Fail day

Is it over yet?

Today is a strange day. Partly because I haven't left the house at all (horribly, not that unusual) yet but mainly because I'm playing games, online, in an unbroken 24hr stint. This is for a magazine feature, not some weird lifestyle decision. I started at 8am and won't finish until the next 8am. I'm already getting the distant, disassociation from reality that you get from a transatlantic flight. My entire contact with the outside world has been through a headset and gChat. I might as well be in space right now.

The longer it goes on the weirder it gets. It's entering into that 'this isn't real any more' feeling that staying up late often takes. I'm quite exciting about seeing daybreak though. Anyway I know this doesn't really count as a real post but it hard to compose something when you're playing games for an entire day. My eyes hurt. And my brain. And my knees.

Who's news

When I think of reporters, I always think of slightly broken people living in cars full of rubbish as they hunt down 'the truth' – part gumshoe, part paragon of honour. People that go in search of a story, uncover something and then come back and say, “Look...”.

It doesn't work like that now, though. Most information is trafficked through the internet. By the time the traditional hack has got their notebook out, whatever they've found has gone global. It should be a good thing and it is, really. Everything is  available to all. The whole world knowing exactly what's going on. But the hit-chasing nature of the internet worries me a little. I've noticed loads of plane crash stories at the moment – partly because planes are crashing but also because, in the light of the Hudson River incident, Planes going down are pretty hot right now on Google. That means crashes that wouldn't get attention any other time rise up the ranks and get noticed. A few weeks time, maybe not so much.

That's all good and true because what the public want, the public gets. But how will that affect news organisations as their websites – and so the portal to the world for most people – become more and more important. Obviously vital issues will always be up there: the politics, wars and so on. But people notoriously live in denial and have short attention spans. Will companies like the BBC or Reuters champion stories that don't rate highly in the search engines, or go for the fast traffic? Not to forget of course that the general populous are easily pleased with gossip and stories about shiny things. The placated, ignorant masses so popular in near future sci-fi could end up being a  self imposed destiny rather than an unscrupulous higher power trying to control information.  

Musical Youth

The internet and iPod has totally changed the way I listen to music. Rewind a few years and all I had was a cassette Walkman and probably two cassettes – one in the machine and one in my pocket. If I was pioneering the pirate spirit and had copied some CDs that might mean four whole albums to listen to. Because of that I tended to bond to whole records. Even the ones I wasn't keen on, simply because: what choice did I have? With such limited supplies and only radio, TV and magazines to rely on, I didn't really get to experiment much. So I repeated the same old tapes over and over again. To this day I'm not sure if some music genuinely grew on me or whether there was a Stockholm Syndrome thing going on.

Now with my 'pod and the internet, I spend days drifting through a indeterminate haze of noise, picking off the bits I like. Browsing blogs and collecting up whatever passes, like stones on a beach; afraid to put it down, unsure of whether I'll ever find anything like it again. I tend to bond more, now, to individual songs rather than artists. In fact my attention span for albums is all but gone. Where before I'd listen to a crap tape because, a) it cost me £8.99 and, b) it was all I had. Now I'm always on shuffle or playlists – my own personal radio show. I'm not saying it's better or worse, it's just the way it is.

Why Jedi don't get laid.

I got angry today. Not the usual internal frustration where I get annoyed at myself and sulk for a bit but a real “don't come near me” kind of stink. I wanted to snap at people. I wanted to tell them to sort their own bloody problems out (which were mine really but then that's the whole point of being in a mood.) Thing is there wasn't even any reason for it as far as I can tell. It just happened, round about four-ish.

The fact that I couldn't even think why I was moody got me thinking about where anger even came from in evolution. Did raging monkeys have an advantage? Yep, apparently so (thanks Google). If you're an animal, anger and fear are pretty much all you get as far as emotional extremes go. Fight or flight. And bananas, if you're a monkey.

As an animal, being angry is something you can use, a tool to achieve certain goals. Mainly food and sex. It turns out the dark side is right as far as natural selection goes. Big growley Sith monkeys get all the girls, food and best trees to sit in because they use their temper like a superpower. Jedi monkeys, on the other hand, stay at home on Saturday nights, totally failing to secure a date or their place in the natural history museum.

And even though we've evolved to wave iPhones instead of pointy sticks, not only does the mechanism remain but it still serves a purpose. Which is specifically that angry people are more likely to take risks and be optimistic about the outcome. It still doesn't explain why I got in a huff today. And, as someone who rarely gets properly angry, would suggest I'm at an evolutionary disadvantage when it comes to getting the girls, bananas, or Lightsabers.

Boom!

I got blown up once when I was younger. It was only a small explosion but they're a bit like bears – size is irrelevant past a certain point. Specifically, the point at which you find yourself in a small room filled with smoke, deaf, and in possession of an extra hole that wasn't there a few seconds ago.

It all started when a friend of mine got hold of a selection of firework gunpowder. You can probably work out the rest but stick with me. I can't remember where it came from but we had loads. Not just quantity but variety. I was always (and still am) the sciencey one so I set about trying out batches to see what it all was. There was propellant, different colours, sparkly stuff. A few hours experimenting soon separated about 10 or so different types of boom.

To start with we made small things: roman candles the size of your thumb, rockets made from tin foil cases formed around biro lids. Amazingly, it all worked. The rockets were the best. They'd fly up about six feet and go pop. Then another friends arrived. Immediately he started to convince us of a better plan: stick everything in a toilet roll tube and make the biggest explosion possible. Looking back now that was a mistake. We crafted a doomsday device that exuded menace, much in the way you'd expect half a pound of crudely packed explosive might. The IRA would have been proud. We carried our deadly baby like a new messiah and planted at the top of the garden. We lit the fuse. We ran.

The most absolutely, breathtakingly enormous nothing happened. Cowering from the kitchen (behind a big plate glass window for added protection) we waited. It was raining and after about half an hour, having convinced ourselves nothing was going to happen, we stopped hiding and I went to my car to get some cigarettes. When I came back, there was the tube, being carried in cautiously by my idiot friends as they took the lid off. To get the full effect of the next bit you have to imagine it's all happening like a slow-mo movie scene, full of drawn out cries of “Nooooooo!” and dives through the air. It wasn't like that. There was just a great big fucking bang and the collective opinion between the three of us that the last thirty seconds had been a mistake.

There's a blank bit next. Suddenly, we were all in a room filled with thick white choking smoke, unable to hear anything beyond a high pitched ringing. There was a hole in the table and another in the front of my jeans, about three inches below my knee, leading to an exit 'round the back. Oddly enough, I vaguely remember looking lazily behind me for whatever had caused it before I thought to check myself. Then it all kicked in a bit and I started desperately clawing at my ankle to survey the damage. It was light - a small graze and a cut caused by a fragment of the plastic base used to stand the tube up. It could have been a lot worse. To this day, though, my balance and hearing still fritzes out occasionally, although the scar healed completely. Amazingly, when the friend whose house it was told his dad why the table was pockmarked with shrapnel he just shrugged it off. I never told my parents.

Tell me about the f*cking game

Despite what I actually do for a living I still feel uncomfortable calling myself a writer. Writers are amazingly talented people that can create worlds on a page, or change the way people think. I just put words in an acceptable order to describe things. Usually it's reviews. I love writing reviews; dissecting why things work and championing the highs or discussing the lows. I take pleasure from trying to get across a point, moulding language to deliver opinion and experience. I'm not saying I'm good. I just like doing it.

Which is why I hate stuff like this, “Perhaps Resident Evils 5's most remarkable achievement is how it deftly straddles the line between the franchises sometimes endearing, sometimes frustrating, legacy gameplay mechanics while incorporating more contemporary action adventure elements like enhanced interaction and exploration of environments and a decidedly more shooter-like control scheme.” It's a quote from a review of Resident Evil 5 that appears on Metacritic. I can almost smell the sense of satisfaction the writer got from penning that. How clever they must of felt when they said... the thing... about the... stuff. The problem I have with that sort of writing is that it tells me nothing about the game. Having played it I can tell you it's mainly about shooting angry men in the face. I think that's what the bit about 'legacy gameplay mechanics' might be about.

It seems to be a real games journalism thing. I don't think I've ever seen a film, book or music review like that. Generally they seem content to explain what the experience is like and whether it's recommend or not. When it comes to video games, however, it's all about the big words and twisty sentences, delivered by people content to revel in the belief that their every word is a gift. I've worked for two people who's catchphrase was “tell me about the fucking game” whenever they encountered stuff like this. Usually screamed through strained vocal chords while veins popped on their foreheads. The paper it was written on crushed in a balled fist and shaken to emphasise each word. I think it's because games are still a relatively new medium. It subconsciously drives people reporting on them to try and sound all grown up and intellectual to compensate for the suspicion that no one takes them seriously. What they really want to say is, “man did you see that head come apart?”