine people not liking it,” and I think he’s right. Repetitive beat lovers would like be put off by the broad synth drones, which make it relatively boring by the standards of most electronic music. The ambient crowd meanwhile might feel uneasy with the monotony and frequency of the heavy kick drum that runs through it. Perhaps people generally just like particular tracks - which might explain why the beatless ambient turns up more online.

I have to admit that although I like Voight’s citation of LSD and northern European forests for the genesis of this music, I don’t think it’s any less urban than other electronic music. It’s interesting to me that so much ambient seems to have a kind of pastoral inspiration (Aphex Twin on a farm, Brian Eno on a beach), and yet nevertheless seems to fit perfectly into an urban space.

Crucially, however, I think what’s interesting about Gas for me personally, particularly the Zauberberg tracks, is that it makes a near-ideal soundtrack for writing. It’s intense, without being intrusive. It’s instrumental, droning, which seems to allow some degree of beat hypnosis, but doesn’t become soporific, so that I can remain awake and alert.

I’ve said some of this before on here when talking about acts such as Belong - lyrical music seems to distract me from work. Human voices leak into what I’m doing too much, to the point were lyrics end up on the page all the time. And they’re not my words, or even necessarily what I want to say. Further, I want to roll with the upbeat singers, and croon in melancholy with the downbeat. They’re too engaging, too attention-seeking. Music with words works well for relaxation and research, but it always slows production. Gas albums, and similar kinds of electronic music, seem detached from that kind of musical engagement. They allow experience to compile differently, and seem to let my brain to take the lead.

In a music-as-drug-experience way, it reminds me of those rare times when a drug seems to enable focus, attention, and motivation, while enhancing the experience, rather than disorientating, distracting, or otherwise filling my consciousness with noise.

(There needs to be a legal kind of psychedelic caffeine developed, which increases the pleasure of experience and focuses attention, without fogging intellect. Where are all the designer drugs we were promised in the 90s?)

“I make no bones about it, I really was… a horrible, violent, nasty man. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not ashamed of it either… See you at the Oscars.”

I rather envy those people who have been able to reinvent themselves from the name up. Charles Bronson, born Michael Gordon Peterson, is a brutal, British example of the self-mythologising creature. A haywire prototype that exists outside the normal channels, and a brilliant example of what an errant personality can achieve, even under heavy constraint.

Whilst most tall-story personalities are at least given the kind of life we all share as a stage, Charles Bronson has had solitary confinement, and the rooftops of British prisons. He’s managed to become a tea-drinking muscle-monster of British legend (2,500 press-ups a day), while barely spending any time outside the walls of our gaols.

He has also never killed anyone.

That fact appears in the very middle of the recent film, Bronson, for a fleeting moment. I felt as if it wasn’t stressed enough: for all the craziness, the hostage-taking, the riots and fisticuffs, Bronson has never taken a life, which seems to set his myth apart from the other nightmarish denizens of our deepest pits. It’s a vital aspect of the context of Bronson’s thirty-four years of incarceration: that he is violent within self-set boundaries. The working-class gentleman lunatic, with his moustaches, his gladiatorial strength, and his principles.

The film has a special kind of cinematic ugliness to it, and the lead actor, Tom Hardy, does well to fill out the eccentric profile of the man. He juggles both the grinning lunacy, the glee of violence, and the bruising of punishment with extreme care. Hardy, as Bronson, also narrates, via a series of fantasy-stage-set performances, which set the tone of the film as firmly within Bronson’s own bizarre worldview: celebrity-meets-thuggery-as-performance-art. The clown and the circus strongman warped by the invisible force-fields of fame.

The film captures some of the bizarre cruelty of Bronson’s life, his own unpredictability, and the difficulties of the system charged with containing him. Yet it does not seem to express what matters about the actual story of Bronson’s existence, which I would argue is far more interesting than the stylised prison theatre we get to see on screen.

I was waiting for something of Broadmoor and the rooftop protests from Bronson’s perspective, and treated to little more than a slideshow. (I suspect Bronson’s chimney toppling antics were the first time child-me had been notified of the existence of prisons, or of their inhabitants, and so I was awaiting some kind of extra loop of connection with those images.)

Some of Bronson’s more outlandish moments were neglected by this script, and his early life as a circus strongman and bare-knuckle boxer was remixed into a fictional reworking of the few weeks he did spend out of prison in the 1980s and early ’90s. It’s as if the film was mostly interested in its own caricature of Britain’s most violent prisoner - complete with scintillating soundtrack - and that the production had failed to realise what strange, bloody gold awaited them under the skin of the real man and his world.

There was no need for flights of cinematic fancy when the reality is so colourful and disturbing. The movie seems to avoid some of Bronson’s finest lines - such as his absurd demands in hostage situations - and to avoid any real insight into why he performed some of those bizarre acts of violence. Inevitable, I suppose, given that Bronson is the (unreliable?) narrator of its proceedings. This is the film of the “fighting name”, rather than the prisoner.

I’m sure Bronson really is proud of the film, because it is a broad extension to his personal reinvention. To be genuinely faithful to the man, rather than the alter-ego, would have meant creating a film that reflected the decades of solitude, and the astonishing loneliness that so many years must have wrought. Unimaginable boredom and silence punctuated by moments of incredible, outlandish violence. The first part of that, at least, is something film doesn’t articulate all that well: deliberately so in this case. And Bronson, the movie, is all the worse for it.