And Now, Video Games

I don’t know about you guys, but trying to be clever is rather exhausting; and while last month’s ‘what is art, what is life’ vibe was great fun to discuss, it was a bit tough on the brain when things like exams and the growing sense of failure and pointlessness to one’s own existence are rearing their ugly heads for all of us once more. As ever, you guys are free to take this post and respond to it in any way you like, but I’d like a less brain-battering topic for the next month or so: so here are my five favourite video games (because I’ve been reading a lot of Buzzfeed lists lately) in no particular order (because the list is a poor form of responding to art).

Mass Effect 2 – Not its sequel, Mass Effect 3, but the second in BioWare’s sci-fi epic. The outline of the game is simple – aliens that are a smaller minion of a larger foe threatens humanity, you must stop them, etc. etc. – but the way this narrative is told is spectacular. Obviously, there’s the famously interactive story-telling, but the structure of the game, in which you recruit individual heroes to your team to defeat said threat, generates a dozen or so complex and interesting characters. BioWare builds on this by making those characters interact with each other, making them more than collections of different stats to be used in battle, and into characters as sophisticated and genuine as even the player’s character. Then there’s the sucker punch that any, and probably most, of them will die at the end of the game, in ways random enough to make you grieve the cruelness of life, but dependent on your own failures enough to make you feel responsible for their losses.

Fire Emblem: The Sword Of Flame – I’ve only started playing this decade-old turn-based strategy game this year, honestly after wondering who the Hell Marth and Roy were from Smash Bros., and it’s fantastic. It’s a combination of strategy – you move your units around a map, Civilisation-style – and RPG – these units are characters, with their own personalities and stats that develop as they fight in more battles – that works wonderfully. It’s also cruel, with all destroyed units amounting to character deaths, and I’ve suffered the heartbreak of losing three warriors in a sidequest in which all I got for completing it was more inventory space. And this might be Raging Feminist James popping up again, but the first character you meet is a woman who’s not a mage or an archer but an actual warrior with a sword who wears more than just underwear and doesn’t have a man to love and define herself through and this was 2003 people can we not build on this success?!

Darkest Dungeon – Another game I’ve played recently, this is an indie game you can get from Steam for about fifteen quid, developed by Red Hook. It’s relatively formulaic, with you controlling a band of heroes who venture into your family’s ruined mansion and grounds to destroy the evil that forced your family out, and it plays like a dungeon crawler with Final Fantasy-style turn-based combat. But the thematic emphasis is on the psychological trauma of your heroes; they have a Stress meter that fills as their HP falls, and can lead to conditions like masochism and fear being afflicted on them. There are a few good traits too, like virtuous and courageous, which add just enough random chance and hope to make the game slightly less depressing than watching a particularly good performance of King Lear.

Super Mario Sunshine – When people say ‘this is my childhood’, this is what they mean: I got this game just after coming out of the hospital for being diagnosed with diabetes, and while I wasn’t depressed or anything as a result, it was pretty cool to piss off to an island of dumpy blue people and Yoshi instead of face the reality of oh god yet more injections. The game departs from most Mario games, including the platforming aid FLUDD, having voice acting, introducing Bowser Jr., etc., and is genuine fun as a result; I don’t feel the series loses its simple charm for these additions, and mechanics like FLUDD’s interchangeable nozzles add a lot of gameplay variety that you don’t really get until Mario Galaxy a few years later and the introduction of gravity-based platforming.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – One of those older bits of nerdy culture that has spawned memes and references from people who never played the original game (like this gem that I too indulge in shamefully), this is basically a visual novel set in a courtroom cunningly disguised as a video game. The trials are painfully linear – you have options of what to do, but the single ‘correct’ choice feeds into a linear narrative, and all the other choices are dismissed in the game – but the characters are wonderful, the setting vague enough to be relevant a decade after its production, yet similar to real-world cities and cultures so that it’s not totally a work of fiction. There’s also the peerless Steel Samurai theme, which helps.

Just Middle-Class White People

Rhavine your challenge interested me, and I’m never one to back down from an upsetting experience for no gain other than to say I’ve done it, so I too shall be listening to Nicki Minaj this weekend; although while I’m talking about her, I can’t stress enough that it’ll be a tough gig unseating Canadian MC Eternia from the top of my list of female rappers – seriously go listen to To The Future.

Izzy, you mentioned that your education is ‘middle-class white people with a twist’ – I envy said twist, personally. At uni, out course is literally the Old, Rich, Middle-Class White Heterosexual Cisgendered Dudes Course; it took until February for a writer to pop up that didn’t fit this description – and even then it was Mary Wollstonecraft (a middle-class, white heterosexual cisgendered woman) – and that was part of our Intellectual and Cultural Sources module, not the main Narrative Texts course.

It strikes me that the idea of a canon seems to be reinforced the higher up the education system you go, therefore: when I was in primary school, teachers would be happy with us reading anything we liked, simply because when you’re seven, doing anything more intellectually stimulating than poking crayons up your nose must be relentlessly encouraged. Then in secondary school, there was a loose idea of a canon, that you need to read things like Dante to get into uni, but it’s really not essential; this is why I’m rather well-versed in Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and know nothing about whatever the fuck the Romantic movement is.

To me, this not only strengthens the rigidity of a cultural canon – that only some things can be read and interpreted at degree level – but impacts negatively on those things outside the canon too; non-canonical texts are suddenly infantile, or not ‘proper’ literature, meaning they are defined with explicitly negative traits, instead of the (harmful yet not as demeaning) definition in the negative as merely ‘non-canonical’.

Because, if the point of art is to make us feel things, I’ve had much stronger responses to games, books, films and music outside of a canon than I have to those within it; I was much more distraught at the good ending of Sucker Punch’s excellent game inFamous 2, for instance, than I’ve been at any point in a Shakespeare play. This isn’t to say that the former is objectively more emotional than the latter, but in an online world where we are more connected to each other than ever, and freer to express our individuality and ideas, I think its of greater artistic and intellectual value to interrogate our preferences, and have discussions with each other about why we feel what we feel, and why things are in our individual cultural canons, rather than everyone decide that these ten books are the ‘clever’ ones, and we can only ever discuss them.

This is why I’m annoyed at the idea of a canon, and the narrow focus of the first year of my degree; I’ve been raised in a society that relentlessly emphasises individuality and self-expression – be it through fashion, tastes in music, or writing platforms like our very own WordPress – and so am uncomfortable being told what to read by people who died a generation before this stuff was even conceived of (the UCL English course has not changed in 60 years).

But it’s not like I can comment on literary or creative diversity; I’m a white, cisgendered dude myself, so obviously I can’t have meaningful opinions about diversity, right?

Engaging With Music

Because I’m doing (by which I mean ‘ignoring in favour of seeing friends and running for a position on the Dodgeball Team Committee) a degree at the moment, I’ve not got oodles of time for a post, but there was one thing I picked up on in your post Izzy, your engagement with books. You said that you hadn’t engaged with another art form as intensely as books and, while I’d agree that books are probably my number one in terms of engagement, music is pretty high on the list.

It’s an obvious point to make, but one worth making nonetheless, that music combines both lyrical and verbal ideas, and musical ones; there’s the obvious point that bands include guitarists as well as a singer, but even the words of a song themselves are designed to be performed in a public place moreso than even the most bold, musical lines of poetry. And while this has kinda shot the music industry in the foot – because it’s easier to make something catchy than make something meaningful, and both approaches to music sell records so we’ve suddenly got a whole load of catchy crap on radios and in clubs – there are a load of bands and songs that are meaningful, that will be listed in the remainder of this post, because I’m too busy at the moment to even come up with my own post structure, let alone topic.

Anything by Rise Against

My friends who aren’t Rise Against fans are probably sick of hearing this, but this obnoxious punk band aren’t just the best group I’ve heard musically, but might be responsible for more life-changing quotes than every ‘literary’ text I’ve ever read in my life: ‘I found God in the sound of your factories burning down’ inverts the typical American capitalist interpretation of God, as condoning the freedom to better oneself at the detriment of things like the environment; ‘Would God bless our murder of the innocent? / Would God bless our war based on oil? / Would God bless our money-hungry Government? / Would God bless our ineffective court systems? / God bless the sweatshops we run, / God bless America!’ is an even more explicit two fingers to the illogical divine justification of US economic and political actions over the last generation or so; ‘From the coffins full of kindergarteners, / Is this what you call free?’ attacks lax gun laws; and there’s my personal favourite, ‘How we survive is what makes us who we are’. Ironically, I can’t put into words my awesome appreciation for this band.

Classified

A Canadian rapper who manages to not be racist, sexist (apart from one line that he now sings differently in live performances) or homophobic (apart from one line from a song he no longer performs live); it’s those examples of growth and personal improvement over time that make him such a good guy to me. He also makes puns, out of light-hearted topics as well as suicide – ‘I’ll be blunt, we all thought about suicide once / But I guess I’m not selfish enough and didn’t make the cut’ – showing a courage and skill in attacking and defusing taboo topics with comedy.

Flobots

A mix of rap and punk; the repeated line ‘I can end the planet in a Holocaust’ at the end of their popular Handlebars is a combination of the meaningful and the stunningly repetitive, that really sticks with you as the song fades out.

The Bloodhound Gang

But not every meaningful song has to be serious! This comedy rap-rock group include such masterpieces as The Bad Touch, a song consisting entirely of creepy yet superbly eloquent pickup lines, and The Ballad Of Chasey Lane, a song about a prostitute, and the immortal repeated line ‘Mom and Dad, this is Chasey Lane / Chasey, meet my Mom and Dad / Now show us them titties! / Show us them titties! (etc.)’, which is honestly how I intend to introduce every friend I make to my parents in the future.

And I’d finish this off with some judgement about the music industry itself and music’s relation to poetry, but I can’t think of anything. Sorry Rhavine, I don’t know if I’ve given you much to work with here

Shark-Frakking-Nado

Izzy’s kitten for Christmas? Can’t be doing with that, it’s too cute.

Bradley’s apocalypse for Christmas? Getting warmer, but without any evidence of this apocalypse it’s just a pipedream.

Let me present you guys with what I consider to be the greatest of Christmas presents (except potentially The Incredibles on Gamecube that I got one year): the film Sharknado on DVD (do the kids still use those?). It has both apocalyptic destruction, and inexplicably airborne sharks, what more could you want?!

All joking and silly present-ranking aside, our last three posts have summed up for me what Christmas is actually about; the whole idea of ‘giving’ and ‘family’ are all well and good, but I think they’re more superficial than we appreciate – the true purpose behind Christmas is to do whatever you want, the gift-giving and Christmas Day face-stuffing are just means to that end.

Our insanely materialistic culture helps with that ‘do whatever you want’ end: you want to go to an abandoned island and survive in improbably violent and sadistic means? Here’s the new Tomb Raider. You want to change your physical appearance? Here’s some cosmetics and a fifty quid New Look voucher. You want to get pissed really quickly and forget the whole day in the best way possible? Well, we’re gonna soak the Christmas pudding in brandy, so knock yourself out.

The family aspect fits with this as well, as the whole ideal of ‘family’ as a warm, secure, loving place of relaxation and unwavering acceptance is made increasingly dreamlike every day as we have to work longer hours for less money in increasingly dire and depressing places (I, for one, would consider a job at McDonalds in three years’ time an above-average use of my degree). The not-Christmas parts of the year end up romanticising this notion of the awesomeness of one’s family, so as soon as the Christmas season gets underway, we yearn for that security and stability family offers, so we piss off home with our laundry and scraped 2.1s in essays for some relaxation.

But this focus on choice is best exemplified through the fact that Christmas, regardless of what all the TV adverts tell us, is perhaps the most individual holiday of the year. While Easter has been bastardised from a religious celebration into a cult of personality around a chocolate egg-shitting rabbit-god and Halloween has long since forsaken its spiritual roots for dressing up and getting waster, the sheer religious significance of the theological bit of Christianity – the birth of the one dude who’ll, you know, save all of mankind – means that Christmas can more easily be celebrated in its original religious context than these other celebrations; a branch of my family goes to church every Christmas day, even the more agnostic members of the branch, because the religious bit of Christmas is more ingrained than any other celebration.

And for all my bitching about the consumerism of Christmas, this has helped people of other faiths get involved in the festivities, with the subtle shift from overtly Christian messages to more generic ‘meanings’ of peace and hope resulting in friends of mine, from Jewish, Islamic and Atheist backgrounds, all sticking a star on a tree and dropping 300 quid on presents for people they don’t really know. There’s been a weird reinforcing and softening of the religious element of Christmas, basically letting anyone in on the fun.

Meanwhile, my Christmas has consisted of getting a wonderfully crap film and staying slumped in a corner of a mate’s flat until three in the morning after a party, and will revolve around going home to pick up some insulin and money from my family so I can continue to buy food without having a job before eating a fuck-ton of pigs in blankets, and none of those things really come under any of the ways of enjoying Christmas I’ve mentioned before.

So whether it’s kittens or apocalypses, we can all enjoy Christmas the way we want to – just don’t feel obliged to tweet incessantly about it, I’m sure that’s not what God had in mind when he started the whole Christmas thing.

I Like Snow Sadistically

I swear to God guys, one month in and you’ve both missed post deadlines? Maybe we should include harsher punishments for repeat offences – I’m thinking hanging, drawing and quartering next time for you Bradley? And don’t worry Izzy, we’ll think of some appropriate punishment, I’m sure (sharpens quartering weapons).

But back to the discussion at hand; Izzy, you took us in the delightfully British step of talking about the weather, and I’d like to continue that theme, particularly with regards to snow. I was going to bitch about how awful and impractical snow is, and how all it does is give things falling from the sky a bad name compared to rain and hail, both of which I am a fan.

I then realised that I’m also a fan of snow (completing an admiring trifecta of things dropped on us by the gods, if nothing else), simply because it makes life harder for other people. Yes, I’ve built snowpeople and made snowangels in my time, but I’ve gotten much more amusement from trekking through feet of the damn stuff to school in January, watching smaller students and foolish teachers in heels and dress shoes tumble about like this moron, or gang up on each other in ridiculously one-sided snowball fights that left some poor sods drenched, and others running into the distance, cackling in a jaunty manner.

These days it’s arguably better, as now I can look at people making tits of themselves from the comfort of my own home, and we get the now-annual ‘Winter Is Cold’ story plastered all over the main news outlets, a tragic piece of non-news that will surely dwarf the Autumn Statement, Ebola, ISIS, and the work of Football Baby, despite making no sense whatsoever – transpose the model to Summer; would it be news that the sun is visible in the sky for long periods of the day?

Even when I’m outside and laughing at the snow-based misfortune of others I’m feeling great, because I do sensible things like wear coats and trainers, and generally try not to give a toss about the weather – I need to get from point A to B, so worrying that there’s snow in the way will slow me down from this objective that will be completed eventually, so is pointless – whereas many others don’t.

So bring on the snow, bring on the cold, and bring on general Wintery bullshit; I can’t wait to see how my friends from warmer places react.

On Beginnings And Endings

Howdy all,

This is the first post on the Zone Of Proximal Development (referred to in italics because it’s clearly a significant literary work – Izzy and Bradley, feel free to tell me to stop doing that), a blog that’s supposed to be about conversation, and building on what each other says; sadly, I’ve got nothing to build upon or react to, so I’ll begin this blog in a rather obvious fashion, by talking about beginnings.

November has been a month of beginnings for me, all three days of it; while most years I’ve spent this month grinding out work in preparation for oh so important GCSE Controlled Assessments around Christmas, or winding down after Halloween because, let’s be honest, it takes a good few months to get over going back to school after Summer, this year has been full of starting new stuff. This blog, for instance, came into being yesterday, I’m doing NaNoWriMo, which involves starting a novel from scratch, and I’m starting to take my English degree seriously, after barely concentrating on it for the last six weeks; I plan to read Ovid, Malory, Tristram Shandy and Ulysses in a week because frak yeah, literature!

I’ll also be starting new things as the month progresses: I plan to review trips to Rise Against and The Orwells gigs for a magazine here at UCL, and going to see The Orwells for the first time will be a new experience in of itself. I’ll also write a mid-season review of The Apprentice in a few weeks for that magazine, so this month will be my first forays into something that resembles actual journalism, as opposed to just writing self-interested blog posts and crappy novels that’ll never see the light of day.

But although November has become a month of starting stuff, I can’t really see a defined point of ending stuff anywhere in the near future: maybe Christmas, at the end of my first term – surely I’ll be catching up on and getting ahead with reading; perhaps Summer, the end of my first year at university – I plan to get a job, or try writing for local newspapers to get some experience of professional journalism. Whichever way you slice it, I’ll probably be starting new things to take the place of old things for the foreseeable future, mental breakdowns aside.

Because that which begins doesn’t have to end: my personal blog is hardly the epitome of endlessness, but I’ve been posting almost every day for well over a year now, and I have no intention of stopping that. Also, things might not end, but simply change into other things: my reading of Tristram Shandy will certainly come to and end, but will be replaced by Ulysses, Mill on the Floss, and Frederick Douglass at various points down the line. Even if my personal blog does end, I’ve got this blog, that I’m very excited about and, if all goes according to plan, will probably get more enjoyment out of than my private one, which doesn’t have the same communal elements to it; this blog could have begun, and not end any time soon, mental breakdowns of Bradley and Izzy aside.

Without getting too bullshity philospher on you guys, I’m terrified of not doing stuff, and having long periods where I don’t have projects to work on – I nearly went insane with boredom with the three months of Summer I had this year. And so maybe I’m more comfortable starting things than ending them, that I’m prepared to have a million projects and activities going at once, and then throw one more onto the pile, just so I know I have something to do every day. I’m seeing this month that balancing a novel, two blogs, and 200 pages of Sterne’s rage-inducing digressions is hard work, but if someone offered me a part-time job or a new club, I’d probably take it; Hell, I’m going to Karate tonight, Handball tomorrow, board games on Wednesday, and Dodgeball on Friday and maybe even Thursday too.

So I’m a fan of beginnings, and less so endings; but until I’m hospitalised with stress, or literally run out of hours in the day to do things, I don’t plan on ending anything I’ve started anytime soon.

– James