> jim rossignol

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.

Since working on a print magazine (PC Gamer) for a couple of weeks last month, I’ve been meaning to write something about the difference between writing for print and writing for the web. It’s a notion that’s been gnawing at me at least since I wrote the book, which I found infuriating because I’d become so familiar - even before I was blogging full time - with the scaffolding possibilities of electronic text.

As I wrote 80,000 words of text, I found myself polishing up my writing to explain precisely what I was talking about, where on the web I would have tied it up with a hyperlink*. Rather than writing for the specific audience I knew was going to sit at the other end of a blog, I was hoping anyone could pick up the book. Which rather seems the wrong way to go about things: surely the website is more democratic? But no, quite the opposite is true of how I’ve ended up using the two media. Writing on my own blog, I don’t give a damn who is reading, and writing on for Rock, Paper, Shotgun I have to assume it’s a certain calibre of gamer to have even found the place. As for a book, well, I wanted my mum to be able to get through that without a decade in online gaming.

But there was a more profound structural difference to the page: I couldn’t add links anywhere. I’ve always hated the distracting fussiness of footnotes, and my editor didn’t much like the either: clean text, and nothing else. So there was no way around having to encapsulate everything in the body text.

Towards the end of this process, having read the manuscript several times through, as well as knowing it via all the little revisions we’d done as the process went on, I began to see where all the imaginary hyperlinks went. I could go back into that document, I knew, and cross reference things with links online: explanatory Wikipedia links, comedy YouTube references, and even direct portals to the games I was talking about. Perhaps, when we finally get the Creative Commons version of the book online (which is actually only some paperwork away, come to think of it), we’ll find a way, and a time, for me to include all those links, and to create a version of the book that fixes and positions itself in the web by reaching out in a thousand directions, with a thousand links.

Anyway, time on the magazine and find myself thinking the same thoughts: the inflexibility of the page! No CTRL-F to find that exact phrase in an instant, no click to punch through the page and into an entirely different magazine/website/game/video that we referenced.

But then there was the other side of the woodspace publishing process: the designers. Working on feature stuff - rather than the static grids of regular content - you suddenly find yourself in the best part of magazine design. Suddenly writing has an element of visual directing to it, creating themes for how to illustrate the stuff that can’t be explained with the screenshot and a splash of concept art: independent gaming, wi-fi, co-op, the future.

I remember wanting to do a series of articles where we attempt to tell a story through entire full-page spread images. I think we did it once with Planetside. First spread was the dropship, second spread was the drop, third spread was sniping at the base from the hill, the fourth spread was inside the base itself. Each page was part of the long zoom, the linear thread was the text, and each boxout a small zoom focus within the larger page: this element of the battlefield, that element of the interface. It ludicrously fine work by the designer, Mark Wynne. And it used the material at hand: an area paper with a fold.

This isn’t all that print does, because it can also juxtapose image and text much more concretely: the art of the captions, the boxout. These can be tricks and jokes in their own right. The latest PC Gamer redesign added in more variable graphics to its original mix: infographics, including web diagrams of the relationships between characters in Starcraft fiction, graphs showing the relative speed of the web now and then. The traditional picture-plus-text, but with more, which is something that magazines like Wired have been doing for a long time.

This month’s Wired UK does it too with an incredible illustrated explanation of the mechanics of the Somali piracy phenomenon. It managed to use the page to create a splendid fresh logic, one that used the page to convey packets of information in a flow-chart whole. Maps, equations, charts. Sure, it’s just a “boxout” sequence that you might be familiar with from any magazine over the years, but the delivery was an exquisite flow of discrete meetings of illustration, text, and numerical data.

There’s several pages of that (above), it’s totally awesome.

This can be done on the web, but it’s harder, and it can be expensive. Obviously what’s best about the web from the point of view publishers is that it’s super-cheap. You create a grid and drop images and words in, day after day, just as you do in the standing copy areas of the magazines. But there’s no paper.

It seems that even the publishers that did try to bridge that gap and try and designed magazine format on the web - I’m thinking early jpeg’d online mags or the first year or so of The Escapist - ended up binning the idea and heading back to the bloggy format columns of text, presumably for the sake of money, but perhaps also because the web browser demanded it.

It’s interesting to hear the different sides of the argument chime in on this: lots of magazine folks argue up the material nature of their product, the things you can do with a page, the tactile response of paper. Meanwhile a number of professional bloggers I know are veterans of the magazine industry and they see magazines as a dead man walking. It’s inflexible, expensive, and even wasteful, they say. There’s no way it can hope to hold up, and maybe they’re right. But if magazines die then perhaps the art won’t have to: maybe we can find a way for the same kind of melding of wordy editorial and page design to continue.

Could we end up with WYSIWYG editors so flexible and fast that we’ll be able to lay out vertical column magazines in an instant, merging infographics, text and images into the flowing whole that they’re able to become in print magazines? Will we see web designers becoming less technical and more like the page-designing guys that made my Korea feature so beautiful, or Kieron’s Zangband article so digestible? Isn’t the real issue the crudeness of web browsers and the horrible constraints of HTML as it currently exists?

Am I going to be able to print out a future blog of mine via an on-demand newspaper service and distributed it as a beautiful print object at future games conventions? Is this - columns of text, pop-up thumbnails and embedded video - really it for the visual logic of the web?

*The worst thing commercial blogs do is use self-referential links to game names, or subjects, when their tag or whatever does not explain the topic. Instead, take me to the official site, or the Wiki page! Useless basts.

Oh, also, I wrote a rollicking feature on the future of games for next month’s PC Gamer UK with contributions from Charles Stross and Eskil Steenberg. I’ll hype it again soon, but it’s worth picking up.

William Bryant Logan seems like a name that should be on the cover of a book. It’s a good, earthy name. It’s the name of an author who is a gardener, a scholar, a journalist, a Christian, an ex-oil rigger, and a mountain climber. All these aspects of his life are expressed in the busy pages of Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin Of The Earth. (First published as a paperback in 2007.)

Judging a book by its cover, in part, I bought Dirt on the basis of the fantastic title, and on the report that it contained this fact: “an acre of soil produces one horsepower every day”. The fact came first, via Twitter. Where did the fact come from? Via William Bryant Logan’s Dirt. That was a sale, right there.

A book about dirt. Soil, mud. And one with intriguing facts.

The book is a collection of essays that tie into the many aspects of what is - I now realise - a relatively mysterious medium. Dirt, dust, soil, earth, clay: a set of living systems that ties in any number of processes and materials across the planet. Logan’s writings detail a number of them, rooting around in matters of composting, soil evolution, dung beetles (including a species that hangs at the arse of a monkey, ready to base jump from a tree with its chosen stool), earthquakes, ground water, the theories of clay, molds, the wind, and the relationship between early agrarian presidents of the United States, Jefferson and Adams.

Logan’s book is piecemeal, rather than any kind of systematic natural history or survey. Nevertheless it’s the diversity of thoughts and descriptions that make this book fascinating to a dirt layman such as myself. It also seems to contain a broad thesis about how soil is akin to life, and how it is the foundation of life. The section on the weird nature of clay, and its relationship to the early stages of life, even the sheer complexity of this apparently simply substance, is extraordinary.

“The clay code… is more complex that either genetic code or human language. Only now are we beginning to catch glimpses of its order, and one cannot help thinking that pursuing it will be as fruitful and endless as the cabbalists’ search for that perfect of the Hebrew aleph, by which God created the universe.”

Logan’s writing is elegiac: he seems genuinely sad for eroded and contaminated soils, and laments the waste of bad composting. He offers poetic renditions of lessons in geology, and begins to suggest that soil is interrelated with what it means to be human. Indeed, the book explains, soil itself is a kind of living, self-healing entity, which we can and must understand our relationship with. There’s something beautiful about this that is made all the more intense by our increased understanding of the properties of this substance. Logan exults soil scientist Hans Jenny as one of the greatest minds of the past century, for his contribution to this body of knowledge.

Of course I agree with the ideas about the life of soil, and our need to better understand how we use, make and exhaust it. It’s a characteristic that’s true of much of the natural world, and it only needs stating in this case because soil is so ignored, and abused. It is not, thanks to this book, underwhelming. Logan does a fantastic job of providing the tools necessary for furthering even the slightest interesting in the materials beneath the gardener’s feet.

However, Logan’s Christianity does frame much of how he discusses his topic, and not always beneficially to the neutral reader. For the most part the Bible references are well-judged: splendid allegory. By the last third of the book, however, the pastoralist sermonising tendencies - via Biblical example - had begun to grate, and I almost put the book down.

This is a writer who is, apparently, keenly interested in the wonder that science can evoke from our expanded understanding of the natural world. The book is filled with references to soil science, geology, and even cosmology. And yet it is an uncomfortable position: Logan seems to still be irked by the arrogance of science - a common feeling among believers - which is something I would have sympathy for if it were not for his generalisations against science, and his eccentric defence of the profoundly dubious practice of dowsing for water.

“Science tells us that we are lords of Creation and that we know everything, but it would seem that our mental world is often more impoverished than an ant or a weed.”

Even when reports like this one discuss magnetic sense in animals, the fact remains that dowsing has been repeatedly debunked. There is no case for it. Logan’s belief in this strange behaviour set seems more about his hope and faith in ancient belief, than about any kind of useful understanding of the natural world. Science, far from telling us we are lords of creation, tells us that the world is more complex, and far stranger, than our ancient forebears could have anticipated.

These irrational blips make for uneven reading for even an occasionally magical empiricist like me, and it made me grumble. I was ultimately able to ignore it, and put aside the religious undertones as something like poetic license, but the sense of internal tension remained.

Like a whole bunch of my peers I’ve become increasingly interested in these kinds of topics, with gardening and growth, and with their relationship to how we progress, and it’s hard to find articulate writing on the topic that doesn’t slump into tedium. In part, Dirt serves to colour our knowledge and fuel our excitement and wonder, and I want to recommend it for that reason alone.

“The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market… minarets, palms, mountains, jungle… a sluggish river jumping with vicious fish, vast weed-grown parks where boys lie in long grass, play cryptic games.”

Yesterday’s Twitter musing raised the idea of a GTA game featuring an old man: wandering the streets, smoking, reminiscing. This led me to suggest a Williams Burroughs game, “Interzone”, where you battle the forces of control by distributing fucked up ideas across the city. So let’s outline a design for Interzone.

“No narrative, all side quests,” says Greg J Smith. That suits the Burroughsian idea, of course. And yet you can see how a Burroughs quest structure might work: a fragmentary mass of clues leading towards one inevitability. “The Old Writer would write himself out of death.” The endgame would be immortality, access to The Western Lands, and you’d find your way in the city. There might not be a story - perfect for the random sandbox play of the city in which a player is wandering, exploring, struggling - but that doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be an ending.

“A ghost in daylight on a crowded street.”

Visually the game world lands part way between Junkie and Naked Lunch. Part New York, part Tangiers. It’s a familiar city, but there’s something wrong with everything. Clearly the GTA city of Interzone would have to be far more tangled and jungloid than any game city we care to suggest.

“Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.”

Two game mechanisms for Interzone.

The first is morphia: addiction. The Old Writer will have have to make contact with various individuals across the city so that he can stay in control of himself. The longer you go without a hit, the harsher visuals and audio becomes, the more complex interactions are. But one contact will run dry, you’ll always have to search for another: following spectral junkies, looking for clues. Too long and you begin to lose control: the avatar wanders on his own, ravenous for junk. Eventually it’s unplayable: too bright and grating to look at, too difficult to control. And yet you’re facing a tricky kind of videogame resource management: take too much and you’re fade out, overdosing, resetting to zero. Wake up in a bed in a dark room, sunlight through a single dirty pane.

“A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what’s going on.”

The second mechanism is the Cut Up. You are constantly under threat of being captured: seized by agents of control. They only way to deal with it is to disrupt their activities, to keep them off your tail, dealing with other things. You distribute fucked up ideas to key locations. Pamphlets dropped off with key people, reducing the likelihood of the forces of control appear to deal with you. At higher levels you begin leaving tape recorders filled with subliminal messages running, an area-of-affect attack, context bombs. Parasitic upgrades.

The last resort - a thing of brutal finality, and your most limited resource - are the handguns that Burroughs loved. Just nine rounds in your automatic. Nine chances to escape control. Nine lives.

Cut word lines — Cut music lines — Smash the control images — Smash the control machine — Burn the books — Kill the priests — Kill! Kill! Kill!