And the campaigners in the trees go tweet, tweet, tweet

It's certainly been Twitter's week - between Jan Moir, the Holborn Hitman and Trafigura (or, as it may want to change its name to capitalise on its new brand awareness, #trafigura) a few basic principles have been hammered home pretty clearly: strong, emotionally involving content can proliferate very quickly across Twitter. You need a source - 140 characters isn't enough to explain and motivate a cause. So, start with a news story, or a blog post, or an article, and use Twitter to provide the snowball rolling between points - updates, comments, campaigns. Pushing onto trending topics raises profile, but it's a call to investigate, not a story. And once the celebs get involved, get ready for a lot of repetitive retweeting.

Also that our greatest weapons in the fight against homophobia are misogyny and fat gags, which may be a cause for minor concern.

Lemon soaked paper napkins

Having a little layout trouble, and no time to hack into sorting it out right now. To get around it for the moment, I've extended the sidebar to the point where it snaps onto the bottom of the page - so, for a nastily-justified archive and links, keep scrolling down. Normal service will be etceteraed as soon as thing.

Messing with your HUD

This month's issue of Wired UK has a piece on Dr Dan Pinchbeck and his work on the academic applications of gaming mods, written by me and timed nicely to coincide with his success at Indiecade 09 and the release of his latest work, Korsakovia, which is available for download from The Chinese Room. It's not up on the web yet, but it will be soonish; I'll put a specific link in then. The following is a sort of unspool from there - some thoughts on the game and its progress that didn't quite fit on the page.

While researching this, I went down to the coast to meet Pinchbeck and talk over the surprising success of Dear Esther. His previous mods were limited in impact, not just for reasons of quality but through simple logistics - Antlion Soccer was a multiplayer mod without a dedicated server, and Conscientious Objector was a mod for the id Tech 4 engine used in Doom 3, which does not have the same kind of mod community as the Source engine. I really like Conscientious Objector - it's a study in impotence, essentially, where you are sent into a zombie-riddled Mars base with only a non-lethal weapon to your name. You can knock the zombies down with rubber bullets, but it's like tasing a bull - they get up and come at you again.¹

The other change to the structure of Doom 3 was that, instead of a superior officer giving you instructions you had a handler, Carl, who clearly thought you were a dick. While he wasn't exactly a fan of the zombies, he was largely indifferent to your comfort and safety beyond the completion of your duties, and quite eager to remind you of the futility of even the most artful headshot. Pinchbeck's doctoral thesis covers the experience of the perspective character in the first person shooter, and the way they are blended with the player's - characters are often amnesiac, so they know as little about the world as the player, or are suddenly dropped into an environment - an alien planet or an undersea city - which is alien to the character and needs to be explained by a helpful voice over the commlink. It's easy to get pretty attached to these radio guides, since they not only prescribe your next action but also provide you with validation and compliments. Of course, this emotional relationship means that second-act reveals where the voice turns out to have misled you are also very common.²

The voice in Dear Esther doesn't tell you where to go - it only reads, at set moments, from a random selection of letters to Esther as you wander over a deserted and increasingly disrupted Scottish island. The letters are randomised, so no playthrough is the same, and a fragmented narrative of a car crash, a grieving man and a stolen library book is glimpsed but never resolved. When I asked Pinchbeck whether this strictly constitutes a game, he said that it was a game engine, a nice distinction in both senses.

Speaking purely personally, I'd say that it is a game, or at least (to use the language of Tale of Tales) an interactive realtime vignette. There may not be a traditional conflict narrative, but there is a story, however dimly viewed, and there is a narrative arc of escalating emotional intensity leading to a definite, if ambiguous, conclusion. You can tell it's the end because the game ends. I've been playing Robert Yang's mods recently, and possibly they have jaundiced my view because the gameplay elements are only really present in those to serve the narrative, but the lack of challenge in Dear Esther is much less of an issue than some of the stretches between events spent trying to establish which bit of headland you should be walking towards. Follow the birds.

Rob Briscoe's planned remake is exciting not just because of Briscoe's recent experience of professional level design with Mirror's Edge, or because Ben Andrews is turning in some great concept art, but because the visuals and the level design were the elements really susceptible to improvement. Jessica Curry's score, in particular, is terrific - she is also responsible for the sound design in Korsakovia, a game I haven't played that much yet because I found the alpha too upsetting³ . I've heard Dear Esther described as a game that you wouldn't want to play twice (along with a number of other games I've played more than once), but I'll definitely be looking at this when it comes out in the New Year.

^[1] Diversion the first - when I wrote a "Tech Torn Apart" piece on the TASER X26, a piece of technology with which I am in a very ambivalent state of love, the Taser representatives were eager to make it clear that Tasers were not shot or fired, but rather "deployed", or if necessary "launched". The physics of propelling a pair of electrified fish hooks towards another person with an explosion notwithstanding, I really enjoyed this lexicographical delicacy, and was seriously tempted to take it further, into the world of the Tasee enjoying the Taser experience, in the same way that used cars became previously owned cars became previously enjoyed cars. But, zombies. Back


^{[ 2]} Diversion the second - this, incidentally, is why the reveal in the first act of The Nomad Soul, when the perspective character's wife turns out to be a demon, is almost totally underwhelming. Barring some cutscene loving, you've barely met her. So, although everything you knew about her is wrong, what you knew about her was effectively nothing, with commensurate shock value. Back

Perhaps the greatest baddy-all-along reveal is - spoiler warning - in Bioshock, where it turns out that the avuncular Atlas has been manipulating you emotionally and psychically. This formulaic knife to the back is often followed by the revelation that the criminal you have been pursing at your guide's behest is actually a heroic freedom fighter, but in Bioshock he remains a giant douche. In fact, your only real friend is a besuited Baba Yaga who spent World War 2 performing horrible experiments on people. And I'm not even sure she likes you that much. It turns out that the submerged city of Rapture is a lot like Freshers' Week. Back


^{[ 3]}To round out the attributions, Korsakovia is being co-built by Adam Griffiths of Dark Rock Games. While I've got you, the soundtrack to Dear Esther really is worth a listen - it's available for free download here, and was supplying my phone ringtone until I finally admitted that creeping menace is not actually what you want from a ringtone (replaced by the Team Fortress 2 theme; I'm hoping this is adorkable). Back

Woop woop woop, it's the sound of the polite

When a gay person hears "faggot," they hear it as a question: "Remember when that mailman spat at you?" or maybe "Remember when your mother cried when you finally managed to come out to her?" It is the sound of pain, confusion and fear - or perhaps mild amusement that the mailman could only spit a measly meter from his door - but usually it is an unpleasant memory, like one of the fragile crates breaking with an orange flash in "Handle With Care."

Mod designer Robert Yang on responses to the discovery by players of one of his mods that their perspective character is a gay man, Not That There's Anything Wrong With That.

The fear of homosexuality by willing participants in a highly homosocial environment like multiplayer games - where an awful lot of the people you're interacting with are likely to be male - is pretty interesting. Much less interesting is the cavalcade of racial and sexuality-based abuse that at this point is pretty much baked into the PvP experience - as referenced by this (NSFW) remix of an advert for Halo 3. I play multiplayer FPS, and in particular Left 4 Dead. Usually I do this with friends, but sometimes the mood takes me and I jump into a quick match. Quick matches are the zipless version of deathmatching, really - you'll probably never see these people again, and your brief time together is conditional upon the achievement of a common goal. It's a zombie massage parlour.

Problem being, these casual encounters might involve one of two insults being bounced around a lot - newb and gay. You're gay, the zombies' pathing is gay, the clipping when attempting to get through doors to avoid an enraged monster is gay, and so on. Also, in their desire to represent a diverse range of survivors, Valve made one of the playable characters African American and another a woman. You can see where that might go in a moment of rage, or attempted bonding between socially uncertain young men.

XBox Live has a recommendation system, which allows users at least to express a very simple approval or disapproval of a fellow player - which may not be very much use for establishing a world of gamers without prejudice, but will allow you to filter out players you have had unhappy encounters with from your personal view of the world. That isn't much of a grievance procedure, though, and in fact the terminology is so built into the culture that I suspect that a complaint to Microsoft that its servers were full of people willing to call you a fag at the drop of a hat would be met by sincere "yes, and...?" bewilderment.

Possibly this would be less the case with the liberal use of racial epithets (and one racial epithet in particular) for the character of Louis. This article in the Houston Chronicle was reblogged by various game sites and led to a lot of furious responses (gamers discussing racism is, along with comic book fans discussing the question of consent in recent issues of Spider-Man, a conversation it can be quite painful to experience). The examples the writer gives are, unfortunately, pretty weak - and it is either disingenuous or foolish to say that Left 4 Dead 2 has been "causing an uproar", with the heavy implication that this uproar was about its Louisiana setting and the possible triggering or racism thereof, rather than the fact that many gamers think that it should be an expansion pack to Left 4 Dead rather than a standalone game - but the question deserves a better article and, in the main, better responses. Especially, in fact, because Steam has no equivalent marking system to XBox Live, so even this very blunt instrument is absent. You can complain to server admins, but again the rotating and ephemeral nature of the servers used for quick matching means that this would be a very small amount of spit hurled into the teeth of a force 8.

So, what do you do? I'm still trying to work out an answer to this question. It's tough on the other players, but generally my response is to make it clear why I'm leaving the game, and then leave. This is a bit feeble, but not many options exist. Depending on circumstances, it doesn't always seem wholly inappropriate to empty one's rifle into the head of the person who made the remark on the way out. The difficulty being that in the etiquette of games both of these activities - rage quitting and team killing - are unacceptable, as they impair the playing experience for others. It's a little mind-bending to think that applying these principles to the real world would make it less polite to leave a room in the middle of a game of bridge than to call a fellow player a faggot for a badly judged clubs bid.