Crossing over comics and interactive fiction, at first sight, seems to make sense. Your room description becomes the caption and the picture in the frame. Your speech and that of other characters can become speech bubbles. Interactive color - based highlighting can indicate a valid or invalid response as you type. Possibly even an inline popup suggesting alternatives can get round the vocablulary problem. Your past moves would appear in previous panels which you could go back and review. There are quite a lot of fun games you could play with the whole concept.

The central problem, is, of course - verbs. Your rich verb/adverb/ajective set is reduced to pointing and clicking. Possibly double click and pie menus would give you some verb choice. I can think of quite a few things I could do with this setup...yet there's something magical about interacting with the computer in text and having it understand you.

"TAKE RED APPLE AND QUICKLY GIVE IT TO THE MAGIC PONY.".
WHICH APPLE DO YOU MEAN THE BIG RED APPLE OR THE SMALL RED APPLE?

Arrgh.

Flower

Yesterday, I went to FACTto see an exhibition that purported to be about video game art. Most of it was mildly interesting, some as a historical document, some as hinting at different possibilites. Among the exhibits was a Research Machines 30Z running the original Dungeon. Alongside it was another game, at the other end of the spectrum called Flower. Its a long time since a game had any kind of emotional impact on me, but this did, mostly because it was a very carefully crafted aesthetic experience, matching fluid control, music, sound and visuals.

I think it's an important reminder that drama is only one mechanism by which emotional impact is achieved: that color, rhythm, form and melody are just as important. To this day one of the most impressive theatre productions I've seen was a staging of Electrain which an ensemble chorus, music and lighting was used to complement a whole in a similar way.

It also reinforces the limited nature of interaction we have with the games. Primiarly we have focused on point and act selection semantics, especially shooting. The question thats running through my mind now is - what have we missed? If we went back in time and gave this medium to William Blake, or Coleridge, or Mozart, what would they see? What would they do with it? What possibilities are we missing just because we are blinded by the norms that have been established by an industry thats been hideously successful, commercially?

This made me think of Cordwainer Smiths The Game Of Rat and Dragon.

I always thought his planar mouse brains specialised for hyperspace navigation were fanciful. There's a game in this somewhere: I dream of pulsating quaternion dragons looming in extreme swirling realtime plasma fog...

Blues Bar Dialogue circa April 1993.

  JB: Sorry. I've just woken up!

  JC: ZZZ Ain't nothing like sleep for a black sheep!

  JB: I go out at lunch time, get very drunk, sleep till 9.45, wake up
  find a message from my mother on the answerphone "Oh, Jon, where are
  you", then go to the pub for another drink, emm?

  JC: Story of a life! I like the socks you are wearing!

  JB: Yes, but it took me 5 minutes longer to get here trying to find my
  glasses.

  JC: But you are here in time to claim your free beer!

  JB: Free? I've been saving up for it..

  JC: It's strange to see you looking like you might be happy - a visage
  last clapped eyes upon millelenia ago!

  JB: Happy? Guilty of all the crimes this century has commited maybe,
  happy? A moribund euphoria.

  JC: Forgive me for mentioning it, I should have known better.

  JB: Decadence before the fall.

  JC: It's not just you, Jon Bainbridge. Take a look around you. This is
  a lustful and demented planet and we are all happily going to hell!

Labels: harrogate notebook bluesbar 1993

From my notebook 04/04/91

I remember waking up and thinking "that was a good dream". Now I can't remember what it was that I dreamt. It pisses me off that I'm so creative in my dreams yet when I wake I cannot seem to find any coherent images of metaphors that have not been used one thousand times.

My dreams all seem to be of travelling and changing, yet in real life I get nowhere!

"Travelling and falling, these are the best dreams you can have." This, accoording to the Senoi, the dream - tribe via Le Guin.

What lies at the end of dreams? Life is a cul-de-sac with a decidedly dead end...not a very good metaphor, but..from the nipples of the mother-goddess flow the milk of life.

An even worse metaphor, then..

Labels: harrogate dreams metaphors godawful 1991

Sunday Afternoon Porno Video

1 Switching on

The buzzing of phosphor dots re-arranging themselves
madden the senses like the hum of a thousand flies.
They attempt to escape the surface of the screen
but they are stuck in the skin of a steaming turd,
that enfolds them and congeals as it solidifies.

2 Switching off

The listless eyes absorb the sophistry of simulated sleaze
the bored ears attend each mindless moan
A screen of pulsing and panting, signifying nothing,
Until just before a false little death
silence slices through the last theatrical groan...

Labels: porn poem poetry nilhilism shit

From my notebook: 08/03/91

My refusal to indulge in secondary process thinking lead swiftly to insanity...not at all wise was it? All this isms pique my ire: situationalism, feminism, Stalinism, Internationalism. Ismism is the interlocked disease of our time, the intellectual equivalent of cheap clothes made by sweatshop labour.

Ok I've been a total shit to Katrina and must apologize. To conflate physical beauty with vapidity and vanity seems a particularly obtuse mistake for a epistemologist to make.

I'm not really a writer just an lexical auditor with pretensions to becoming experimental epistemologist.

Periphasis. A word to conjure with.

Conversation with Tom Alexander:

John: How well do you know Damien?

Tom: Too well.

..

Tom: A lot of very talented people, like Katrina.

John: (surprise) Katrina!?

Tom: She's got the motivation. That's 50%..

Rising conflict can be built out of attack and counter-attack. Rhythm and contrast. Look for those things everywhere, they are bedrock basics.

Nick Pollard: As a writer, beer is better.

So, why do I have heartburn?

North, fifty seven, peristalsis. Nine, six, five, clime, slime. Rhymye.

Claim nothing for your own or you will reap what is sown.

Note that there is hope. The Tories just got the Judith Hanna treatment in the recent by-election. Good. Flush turds down the pan, they belong in the sewers with the rats.

My ancestors were wise: "Don't give a man a sword until he knows how to dance."

Rites of passage. Time to drop the old things and go on.

I was bitter, introverted, socially gauche. This hasn't changed much. Also, slightly obnoxious to women. That's changed. Now, I'm really obnoxious to women.

Labels: harrogate notebook proverbs vocabulary 1991

Earthsea

Like many, I'm a big fan of Ursula Le Guin and her writings. In particular, the Earthsea books were ones that I read whilst a teenager, and have revisited several times since. They have many dimensions and introduced me, all unknowing at the time, to Taoist thought. Given that I had a strongly Catholic up-bringing that I was less than enchanted by, the alternative approaches to morality, spirituality and society in the books fascinated me greatly and gave me an alternative viewpoint to many items of dogma the teachers and nuns at school were eager to push onto me. Later, when was a University student, I discovered the Tao Te Ching and was delighted by it's combination of authority and ambiguity.

So I was pleased to discover that a film adaptation of it had been made whilst looking for something to watch over the Christmas holiday, and was airing on a channel I could actually watch. I was expecting something like Peter Jacksons effort at the Lord Of the Rings triology. Perhaps not an adaptation that could capture all the dimensions of the books, but at least a credible transfer of the narrative to a visual medium, perhaps highlighting the aspects that transferred well to a visual treatment.

Instead I switched off the show after five minutes, feeling as if I had just watched someone urinate on a particularly valuable antique. Everybody was white. The name of the lead character was wrong. All the scenes were sexually charged. The story was recast to being about a mad megalomaniac who wanted to unleash dark powers to rule the world. All the hackneyed clichés you can imagine, they were there. I no longer recognised the thoughtful coming-of-age story of a goatherd turned wizard from Gont, struggling with his powers and identity, and the hard choices of a child-priestess, abandoned in the desert, her childhood sacrificed to empty ritual.

It turns out that this adaptation is notorious and has caused a serious spat between Ms LeGuin and the production company. I cannot fathom the decision-making process that lead to the production of this dreck, and hope the producer is never let near a job which requires the slightest creative judgement ever again. Harsh, but that's what you should do to someone who does the equivalent of re-inventing the Wind In The Willows and making Toad a rampant philanderer.

Labels: earthsea fantasy leguin

It is the end of September and you feel much older..

Time for the September song..September the 29th is the perfect day to discover this song. I'm glad I did..