Your nuclear existence

A scant observation I'd like to borrow thirty seconds of your time to share, if I may: no, not to tell you the word about Jesus Christ, but to note that an increasing number of consumer technology advertising hooklines are deploying a very specific phrase as breezily as if it's the latest model battle tank.

Last year, you were buying gifts for “your family”, this Christmas season it's “the family”. I thought I was just getting a pair of socks for dad, but whatever. Oops, I guess I just indirectly invalidated my claims three sentences earlier. Bugger, I guess. You'll have to forgive me, my record for delivering on lofty assertions in which I have no stake whatsoever in upholding has been faltering as of late.

Now in this techno-savvy context, what does the use of “the family” as opposed to “your family”, or “my family”, connote?

First and foremost, the family appears as a kind of obligatory accessory, a mandatory ingredient in the life of the sophisticated, hip urban consumer. It's something that “everyone” has, whether they want it or not – regardless of and totally divorced from the reality that not everyone has a family, or even one they particularly want to associate with.

If you belong to the certain youthful socio-economic bracket that can afford hip-and-happening consumer technology like /Ipads/Galaxy S II's/miniature pocket keyring hydrogen bombs et al., then you have “the family” that has provided you with the lodgings, education, nourishment and home life throughout the course of your privileged upbringing presumably necessary to attain the stance in society whereby you have the disposable income to purchase such items.

“The family” is successful in its own right. It made you what you are, it got you to where you are today. You're successful, you've made it, and now you're going to build on that success by buying one of whatever Mr. Shitface is dangling like a droopy marshmallow on the end of his long pointy stick over your proverbial cage.

To be sure, I guess the element of depersonalisation in such a phrase is necessary for exactly the same reasons outlined above – the marketing boffins can't know for sure that whoever is reading their advert is going to fall into the aforementioned consumer demographic, so saying “buy a gift for your family” might ruffle some feathers and/or possibly be a bit un-PC.

But really, I guess the whole feel-good-about-yourself-because-you're-a-wealthy-urban-guerilla-connotation that comes with it is just an unexpected bonus – like finding that your laptop doubles as a place setter. Bon appetite, and don't you go handling those crackers irresponsibly, you hear?.

Built to last

Christmas time always seems to bring out the techno-head in me, so it is with a healthy suspicion when I say that for no particular reason, I decided today I would write a blog entry about Toughbooks. I may as well have chosen to write one about Siberian snow leopards. But I've spent the past year working with the damned things and for all their interminable bloody quirks, the things have grown on me, when I'm not curtailing my urge to put the manufacturer claims to the test in the most spectacular way possible and hurl them into the nearest solid surface or Atlantic maelstrom at warp factor 5. I like their old-fashioned quality. They're solidly built and well made, which I guess is appropriate and a real breath of fresh air when every other notebook and/or/ prosumer product in general these days is crappy plastic or some substitute thereof, cooked up in a chemical vat somewhere next door to the WMD factory. And they incorporate all the best elements of the wave of trendy tablety-stylusey computing-type thingy consumer devices that have hit the shelves in recent years. I don't think I would be making too outlandish a statement to say that they basically channel the spirit of the mouse-bot from Star Wars in notebook form. I won't use the word cute. That would be committing political suicide. But anyway, hopefully you get what I'm on about. I'm really not sure I do, so some help might be appreciated in this department. 

This in conjunction with the venerable Lumix dynasty of compact cameras convinces me that Panasonic are quite capable of making some good stuff and quite possibly one of the key players that will cause DSLR's to become a thing of the past for the enthusiast or hobbyist in the conceivable future. I splashed out for a Canon 550D approx. 7 months ago (just before the 600D landed and caused the price to drop, grr) and now kind of wish I hadn't – the range of compact cameras that are on par with DSLRs in terms of image quality is steadily increasing every time I turn my head to look, like some kind of aggressive mutant algae on the colourfully exaggerated mural of my perceptions of the camera market.

Funny how neither of the invincible heavyweight duo (Cannikon)'s offerings in this area have caught my eye quite as readily. Powershot and Coolpix are names that are known to me, but they just don't have the same up-there or trendy connotations of something like a Lumix, Olympus EP-series or a Finepix X100 (drools) Which reminds me... Anyone want to trade? Kiss X4 plus two lenses, Tamron 17-50 & Canon 50mm 1.8, both with hoods & 52mm polarising filter for the latter. Chuck Fujifilm's second-to-latest offering, duly mentioned above in my direction and I'll consider. No, I'm not talking about the X10. None of that popcorn-snack-sized Roman rubbish. (Disclaimer: Above offer may not actually be propositioned in seriousness and may possibly be the result of the author talking glibly out of his ass, as usual)

I do digress, don't I? I may have to amend my initial statement about this blog post being about Toughbooks, because as it turns out, it's really not. I would have bored you all senseless if it were, anyway, because no-one's heard of the damn things who doesn't shoot terrorists or chase dinosaurs for a living. But I suppose there is a common thread here, and it goes something like this: Build quality is a drawcard for the lay consumer as well as the professional, and when you mix quality build with antique retro aesthetics, more often than not you get something really rather nice. My 550D is not really built for outdoor shooting. I know the 5D Mark II (now there's something I really would trade my entire camera kit and quite possibly a substantial number of other valuable things in my possession for as well) has that beautifully constructed magnesium-alloy body and all the other trappings of professional ruggedness much like the 1D Mark IV, the Nikon D700, D3s or whatever else have you. Whenever it starts raining, I run for the nearest solid object between me and the man upstairs taking a leak. I guess it's not all about the camera body, there's no way you can keep an expensive lens swaddled in cotton wool forever, and if you're going to be shooting in downpour or thunderstorms or lava flows or biblical apocalypses you would probably be best off throwing in your lot with the Canon camp and dropping multiple weeks' worth of pay checks on an L lens that is specifically weather-sealed. But I like things that are metal or alloy or wood or solid fibreglass, things that seem to be well-made, things that seem to come from the real world that you can picture some old guy sitting in a room spending hours polishing and buffing to the extent that he can look in the front panel and see his own reflection and remember that he forgot to put his monocle on that morning and shrivel up in embarrassment.

It's not just about the functional properties of the build. When you own an item that you perceive to be quality, you are inclined to look after it better, you anticipate the results it delivers with a more positive outlook. There is a definite market out there for lay-level consumers who like products that affect an air of quality construction, whether or not they actually are, or whether they have any idea of the technical intricacies that define it as well-made or otherwise. I definitely bloody don't. The Leica M9 could be stuffed with newspaper and old Cheezels inside and I wouldn't have a clue.

As a side note, I'm wondering if this has anything to do with an infusion of the steampunk aesthetic popularised in recent films like Sucker Punch or the Bioshock franchise? The technology in those textual worlds have a common, definite sense of the internal workings of devices being made transparent. You can see all their gears and knobs and levers going like the inventors were using the Incredible Machine as their prototype simulator. Mousetrap hits see-saw which strikes match which lights rocket fuse which blows hole in wall causing water to flood through and power turbine. You might not get exactly the same effect with a Cf-18 Toughbook or a Fujifilm X100, but you still get the undeniable impression that it was made using real materials not mined on the Moon, it has a real weight and substance to it. It's part of the built environment, it will last when your 50mm 1.8s or school-lunchbox notebooks are biting the carpet.

Oh and Digitalrev fixed their site! This is worth celebrating. I am impressed mucho.

The sound of silence

If games are their gameplay, then the essence of the first person shooter genre is noise and violence. It's things happening, multiple threats coming from opposite directions, a player who is required to think and adapt to a rapidly evolving situation in real time.

Half-Life 2 is really rather unique in this respect, even as an entry in its own franchise. Not many first person shooters are confident enough to let players take a step back and drink in the silence every now and then. To allow them to stand alone on a clifftop and just do nothing, taking in the stark vista of the abandoned surroundings until they are ready to press on. This stands in contrast to a number of more modern shooter games where the noise, action and violence is omnipresent to the point of being numbing.

The examples that spring to mind for me occur primarily in the vehicular chapters “Water Hazard” and “Highway 17”, but I don’t think it’s especially specific to the road trip-style vignette gameplay that these sections engender. Think of the section where you battle it out with that carpet-bombing attack chopper in the lagoon just before Black Mesa East. After ten minutes of intense combat, adrenaline, concentration, there’s a thrilling rush of exhilaration as you watch the bloody thing spiral out of the sky in flames to land in pieces at your feet, the stinger music providing a sudden spike of dramatic tension and relief.

Then comes a brief instant of confusion. For those past ten minutes you had a single-minded purpose in the game: you knew without question what you had to do: escape from and/or preferably destroy the most immediate threat i.e. the chopper. But now, for just a split second, you’re unsure of what to do next.

And in that moment, that’s when the game’s peculiar silence takes on a life its own. You realise where you are, the sight of the setting sun over the lake dawns on you (no pun intended), and it compels you to stop and marvel at this strange oasis of picturesque beauty hidden just on the outskirts of technocratic dystopia. Barrels bobbing in the water look like lifebuoys, and stone monoliths create long shadows on the surface. There's a chirp of evening crickets coming from some unidentifiable source (crickets, presumably, or perhaps someone making cricket noises) In this light, Half-Life 2’s crumbling post apocalyptic earthscape takes on a weird sense of peace.

 

The fact that it’s placed immediately after a balls-to-the-wall action sequence is not accidental either. The player has a chance to catch their breath, remember why they are here and proceed at their own pace (although sometime today would be nice, I’m sure)

Highway 17 uses silence a tad more liberally and not in any so memorable set-pieces; it’s more in the creaking of an old boat-shack door, a tyre swinging from a tree, the chilly wind blowing over the cliffs, the vastness of the seascape that remind you just how alone you are. Even the Combine patrols encountered at regular intervals seem like quaint anomalies rather than the symbols of all-powerful authority over this Hebridean landscape.

The absence of any soundtrack is crucial to these moments. It creates an immersiveness that is impossible to fake, one which is further authenticated by the lack of characterisation of the player character (G. Freeman esq, this guy). The seemingly natural progression of time, the sky darkening as day turns to night and vice-versa, is similarly a key component here.

What moments of silence such as these achieve, in a functional sense, is to remind us that the essence of this game is more than the noise and violence of its core gameplay elements. We are more than just players; at another level, we are participants in a fully-realised fictional drama, and beyond that, we inhabit a fully realised fictional world where we have the freedom to do as we will, to sod the hero's journey and go dune-buggy joyriding squashing antlions till judgement day if we so choose.

Half-Life 2 is, in its own way, a uniquely lonely game. (Yes, I get that may possibly be related to a significant chunk of its target market being perceived as possessing minimal to borderline functional social skills) But a starkly beautiful one, too. I’ve yet to see any subsequent entries in the genre, even those which are self-touted as “post-apocalyptic” that have quite managed to replicate the same effect.

No doubt there are plenty of recent shooters out there with technically more impressive visuals which ooze atmosphere (dammit, I thought I'd get through this spiel without making a single use of that word) in every singular facet of their art design. But Half-Life 2's silence is all its own. It's in the uncanny strangeness of the emptiness of this world, which hits you all at once when you least expect it. It's of a type that players will seek out voluntarily rather than having it bludgeoned into them at the end of a Combine stun-stick.

Ok, I’m done licking Valve’s boots now, but you get the point. It’s still a bloody well-made game in terms of art direction, even when the Source engine is going on seven candles on its birthday cake (which is not a lie).

Oh, and it was Halloween last night. Probably should make some mention of that. When I snap my fingers you will awaken and re-read this article all over again, except this time it will be scary. Blah.

Lie or no lie, it's still one for the metaphor hall of fame

Broadly speaking (the best kind of speaking. Or not actually. Probably comes in somewhere about seventh, on a good day) there are a couple of different ways of evoking atmosphere. Not to trot out the dead horse that is the second-most long suffering metaphor of all time currently in use in modern everyday conversation after automobile engines, but it’s vaguely analogous to baking a cake. You can drop that extra sprinkle of cocoa into the pan last of all as topping, or mix it into the batter from the word go so you get a garden variety (vanilla, even?) chocolate cake.

Really, it doesn’t matter if we’re talking cinema, games, literature, dance or what have you. Structurally, the narrative and the atmospheric elements of a text should be seamlessly integrated as to make the audience unaware of the process by which each supports the other. However, there are always creative decisions to made with regard to the specifics, which of course is where things get interesting.

Today I want to look at something a bit different: Sloth racing on Saturn. I couldn't find much on that topic, though, so instead I'm going to put Tom Waits’ spoken word piece from the 1985 album Rain Dogs, titled "9^th and Hennepin" under the microscope. This is quite a compact and economical snippet of dark musical poetry that begins by painting broad strokes, quite literally rounding out the scenery on all sides to create an effectively realised picture in the listener’s mind’s eye:

Well it’s 9^th and Hennepin

All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes

And the moon’s teeth marks are on the sky

Like a tarp thrown all over all of this, and the broken umbrellas like dead birds

And steam comes out of the grill like the whole goddamn town’s ready to blow

And the bricks are all scarred with jailhouse tattoos

And everyone is behaving like dogs

And horses are coming down Violin Road, and Dutch is dead on his feet

And all the rooms, they smell like diesel, and you take on the dreams of the ones who slept there.

And I’m lost in the window, I hide in the stairway and I hang in the curtain and I sleep in your hat.

And no-one brings anything small into a bar around here, they all started out with bad directions

And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear. One for every year he’s away, she said.

Such a crumbling beauty, ah

There’s nothing wrong with her a hundred dollars won’t fix

She has that kind of razor sadness that only gets worse with the clang and the thunder

Of the Southern Pacific going by

And a clock ticks out like a dripping faucet, till you’re full of ragwater, bitters and blue ruin

And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen

I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen it all, through the yellow windows of the evening train.

The streams-of-consciousness style flow and overall structure is maintained by the continual use of “And” at the beginning of each line, which gives the piece as a whole the air of a hazy vignette, one intended to be mainly texture and atmosphere without much basis in reality. There’s a sense of disconnectedness in which the speaker realizes all of his worst suspicions and fears about the place (a real street corner in Minneapolis), but he is imagining without seeing, as Waits himself has commented in his explanation of the piece.

What’s really interesting here I think is the way Waits begins. He starts out by describing the broader picture and then moves into the closer, more personal. If this were a scene from a film it would be a long continuous crane shot that starts out above the city skyscrapers, swooping down into the streets, past the streetlights and shadows of people and into the doorway of the hotel in the story, eventually meeting the “girl with the tattooed tear” at the bar. What we have here is a sense of progression from the disconnected abstract to the specific. We shift gradually from broad strokes of disjointed atmospherics to concrete realities of character and narrative. Waits fully fleshes out the world he has created before plunking us squarely in the middle of it as one of the spun-out drunks at the bar. 

This prominent foregrounding of atmospherics is a popular technique in modern cinema because it allows the filmmaker to fully immerse the viewer in the imaginary universe on the screen, before introducing the who-what-where-why of the story itself. It becomes immeasurably easier for the audience to accept and be emotionally involved in what they are seeing, if they perceive that which they are seeing to be reality, or are at least superficially unaware of its fictionality. I suppose it makes more sense to guarantee your audience will be totally under the spell and ready to listen to what you have say when you finally start to say it. Examples? I’m thinking along the lines of Wall-E. I’m well and truly sick of talking about that film though, so I’m going shut up and leave that one up to you to expand upon for the time being. Maybe after a decent interval I’ll be able to discuss it critically again without feeling like a malfunctioning gramophone. Seven posts or so should do it.

On the other side of the pancake, consider a futuristic science fiction film. Something like your Minority Report, or its similarly styled spiritual father, Blade Runner. Here we have injections of atmospheric detail at regular intervals throughout the movie. In this case, it’s largely made possible by the constant visual onslaught of what the filmmakers have imagined everyday life in the XX^nd century (insert random post-noughties date of choice here) will look like. Indeed for the science fiction genre, this is precisely what makes the regular maintenance (I use that phrase completely ironically) of atmospheric detail so easy - technological change is one of those things that is all-encompassing, and will be evident in virtually every facet of the on-screen activity, from projecting quarterly reports to feeding the cat. Flying cars, or colossal urban billboards that advertise personalised consumer goods help keep the suspension of disbelief constant, allowing the viewer to fully accept the theatrical illusion. In places these immersive footnote details are even used directly as plot devices – I’m thinking, for example, of the tiny spider scout police robots in Minority Report that hunt Tom Cruise through a skid row tenant block.

But in both of the films used as examples above, there isn’t really a tutorial half-hour of atmospheric acclimatization before the plot proper starts. We’re launched head-first into the who-what-where specifics of the story and characters and expected to acclimatize to the reality of the onscreen world as we go. Those little atmospheric flourishes sprinkled throughout are the one-percenters that enable us to do this. It’s a somewhat different approach to the one outlined in the Waits example, and I would say, a less risky one to be sure. Putting all the texture and atmosphere up front and then launching into specifics risks audience disconnection once the spell wears off, but a seamless transition between the two is like a well-made gateaux: a culinary one-two-punch with delicious piped chocolate icing on the top and outer sides and something exponentially more awesome in the middle. I don’t know what. This maybe:


 

Let’s go back, back….

Does anyone remember Quake? I’m talking about the original, bunny-hop-around-medieval castles obliterating Lovecraftian horrors-with-a-nailgun-that-should-really-only-function-when-pressed-flush-to-a-flat-surface-due-to-manufacturer-safety-regulations-seminal ID Software first person shooter. It’s been somewhat obscured in collective gaming memory by its more conventional hulking space marines vs. ugly mutant bodybuilder aliens succession of sequels, but you can still grab it off Steam for 10 bucks. Play it, and as you do so, marvel to yourself: this is what shooters used to be.

All the seemingly intrinsic mechanics we take for granted as part of the genre today are unknown to this beast. Cover-based combat, regenerating health, evil PMC’s featuring as the excuse to throw wave after wave of human cannon fodder into successive linear corridors of conveniently placed debris, barbed wire, broken down tanks or crashed jam donut vans, none of them has any business being at this shindig. It’s a fascinating meld of 3D puzzle platforming, dodging traps a la Indiana Jones (I refuse to use the words “tomb” or “raider”), fast paced combat against otherworldly monsters and rudimentary survival horror. Visually it’s oozing with atmosphere, with advanced (for the time) lighting sources that are actually quite effective in complementing the recurring dark and demonic imagery throughout.

Yet it offers a very different kind of fear to that we encounter in many games today. Not that horror is its strongest suit; in comparison to psychological mindfuckery such as that transpiring in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Quake’s scares seem somewhat tame. And there’s no plot beyond a very basic, “you have four runes to collect and there are lots of nasty things standing in your way,” blurb.

But what Quake evokes quite well is the sudden, visceral feeling of fighting for your life. This is a true relic from the old days of gaming, where players weren’t babied around. Completion is certainly achievable, but Nightmare difficulty means exactly that. Frustration and endless reloads will comprise a major part of your playtime. On the topic of which, quicksave is conspicuously absent leaving only a hastily scrawled explanatory note on the kitchen benchtop, tearfully apologising by way of the fact that it hasn’t been invented yet, which I suppose is a somewhat more reasonable excuse than saying you had to go home to feed the cat. All saves and reloads must be done through the pause menu, the comparatively lengthy process of which naturally discourages the use of the save function altogether. As a result, when you do manage to come out of a particularly trying battle by only the skin of your teeth, there’s a genuine sense of satisfaction. Your character is surprisingly agile for a pre-noughties shooter, so learning to move and shoot while maintaining environmental awareness are the skills that will allow you to survive. This lends itself to fast-paced gameplay that hurls you unsuspectingly from one threat to another in quick succession, barely giving the player time to breathe in between. 

And coming face to face with a mighty Dimensional Shambler or a pack of Fiends lurking in the shadows out of sight can be genuinely unnerving, as can running down a corridor toward a tantalizingly placed Quad Damage powerup only to have the floor open beneath your feet and drop you into a murky dungeon full of things with claws and teeth and filthy hygiene habits. Whenever this happened to me I’m sure that somewhere, an old ID level design veteran was chuckling evilly.

It all adds up to a game environment where between the oppressive atmosphere, truly tough enemies and old-fashioned adventure-serial crypt-pinching trickery, you rarely if ever feel completely at ease. And this was 2011 me playing. I can’t imagine what a splash (damage, natch) it must have made back in 1996, with its full 3D environments and immersive lighting. I first remember playing this game when I was 8 years old at a department store, hogging the demonstration computers they had set up and thinking what a thrill it was to be playing an MA-15 rated game chock full of zombies that exploded into clouds of gory gibs and warped mutant spider camels with human heads and serious dental problems. Come to think of it, that might explain a great deal about why I turned out the way I did today. Um, yes. Moving on.

Perhaps the greatest compliment I can bestow upon Quake is that it harks back to a time when first person games still held promise as a genre with real creative potential for the medium. All these modern checkboxes of “realistic” real-life-conflict-based “tactical” shooters filled with painstakingly rendered human opponents and plots lifted straight from Hollywood blockbusters by people with scriptwriting degrees, of which the genre has been progressively channelled into ticking off on a mandatory list of creativity-killing selling points, only serve to infantilize and dumb down first person-action and indeed gaming as a whole. This is a proverbial shipping container we need to think outside of if we’re ever to fully realize the tremendous immersive and story-telling potential of first person games more generally. With that goal firmly in mind, it’s fun to look back at old shooters like Quake and remember that developers, too, were once able to just let their imagination (and their rockets) fly.

No, not the Bruce Willis sci-fi movie of the same name.

I can’t help but wonder if there’s a reason for the increasing proliferation of audience surrogates popping up like enterprising gophers in recent well known and less-well known Hollywood films as of late. When I use this term I am talking about characters in movies for whom at least one of their roles in the narrative is to metaphorically represent “the audience”. Straight off the bat and flying out into the tropopause at supersonic velocity there’s a couple of examples I’d like to talk about in the subsequent blather: Ariadne in Inception, Neo in The Matrix, Upham in Saving Private Ryan (Hornaday 2010, Jameson 1998: 23). Mostly the former, but some of the latter.

There’s a common thread in all of these movies. Some of them are high-concept, others less easily summarised, but they all require viewers to accept worlds outside the boundaries of the everyday, where accepted norms of reality have been transgressed, rewritten or completely turned upside down and faceplanted into the sand.

There’s a practical need for audience surrogates, of course: particularly when the protagonists of a film are acclimatised to the rules of the onscreen universe, it would make no sense for them to explain those rules for the audience’s benefit without a trainee member to rationalise the brief (i.e. Inception, Saving Private Ryan). The rules of Inception’s shared dreamscapes are so complex and elegantly layered that the film demands at least some level of verbal exposition, much of which is directed at Ariadne. Likewise, the first forty minutes or so of The Matrix feature Neo’s discovery and orientation of the “world within a world” of the Matrix itself.

In Saving Private Ryan, by contrast, the in-film reality is the battlefield and the grossly distorted version of the everyday this engenders. The other members of Miller’s squad are soldiers whose experience of battle make Upham (Spielberg’s audience surrogate) seem naïve and out of his depth by comparison, symbolically pointing to the helplessness of the civilian audience when confronted with the horrific realities of war (Jameson 1998: 23) To some extent, they act as mentors to Upham (i.e. Private Caparzo’s ruffled advisory that “every time you salute the captain, you make him a target for the Germans”) but for the most part, the audience is forced to adjust to the in-film reality themselves (Jameson 1998: 23).

It’s worth pointing out at this stage there’s a purely superficial aspect to the presence of the audience surrogate, as well, one which is much more commonly associated with mmopugers (Yahtzee’s phrase) such as World of Warcraft or Everquest than popular narrative cinema. Given that we are being asked to symbolically inhabit a fictional universe, we want (and indeed have the unfettered freedom to) imagine ourselves as the perceived ideal. So we project ourselves into the popular culture multiverse as the visually idealised versions of ourselves, complete with good looks, nice clothes and an ever-present air of confident capability. The audience surrogate, to use a very 21^st-century-specific term of endearment, is the “avatar” of collective desire. There is a great deal of literature on the real-world concept of “celebrity” status and its similar significance as the embodiment of a collective set of ideas which people hold dear, which I think is probably relevant checking out in lieu of me expanding on it and boring everyone to sobs. I could say a bit about Inception specifically here, though, and that bit goes something like this: if we’re inhabiting the Freudian dreamscape of repressed desires (or the collective dream space of the darkened cinema), it makes sense that, perhaps involuntarily, we would dream of ourselves in our idealised forms. This is comparable to what Morpheus in the Matrix called, “residual self-image”, and indeed, the same dynamic is at play in that movie with its leather trenchcoat-clad, noir-styled pastiche of high fashion.

But there’s another angle which I find far more interesting for the purposes of this discussion: why do we want, or need an extraneous character serving as a “projection” of ourselves? Particularly if they’re not the emotional/dramatic locus of the story, (i.e. the character onto which the audience is traditionally expected to project their identity, hopes, fears etc) would this not just displace and/or weaken emotional identification with the film’s protagonist?

Theoretically, yes, but not always. Giving the audience a voice in a peripheral character can actually be used to create some clever polemic situations. For example, observing the events of Inception metaphorically through the eyes of Ariadne distances the protagonist Cobb, making him something of a mystic. He becomes an aloof, unknowable mentor figure. This in turn preserves the element of suspense around the film’s climax as it hinges upon the interference of Mal, who is herself an enigma of whom Cobb alone has knowledge. At the same time, Cobb becomes dramatically significant to us as half father-figure, half seer; a conflicted anti-hero who we are forced to trust to help guide us through the labyrinth of the dream. We may not identify with him as a projection of ourselves, but rather, Nolan makes us closely dependent on him from the outset and this fosters a kind of emotional identification.

This looks like a good spot for me to shift the topic to end on a question mark and possibly trot out my favourite I-word into the bargain. Does having a character and a personality we can project ourselves onto specifically for that purpose (as opposed to the implied physical presence of the spectator-audience, mediated through the camera lens) wreck the sense of immersion at all?

In what we might call the “traditional” mode of viewing, the audience is the implied observer, which doesn’t give us any visible signs of existence in the onscreen world but instead naturally replicates the process of seeing to the point of being self-effacing. Before we’re introduced to Ariadne, we watch the opening scenes of Inception as easily and naturally as if we were just another person sitting silently at the dinner table listening to Cobb and Saito talk. With the “audience surrogate” model, we possibly lose that sense of situated, first-person immersion but gain a sense of empowered dramatic involvement. The sense that we are an actual in-universe identity with the ability to directly influence or change the course of the narrative adds poignancy and pathos to the action.

So I suppose it ultimately boils down to the question: which is more important in the cinemagoing experience? The simple act of seeing, or being emotionally involved in the narrative? Incidentally, being a longtime fan of the Thief game franchise (as I think I may have mentioned once or twice before), I’m reminded of all those debates surrounding “first person vs. third person” that cropped up after Thief: Deadly Shadows went postal with its third person mode back in 2004. But this is a whole different basket of beetles. Well, perhaps not so different. I contend tentatively and somewhat necessarily ambiguously that it depends what the requirements of the movie are and what you’re personally trying to achieve as a director. But that was predictable, so here’s something that’s not: BGloooghgooopooolsdgfsdgsreaaargh.

Sources referenced in this entry:

Hornaday, Ann (2010) “Inception's' dream team weaves a mesmerizing tale”, Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/inception,1158861/critic-review.html

(accessed 14 March 2011)

Jameson, Richard T (1998) “History’s Eyes: Saving Private Ryan” in Film Comment 34.5: 20-23.

The Matrix (1999) Director: Larry & Andy Wachowski, Warner Bros.

Saving Private Ryan (1998) Director: Steven Spielberg, Dreamworks. 

Playing God, or one of God's low-order subordinates. Also RTS's haunt my nightmares.

City sim games don’t generally evoke memories of mind-blowing graphics or death-defyingly cinematic action set pieces. They tend to appeal more to those with a slightly obsessive personality, who enjoy seeing things come to fruition over time. With this in mind, here’s a game you should be playing: http://www.mobygames.com/game/afterlife. 

If you were to go over Lucasarts’ nineties-era back catalogue with a fine-toothed comb then certainly you’d find long-established hit titles like Day of the Tentacle or the Monkey Island series, but you might also notice this little-known gem which (then) represented a radical departure from status quo for the studio. Afterlife is a high-concept city-building game which cast the player as a Demiurge (an all powerful deity only a few office floors down on the quantumdimensional being pecking order from God himself, in this case collectively represented by the mystically aloof Powers That Be from which the player receives periodically humorous directives throughout) tasked with the responsibility of building a fictional Heaven and Hell for the mortal denizens of an alien planet many many light years away, but with a society and beliefs very similar to our own.

You could find out all of the above from reading the Wikipedia entry, though – what you wouldn’t is that it’s actually fun. Sure, there’s quite a steep learning curve and a veritable barnyard of highly specialised gameplay mechanics and rules to get your head around - at points it resembles an RTS but without the offensively brutal combative edge that more often than not takes all the hard work you spent building fifteen Carrier battle groups, crinkles it into a ball with the density of a neutron star and stuffs it into the wastepaper basket. However, that just makes it all the more satisfying when you do actually manage to navigate the minefield of early-game money struggles and get a respectable little Hades or Elysium springing into being before your very eyes.

Most importantly, though, what Afterlife has which so many contemporary games these days are sorely lacking is a) a sense of humour, and b) a tendency not to take itself too seriously. It does everything with a flourish and an overall sense of savour faire created through its low-key wit, not least among which features the relentlessly charming banter between the two player adviser characters, Jasper the demon and Aria the angel. And to be perfectly honest, I think that’s the main thing that offsets the mind-numbing boredom that usually comes from playing a game such as this which requires excessive micromanagement, such as an RTS. Have I mentioned RTS’s suck recently? 

There's such a variety of blatant and subtle references and in-jokes strewn throughout Afterlife that you'll find yourself actually wanting to unlock more expensive buildings just to read the amusing little description texts that come with them. Anyway, enough out of me: go play it, if you can find a copy.

I would have written "Myst-ified" here, but then I would have been summarily condemned to the ninth circle of portmanteau hell

On the subject of major game franchises that we haven’t heard so much as a blip on the sonar system from recently, the Myst franchise is a notably now-deceased example that managed to spawn four bratty offspring, a spin-off and a corresponding cult MMO before it flopped. Alright, point of clarification: the sequels weren’t bad. Actually, they were quite good, in fact, some going so far as to surpass the quality and timeless charm of the original. I’ve been trying to map out a point of analysis for the recurring formula of this game series for a short while now, and I think I’ve finally arrived at one.

What Myst, all its sequels and spin-offs (i.e. referring to Uru, Uru Live) have in common is that they rely on a primarily visual reward system. In return for exploring, completing puzzles and learning more about the story and characters, the player is allowed to advance further and thus behold the latest pretty techno-surrealistic vista the art department has managed to conjure out of its collective sleeve.

It’s by no means unique in this respect. Early 3D platform games such as Super Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie spring to mind as other examples that have operated using a similar mechanic. The latter even directly parodies this fact by showing the player incomplete paintings of worlds that must be filled in using “jigsaw pieces”, the game’s chief currency in trade, to unlock the entryway to that world.

Travelling back even further down the poetic oak-tree lined boulevard of memory lane we encounter the classic retro side-scroller 2D platformers blocking our paths like a police cordon around a crime scene. Because of the limitations of the technology and 2D perspective you could only display a percentage of the game world limited to the size of your monitor at a time, and the camera moved as your character did, so moving your character forward was directly linked to revealing more of the game environment. Spatial progress and visual gratification were, in this genre, completely synonymous. Therefore, many in-game obstacles were geared toward actually literally impeding the player’s physical progress, as opposed to more abstract and complex challenges observable in later 3D platformer titles (i.e. collecting parts of a dismantled space ship in preparation for the end-game confrontation in Jet Force Gemini).

This is why games with essentially (sometimes necessarily) repetitive or bland aesthetic environments usually focus on an alternative reward system for exploration and advancement. Consider some examples of non-visual player reward systems:

• Early FPS’s with low graphical capabilities: Wolfenstein, Doom etc: reward is the novelty of the introduction of new gameplay mechanics (i.e. use of new weapons, enemies etc) 
• Action RPG’s: Diablo, World of Warcraft: the game is player character-centric; therefore “levelling up” of one’s character is the reward as it records effort and time spent through a numerical syntax. I.e. the player character itself becomes a work in progress and a motivating factor for continuing play.
• First-person horror thrillers: F.E.A.R, Cryostasis, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Doom 3: reward is emotional stimuli i.e. the momentary cinematic shock and awe of the paranormal encounter.

Myst and its progeny are notable, however, for taking the visual reward system to its logical extreme. More specifically, here it has become a self-consciously parodied trope that is an integral part of the game world and backstory. This occurs through the plot device of “linking books” that are the only means for players to travel to and from in-game levels (Ages). In the Myst lore, Ages must be “written” by authors (read: surrogate level designers). Learning to write Ages is a closely guarded art which takes years to master. Each Age has a distinct atmosphere bearing the mark of its creator, comprised by any number of things: from a uniform colour palette, use of recurring geometric shapes, methodological consistency of puzzles, polarisation toward technocracy or the pastoral, and more often than not corresponding textural identities in the soundtrack vis-à-vis unusual or unique instrumentation.

Myst is unique in that it represents the characterisation of environment. This is a game where levels are given veritable personalities in their own right. When players achieve the objective of unlocking an Age by locating or activating the Linking Book, they are motivated by the promise of a unique aesthetic reality at least as much as that of discovering new plot details or the simple sense of achievement generated by the completion of an intellectually challenging task.

Here the game posits entire worlds as singular acts of authorial self-indulgence. Myst’s “Ages” are self-contained works of art within a single product. The basis for this probably lies in the series’ origins; Myst was at the cutting edge of 3D rendering technology when the original game was released back in 1993, and so the pressure of expectation has weighed like a poorly designed diving helmet on each subsequent entry in the pantheon to push the envelope in terms of graphical sophistication. And even though the developers have concurrently fleshed out the Myst universe and given it a sense of identity beyond that of a glorified tech demo, there continues to be this lingering association that hangs around the series as being a river barge for a comfortable tourist ride up the Amazon of fantastically surreal extraterrestrial worlds. But in this regard, it’s an interesting example of a game franchise that taps an often marginalised or underplayed function of games in general – transporting us to simulations of places we could never actually visit IRL, rendered with astonishing depth and attention to detail.

Quick thought...

When I say that the name Tim Burton has become a cliché, I’m aware that things are a mite more complicated than that. Sure, saying you were a Tim Burton fan used to mean something; you were a little bit oddball, you had a slightly skewed sense of humour, a fascination with the morbid, the gothic, the unexamined. Recently I attended the Tim Burton Exhibition at Federation Square, Melbourne. The queue awaiting admission in itself was enough to make me sit up and take notice as it was approximately the length of Quetzalcoatl tied to a nine-headed hydra using a printed transcript of the Internet as a rope. I think that was the point at which I really woke up to the reality of what I’m now trying to grapple with. Now we are at the stage where the phrase “It reminds me of Tim Burton”, is thrown around on DeviantArt like a diseased dead cow over a castle parapet and where any non-3D animation that doesn’t resemble a 1930’s Disney cartoon down to the letter is instantly branded with the term. Or so it seems.

To some extent Burton’s work has always simultaneously and somewhat uncomfortably straddled the line between mainstream and sideline pop culture, like an unfortunate rodeo stuntman balanced precariously on twin horses both of which are trying to ride off in opposite directions. What accounts for this, is that thematically much of the director's work parodies the sameness of everyday life in Western society. The exemplar of this, of course, is Edward Scissorhands with its pastel-colour pastiche of American suburbia, but so many of his own drawings and paintings provide a unique perspective on instantly identifiable scenes and figures from everyday life.

Which is of course what makes assigning the label “cliché” as ironic as it is problematic.

Art imitating life? Another overused phrase. Nonetheless, I think there’s a rich vein of humour to be mined in the fact that an artist whose work parodies the mainstream has drifted slowly in the direction of the mainstream after the fact. The same type of twisted irony, in fact, which might well appeal to the maestro himself.

Little less action and a little more conversation please.

Five weeks later… I’m back. Somewhat better travelled hopefully. On the flight home I watched a lot of movies. Three good ones and one not so good. Thankfully though, one in the former category was Clint Eastwood’s understated World War II epic Letters from Iwo Jima. Certainly, lurking in the back of my mind like a pride of starving lions (no, of course I haven’t been anywhere in particular recently…) the whole time were a whole bunch of peripheral concerns about topics such as the presentation of history through film and, more specifically, the presentation of war in film and other mediums. All of which are pet concerns of mine.

What really struck me and I what I walked away with from Letters, though, was the emphasis that Eastwood places on people. He understands a fundamental requirement which so many other directors, authors and artists frequently under-prioritize in their tales: the need for an audience to identify emotionally with characters. I got a vague sense of this in watching Gran Torino and Letters has that similar field of human scope. It’s such a basic, foundational ingredient of good film-making, but it’s so often undervalued or overlooked. I’m fairly strongly of the opinion that having good actors who can play their parts convincingly is among the most critical elements in a film, but until recently, I didn’t fully understand why I thought that way.

The reason is simply this. I judge whether a film is good or not based firstly upon whether it moved me emotionally, and secondly whether or not I was aware I was being manipulated in this respect. Either way, a story cannot have dramatic impact unless you actually care about the characters involved. If the audience is disconnected from the emotional plight of the story’s protagonists, then the story loses that immersive quality that defines pure fictional escapism. The screen displays a series of fragmented images of pretty places and people, but the audience is still sitting there in the darkened cinema, aware of their own powerless embodiment and probably, in all likelihood, getting restless and waiting for the damn thing to end so they can trudge off home to bed. For films about war, this is perhaps all the more important, given that the stakes in the fictional scenario being presented are so much higher (i.e. unlike a romantic comedy, characters can die; unlike a James Bond film, no character is immune from death, etc)

Was I aware I was being emotionally manipulated in Letters From Iwo Jima? At times, yes; at others, no. But the film’s most valuable trump card is that it creates recognizably human, empathetic characters from the fabric of an enemy which historically has been demonized as barbaric, faceless and inhuman. Most notably, Eastwood uses music minimally, which gives dialogue scenes a realistic quality, as if of everyday conversation, perhaps engaging with an old friend. Realism in this respect goes hand-in-hand with historical immersiveness. As the audience, we become fully enmeshed in the plight of Saigo and Nishi, Shimizu and General Kuribayashi because we come to know them as others do, through conversation; through that simple human quality of speaking and listening.

That not so good movie I was talking about? It actually wasn’t that bad. It was this wacky little Ukrainian thing called We Are From The Future 2. The thing was that technically it was far superior to what I was expecting. It must have had a decent-sized budget for a foreign film. I’m inclined to rate it down because the scenes of battle carnage that are shoved relentlessly up the audience’s nose for the film’s second half are so grossly mired in their own tacky gorefest, often accompanied by a driving metal soundtrack, that they overshoot the ballpark of realism and land squarely in the neighbour’s backyard of kitsch (I’ve always wanted a chance to use that word, and there it is! I’m happy now, for at least the next four minutes). Moreover, some of the earlier scenes taking place in a modern WW2 re-enactment of the battle are equally cheap. Partying youths wearing SS uniforms dance to the same bloody annoying Eastern European heavy-metal, as slow camera movements pan over the stage and the crowd and luxuriate in the violence, the noise and the visual palette of militaristic symbolism.

But I’ll say this for WAFTF2: it was economical. It only had an hour and a half or so to do its thing, and as an action film, it succeeds admirably. By the end of it I was mildly interested/morbidly fascinated to go out and look for We Are From The Future 1, so I’m prepared to count that a success. I suppose it’s just that straight after watching Eastwood’s far superior (although to be fair, marketed at a somewhat slightly different recipient base) WW2 film, this was a starkly noticeable change of pace.  

The fact that WAFTF2 chooses as its focus a less historically Hollywood-trodden theatre of war (i.e. the Eastern Front and Ukrainian involvement), however, gives me an immediate instinct to scrutinize it as a work of filmic history, rather than as the sheer escapist entertainment it is. I mean, it’s about time-travelling college students, for Pete’s sake. In this respect, WAFTF2 suffers rather than profits from having a relatively high-budget technical arsenal at its disposal: as the audience, I didn’t know whether the filmmakers’ intent was to create a realistic portrayal of what it would have been like to fight in the Battle of Brody in 1944, or whether I should be taking the action at face value. So I posit the question: is it possible to depict historical violence and warfare at a high technical level (Saving Private Ryan being the oft-quoted textbook example/high water mark) without the element of cheap, escapist thrills that inevitably seems to go hand-in-hand? Something, hopefully, to think about.

I'm not a spanner, I'm a real boy

First post I drop into this space and it’s effectively to say that I won’t be posting any more for a while. Admittedly with a somewhat longer and hopefully reasonably more interesting post-script tacked on to the end, but anyway. So I’m heading to South Africa in four days and with very little disposable time on the cards for future me, I’m investing some of what I’ve got in stock at the moment doing what I do best: going through the back catalog of older games I’ve been advised to play and made a mental note to do so at some point. To that end, I’ve only just recently gotten around to buying and playing through Valve’s puzzle-platformer-FPS which-is-not-an-FPS Portal (it’s brilliant, incidentally, even if everyone told me so long before I actually played the game for myself) And even as I’m trying to organise my initial impressions into something approaching a critical response while all the while thinking “Golly gosh, that was actually a pretty awesome game”, I’ve been sitting here wondering to myself why I’m left with a niggling sensation of familiarity the same time as I’m admiring the innovation and success of a risky concept, and I’ve only just now realised. Portal is set in a dystopic future. Its prominent themes are isolation and loneliness in an unknown, potentially hostile environment. And it revolves around a robot main character who displays at times a set of very distinctly human personality traits.

It’s not dissimilar in this regard to two other excellent entries in their respective media categories that I’ve played/watched reasonably recently and thoroughly enjoyed. The first of these is Pixar’s critically acclaimed 2008 feature-length animated film Wall-E. The second is a lesser-known indie Flash-powered point-and-click adventure game called Machinarium, (http://machinarium.net/demo/) created by Czech-based development studio Amanita Design. The latter takes place in a sprawling mechanoid city of rusty-spires and winding pipes - Minas Tirith with extra tetanus shots - itself situated in the middle of a vast radioactive wasteland. The plot revolves around a quirkily charismatic Joe Average bot trying to loosen the iron grip of the evil Black Cap robots that have taken over the city and save his girlfriend in the process. Needless to say, it’s excellent as well – a real throwback to the classic Lucasarts and Sierra adventure games of the 1990s, with the added dash of a bit of Tim Burton visual flair thrown into the mix.

So I’m sitting here wondering to myself. What makes robotsville so compelling as a thematic subject? Is there something entrancing in the idea of a robot-populated dystopian future that makes endowing them with distinctly human personalities so thought-provoking? I mean, there’s clearly a novelty in the idea that something man-made can possess a soul, the above three fine examples of popular culture attest to that. But what is it about robots in particular?

The concept of the humanoid “robot” is certainly nothing new. It stretches way back to the biblical era and in Hebrew lore, the golem. In the Talmud, the ability to create a golem was bestowed only upon those who were very holy and close to God, and in doing so were bequeathed some of his wisdom and power, which included the ability to create life. But a being created in this manner would always be the lessermost of the God-Man-Robot tripartite. This points to a key precept that tends to underscore a lot of pop-cultural representations of robots. This is the notion of subservience; the idea that robots were created as servants to do the bidding of man. This being the case, there is some kind of novelty in seeing them elevated. Seeing them take on human personalities – it’s an uproarious travesty, a laughable absurdity when you think about it. The servant becoming the master.

This is where, I would posit, the imagery and symbolism of the post-apocalyptic landscape becomes significant. After their creator ceases to exist, and is seen to be conspicuously absent, these objects – these creations of man – take on an increased status as the dominant inhabitants of the environment. At a glance, there doesn’t look to be a whole lot in common across the three separate settings comprised in Machinarium, Portal and Wall-E: Bustling steampunk metropolis vs. the narrow confines of a series of abandoned underground test chambers vs. sprawling post-apocalyptic plains dwarfed by towering garbage colossi. But each of these places is in some way perfect for its robotic denizens to flourish as distinct personalities in their own right. They are all connected by, and grounded in the idea of emptiness; a landscape devoid of humanoid forms.

But in many cases the production designers actually go a step further, adding in little symbolic touches to remind you how insignificant human civilisation really is here, and in the wider scheme of things - especially when your main characters are robots who will live forever, or at least until they break down. Wall-E is overtly conscious of this. Everywhere you look, there are towering skyscrapers of junk, of domestic objects that provide subtle reminders of the now-all-but-extinct everyday lives of the human race. In Portal, we know that the Aperture Science laboratories are long deserted, their inhabitants long killed off or gone mad, by the deranged graffiti left scrawled on the walls, the rust covering every surface outside the test chambers. Putting robot characters in a visual surrounds that is conspicuously and self-consciously devoid of human life promotes them to true sentience; it gives them a new status as humanoid personalities, not just the steel-and-microchip servants of mankind.

But getting back to the heart of the matter, what about the actual personalities of the characters? What makes robots so interesting? When you help the umbrella-wielding old-lady robot in Machinarium find her runaway armadillo-bot pet, why is that any more dramatically compelling than a comparable situation involving human characters? Put simply I would argue this is because there is a certain novelty in recognising and identifying with emotion which is not expressed through traditional visual cues. When Wall-E’s windshield wipers start going like a metronome at the first sight of EVE soaring through the skies, we know this means admiration; love. When we reach the final room of Portal and finally see GlaDOS in all her terrifying bizarreness, that eclectic assortment of orbs and cables and spinning tubes towering above you, she has four display panels arrayed around her sides cycling rapidly, streams-of-consciousness style, through images of cake, knives, warning signs, tools, lightbulbs. This seems to suggest the fragmented insanity of her thoughts.

I would also add, as briefly touched upon above, that there’s a definite romance to the idea of characters who will live forever. The credits sequence of Wall-E features a visual pastiche on the different periods of human civilisation, progressing from cave murals drawn on walls through ancient Mediterranean mosaics through 19^th century French impressionist paintings, suggesting the rebuilding of human society after the planet has been repopulated. Through it all we see Wall-E and EVE, still together. Human relationships inevitably end, because they must – but this seems to suggest that eternal love is somehow possible, if only for the absence of man and his limitations. It’s a mind-boggling and somewhat disturbing thought, one that turns your head upside down. Oh, and it’s movie with a kid-friendly audience in mind, too. That tends to affect the possibility of any kind of messy break up being displayed on screen... Who knows, maybe after the credits roll comes the twenty years of Wall-E stagnating in a job he hates with three little bot-kids, a mortgage and the mid-life crisis, with EVE leaving him because he’s lost the spark and passion for life he had when he all had to occupy his time of a Saturday was constructing thousand-foot-high skyscrapers out of soft drink cans. Even the song that GlaDOS sings over Portal’s credits sequence, “Still Alive”, which, incidentally, is hilariously funny and takes out first place for the best novelty song I’ve heard in some time – points directly to the fact that she is a machine and will therefore always be somehow superior to you: able to do and survive things you can’t. Despite the fact that in the previous sequence you just redirected her own rockets at her using the portal gun, blew off all her various appendages and threw them one by one into an industrial incinerator. You can do things, story-wise, with robots that just can’t be achieved with human characters, because they’re made out of metal and will keep on chugging until at least until judgement day decides to roll around and possibly even after (case-in point: the Terminator series).

But all this is just the tip of the iceberg. Yes, as discussed above, we’re certainly navigating some very empty and lonely spaces over the course of these stories. But they are only made such because it is necessary to create a vacuum into which a simultaneously fantastical and familiar visual environment can be spliced. In all of the aforementioned pop cultural examples, the visual architecture and attendant inventions have a practical sense to them. Devices aren’t just an arbitrary collection of levers and buttons. There is a logic and an eerie familiarity to items and devices that allows the audience to identify emotionally with these worlds. Take for example the combo-locked safe in the prison cell that hides the popgun in Machinarium. Or the fact that all the robots in that game drink cans of oil. Then there’s the scene in Wall-E where Eve and Wall-E bond over the latter’s personal collection of junky bits and pieces like rubix cubes, lightbulbs and a cigarette lighter. In Portal the confiscation fields that bookmark the end of each test chamber and vaporise any unauthorised material resemble airport scanners. Little references to similar contraptions in our own society that mix the uncanny with just enough of the familiar to create a sense of the novel. Machinarium actually reminded me a little of the steampunk Australian short film, The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, that was released several years ago. There’s the same apparent preference for desaturated colour palettes and a focus upon a landscape dominated by the iconography of industrialism, not to mention the sense of vertigo enabled by the prospect of a massive vertical city to explore. And like Machinarium, Morello shares that same uncanny sense of déjà vu mediated through its visual architecture.

In Portal and in Wall-E this takes a slightly different slant because as already stated, at least in some part, we’re still on Earth; we’re still in a world that was at least at some stage recognisably our own and inhabited by a society we know. But Machinarium never specifies where or when it takes place. It’s a completely new and imaginary world that invites exploration, with subtle references to our own visual culture but never so far as to suggest it was ever anywhere we’ve been before. It hasn’t been grafted on to what we already know and understand. So it has to try even harder to get the audience to identify with it. In that sense it’s at once more and less familiar, because you have a robot civilisation which lives in a vertical super-city of tiered apartment blocks in a manner reminiscent of Renaissance-era Florence. Busker-bots roam the lower echelons hawking their tunes, corrupt Black Cap metro police thug-bots exploit their authority and enjoy the privileges and decadence that come with power while unjustly incarcerated, oppressed robots populate the prisons beneath the sewers. Wheelchair-bound elderly robots ruminate by the fountain in the town square while the bar is rife with shifty patrons waiting to cheat you out of your money with a game of checkers using nuts and bolts. The civic institutions, class structure, way of life and social patterns in Machinarium are all recognisably human. In this way, robot society becomes almost a direct surrogate for human society. But there’s something ever-so-slightly different about it which means we continue to laugh, to be surprised and to wonder at what we’ll find around the next corner when exploring Machinarium’s catwalks, tunnels and cul-de-sacs. This is a world we’ve seen before, though maybe not in quite the same form or guise.

Bit of a distinction to be made at this point: Wall-E and Machinarium both embrace the gritty, rust-covered steampunk aesthetic. And yet at the same time it’s striking to note the visual similarities between Eve from Wall-E, and GlaDOS from Portal – I’m thinking mainly of GlaDOS’s security cameras that swivel to follow the player wherever she goes, or the turret guns that whisper “I don’t hate you” even as they fall to their deaths through a player-created hole in the floor (or is that the ceiling?). In both Portal and Wall-E, clean white reflective surfaces and sleek curves on the turrets and cameras suggest sterility and conformity – the empirical test conditions of the modern scientific lab environment. LED lights blinking eerily from within resemble eyes. Eve’s are vaguely humanoid – almond shaped and bright blue, suggesting calm and warmth – but all GlaDOS’s minions have red eyes with the opaque, sinister stare of a CCTV camera. They reveal nothing of what lies within, other than a radiating a cold, focused malevolence. Because in a pop-cultural era where some robot characters are so close to being human, the real threat and counterpoint is the true mind of the computer, its logical extreme: the soulless being without any moral code beyond that which can be expressed in numbers. Focused, precise, inhuman. The tension inherent to this dichotomy makes GlaDOS the enigma she is. There seems to be no order to her bizarre ramblings – these at least seem very human behaviours at the outset - but then she may just be manipulating the player with the calculated, reverse-psychology precision of a computer all the time. Is there a method to her madness? Is her mind human or machine? What drives her to act: a personality, or a mathematical equation? Whether she is one or the other, however, is never fully resolved. At least until Portal 2 comes out next year. Maybe.

What links all of these examples – Portal, Wall-E and Machinarium – together is that they all involve robot characters who are struggling to overcome their limitations as the steel-and-plastic creations of man and become quasi-human personalities in their own right. At heart, this is why robot stories are novel, occasionally poignant and always timeless. They play on an almost primordial source of continuing fascination to man’s psyche: namely, the idea that something which is not alive can become alive. GlaDOS in Portal directly parodies this at one point by attempting to convince you that the Weighted Companion Cube – nothing more than a metal block with a heart drawn on it - is a sentient being and you should treat it as your friend, and you almost believe her, because although from that point on you continually expect the cube to speak and vindicate her words, it never does. It’s part of the ultra-dark humour and pervadingly twisted atmosphere of that game that makes it so brilliantly original and wickedly funny. Here I’ve compared it to several other excellent examples of the genre that I’ve encountered recently, though I’m sure there are at least several billion other tangents you could go off on if you felt thusly inclined to compare it to other similarly themed games/films/coffee mugs.

May be some time before I check in again with another couple of pages of pithy ramblings, although seeing as at this very moment my regular rate of article output is approximately 0 from 8395 (just about equal with my readership base), I don’t imagine there’ll be too many issues there. Anyway. Don’t go leaving the country or anything. Hang on, wait a second...