I was going to talk about the book for a while – Susan Sontag on Photography – but aside from pointing out that in this true story, an image became a very real form and remains so, going on about the book would really be pretentious. So, I’ll talk about the bookmarks, the important bits. Continue reading
The first piece I read was by a woman called Lauren who was engulfed by an Internet furore that drenched the already soggy video game media in the kind of shit that consumers find particularly sticky. The furore was about journalistic integrity being compromised by games companies and their marketing and PR wings.
It was a horrible, tawdry little furore and Lauren bore much of it due I now believe to inexperience… Continue reading
What doesn’t seem to suffer, what in fact appears to be able to coast along in a stinking miasma of tired, insultingly rote repuking of the same clichés is the marketing blurb from the USA’s major publishing players. Take for example Bethesda – which has some decent properties to sell and also the license for nostalgics-only WWII shooter, Wolfenstein.
For the uninitiated, Wolfenstein was an early First-Person Shooter game that has garnered a reputation akin to DW Griffiths cult-racist movie Birth of a Nation in that both are ancient and as such must be respected and gooped over by nostalgia fans. Continue reading
Yes… that game. That music. I want a Wii U now… F-Zero at 60Hz. I have so many amazing F-Zero memories… round at other friend’s and fellow games journalists houses with import Super Famicoms. On a Virgin Atlantic plane is another. At my house is another… on a ferry. I bloody love F-Zero.
According to ace gaming site SPOnG.com (for which I work): Continue reading
Got a letter from the Government the other day. A form letter as it goes. The kind of form letter that absolutely terrified my 80 year-old mother.
She’s an ex-Wren, ex-PA to Lord Mountbatten, now slightly demented due to a hospital trust that I won’t name that in my opinion mismanaged her discharges (yes, plural) following a kidney removal, aka her Nephrectomy
Mum lives on her own somewhere in Hampshire. Her husband, my step-father, died suddenly, in the kitchen one morning. I know where she lives, of course, because I am down looking after her for a while. I am down looking after for a while because the government hates old people.
The previous government loved hospitals and wanted all its pals in the “private sector” to love hospitals too. Hence, somewhere in Hampshire there is now a ‘Super Hospital’. This is ‘Super’ in the sense of “Oh my fuck, I am super angry at their utter disdain for old people!”
Mum’s operation was just before Xmas. I’m not going to go into the tale of how the Super Hospital tried to discharge her on Xmas Day – having said, on Xmas day, that it wasn’t going to. I am not going to go into that story yet.
I am going to make a note here about how the Hospital Trust sent a letter about a follow-up meeting from the department of Anaesthesia. To repeat, it’s a follow-up letter, sent to an old lady.
In part it reads:
The National Rifle Association (aka the barmy, right wing, gun lovin’ fellas… aka The NRA) has released a game. It’s called NRA Practice Range. It has guns. Elements of the games media find this hypocritical or somehow ironic.
Not only do these reactions portray a failure to grasp the meanings of both words, they also illustrate a huge problem with a perfectly respectable working press that wants to be seen as a political or even art media: writing about games is respectable without having to “defend” games. It is okay to exercise the critical muscle.
Continue reading
He uses George Orwell selectively to batter home a point about how dead George would have hated a prize that co-opted his name after he died being given to people who he may or may not have agreed with but we will never be in a position to know.
I like to call this technique ‘The Puppetry of the Corpse’
Old Tory ideas never really die, they are just too Conservative for that. This cartoon, a Labour recruiting poster apparently (via David Milliband) certainly indicates as much.
It comes from the year of The Wall Street Crash when the chaps further up the ladder learned what the markets really could do when feral forces went to work. 1929.
The year The Great Depression stirred in Britain. But the satire portrayed in the poster is true in 2013.
Yesterday’s Welfare Debate, featured much old thinking including the deserving and undeserving poor and the Striver and the Skiver, which was largely uncontested by the current stagnating Labour rump and its hangers-on.
I write now as a lefty and not as someone whose day job is trying to get people to read the commercial website about video games (‘videogames’) that I edit. Sadly I find myself writing about this sad piece of hit-begging nonsense masquerading as economic analysis in the New Statesman magazine (Est 1913).
Diablo III is a popular product, famous in its Personal Computer (PC) gaming commercial niche. It is a game of dress up and pretend. It has a hokey premise and mildly exhilarating yet still very conservative (as are most video games produced by large publishers as opposed to the imaginative small indy makers) set of mechanics. It is played out by thousands of people who enjoy it and do no harm.
Recently its makers – Activision/Blizzard, an offshoot of Vivendi – decided to introduce real money auctions to this playground. This is a way to make more money from the harmless people playing the harmless game.
Continue reading
Science versus Gods. Royals versus Commons. Cute versus Ugly. Clever versus Stupid. Poor Versus Rich. News versus Features. Analysis versus Timeliness.
This is how the New Year of 2013 blustered into my home.
Lots of invidious comparisons like the demands for money-making or penury made themselves important in a loud and loutish way before the Xmas fat was even rendered.
Continue reading