Alice Oswald's 'Memorial'

I've read Oswald's slim, startling, epically beautiful re-writing of the Iliad twice already this weekend. You can read a long extract on Amazon, but here are a couple of my favourite passages:

DIORES son of Amarinceus
Struck by a flying flint
Died in a puddle of his own guts
Slammed down into the mud he lies
With his arms stretched out to his friends
And PIROUS the Thracian
You can tell him by his knotted hair
Lie alongside him
He killed him and was killed
There seem to be black flints
Everywhere a man steps

Like through the jointed grass
The long-stemmed deer
Almost vanishes
But a hound has already found her flattened tracks
And he's running through the fields towards her

Like through the jointed grass
The long-stemmed deer
Almost vanishes
But a hound has already found her flattened tracks
And he's running through the fields towards her

.....

SCAMANDRIUS the hunter
Knew every deer in the woods
He used to hear the voice of Artemis
Calling out to him in the lunar
No man's land of the mountains
She taught him to track her animals
But impartial death has killed the killer
Now Artemis with all her arrows can't help him up
His accurate firing arm is useless
Menelaus stabbed him
One spear-thrust through the shoulders
And the point cam out through the ribs
His father was Strophius

Like when a mother is rushing
And a little girl clings to her clothes
Wants help wants arms
Won't let her walk
Like staring up at that tower of adulthood
Wanting to be light again
Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted
And carried on a hip

Like when a mother is rushing
And a little girl clings to her clothes
Wants help wants arms
Won't let her walk
Like staring up at that tower of adulthood
Wanting to be light again
Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted
And carried on a hip

The compliment currency

I was talking to a couple of friends recently about the concept of graciousness. They have both reached a certain level of maturity and fame - no longer up-starts, but instead people whom up-starts look up to.

They spoke about having to get used to having people ask and act upon their advice; and having people say flattering things about them. Being typical New Zealanders they find this uncomfortable, and both acknowledged a tendency to shrug off or downplay compliments - a behaviour they are trying to break in themselves.

As well they might. As Bryan Coldferry, the Irish-American author of The Compliment Currency: How a few well-chosen words can change the way the world responds to you, notes in his opening chapter:

Refusing a compliment is the same as refuting the complimenter's judgement. It is neither charming nor self-deprecating: it is saying I do not value what you think of me. Moreover, it demonstrates a lack of reciprocation. This person has gone out of their way to notice and comment upon something about you. You have thrown their goodwill back in their face. As much as we all could learn the benefits that accrue from delivering compliments, we could equally benefit from learning to take them.

Coldferry's core thesis is that compliments are the lowest cost form of influence available to us. They cost us nothing to give, and their returns can be completely out of scale to the effort we have invested in them.

Florid compliments used to be the norm: Coldferry, in the obligatory looking-back-through-history chapter, gives the example of dedications to patrons in the Renaissance, the oh-no-you-are letters that flew between the Romantic poets, and the ongoing vestiges of this practice in hyperbolic book blurbing activities. But, he argues, we have fallen out of the habit of making sincere compliments in the flesh. In fact, the contemporary world is almost cynical and suspicious of compliments, looking for the knife in the hand of the arm that's just been thrown around us in a congratulatory fashion.

At the same time, he observes, social networking sites have made complimenting easier in virtual relationships. Retweeting and Facebook likes are cost-free activities that have out-of-scale rewards (admit it: how good do you feel when you see six people have retweeted one of your pearls of wisdom?).  (The book was published in late 2011, otherwise Coldferry would presumably noted the complimentary opportunities of Google Plus and Pinterest.)

Coldferry argues that by taking this complimentary behaviour back into face-to-face relationships, we can harness the power of making people feel good about themselves. A casual 'You're looking well' can open up a warm conversation at a networking function; frequent verbal reinforcement in the workplace, preferably within the hearing of peers, is more motivating than annual pay increases (shades of Daniel Pink here).

The Compliment Currency, like so many of what I now refer to as 'colon books' (Snappy Verb: Longer description of how something very small actually explains/affects the whole world) takes a small point and stretches it over 180-odd generously white-spaced pages. Amid the padding lurk a few gems - for example, Coldferry's list of the most complimentary nationalities (as determined by the number of recommendations written on LinkedIn profiles, a rather ingenious use of this data). The top three:

• USA [The home of the self-assured self-promoter, this is no surprise. Coldferry notes that Americans have truly learned to exploit the fact that giving good compliments makes the complimenter look like a knowledgeable, powerful person]
• Brazil [Latin American cultures apparently are more open to compliments about physical appearance than Anglo-Saxon countries, but Coldferry does underline to aspiring complimenters that weight is an issue that should never, ever be broached in a compliment. For women, he recommends shoes; for men, ties and watches. Also, noticing that someone has had a haircut indicates that you pay attention to them over time, not just when they're immediately in front of you.]
• Canada [This surprised me, given the stereotype of the chronically self-effacing Canadian, but Coldferry identifies a strain of compliments that sound like the phenomenon of the humble-brag - less bombastic than American compliments, but still reflecting well on the maker as well as the receiver.]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, England comes in low on the scale, but still ahead of the ultra-reserved Germans. Poor old New Zealand doesn't rate a mention, but if asked to venture a guess, I'd say we'd closely resemble the British - compliments are mildly suspect, and seldom graciously received. So next time one comes your way, try a 'simple thank you' (and then check out Coldferry's chapter on how to draw on a store of rehearsed compliments to make a 'spontaneous' return).*

*Footnote

Coldferry misses a trick here - Jane Austen's priceless description of the ingratiating Mr Collins explaining his pre-cooked compliments for his patroness Lady Catherine de Bourgh:

"[Lady Catherine's daughter's] indifferent state of health unhappily prevents her being in town; and by that means, as I told Lady Catherine myself one day, has deprived the British court of its brightest ornament. Her ladyship seemed pleased with the idea, and you may imagine that I am happy on every occasion to offer those little delicate compliments which are always acceptable to ladies. I have more than once observed to Lady Catherine that her charming daughter seemed born to be a duchess, and that the most elevated rank, instead of giving her consequence, would be adorned by her. -- These are the kind of little things which please her ladyship, and it is a sort of attention which I conceive myself peculiarly bound to pay." 

"You judge very properly,'' said Mr. Bennet, "and it is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are the result of previous study?'' 

"They arise chiefly from what is passing at the time, and though I sometimes amuse myself with suggesting and arranging such little elegant compliments as may be adapted to ordinary occasions, I always wish to give them as unstudied an air as possible.''
Mr. Bennet's expectations were fully answered. His cousin was as absurd as he had hoped, and he listened to him with the keenest enjoyment, maintaining at the same time the most resolute composure of countenance, and, except in an occasional glance at Elizabeth, requiring no partner in his pleasure.

Creating compelling collections

An interesting older article (via Mia Ridge) on 'Understanding Compelling Collections'. In it, John Coburn talks about the experiments the Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums did in 2010 with sharing their collections online.

Coburn writes eloquently about facing the challenge of finding audiences and attention in social spaces. What will be compelling?

The short answer, in my view, is anything that How To Be a Retronaut would share.

The site defines itself as a time machine with ‘capsules’ of historic image collections uploaded every day. The capsules are carefully curated. They are era-specific, event-specific, moment-specific. Abandoned New York movie theatres. Mug shots of destitute Victorian criminals. 1920s Egypt in colour. Yugoslav war memorials. The last surviving witness of the Abraham Lincoln assassination.

It’s a popular site averaging 30,000 visitors a day, and over a million a month. Each capsule is generally shared a thousand times by viewers. The likely reach for each capsule is beyond calculation.

These images are the stuff museums and archives have in abundance. So neatly sidestepping the interminable question of copyright, why are many museums reaching only a fraction of this audience with our collections online.

Chris Wild of How To Be a Retronaut suggests the following “(Museums and archives should) forget about history and think about imagination. (Focus on) the images that tap into magic and the sublime. The images that disrupt people’s model of time, fracture it, break it apart. Looking at these images, viewers should encounter eternity and their own mortality”.

I agree with Coburn. I think digitisation should be promiscuous. I think people should be just flinging this stuff through the digitisers (by which I mean, whatever machine they're using) and bunging on the minimum amount of metadata, and then getting them up online. Stop agonising over the quality of your descriptions, over how to prioritise your programme, and just get the presses rolling. Digitise old stuff, so you don't have to worry about copyright so much. Take a risk and put stuff up; clearly post a take-down notice in case anyone objects. Allow people to add information to improve searchability - not squitty little tags, but proper big text fields. Even better, if you have the resource, do something like Brooklyn Museum's Posse and let QA'd contributions enter the metadata.

Making these collections compelling takes a lot of work though. When I was working at the National Library, getting our collections up on The Commons on Flickr was such a rush - so many barriers jumped in such a small amount of time. But the stuff we could share was so carefully vetted that we were (initially at least) restricted to innocuous landscapes and photos of ships - i.e., anything that didn't have people in it. We did the best with what we had, but it hurt knowing what great stuff - what magical and sublime things - we had in the collections.

Even now, I'm entranced on a regular basis. Photos of instructions for a wool-processing machine. Of awkward looking wanna-be models in the 1970s. Of a display of tire treads, or lightbulbs, or lampshades.

Or my recent obsession, photos of children from the 1870s and 1880s taken in the Whanganui studio of William James Harding. The children change, but the two rockinghorse props stay the same (I'm also beginning to suspect the beret and boater were studio props as well). And the children themselves, solemn, rarely cracking that cheeky, knowing grin of children who grew up with little cameras in the home. Often doughy, lumpen. Wearing these voluminous clothes, petticoats poking out, big black boots on their small feet. I've started a little board on Pinterest for my favourites, just to see if other people find them compelling too.

Ladies' choice

I was recently passed the following story by a friend.

The Lady and the Tiger

The semi-barbaric king of an ancient land used an unusual form of punishment for offenders in his kingdom. The offender would be placed in an arena where his only way out would be to go through one of two doors. Behind one door was a beautiful woman hand-picked by the king and behind the other was a fierce tiger. The offender was then asked to pick one of the doors without knowing what was behind it. If he picked the door with the woman behind it, then he was declared innocent but was also required to marry the woman, regardless of previous marital status. If he picked the door with the tiger behind it, though, then he was deemed guilty and the tiger would rip him to pieces.

One day the king found that his daughter, the princess, had taken a lover far beneath her station. The king could not allow this and so he threw the offender in prison and set a date for his trial in the arena. On the day of his trial the suitor looked to the princess for some indication of which door to pick. The princess did, in fact, know which door concealed the woman and which one the tiger, but was faced with a conundrum —if she indicated the door with the tiger, then the man she loved would be killed on the spot; however, if she indicated the door with the lady, her lover would be forced to marry another woman, a woman that the princess deeply hated and believed her lover had flirted with. Finally she did indicate a door, which the suitor then opened.

At this point the question is posed to the reader, "Did the tiger come out of that door, or did the lady?" The question is not answered, and is left as a thought experiment.

The version I was sent also had the following explanation appended.

"The Lady, or the Tiger?" is a much-anthologized short story written by Frank R. Stockton for publication in the magazine The Century in 1882. "The Lady, or the Tiger?" has come into the English language as an allegorical expression, a shorthand indication or signifier for a problem that is unsolvable. The underlying allegory is parallel to the dilemmas often faced by participants in problems predicted by game theory.

Thought experiments have been a relatively new discovery for me. Looking back at high school, I can't ever remember a teacher posing one at my class (even covertly). In nearly six years of studying art history at university, I don't recall exercising this particular style of thinking. It's only as I've moved into the web world - and started catching up on physics on the side - that the term has become familiar to me.

I'm stumped by how this counts as a thought experiment. The princess has only one choice, as I can see it - swallow her pride. Dooming her lover is not a choice. That I found the answer so straightforward concerned me. Had I missed some crucial clue? Do I not know how to "play" thought experiments? So I sent this on to a smart friend, and explained my dilemma. What I just being slow-witted? Or was this story (sorry - thought experiment) mildly misogynistic? Would it have invoked game theory if it had been a prince and his unfortunate lover?

My friend wrote back

I agree. It is confusing to me. I guess the dilemma is supposed to arise from the condition that the woman behind the door is "a woman that the princess deeply hated and believed her lover had flirted with". But that just seems to turn it into an exercise of guessing the intensity of the princess's jealousy and her capacity for vengeance. "Guess the character's psychology" does not make for a particularly compelling story.

Then wrote back again

* and by "does not make for a particularly compelling story", I meant "thought experiment".

In the meantime, in response to "The Lady and the Tiger", I had been drawn to share back one of my one favourite parables - which I now saw could be described as a "thought experiment". It is an Arthurian fable called "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Lady Ragnelle", a version of the "loathly lady" theme that was popular in medieval England. An earlier version appears as Chaucer's "The wife of Bath's Tale"; I came across the story as a child, reading Roger Lancelyn-Green's retellings of the Arthur stories, and have never forgotten it.

I decided to share "Sir Gawain and Lady Ragnelle" with the people who had originally sent me "The Lady and the Tiger", and see if I could pose it as a thought experiment myself.

 Arthur, driven as always by his honour, winds up in a situation where he is charged by a mysterious knight to discover what "women truly desire". The knight gives Arthur a year to seek the answer and report back to him - if he does not find the correct answer, he will be killed.  Arthur rides the length and breadth of England, seeking out women and asking them the answer. Some tell him jewels, some youth, some beauty, some wealth. None give him the answer he needs.

One day, near the end of the year-long deadline, Arthur  goes hunting with some of his knights to relieve the pressure. While out riding, he comes upon the ugliest and most unpleasant women - one in front of whom even Arthur's legendary courtesy deserts him.

The loathsome Lady Ragnelle ("she who has never beguiled a man") reassures him she has the answer he needs, but will only give it to him if he agrees to wed her to his favourite Sir Gawain. Arthur is torn, but gallant Gawain  - the flower of the Round Table - forces him to accept the offer. Here's what Lady Ragnelle tells him:

“Sir, you will now know, without digression, what women of all degrees want most,” Dame Ragnell responded.  “Some men say we desire to be beautiful and that we want to consort with diverse strange men; also we love lust in bed and often wish to wed.  Thus men misunderstand women.  Another idea they have is that we want to be seen as young and fresh, not old, and that women can be won through flattery and clever ploys.  In truth, you act foolishly.  The one thing that we desire of men above all else is to have complete sovereignty, so that all is ours.  We use our skill to gain mastery over the most fierce, victorious and manly of knights.  So go on your way and tell this to the knight, who will be angry and curse the one who taught it to you, for his labour is lost.  I assure you that your life is now safe, and remember your promise.”

As the Lady said, Arthur's answer satisfies the knight. Now the wedding must go forward. The Loathsome Lady arrives at Arthur's court, and Gawain burns with shame and unhappiness at her ugliness, her untuneful voice, her horrific table manners, and the ill-concealed mockery of the court. At last, Gawain and the Loathsome Lady retire to their bedchamber, where the Lady requests Gawain that he perform his husbandly duties.

When Gawain screws his courage to the sticking place and turns to embrace her, to his great surprise he finds in his arms not the loathsome lady but a woman whose beauty eclipses that of every lady in Arthur's court. She reveals to him that like the knight who originally challenged Arthur with the riddle, she is under a curse: she must take her loathsome appearance for half of the day, and assume her true shape for the remaining twelve hours. Then she asks Gawain what he would choose for her. Should she shame him before all the court with her ugliness during the day, and save her true appearance for the night they are alone together? Or should she appear in her beautiful guise during the day, but have him endure her loathliness when they are alone?

It is less a thought experiment than a riddle, I suppose, but I'll leave it up to you all to decide what you as Gawain would have chosen; Wikipedia has the conclusion ...

I can remember the thrill I felt as a little girl when I read the conclusion: both the narrative neatness, and the satisfaction of the answer. Now, I realise that the sovereynté that Lady Ragnelle described was a joke at the time, and perhaps still a joke today.

And yet I retain a great fondness for this little tale. I am still pierced by a deep relief for Sir Gawain each time I recall the story - the pleasure in the magically correct outcome. The story of Arthur has always been one of great tragedy for me (a theme we'll return to); this small bright moment studded in his saga has always meant a lot to me.

Caveats all round

An article from The Economist details an English court case over a disputed antique chain of office,  valued first by Sotheby's as a Tudor copy, and later sold by Christie's as an actual Tudor piece:

Essentially, if a work of art or an antique is of personal or financial importance, it pays to get a second opinion if you don't much care for the first one. The job of an expert is to use acquired skills and natural gifts to narrow the gap between opinion and fact. The better the expert, the more narrow the gap—but it never disappears entirely. Experience teaches collectors, dealers and art historians that mistakes are unavoidable. Learning from them is often more beneficial and less expensive than going to court.

And in a timely coincidence, a piece from the New York Times on avoiding buying fakes. Endearingly, it's from a column titled 'Wealth matters', and includes this sentence in its preamble: "I know enough about the art world to know that is a secretive, clubby place with more than its fair share of eccentrics."

Reflecting on Webstock 2012

Over on my work blog, I've written two posts reflecting on Webstock 2012:

• On design and craft
• On finding your joy and strategic creativity

Odds and sods

Some days on the radio feel like a job interview - you have your spiel prepared, but the first question wrong-foots you. Yesterday Kathryn asked me a bunch of unexpected questions about dealer galleries. I'm not sure where her perspective comes from, but it's quite different from mine. (Links to some of the things I talked about are on the RNZ website.)

Completely unrelated: here are the reading lists I've put together for the 'What I've Been Reading' sessions at the last two Kiwi Foo Camps.

It's the ludonarrative, stupid

I read Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter and Pippin Barr’s How to Play a Video Game in one long binge over Waitangi weekend. I realised at the end of the weekend that I had read the books in what would seem to be the wrong order - Bissell’s longer memoir first, Barr’s slim primer second - but I think this accident brought more depth to both.

Let’s start with autobiography. Barr uses autobiography as a framing device, taking us through his near life-long history of gaming, from playing Aztec as a four-year-old on the family’s new Apple IIe to his job now in Copenhagen, 28 years later, teaching video game design in a university. The journey wends past games arcades, rented Sega Mega Drives, teaching his uncle to play Red Dead Redemption, and Barr’s moment of internet splendour last year, when his own game The Artist is Present broke out of the niche of indie game forums and hit the online pages of publications as diverse as HuffPo and The Arts Newspaper.

Barr tells us the personal narrative of his history with his subject matter; this is a hallmark of Awa Press’s Ginger Series, of which How to Play a Video Game is the 12th release. Ginger Series authors give us an entry into a world they enjoy, even adore, through sharing the story of their own romantic relationship with it. Bissell takes this autobiographical approach much further. His book criss-crosses between reportage, travelogue, love letter, and excoriating self confession, especially when it comes to his several years spent not writing (he was the author of several books of fiction and a regular columnist for a number of magazines), playing games in marathon-like sessions, and throwing cocaine up his nose:

Soon I was sleeping in my clothes. Soon my hair was stiff and fragrantly unclean. Soon I was doing lines before my Estonian class, staying up for days, curating prodigious nose bleeds and spontaneously vomiting from exhaustion. Soon my pillowcases bore rusty coins of nasal drippage. Soon the only thing I could smell was something like the inside of an empty bottle of prescription medicine. Soon my biweekly phone call to my cocaine dealer was a weekly phone call. Soon I was walking into the night, handing hundreds of dollars in cash to a Russian man whose name I did not even know, waiting in alleys for him to come back – which he always did, though I never fully expected him to – and retreating home, to my Xbox, to GTA IV, to the electrifying solitude of my mind at play in an anarchic digital world.
...
Video games and cocaine feed on my impulsiveness, reinforce my love of solitude and make me feel good and bad in equal measure. The crucial difference is that I believe in what video games want to give me, while the bequest of cocaine is one I loathe. I do know that video games have enriched my life. Of that I have no doubt. They have also done damage to my life. Of that I have no doubt. I let this happen, of course; I even helped the process along. As for cocaine, it has been a long time since I last did it, but not as long as I would like.

So Barr’s story is a beginner’s guide that shares his own beginnings; Bissell’s a classic bildungsroman. Both writers verge into being obsessive players, regularly logging 80+ hours on a game (‘I can think of only one other personal activity I would be less eager to see audited in this way’, writes Bissell, ‘and it, too, is a single-player experience’). Bissell seems more performance and personality focused (his interviews with figures in the game design world are a strength of the book that prevent it from becoming me-me-me-ish), Barr somewhat more philosophical and reflective.

There are many points where I could do a compare and contrast, or just write a list of 200 Things I Learned Reading These Books (I need to declare at this point that I am a hopeless non-gamer, and that everything here was new to me, from William Higinbotham, to the use of ‘training sessions’ at the start of a game to teach you the controls, to the beauty of Flower). But the thing that really interested me, and the thing that I really want to explore here, was each writers’ underlying concern in their book.

For Bissell, the writer, this concern is storytelling, and how video games are still weighted towards game play rather than narrative:

This is one of the most suspect things about the game form. … A game with an involving story and poor gameplay cannot be considered a successful game, whereas a game with superb gameplay and a laughable story can see its spine bend from the weight of many accolades—and those who praise the latter game will not be wrong.

Early in the book, Bissell reflects on a piece of juvenilia, an essay for an anthology of “young writing”, where he wrote about ‘video games and whether they were a distraction from the calling of literature’. Then he questioned where video games land on ‘art’s fairly forgiving sliding scale’; today, he says, with video games the youngest and increasingly dominant form of popular art, such questions are redundant.

However, he continues, in that essay he was trying to talk about the intelligence that distinguishes art works from everything else. Intelligence, he says, can be expressed in all sorts of way; morally, formally, technically, stylistically, thematically, emotionally. Masterpieces - the things we identify as wiping the table with their intelligence - are comprehensively intelligent; intelligent in all sorts of ways. And they are generally the result of one unified vision, one single game. Video games, he notes, are usually the products of many minds: many games ‘have more formal and stylistic intelligence than they know what to do with and not even trace amounts of thematic, emotional or moral intelligence.’

Can game play and narrative ever be happily melded? Bissell is unsure:

A noisy group of video-game critics and theoreticians laments the rise of story in games. Games, in one version of this view, are best exemplified as total play, wherein the player is an immaterial demiurge and the only ‘narrative’ is what anecdotally generated during play. (Tetris would be the best example of this sort of game.) My suspicion is that this lament comes less from frustration with story qua story than it does from the narrative butterfingers on outstanding display in the vast majority of contemporary video games. I share that frustration. I also love being the agent of chaos in the video game world. What I want from games - a control as certain and seamless as the means by which I am being controlled - may be impossible, and I am back to where I began.

Bissell also observes that video games are different from other art forms in one very exact way: the player is just that - not a viewer or reader, but an active, decision-making participant. Bissell casts around extensively on the potential conflict between narrative and gameplay and, by extension, between the player’s agency and surrender. ‘You get controlled and are controlled’, he notes: the balance is more equal than most forms of art, but the fact that you get to shape the story to any extent reminds you that ‘a presiding intelligence exists within the game along with you, and it is this sensation that invites the otherwise unworkable comparisons between games and other forms of art.’

For Barr, this is less a conundrum than a fruitful tension. His special interest - as a gamer, an academic, and increasingly the game creator - it is playing against the grain, exploring what the world offers, how far you can probe it. What happens if you walk away from your mission and instead decide to drive your car into a lake or watch a rabbit hop around your horse?

In one chapter, Barr describes going off the rails in Grand Theft Auto IV:

When the game demands you ‘drive to the second diamond pickup’, go rogue: veer the truck away from this destination and start calling the shots yourself. Drive for a while, and listen to a jazz station on the radio as you search for something new to do.

Eventually you find yourself in the game’s version of Central Park. You carefully drive the lage garbage truck down leafy pathways, swerving to avoid pedestrians. Looking for an amusing diversion, you drive into a lake and somehow manage to keep going with half the vehicle submerged. The music becomes muted by the water, lending a muffled soundtrack to the already strange scene. You drive like this for a while, tooting the horn at people walking next to the water. They stop and star at the incongruous sight of a garbage truck driving in a lake in Central Park.

I’m pretty underwater jazz wasn’t what the morality police were thinking of when they condemned Grand Theft Auto IV in one of those regular Think of the Children pieces about video games. And a following paragraph gives an interesting spin on Bissell’s worries about control:

So, there are two very different ways to approach a video game. You can perform - focusing on trying to do the right thing, succeeding, and ultimately winning on the game’s terms. Or you can play - doing what you want to do, not what you ‘should’ do. The idea that we can decide how we feel like relating to a video game is important, even revolutionary. It means we are playing the game, not the other way around.

Gaming the game doesn’t necessarily mean gaming the game’s maker, however. Instead, it’s more like picking up the ball they’ve just tossed you:

... it’s not just that you can do these things, the game’s creator wants you to. Playing a game can be seen as a kind of conversation with its designer. Each time you try something … it’s like asking the designer a question: ‘What if I do this?”. Their answer comes in the way the game responds to your actions.

This was the point that really fired my imagination in the two books - and brought me circling back to the frustration Bissell feels. No matter how many diversions you take or daft things you attempt, you’re still playing inside a circumscribed world, one where every pixel is controlled by rules someone else put in place.

The one exception might be the kinds of game that Barr clearly loves: simulations like The Sims, and the collaborative world-building game MInecraft. It is the potential for collaborative play that really seems to thrill him:

A big part of the excitement of playing a game with someone else is sharing a world with them. Even the simple act of handing an object to a friend in Minecraft invests the experience with a strong sense that you’re both really there. Some of the most magical experiences I have had in a video game happened when a friend and I walked together through the world of Minecraft, commenting on each spectacular rock formation we saw, and decorating entire landscapes with torch patterns just so that we could stand together at a vantage point and admire the beauty of what we’d made.

But it’s not just the happy happy joy joy game worlds where this feeling is evoked:

Video games creators have lately been catching on to the idea that we might not always want to engage in mortal combat against our friends and families, but play together instead. Often this means teaming up to engage in mortal combat against others. In Left 4 Dead, a zombie-based game, four players join forces to try and survive in various zombie-infested locations. While battling zombies is entertaining on its own, having a friend rush to your side to dislodge a zombie and then give you medical aid can really get the adrenaline pumping …

… There are few gaming experiences more immediately stunning than seeing another person run past you in the same virtual world. The realisation that various moving figures around you are, in reality, all people who are playing the same game, following the same rules, and sharing many of the same objectives as you is a paradigm shift. [These virtual worlds] take on a greater significance because you are literally in it together.

With more space and a different remit, but to the same conclusion, Bissell also discusses Left 4 Dead. He recounts one game in which he had to choose between personal ‘safety’, and going back out to rescue his three teammates, against seemingly impossible odds:

At great personal risk, and out of real shame, I had rescued two of my three friends and in the process outfaced against all odds one of the best Left 4 Dead teams I had and have ever played against. …

The people I saved that night still talk about my heroic action - and yes, it was, it did feel, heroic - whenever we play together … All the emotions I felt during those few moments - fear, doubt, resolve, and finally courage - were as intensely vivid as any I have felt while reading a novel or watching a film or listening to a piece of music. For what more can one ask? What more could one want?

I want to bring in a quote now from a recent post on Barr’s blog. It was through Barr’s blog that I began to develop a curiosity about video games - their making, their playing, their legends, their philosophies. Barr’s blog is more sophisticated, more revealing, more humourous than his book - perhaps because it is written for that marvellous thing, the half-imagined, half-obscured audience of people who are just like the author.

In this post, Barr comes back to this point he and Bissell have been circling, this magical opportunity. Reviewing an article by another writer on the four types of video game tragedy, he concludes:

we could suggest that much of the tragic isn’t about making choices but rather about the inability to make them. Perhaps one of the challenges for tragedy in video games is to jettison the notion that the player should always be the explicit author of their circumstances but instead as merely one part in a larger world which is not always impressed or even affected by their actions.

Beyond this, however, I think it’s simply true that we, as players, need to get our shit together a bit and attempt to engage with the drama of the games we play. If it’s really true that we’re incapable of choosing a tragic ending, then to my mind that suggests a degree of apathy and weakness of spirit on our part and we ought to train ourselves to be stronger participants. It would help, of course, if games themselves respected us more in this same way, but it’s clearly a shared problem, not the pure responsibility of game makers.

My overall impressions? Barr’s book is (by design, I believe) more simplistic than his wonderful and self-effacing blog; I think he has a deeper and stranger book hovering in his near future. Bissell’s book is a little baggy-seated, and occasionally repetitive, but also very entertaining. But both have opened my eyes, not just to the rich, deep, wide, silly, expensive, violent, harrowing and pluripotent world of video games, but also to the conversations that go on within it.

Tragedy

I'm sloooooooooowly tapping out a review of two books I read over Waitangi weekend, before my brain went on the fritz due to the annual overload of Kiwi Foo Camp and Webstock: Tom Bissell's Extra Lives and Pippin Barr's How to play a video game.

The aspect of Barr's book that really struck me was his notion of playing games against the grain - departing from the central narrative in order to explore the world you're in, or departing from the given context to play the game from a different perspective.

Barr's latest blog post is on another writer's article, Line Hollis on tragedy in video games, and picks up somewhat on this theme:

I think it’s simply true that we, as players, need to get our shit together a bit and attempt to engage with the drama of the games we play. If it’s really true that we’re incapable of choosing a tragic ending, then to my mind that suggests a degree of apathy and weakness of spirit on our part and we ought to train ourselves to be stronger participants. It would help, of course, if games themselves respected us more in this same way, but it’s clearly a shared problem, not the pure responsibility of game makers.

At the risk of sounding all Shit Non-Players Say About Video Games, these two books have introduced me to a medium to which I've previously given very little thought. It means that now I click through to things like this article about the career (and death) of the video game artist Adam Adamowicz, and feel a new sense of interest and understanding. It's the gift that good writers give you.

Geek in residence

A fascinating job up for grabs at Opera Australia

Opera Australia aims to present opera that excites audiences and sustains and develops the artform. As part of this mission, we have established the role of Geek in Residence to assist the Company in developing several online initiatives designed to connect with a broad audience over a 12 month period. These projects include building on the Company’s current social media activity, developing an opera-based interactive game, researching a Facebook online ticketing facility, and improving existing online portals for multimedia access.

They're also asking for killer project management skills - it's a complex bundle. I'll be interested to see how it turns out.

Let us roll all our strength

For the second year in a row, my favourite session at KiwiFoo Camp was run by the extraordinary Robert Neale. This year Robert blew the room away by reciting then helping us unravel a selection of love poems.

Here's what we heard (and if I've missed anything, please let me know - @auchmill):

Shakespeare's Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
    So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
    If this be error and upon me proved,
    I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 130

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
    And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
    As any she belied with false compare.

In response to which, Tim O'Reilly  mentioned Richard Wilbur's Praise in Summer: "Then I wondered why this mad 'instead' / Perverts our praise to uncreation."

Shakespeare's Sonnet 138

When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor'd youth,
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppress'd.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love's best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:
    Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
    And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be.

Andrew Marvell's To his Coy Mistress

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

    But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

    Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Sonnet 138 made me think of Philip Larkin's Talking in Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
 Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

And in the session, Tim also quoted from Yeat's Brown Penny

Ah, love is the crooked thing.
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it.
For he should be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.

And given that it is the season, the Guardian's selection of love poems made by contemporary writers (including some of my beloved Thomas Wyatt) makes wonderful follow-on reading.

Follow-up

A post by Jenni Fuchs on how museums are using Pinterest (the point about museum stores is interesting).