The Longest Game

 Here's one of many tangents from a very enjoyable series of conversations I had with Katy Naylor, either side of Katy seeing Jonah Non Grata's Soho show, about that and other participatory projects:

Simon Kane:

Do you know the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game?

 

Voidspace:

Yes, it’s impossible. Notoriously impossible.

Simon Kane:

Once I worked out what that was doing, I thought this is incredible, because it’s actually subverting what a game is. It’s not a role-playing game at all. I think it’s designed to be about creating a very visceral emotional relationship with the technology. The whole point of it is that it’s almost impossible to play.

 

Voidspace:

I had always thought of that as a bug rather than a feature, and just said it was early days, and they hadn’t actually got the hang of difficulty moderating it.

Simon Kane:

It’s about how you deal – it’s a Kobayashi Maru – it’s about how you deal with this unplayable game.

Voidspace:

In the modern Table Top Role-Playing Game world, in the art-game one-pager space, there are games that are deliberately unplayable. There are all sorts of things that are interrogating the form and just being fun and weird. It’s interesting if that was an idea back in the ’80s.

 

Simon Kane:

It has to be. There’s no reason to make it that unplayable. I think it’s signalled by the very first thing you do, where you have to work out how to turn on the light. That’s unnecessary. And you could die. It's horrible. This machine doesn’t understand how a person exists.

Voidspace:

It’s creating in you the sensation of being Arthur Dent, because Arthur Dent hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing. Everything is alien, nothing makes sense, everything is baffling. And so that ties into the idea of this work being able to create a sense of exchange, or a sense of communication that can put you into an emotional state of someone else who’s in the world of the piece. 

Tell me some more about Jonah.

... which, if you can bear it, I contine to do HERE.

 

 

 

 And you can try to play the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure for yourself HERE.

 If you want to see me in a dressing gown in Islington, you can come and see Jonah Non Grata's other preview, at the Hen and Chickens this Saturday, by getting tickets for almost a tenner HERE.

 Meanwhile, the PR continues to work, keep taking the PR, with a lovely piece from, of all places, ATV HERE and another from Midlands TV HERE.

 (And here is the final scene of Jack Aldisert's The Manikins (A Work In Progress) – one of many other things Katy and I talked about – as passed to me in a manila envelope when I left the venue. Enlarge for spoilers...)

 

Stepping Into 2024 Like...

 As if! As if I'd ever "step into" a year. Years step into me, baby. Particularly last year, although I dimly remember resolving not to blog to see if anything else got written in its place, if that counts as a resolution. Results: I had a good day's writing in January, and then plans. Sitting on those plans I enjoyed a lot of days off. Too many. But I definitely enjoyed them, which I suspect is a skill. But now I'm poor. As anyone who follows me on instagram may know, I did finally land a job in the last two months of 2023, and I really enjoyed having that job, and then the job got busier, and I missed having days off, and I got iller and iller, and now I'm in France recuperating. That's a French boar. 

 

 I think she's a boar. My parents drove me up into the mountains to see a village sat in a crater – the Cirque de Navacelles – and she was knocking around a farm on the edge. We left the vineyards of Languedoc and wound up thick white canyons of pine – the temperature falling around us – until we reached a narrow-horizoned plateau of trees the size of bushes sheltering donkeys at the top, a sudden Mongolian steppe. Looking over the side of it was like looking at a map. Click to embiggen. 

 The sun was in our eyes all the way home. 

 It was a nice drive, and reminded me of a couple of things. One was just how much of the year I've spent playing "Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion", searching crags and plains for a cure for my own vampirism, forgetting which horse is mine, running away from anything really well, and maturely coming to terms with my own white privilege by opting to play as an orc. (Everyone in it really does look like Simon Cowell as well; congratulations, Micky D.) 

Simon Cowell has a quest for you pic.twitter.com/uq6C1PsuK0

— Micky D (@DeMickyD) July 11, 2023

 

 The second was THIS excellent adaptation of "Comet In Mooominland"starring our own John Finnemore which Radio 4 has just brought out for Yule, and which is definitely worth a share. I've missed sharing things on this blog. I used to stare at the cover of this for ages when I was ten. 

 Stepping into 2024 like...

 

                                                                                                                         source.                  

Snowflakes Are Cyberpunk

 Modified dust. It's why the statement "no two showflakes are alike" exercises our imagination more than, say, "no two daffodils are alike". Because how many different modifications could there be? 

 Well, here are a couple new to me:

 

 Photographed on cold plates in 1910 by Wilson Bentley, and showcased on the excellent Public Domain Review, Bentley's work is how we've known for so long what snowflakes look like, although I didn't know they could look like this:

 

 In fact, I assumed these must have been models or mock-ups, but as those who follow me on twitter will know - and I'm assuming there's an overlap - snowflakes can ineed produce axles. Many thanks to redscharlach for the tip.

 

 

 On a side note: Apparently, in the new game Cyberpunk 2077, you're able to "customize" your character's genitalia, but in reality you're only given the four options: big penis, little penis, vulva, or "off". Also, the be-penised models – presumably in deference to any possible gay panic among male players – turn out to be never-nudes who take showers in their pants; I guess you can take showers in this game. Also, the little penis is big.

 

 Sorry, I was listening to this podcast while out in the snow. Maybe snowflakes aren't cyberpunk. I don't know what cyberpunk is.

"Gruff voices come from inside" (A Nod to John Blanche)

 Thirty-seven years after the publication of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! the townspeople of Kristatanti still wear their hair high on their heads. John Blanche's illustrations are nothing like the meticulously researched environments you'll find in Skyrim or other first-person Fantasy walking simulators, they're actual folk art, immersing you in not a tangible landscape but an eccentrically embellished personal mythology, which is probably, really, what you want to be immersed in when you fantasy role play. Here, for example, is the guard who sees you off on your adventure:

  Now you'd never see that in a video game. There would be too many questions. And no answers because there's no reason for any of this, other than Blanche's joy in making stuff up. They say a camel is a horse designed by a committee, but actually it looks far more like the pet project of someone who worked on the committee that brought out the horse. And pet projects are the substance of fantasy. We associate the genre with mythology, and we're right to, but mythologies are the product of a people, not a hive. Just bunch of people. There's no way to synthesise their differing accounts - mythology is not synthetic - nor any way of extrapolating what actually happened. Someone simply made something up and that happened lots of times, and I think Blanche's work expresses those instances perfectly.

 I mean, what's this? Doesn't matter. You encountered it. Or this is how you remember it. I think I enjoyed reading, or playing, The Shamutanti Hills this week even more than I had as a child. Video games in the interim had probably conditioned me a little better for all the keeping track one has to do, and I bothered learning the spells this time too, which came in very handy when I lost my sword halfway through the book. I also took time to make a map, something I'd always written off as a chore before, but it turns out it's a creative act, part of the game: you can draw a small crow where you saw a crow for example, or rolling hills, or heads on spikes when you encounter heads on spikes, a classic shorthand for the outskirts of sub-human savagery despite heads on spikes marking the boundaries of the City of London well into the seventeenth century. Talk about projection.

Return of the Thwack

A celebrity variant from the Aberdeen Maritime Museum

 This week's Ships Sea and The Stars sees the return of baffling seaside atrocity Mr. Punch, previously squeamed on this blog back in March. I don't really begin to share or even fully understand curator Sue Prichard's diagnosis of cartoon violence as a malign influence on real-world power structures, but I've also just been literally blowing chef's kisses at Release The Hounds on ITV2+1 so what do I know? Dickens agrees with me however, and you can hear me reading him do so at 30:37. I'm back at 40:28 to read from Tales of a Tar a list of extraordinarily-named games carved into tops of masts, including "Jack and Bet footing in a pas de deux" and "the Saucy Temeraire at Trafflygar", both of whose rules I think I'd rather invent than learn. There's also spoken word and a really beautiful biscuit.

I'm guessing this picture was a commission though.

Have You Heard The Good News About J. Theophrastus Bartholomew?

 It is only sitting down to post about how disappointingly intimidated I feel not just by the tone but by the content of J. Theophrastus Bartholomew's introduction to his Games You Can Play In Your Head - a book promoted by my new youtube heroes the Corridor Crew, and edited down by two of their number from an initial, sixteen-volume set found in a yard sale in Bayport, Minnesota - a book I was incredibly excited to receive, but whose opening pages contained such red flags as "You might think to yourself: but what about all my friends? To which I retort, of course, and without hesitation: who needs them?" or "if you are an adult who attempts to function as a cog in the blood-soaked machine we call the American Dream..." or "Say it aloud: I am playing a game, Father. A game that requires you to leave me in peace and allow me to be a more fully formed human" - it is literally only now, sitting down to write about how worried I am to continue reading this book, that it occurs to me what may already have been blindingly obvious to you: that there is of course no J. Theophrastus Bartholomew. That there never was an original sixteen-volume set, that this is an original work which would explain why J. Bartholomew's name is not on the cover, and that Sam Gorski and D. F. Lovett are entirely aware of how intimidating he sounds because they made him up to sound like an embittered, nihilistic kook because that's the joke. So all I want to share with you now, having sat down, is my absolutely genuine relief at that realisation. He never existed. Oh my god. It's okay. It was a joke. Oh. That feels so good.

Dancing Lessons From Lucy Maud (a note on risk assessment)

For "travel suggestions" read book recommendations, 
and for "dancing lessons" read book recommendations, again,
and for "Bokonon" read Kurt Vonnegut.

 Apologies for the tomorrowness of this post, but I think my body clock's running to a thirty-six hour day now, so look I'm just going to go with it. I walked up Parliament Hill yesterday at 4am, or the hill next to Parliament Hill, and I listened to Ken Campbell's Letter To Bob Anton Wilson. Pretty much all of Campbell's shows have now been released as podcasts now and subjects overlap, but I'd never heard him talk before about Anne Of Green Gables. There's a video of the "Letter" too, and here's a bit of it (or a lot, depending on how long you keep watching):

 A series of "redemptive vignettes" is how Campbell describes Lucy Maud Montgomery's series, capable of reducing the hardest of men to tears and forcing the maestro to finally confront his own "a**holery". Obviously I love a good children's book, the clarity and care and genrelessness, and so by the time I'd got home I considered this a recommendation, and I went to bed. But my body was having nothing of it, so I decided to sit myself down in front of the telly and finally watched Russian Doll on Netflix. I binged all eight episodes. I loved it. But...

 Natasha Lyonne's character Nadia, self-consciously but effortlessly hard-bitten and initially impermeable, turns out to have been anchored to humanity by the children's book "Emily of New Moon". For the second time that morning therefore, a narrative of fractured universes was recommending to me the works of Lucy Maud Montgomery. This actually didn't seem so weird given that in both Campbell's and Lyonne's world "clues fucking abound" to quote Nadia, and yet that thematic aptitude was itself a further coincidence, and probably should have made it feel weirder.

Footage of Ken and Daisy Campbell "astounding their selves into being" at Damanhur

(unavailable on the podcast).

 What I found more interesting, on a zeitgeisty level, was how Russian Doll toyed with an idea I'd seen come up a lot recently - in the Live, Die, Repeat machine from the Vat of Acid episode of Rick and Morty - or in the extraordinary, even more recent, choose-your-own adventure finale of Kimmy Schmidt (again on Netflix). You could call it "risk assessment", although the latter show offers more an opportunity for catharsis, impossible with any previous telly technology.* It seems decisions themselves might be the new monster, the new Atom Bomb. And television's extraordinary at the moment. And it seems a good time to stay in.

* UPDATE: Watching this Nathen Zed video on The Last Of Us 2 I realise I'd probably be less surprised by all these developments if I gamed more.

Dan Harmon playing Minecraft is very "Rick and Morty"

 I've never played Minecraft, but enjoy hearing people talk about video games, maybe more than I enjoy playing them. It takes less time for one thing, but also, the definition of what a game actually is, or should be doing, is still so unsettled that if interest is keen enough, conversations can go anywhere. Here's Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon, going full "Pickle Rick"on a podcast that I enjoy a lot, How Did This Get Played, accompanied by footage of some project called Titan City which seems populated by nothing but pigs and chickens. Maybe too apt now, but it was either this or another post I had in reserve about Endgame, and this seemed the happier Monday. Whether I'm talking about Samuel Beckett's Endgame or Marvel's you'll find out tomorrow. In the meantime, stay safe, me ol' unattendees, and if you're still looking for something to do here is a link to a VR reconstruction of Rick's Toilet of Solitude...