Game on at ACMI finishes up this week, and sadly I didn't get to make another visit beyond attending the opening. Those of you who know me, know that this past 5 or 6 months haven't exactly been the most delightful, and so while I'm saddened not to have made it, I think that I'm ok with other things taking priority.
Way back before Game On opened, me and another friend of mine were talking about starting a games related blog because we thought that the critical writing about video games in Australia was seriously lacking. That all fell through because, well, for a whole host of reasons, but with the introduction of this blog, I wanted to write one of the posts originally intended for that one.
Here it is, 5 months later, and perhaps with added insight....
I have a sadly fragmented memory of childhood, and one of my long-standing personal issues is that I lack strong positive memories of growing up. It's filled with arguments and shouting and fighting and struggling for some sort of identity within boundaries that were unclear and enforced at random intervals with unpredictable ferocity. As a result, or perhaps because of nature rather than nurture, I tended towards the insular as a child, preferring books or computers or some solitary thing instead of being outside kicking a football against a wall as I was so frequently ordered to do.
As a family, like all families do, we used to go on holidays. Long car journeys with infrequent stops and more arguments and more fighting and the final destination of a caravan site where we'd spend the following 2 weeks desperately trying to fill the time...
Like much of my childhood, the memories of those collections of two week periods aren't exactly positive. This is something I'd been thinking about a lot at the turn of this year, prompted no doubt by the coming upheaval and the bubbling tensions between me and my family that had just found their way to the surface again.
Amidst all this, I scored tickets for the opening of Game On.
And there, in the exhibition space of ACMI, I found something positive from my childhood.
They had a sit-down Star Wars arcade game. Faded black and blue paint. Green and red vector lines. A loose controller with slightly spongey buttons. A really, really, really, uncomfortable seat.
And an escape from all of the stuff that was going on when I was much younger.
I remember going to the arcades either inside or near the caravan parks and changing the meager money I was allowed to spend on the games and playing Star Wars or the inferior isometric Return of the Jedi or Operation Wolf or any of the other, less appealing games without special controllers or guns or sit-in cabinets, only wobbly joysticks and broken off buttons. I remember that those games were the highlights of my day, and of the weeks, and of the holidays.
Those games are the positive memories I have of my childhood.
And they were brought back by just seeing that old, faded, battered, but still working, Star Wars cabinet.
When I first bandied the idea for this post around, months and months ago, I was thinking about the games as art debate which kicks around and always seems sort of foolish to me, so I won't get into it, but what I was thinking was that, even if games weren't art, who cares. Isn't escapism enough? Isn't the fact that they've made somebody's life better enough? Aspiring for high art is great, but it isn't only high art that can affect someone, that sends them on a new path through life, or that helps them get through whatever it is that they need to get through.
I'm sure the people who made the Star Wars game were just trying to entertain, but I'm glad they managed to do something more than that.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
children can be so cruel
So, in my millions of email spam, I got (one could argue this was still spam) an email from friends reunited.
This is one of those sites that purports to reconnect you with everyone you hoped you'd forgotten, old schools, old workplaces, old lives.
Driven by a desire to not do the washing up, I clicked the link to see what "Rachel" was doing. I have by the way, no earthly idea which Rachel this is. But once you're there, it's a time suck, and you randomly start clicking on names you recognise. Some of these were among the first non-family people I knew. The kid who always swore (even in primary school - Corky, that's you), the girl who looked like a horse, these were all part of the people who formed a human map around your (who am I kidding - my) early years. A geography of school uniforms and scabbed knees.
And even as we all grew older, I now get to find out that the girl who created food nicknames for everyone, wrestled her sister in the sixth form common room (even for the rest of us, that was like, really immature) and most importantly, tried to buy Roy Orbison tickets after he was dead, is now practicing employment law (and presumably no longer wrestling her older sister).
It's weird to see that people all grew up and are responsible adults (one is a priest "but I'm an anglican, so I can still have sex and all that". Well it's good you're putting it to some use, Blackhead, cause I have spoken to other people who still remember the time you got a massive erection while on stage as the lead in the Mikado. I'm sorry we didn't make any waist high scenery in the art department.) Also, Blackhead, you were raised as a Catholic - wtf?!
The big boys in class, who were always a little intimidating, have lost their bluster. The nicknames have lost their toughness, making the bearers of them seem faded, shells, bewildered by age. Small boys, lost in casual friday attire, or the weekend perennials of cream pants and blue shirts.
I wonder if their lives feel small.
One thing that strikes me though, is the profile of a kid who was a couple of years below me in school, the kid people picked on, and yet either completely didn't realise this, or was totally resilient or un-phased by it. He was the kid who stole five pounds, and then was busted trying to buy five pounds worth of marathon bars at the tuck shop. His profile now includes his jobs as a bin man, bus driver and scrap metal yard worker (all jobs that someone has to do, but this person being allowed to drive a double decker bus is a scary thought) and that he likes the barmaid at his local. He writes completely in upper case, and, like heaps of people on that site, reconfigures his email address, to bypass people having to buy an account in order to contact him. I wonder if anyone ever does.
But the saddest thing - and also the thing that I pissed myself laughing at - is that, in typing his surname as part of his email address, he misses one letter, which changes the context significantly.
It now spells "Boner".
This is one of those sites that purports to reconnect you with everyone you hoped you'd forgotten, old schools, old workplaces, old lives.
Driven by a desire to not do the washing up, I clicked the link to see what "Rachel" was doing. I have by the way, no earthly idea which Rachel this is. But once you're there, it's a time suck, and you randomly start clicking on names you recognise. Some of these were among the first non-family people I knew. The kid who always swore (even in primary school - Corky, that's you), the girl who looked like a horse, these were all part of the people who formed a human map around your (who am I kidding - my) early years. A geography of school uniforms and scabbed knees.
And even as we all grew older, I now get to find out that the girl who created food nicknames for everyone, wrestled her sister in the sixth form common room (even for the rest of us, that was like, really immature) and most importantly, tried to buy Roy Orbison tickets after he was dead, is now practicing employment law (and presumably no longer wrestling her older sister).
It's weird to see that people all grew up and are responsible adults (one is a priest "but I'm an anglican, so I can still have sex and all that". Well it's good you're putting it to some use, Blackhead, cause I have spoken to other people who still remember the time you got a massive erection while on stage as the lead in the Mikado. I'm sorry we didn't make any waist high scenery in the art department.) Also, Blackhead, you were raised as a Catholic - wtf?!
The big boys in class, who were always a little intimidating, have lost their bluster. The nicknames have lost their toughness, making the bearers of them seem faded, shells, bewildered by age. Small boys, lost in casual friday attire, or the weekend perennials of cream pants and blue shirts.
I wonder if their lives feel small.
One thing that strikes me though, is the profile of a kid who was a couple of years below me in school, the kid people picked on, and yet either completely didn't realise this, or was totally resilient or un-phased by it. He was the kid who stole five pounds, and then was busted trying to buy five pounds worth of marathon bars at the tuck shop. His profile now includes his jobs as a bin man, bus driver and scrap metal yard worker (all jobs that someone has to do, but this person being allowed to drive a double decker bus is a scary thought) and that he likes the barmaid at his local. He writes completely in upper case, and, like heaps of people on that site, reconfigures his email address, to bypass people having to buy an account in order to contact him. I wonder if anyone ever does.
But the saddest thing - and also the thing that I pissed myself laughing at - is that, in typing his surname as part of his email address, he misses one letter, which changes the context significantly.
It now spells "Boner".
Monday, June 30, 2008
Fire Songs - The Watson Twins
I was thinking of writing mini reviews of things I came across in my life - books, music, films, games, those sorts of things - but I'm currently listening to Fire Songs by The Watson Twins and I realised that there are limits to what I can write about when it comes to music.
Music hasn't always been a big part of my life. I remember coming to the experience late. There wasn't a great deal of it around the house growing up, just my parent's feeble vinyl collection and the novelty of taping the top 40 from the radio and listening to it on my walkman over and over again until the following week. The music itself didn't really matter to me. It was something there, but not something that I really connected with in any strong way.
And this is where the story shifts into potentially embarrassing self-revelation.
I remember buying my first album from a band where I really felt some small connection to the songs: A cassette of Automatic for the People by REM, released in (check's wikipedia...) 1992. I was 14 years old and Everybody Hurts was being played to death. As people have been pointing out to me recently, I was kind of a late bloomer, so I was just starting to feel the first hints of adult emotion and thinking, goddammit, everybody does hurt, they're right!
It's not a deep revelation. But 14 year old, socially inept nerd-boys aren't known for their startling insight.
Everybody Hurts is not a great song, nor a song that I would listen to now (Drive and Sweetness Follows are both far more interesting, and have higher ratings on my iTunes), but it is one of those songs that captures some essential part of my youth.
In the years since that first cassette, I've gone from tapes to CDs to mp3s; from a chunky walkman to being able to carry my entire collection around in my pocket; from being a socially inept nerd-boy to a socially inept nerd-man.
One thing I haven't done though, is work out why music works for me.
I write. Short films, short stories, novels, comics, occasionally video games, that sort of thing. I've been doing it for long enough that I have a fairly good understanding of how narrative works, how stories fit together, what words do when you put them next to each other, and how my aesthetic sense gels, or doesn't gel, with certain works. I can articulate those things, and hopefully that's something I'll do more of in this blog as I read and watch and play more.
But how music works, eludes me.
I don't have a context for why something works, or where it fits historically, or how it has been influenced by what's come before, or why certain chords sound good together, or why one song works and one doesn't, and listening to Fire Songs, I want to write a serious response to it, but I can't. I'm brought short by limitations in my knowledge and limitations in my experience as a listener.
And that's fine, because I'd probably spend more time analysing why I liked something, rather than just enjoying what I do like, and there's only so much space and time in life for naval gazing.
And, no doubt, there will be more, much more, of that as this blog quietly ages.
Oh, and Fire Songs is an awesome album too.
Music hasn't always been a big part of my life. I remember coming to the experience late. There wasn't a great deal of it around the house growing up, just my parent's feeble vinyl collection and the novelty of taping the top 40 from the radio and listening to it on my walkman over and over again until the following week. The music itself didn't really matter to me. It was something there, but not something that I really connected with in any strong way.
And this is where the story shifts into potentially embarrassing self-revelation.
I remember buying my first album from a band where I really felt some small connection to the songs: A cassette of Automatic for the People by REM, released in (check's wikipedia...) 1992. I was 14 years old and Everybody Hurts was being played to death. As people have been pointing out to me recently, I was kind of a late bloomer, so I was just starting to feel the first hints of adult emotion and thinking, goddammit, everybody does hurt, they're right!
It's not a deep revelation. But 14 year old, socially inept nerd-boys aren't known for their startling insight.
Everybody Hurts is not a great song, nor a song that I would listen to now (Drive and Sweetness Follows are both far more interesting, and have higher ratings on my iTunes), but it is one of those songs that captures some essential part of my youth.
In the years since that first cassette, I've gone from tapes to CDs to mp3s; from a chunky walkman to being able to carry my entire collection around in my pocket; from being a socially inept nerd-boy to a socially inept nerd-man.
One thing I haven't done though, is work out why music works for me.
I write. Short films, short stories, novels, comics, occasionally video games, that sort of thing. I've been doing it for long enough that I have a fairly good understanding of how narrative works, how stories fit together, what words do when you put them next to each other, and how my aesthetic sense gels, or doesn't gel, with certain works. I can articulate those things, and hopefully that's something I'll do more of in this blog as I read and watch and play more.
But how music works, eludes me.
I don't have a context for why something works, or where it fits historically, or how it has been influenced by what's come before, or why certain chords sound good together, or why one song works and one doesn't, and listening to Fire Songs, I want to write a serious response to it, but I can't. I'm brought short by limitations in my knowledge and limitations in my experience as a listener.
And that's fine, because I'd probably spend more time analysing why I liked something, rather than just enjoying what I do like, and there's only so much space and time in life for naval gazing.
And, no doubt, there will be more, much more, of that as this blog quietly ages.
Oh, and Fire Songs is an awesome album too.
Ze purpose of ze blog
This is somewhere to talk about stuff other than your job. Because, apparently, there has to be more out there. Somewhere.
Also, I have blogfright from having to write the first post. And, picturing you all in your underwear is giving me that funny feeling... If you need me, I'll be in my bunk.
Also, I have blogfright from having to write the first post. And, picturing you all in your underwear is giving me that funny feeling... If you need me, I'll be in my bunk.
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