Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary
edited by Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, & Irené Wotherspoon (Oxford)

How would a person in the early 1600s call someone an idiot? “Half-wit” is tempting, but it turns out to date from a century-and-a-half later. “Chucklehead” is no good either (1731), but “blockhead” (1549) is fine, as might be the beautiful “obstupefact” (1601). “Dunderwhelp” (1621) is pushing it, but you’ll be fine with “dullard” (1440), “blockhead” (1549), “idiot” itself (1375), or, of course, the classic “fool” (1275). If you are interested in nicer distinctions, decide whether you mean a “person of weak intellect” (“wattle-head”, 1613), a “crazy person” (“nidiot”, 1534-1613, or “moonling”, 1616), or a “confused, muddled person” (“mafflard”, 1450). Should you desire to reach further back into the past, before the advent even of “fool”, choose from Old English “sotman” or “unandgitfull”, among other treasures from the deep word-hoard. Continued →

As I sighed and sheepishly typed in “wings” yet again, I knew what I was doing. I was satisficing. Scribblenauts, one of the most deeply frustrating amazing games I have ever played, dares you to be as surreal and inventive as possible. It awards bonuses and style points, and challenges you to complete the same level in different ways. It is a glorious feeling when you see that, yes, sure, you can rope that sheep to a hot-air balloon and fly it back to his friends. And yet, if inspiration runs dry, you find yourself falling back on a few old standbys: even if some of what should be uber-powerful objects are cunningly weakened (it is somehow heartbreaking even to a non-believer to see how easily God can be killed), you develop a small repertoire of get-out-of-jail-free cards. You feel guilty, but you do it anyway, because there’s always the next level to check out. In decision theory and economics, this kind of behaviour — choosing a good-enough approach rather than seeking to optimize or maximize — is called satisficing. And I think videogames too often encourage it. Continued →

One of the strangest novels ever written sees the hero, disgusted with bourgeois society, lock himself away in solitude to pursue artificial pleasures. Des Esseintes, the hero of Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884), constructs a device to blend liqueurs in unprecedented combinations, sows a garden with freak plants, tries his hand at making perfume and has a tortoise’s shell encrusted with gems. The book was later said to be part of a fin-de-siècle artistic movement, characterised by a kind of aestheticised neuroticism, whose members were dubbed the décadents.

Locking oneself away to pursue artificial pleasures, of course, is one possible description of playing videogames. You could write a contemporary version of À Rebours in which the hero isolated himself from society with a house full of consoles, which would add to Huysmans’s principled décadence a more depressing cast of decadence in the modern English sense of unhealthy self-indulgence. Continued →

Top 10 videogames of the decade

Everyone seems to be compiling lists of the best games of the decade,¹ so here, with minimal special pleading or argumentation,² is mine. A link is given if I have previously written about the game in question. Nota bene: this is not just some personal list of games that I happen to have liked during the noughties; this is The One True Objective Trigger Happy™-Endorsed List of the Ten Best Games of the Decade, and any different list is simply wrong, mmkay?³
Continued →

1. Apart from Action Button, who are doing the 33 best games of all time. Their list is wrong, of course, but interestingly wrong. ↩
2. Except in footnotes. ↩
3. Especially if it has Bioshock on it. Jesus. ↩

Shoplifting from American Apparel
by Tao Lin (Melville House)

Writing that looks artless is a difficult trick to pull off. This trancelike and often hilarious novella by a cultish young New York writer is all about that trick, and the unusual pleasures it smuggles in just below its seemingly flat surface. The tone of apparently apathetic hipsterism is set early on:

“You know those people that get up every day, and do things,” said Luis.
“I’m going to eat cereal even though I’m not hungry,” said Sam.
“And are real proactive,” said Luis. “And like are getting things done, and never quit their jobs. Those people suck.”

The conversation is reported with the usual novelistic markers of dialogue (speech marks, “said Luis”, “said Sam”), and yet Luis and Sam are not in the same room; they are not even talking, but conversing on “Gmail chat”. A common literary approach is to transcribe such exchanges in a sans-serif font; in writing them instead as traditional conversations, Lin is arguing that, for his characters, this constitutes talking to someone just as much as standing in front of them and speaking aloud. Continued →

Watching the latest season of 24 with increasing apathy, punctuated by bitter, incredulous chuckling, I realised that a lot of TV execs still don’t get it. They think that, since they are competing with videogames for viewers’ time, they have to make something that is just as hyperactive and contemptuous of the audience’s intelligence as they imagine videogames to be. The truth is that 24, in its long downward spiral into crayon-scrawled decadence, is now far stupider than many videogames.

From the heights of season 2′s finale (a feast of finely choreographed unarmed combat and then shooting that paid knowing homage to Lee and Norris in Way of the Dragon), 24 has become a freakshow of moronic and illogical tactics, with cause and effect floating morbidly untethered. Jack kills a hitman adversary by throwing a screwdriver hard enough to pierce a Kevlar vest. Tony prevents his colleague from shooting an FBI agent, only to kill the agent himself with his bare hands. Jack and Tony pick off a couple of thugs in the docks by luring them into an ambush of silenced fire; and then, instead of continuing this winning tactic, decide to engage the rest of the enemies all at once even though they are still vastly outnumbered. None of it makes sense any more, cries the impotently fist-pounding viewer.

The irony is that for a large proportion of the audience, what makes sense to us in such fictional situations is what we have been taught by videogames. Continued →

The Idea of Justice
by Amartya Sen (Allen Lane)

Humans are often misled by abstract nouns of their own making, and sometimes the bamboozlement can last centuries or more. Because one can say the word “justice”, one might conclude that a singular thing or essence called “justice” actually exists. And so one could spend a life trying to figure out what this abstract animal called “justice” really is, and fail to pay much attention to problems of justice in the world.

The eminent professor and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has chosen for his deeply interesting synthesis of political philosophy, economics, and “social choice theory” a title that might at first appear rather bland, but it is holding two opposing ideas in a kind of dynamic stasis. Half the implication is indeed that it is possible to spend too much time on justice-as-a-mere-idea. But the other half is an insistence that justice-the-idea could be reengineered to work better as a basis for “practical reasoning”, such that it might improve the world. Continued →

The Good Angel of Death
by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Andrew Bromfield (Harvill Secker)

Kolya Sotnikov is a Russian night-watchman at a Kiev storehouse that contains cans of hallucinogenic drugs labelled as baby-food. The previous owners of his new flat left behind a curious volume hidden in a copy of War and Peace, containing marginalia that fire his imagination. He sets off on a picaresque journey in search of something buried in the sands of Kazakhstan by a much-loved Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko. Crossing the Caspian sea in a floating fish-processing plant, Kolya wanders unprepared into the desert, where he surprisingly acquires a Kazakh wife, and gets caught up with a couple of Ukrainian nationalists and a colonel from the secret police. Continued →

Wandering the streets of an unfamiliar city, I catch myself thinking “Hey, this is a pretty open-world experience” — one of those uncanny moments when you see life in videogaming terms, like scouting out ideal sniper positions on actual rooftops or visualizing yourself performing a nifty bit of CQC on an antisocial fellow commuter.

As an advertising promise, “open world” is the new AI. Even iD, kings of the two-and-a-half-dimensional maze shooter, are going all Fallout 3 with the upcoming Rage. Of course, the roots of the open-world ideal lie in 8-bit-era classics such as Elite and Tir Na Nog. But in the modern era, largely thanks to the success of GTA3 and its successors, “open world” has become a must-have fashionable feature, even for games that an open world renders more irritating and less fun. Continued →

Singing robots, 8-bit synths, and even more guitars — Supreme Ultimate Fist hopes you like his new direction:

How ought we to respond to fulminations against videogames by people who don’t play them? A great many, of course, may be safely ignored. But when an interesting writer decides to take a passing kick at games, it can be worth digging for the grain of truth in the stereotypical criticism. A case in point: recently, I was reading an article by the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, published in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza last spring, which after a meditative beginning about language and exile suddenly targets videogames, along with TV and cinema – they all purvey, he argues, a kind of Manichean pornography. Continued →

Occupied City
by David Peace (Faber)

In Tokyo on 26 January, 1948, a man walked into a branch of the Teigin Bank, claiming to be a public health official sent to vaccinate the staff against dysentery. What he made them drink was poison. Twelve died. Later, a watercolour artist called Hirasawa Sadamichi was arrested for the crime and confessed, even though witnesses did not identify him as the murderer. Hirasawa later recanted his confession but was sentenced to death anyway, despite the absence of any other evidence as to his guilt. No Japanese justice minister ever authorized his execution, so he died in prison in 1987, having lived on death row for 32 years. The crime has never been definitively solved, and a campaign to clear Hirasawa’s name continues.

Such is the plot basis of Occupied City, and it is all historical fact. The question for the writer of true-crime novelizations, then, is how to arrange the facts aesthetically, and to justify processing them into fiction. Continued →