There is something haunting about the posable wooden human figures designed for artists. The head a smooth blank mask; expressionless and sexless, the human body reduced to its geometric essence. Echochrome’s protagonist is one of these mannequins, hinting perhaps at an allegory of the relationship between player and game. The wooden doll in the artist’s shop is a mere tool, a puppet to be manipulated in the service of a project about which it knows nothing.

When you play a videogame, are you an artist manipulating your digital wooden puppet as you like on the screen? Or are you instead the puppet itself, led by the nose through a series of arbitrary contortions according to the artist-designer’s purposes, in a weightless dance that soon fades into nothingness? “Congratulations,” the game says at the end, “you adopted all the poses that were required of you. Now you can climb back into your cardboard box until the next time.” Continued →

I am tired of war. The relentless crump and shudder of explosions, and the whine-skip-puff of bullets that miss me by inches; my aching lower back; the cynical global machinations of the military-industrial complex. Sometimes I have to find a quiet place to sit and rest just to calm my shaken mind. War is hell. Continued →

From: Microsoft Propaganda Honcho
To: Microsoft Propaganda Minion
Subject: “Five Misunderstood Features in Windows Vista”

Propaganda Minion,

You remember that a fortnight ago, on my orders, we pulled our propaganda document, “Five Misunderstood Features in Windows Vista”,¹ from the internet only hours after tech bloggers around the world had laughed themselves hoarse over it, and I ordered you to rewrite some of the more misunderstood sections. I have now evaluated your changes in the new version. Continued →

1. Original version [pdf]; new version. ↩

The Gone-Away World
by Nick Harkaway (Heinemann)

The great thing about a post-apocalyptic world is that pretty much anything can happen in it. So it is not excessively implausible when, in the middle of this rambling fantasy-SF-horror-kung-fu novel,¹ a troupe of mime artists turns up in a grimy bar and defuses the ambient threat of violence through the power of melancholic dumb gesture. It’s a very funny scene. The danger, though, is that if anything can happen, the reader might not particularly care what does. Continued →

1. The Guardian here unilaterally inserted the phrase “eagerly awaited”, so that I appeared to be talking, absurdly, about an “eagerly awaited rambling fantasy-SF-horror-kung-fu novel”. The status of the phrase “eagerly awaited” is itself interesting. Who was eagerly awaiting this book? How did the Guardian know about them? It seems more likely that “eagerly awaited” is actually PR code for “much-hyped”, which this book certainly was. But in that case it is not a newspaper’s job to endorse the hype, as it implicitly did here. ↩

The Pirate’s Dilemma
by Matt Mason (Allen Lane)

One couldn’t wish for a more colourful circus of corporate stupidity and vindictiveness than the public actions of the major record labels over the past decade. They have secretly installed spyware on people’s computers and sued American college students; last month, one label filed a US court claim that throwing their promotional CDs in the bin constituted a violation of copyright. At the same time, they have been demanding a tax on iPods, the proceeds from which would flow directly into their pockets, and firing the A&R staff upon whom their future depends. None of this, of course, is meant to protect the interests of musicians, only of their executive leeches.

It is a farcical ongoing case study in how not to respond to what former pirate-radio DJ Matt Mason calls “the pirate’s dilemma”. Continued →

Blogs vs books, from a writer’s point of view

Who needs books, anyway? One interesting kind of response to my previous post about the “experiment” of giving away my book Trigger Happy for free was to point to the financial success of many bloggers, and to say that this was the way forward. Writers should, essentially, forget about the “outdated” model of writing a whole “book” and then figuring out how to sell it. Instant web publishing is what people want: it’s groovy and immediate, edgy, now. In that case, though, what happens to the quality of writing overall?

Any facile comparison of “quality” across different media is asking for a kicking. But I’m going to do it anyway. It seems to me that blogs are the perfect medium for discussing highly topical matters in, say, technology or politics. There are many blogs that I admire and read regularly, and they often provide brilliant demolitions of official narratives, or superior analysis to that offered by complacent and/or flat-out dishonest “professionals” in the corporate media, or just better jokes. That said, I would take everything I read in the blogosphere last year, load it onto a cheap thumbdrive, and happily swap it, in an instant, for a single copy of Denis Johnson’s mind-bendingly magnificent Tree of Smoke. For me, there’s just no contest.

Why should this be so? Is there any reason why some future Denis Johnson couldn’t publish a masterpiece serially on the internet? I think, actually, there might be. Continued →

On writers, ‘digital rights management’, and the internet

(Update: Why write books at all when blogging is the thing? See this new post.)

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money — Samuel Johnson

At the end of last year, I decided to give away my book, Trigger Happy, in DRM-free .pdf format. I called it “a kind of experiment”. Thirty thousand downloads later and counting, it’s time to collate the lab results.

Internet distribution is awesome, but you knew that already. More people got Trigger Happy from this website than ever bought a copy of the printed book. The interest shown in an eight-year-old book about videogames by people as far afield (from my point of view) as Brazil and Russia has been immensely gratifying. My book was converted to be readable on the Nintendo DS; and the Nebraska Library Commission made a spiral-bound printed copy for their collection. Links to the download attracted a lot of attention to this site, and in December there was even an article about the book published in the French newspaper Libération.

All of which is to say, it was a pretty good publicity stunt. It might have sold a few more hard copies; more importantly, it gives my future books a better chance of at least being picked up in a bookstore by people who downloaded this one.

Although I didn’t do it for the money, I was also, of course, interested in testing the idea of giving stuff away and allowing people freely to express their appreciation. So I put a PayPal button below the download. Is this, as some people say, an exciting new internet-age business model for writers and other creative types? Continued →

A figure walks through a dungeon. He is nothing but a pink head with stumpy limbs: his black bowler hat, symbol of the capitalist yoke under which he labours, is his one distinguishing feature. There is only one path ahead through the dungeon, so he walks it. What else is he going to do? As he walks, he is assailed by dictatorial messages from the system, which represents our contemporary porno-military-entertainment complex. These messages pretend a sort of kindness, a desire to help, but really they are telling him what he can and cannot do, what he can and cannot dream. He notices he has weapons, and throws a few, but the system assures him they are useless, brainwashing him into docility. There is an awful reckoning ahead, but the system tells him not to worry. All he has to do is to burn the rope. He walks on, as in a dream.

What rope? Why should he burn it? Why is he here at all? You may as well ask: Why is any of us here, hurrying toward a rope that must be burned, for reasons we cannot understand? Continued →