Gone to America

I wonder if I have any readers left. I think it’s time I stopped opening every post with an apology for not having written it sooner. I’ll just accept that that’s the way it’s going to be and move on. I had an interesting weekend, but I wasn’t inspired to write about it. That’s just the way it is. I went to Fire Island for Mike’s bachelor party, which was awesome.

I had no real idea that Fire Island existed. I mean, I knew about it in the abstract, but I didn’t really know what to expect. Mike and his buddies grew up on Long Island and used to hang out there fairly often, but it was all new to me. It’s like a little slice of California two hours outside New York. A couple of trains, a taxi and a ferry and there you are. I hope I have a good reason to go back there at some point. New York is still better than California, but it was very refreshing to be somewhere with a distinctly different vibe – somewhere where the word “vibe” can be employed unironically. A change is as good as a rest. It’s a further example of what a compact and convenient place New York is – it even contains somewhere entirely different to itself.

It’s closeness will be an advantage given my newly straitened circumstances vis-a-vis holiday time. That’s right, I have agreed to join corporate America. This will provide me with some financial security, and various sundry benefits. It also basically means that I have no time off ever again. Well, ok, I have some holiday time but compared to the freelance existence it seems like nothing at all. I’ve never had a job. I wonder what it’s like?

The day I agreed the company’s stock dropped dramatically. This clearly wasn’t actually anything to do with me, but still. I haven’t actually been hired yet, I should point out – there’s still paperwork. Maybe there’s still time to change my mind…

But that didn’t really inspire me to write either. I was actually going to wait until everything was all signed before announcing it, but the segue from the Fire Island thing was just too good to pass up. No, I was inspired to fire up the old browser by a link I came across in the Guardian Gamesblog to a page dedicated to the most important magazine of my youth – Zzap 64! The best magazine ever! Well, the best one dedicated to the Commodore 64 anyway. Big nostalgia trip.

I love computers. Always have. I love interacting with them. I love making them do things. My Dad bought a ZX81 back to the house, many years ago. It was frustrating, typing in line after line of BASIC and losing it all when the 16k RAM block slipped a little, but I spent hours starting at that monitor. Well, the TV. I used to make a point of going into all the computer shops in town and ogling the demos. QTH on Dawson Street, Tomorrow’s World in the Grafton Arcade, Peat’s on Parnell Street… I remember when my parents bought me the Commodore from some broke student out of the pages of Buy and Sell. Games! Ah, the games. Hours and hours and hours.

But I’ve always enjoyed all aspects of computers. When my parents got a PC (an Amstrad 1512 – my urging may have been a factor) I spent lots of time playing with DOS, writing .BAT files and messing with shareware programs from the 5.25” Diskettes on the covers of PC magazines – raytracers, animation programs, speech simulators, whatever. For some reason that was as fun to me as games, and it still is. I like getting new software and figuring it out, whether its Reason or Filemaker Pro or ProTools or Excel or Photoshop or Half Life 2, or figuring out how to put up a web page, or wirelessly network, or design my own ringtone. It’s all the same kind of fun to me.

Since starting work in the videogame industry I’ve been reading up on it. Lots of interesting discussion. What’s the role of narrative? Is gameplay sufficient? Is narrative necessary? Is it really a “character” if it’s entirely player controlled? Does narrative help with immersion? Is immersion necessary? What makes games fun? Is it because interactive stories are fun? Because they allow us to experience a state of flow? I don’t really know. It’s difficult to say why media is fun. I know that my joy in computer games is more closely related to my joy in computer software in general than it is to, say, my joy in movies or books. Not inferior, but distinct. And frankly more useful in the modern world – my facility with computers (I’m untrained, so obviously there’s a lot of stuff I don’t know at all) has been a constant professional advantage.

Anyway my enjoyment is sincere. And I resent it being characterised as somehow dirty by people who don’t share it. I realise that Hillary Clinton et al aren’t targeting all games, but they might as well be. San Andreas (and you may find this hard to believe, but my working on it hasn’t influenced my opinion) is a great game. Vice City was a great game. Not for kids, sure. Why should everything be for kids? I don’t want to get into the specifics of the whole Hot Coffee thing. It’s not really the point. Sure, it’s the reason for the current kerfuffle but the culture was obviously already at some kind of tipping point for it to be such a big deal (for those of you in the rest of the world, trust me – in the States it’s a big deal).

Reading the gamer sites is very frustrating – people making the same arguments over and over again, talking only to themselves. I used to think that the problem was basically that there was a generation that didn’t understand that games could be for adults. I still think that’s a factor, but it goes deeper. The real problem is that there is a lot of people – a majority, even – who don’t understand that computer games are fun. They specifically don’t understand how they’re fun. They see people shooting and being shot in the game, and assume that any enjoyment of that translates to actually enjoying shooting real people. Even if it’s a suppressed urge, it must be an urge, right? If you enjoy simulated violence you must be trembling on the verge of committing real violence, right? No! It’s different!

Everybody knows what enjoying a movie or a book is like – well, most people in this culture anyway – but not video games. I don’t know how to help this situation. I can’t think how to describe the pleasure of gaming to someone who doesn’t share it. It’s frustrating. It’s probably a lot like being a teenager in the fifties. You can’t explain why Elvis is cool, you just have to wait until he’s been around so long that even those who will never understand or approve just have to put up with his existence. Maybe Rockstar should join the army. I’ll suggest it.

Anyway, that’s why this current controversy is so irksome. They just don’t understand! It’s as if they want me to feel that my hobby is some kind of perversion, tolerated only because of those regrettable free speech provisions in the Constitution. I feel the same way I did when my parents tried to prevent me reading The Killing Joke as a teenager. Didn’t they get it? It was art! There was such an unbridgeable gulf between what I saw in it and what they saw in it – a violent comic. A violent game. I suppose these struggles are eternal. I wonder what I’ll be violently objecting to? At least I can be sure that as a rational human being I will actually be correct in my assessment of the threat, unlike all those previous generations.