It’s a brilliant, evocative work of interactive folktale that interrogates our assumptions about choice, success and failure, and the medium of the videogame itself. It’s a supremely boring collection of FMVs with pretensions to interactivity that very quickly wears out its joke about control and becomes a tedious slab of nihilistic whimsy. Continued →

It was when I climbed to the mountain lodge, hid inside a bush across the wooden drawbridge, and fired a single shot from my flare pistol. The flare ignited the lodge, and the guards started running around in a blind panic. I just sat there, listening to the cries of my target inside the lodge as it smoked and burned, until he fell silent. Job done. I got off the mountain fast and proud. That’s one stealthy psychotic safari outing. That’s power. Continued →

You can’t always get what you want. I have just offered my enemies money for reconstruction, and they laughed in my face: in view of my recent “security actions” (um, political assassinations using Apache helicopters), no one believes that I really mean well. To add insult to injury, opposition members of my own government have called my tenure a “comedy of errors”. I realize that everything I do is an act of symbolic communication, and so my actions need to represent a consistent narrative. Lesson learned: I ease border controls and trade restrictions, arrest a few of my own extremist nutters, and eventually another offer of aid is accepted. I do better in the polls, and soon I am rewarded with a video of bikini’d babes walking along a beach, tickled by the “Winds of Peace”. I have reached a pacific milestone. But the tension is not over yet. Continued →

Emergency: One Man’s Story of a Dangerous World and How to Stay Alive in It
by Neil Strauss (Canongate)

Stunt books — in which the author goes off and does something unusual in order to write about it — can be an excellent source of vicarious pleasure. And Neil Strauss — whose previous stunt book, The Game, saw him initiated into the world of “pick-up artists”, who teach geeks algorithms for attracting women — has picked an ideal follow-up stunt for our uncertain times: becoming a survivalist.

“I’ve begun to look at the world through apocalypse eyes,” he declares portentously. What if society breaks down? Could a rock journalist survive in the subsequent atavistic free-for-all? (Strauss’s coinage for this scenario is “a Fliesian world”, as in Lord of the Flies. No, I don’t think it will catch on either.) Continued →

Nobody Move
by Denis Johnson (Picador)

After the 2007 publication of Tree of Smoke, his stupendous 600-page Vietnam-war epic, Denis Johnson might well have wanted to kick back and let off a little steam. He does so in grand style here. Nobody Move is a terse little hardboiled entertainment that originally ran last year as a four-part serial in Playboy magazine. Relatively speaking, the author may be slumming it, but he can’t help slathering the story’s pages in his usual idiosyncratic brilliance. It’s a story of small-time gamblers, crooks and gangsters in the contemporary American west, which opens on a scene of insouciant incongruity. Our hero, Jimmy Luntz, is singing on stage in a barbershop chorus competition. Two pages later he is in a car with a melancholic villain, Gambol, sent by the guy to whom Jimmy owes money. Four pages after that, Jimmy has shot him. Unfortunately, Gambol survives. He and his boss will come after Jimmy hard. Continued →

It’s when I have two men and a dog happily balanced on the undulating form of my giant quadrupedal anthropomorphic caterpillar and then eat a house that I realise this is either one of the most important videogames of recent years, or somehow not a videogame at all. What is this crazy thing called Noby Noby Boy? Continued →

Can a videogame be like a poem? Well, back in the 1980s, Tir Na Nog and Dun Darach raided the mythology of the Celtic sagas; and Lara Croft has just finished doing the same for Norse mythology. Perhaps the Metal Gear Solid series updates the medieval allegory Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, replacing the Green Knight with nuclear-armed giant robots, which is obviously an improvement. The Zelda saga rehearses the epic, episodic romance quest narrative of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Maybe cracking a particularly tough battle in Advance Wars sparks a dopamine rush akin to that furnished by one of William Empson’s anfractuous, hyper-dense poems, and Killzone 2 is the digital equivalent of the comforting ditties of Pam Ayres. Continued →

The Housekeeper and the Professor
by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder (Harvill Secker)

Number theory — what Gauss called “the queen of mathematics”, devoted to the study of numbers and their arcane interrelationships — does not perhaps sound like the most fruitful basis for a poignant domestic drama. And yet this novel, with its skilful admixture of tender atmospherics and stealthy education, has sold more than four million copies in its native Japan. Its unnamed characters suggest archetype or myth; its rapturous concentration on the details of weather and cooking provide a satisfyingly textured foundation. Continued →

The Immortals: A Novel
by Amit Chaudhuri (Picador)

A fifth of the way through this novel, one of its characters, a serious-minded teenage boy called Nirmalya, has a presentiment that he is about to figure in a narrative with a particular theme:

It was as if [...] he was now to be caught up, if not as a player then as bystander, in a story of ambition; he wasn’t sure whose — perhaps his own, but if not his entirely, then his parents’, or other people’s, or could it be even the city’s itself?

Indeed, it could be. The city in question is Bombay, whose ambition is visualized, over the book’s chronological span of several years in the 1980s, in passages that observe new building on land reclaimed from the sea, or luxury apartment blocks sprouting incongruously in the middle of treeless wastelands. Continued →

With all the guff surrounding the coming of President Barack Obama, it was easy to overlook one thing: that he had declared war on videogames. “The time has come,” he said in his inauguration address, “to set aside childish things.” He then outlined a vast programme of console destruction, with videogames to be replaced by enforced listening to Brahms, and communal readings of the Federalist Papers and Goethe. America needed to grow up, because playing with virtual soldiers on your Xbox inevitably makes you want to play with real soldiers and send them en masse to attack far-off countries — which had been, after all, one of the many lamentably childish habits of the outgoing administration. Dick Cheney, watching from his wheelchair, muttered “Go fuck yourself”, and then tilted the giant calcified potato of his head back downwards to continue his game of Advance Wars. (Cheney is a particular fan of levels involving Fog of War, and hallucinates unseen weapons of mass destruction in every obscured square.) Continued →

As everyone knows, the two best podcasts on the planet are BBC Radio 4′s In Our Time and Resonance.fm’s One Life Left. You can imagine how thrilled I was this week to appear as a guest on the final episode of OLL’s current season. Or, instead of just imagining it, you can actually listen to the show, here or on iTunes.

The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind
by Jonah Lehrer (Canongate)
The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything
by Ken Robinson with Lou Aronica (Allen Lane)

A great self-help current of philosophy, from the Stoics to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, conveys one simple message: you cannot change the world, but if you understand the bad habits of your thinking you can change how you react to the world, and that way lies wisdom. Modern popular neuroscience often holds out the same promise: armed with the knowledge of what scientists have learned from magnetic imaging of the brain, the reader will end up master of his own mind. If you know how that muscle inside your head works, you can exploit it better. Continued →