Below is the text, more or less, of the keynote presentation I gave at the very awesome F.R.O.G. conference, which took place in Vienna, October 17–19 2008.

Working for the Man: Against the Employment Paradigm in Videogames¹

Videogames are often discussed under the concept of “play”, but this is not always how gamers themselves talk about their experience: they use instead vocabularies of desperate competition or violence. Take the very common expression of satisfaction after completing a game: “I beat the game.” What exactly does it mean to beat a game? You can’t have a meaningful contest against an inert digital artefact. From the game’s point of view, you did not beat it. On the contrary, you did exactly what the game wanted you to do, every step of the way. You didn’t play the game, you performed the operations it demanded of you, like an obedient employee. The game was a task of labour. From this perspective, playing a videogame looks as much like work as play.

Of course work is a large component of many types of game. The professional chess player competing in a tournament game does not have the carefree, leisurely attitude sometimes implied by the term “playing”: she is performing massive amounts of cognitive work. Similarly with poker players or tennis players: they are not merely fooling around but labouring mightily. Because it has rules, a game is never just a game but also a system of coercion, freely entered into. This in itself is not surprising: as Johann Huizinga reminded us, the idea of play can comprehend, and is not threatened by, a fanatical seriousness.² And the workload of videogames in particular is recognised in their description by some scholars as a species of “ergodic literature”.

But videogames seem more and more to resemble work in a different sense: working for the Man. They hire us for imaginary, meaningless jobs that replicate the structures of real-world employment. Continued →

1. I also considered the alternative titles “I Got All the Fucking Work I Need“, and “Fuck You, I Won’t Do What You Tell Me“, but I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of swearing in the titles of papers for academic conferences. ↩
2. Huizinga, Johann, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1944; London, 1980). ↩

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 →

The Sentimental Hipsterism of Douglas Coupland

The Gum Thief: A Novel
by Douglas Coupland (Bloomsbury)

What does a geek do when he’s all grown up? He gets serious. Douglas Coupland’s brilliant early novels, such as Generation X (1991) and Microserfs (1995), were authentically zeitgeist-defining comedies of lives saturated in the cultural flood of late modernity. Yet behind the wit and gadget-frippery already lurked a small yearning towards some kind of pseudo-theological transcendence. And as the vivid cataloguing of tech-pop culture eased off in subsequent novels such as Life After God and Girlfriend in a Coma, what was left of the writing was revealed as turgid epiphanic striving. The ebullient geekiness was really always just a cover, it seemed, for cloying morality tales.

Coupland’s mode is Sentimental Hipsterism, in which formal gamesmanship and sardonic humour frame a comforting, vaguely inspirational take-home message. It’s as though a flashy, edgy conjuror were to produce a fluffy bunny at the end, to make the audience go “Aaah” as it files out through the stalls. This style has had an impressive influence. In a way Coupland is the godfather of all that ingenuous, moist-faced sincerity, clothed in tricky threads, perpetrated by a slew of younger writers such as Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer. Continued →

A personal history of electronic writing

For the first time, I no longer have a copy of Microsoft Word installed on either of my computers. That’s some change. I wrote my first two books, and many hundreds of articles, in Word. But I’m writing my third book in an inexpensive yet wonderful piece of Mac-only software written by a single person instead of a “business unit” at Redmond. Scoured of Word, my computers feel clean, refreshed, relieved of a hideous and malign burden. How did it come to this?

I remember when Word was all clean and sci-fi and inspiring, on the sharp monochrome screens of late-1980s and early-1990s Macs. When I was at university, hardly anyone owned a computer. We wrote our final dissertations on Mac Classics running Word in the college Computer Room. Afterwards, when I began to write for newspapers, the first electronic writing tool I owned was one of these:

For some reason the fact that this is called an Elektrische Schreibmaschine in German makes me feel all nostalgic for the ultrasmooth Kraftwerk future it seems I was living back then without even realising it, tapping out theatre reviews on a six-line green LCD (not even backlit), and then watching the typewriter daisywheel chatter back and forth to print a hard copy, that I would then take to the library and send to the TLS or the Independent, via a facsimile machine, at 10p per page. Continued →

On literary style in 2006

There is a mental disease endemic in the middlebrow novel and enthusiastically spread by the vector of reviewers. According to this disease, the florid simile or metaphor is the only index of “literary” quality. If a child’s face is like a plasticene moon, or a thought like a bruised peach, then we must be dealing with a Writer, a Stylist. Certain critics join in, and compete to produce the most fantastical incantatory comparison with fruit or solar system. The master of this art, John Updike, this year published a novel, Terrorist, whose titular Muslim-American protagonist shared, by happy chance, all the fastidious hypersensuousness and incontinent metaphoreering of his author. Free indirect style is all very well, but it must not get in the way of the Writer’s performance.

Other ways exist, of course, to be a stylist. Apparently simpler prose is often welcomed for its disdain of frippery, and hailed as a no-nonsense “plain style”. But there are ways and ways to write simply. Some writers do simple merely because they cannot do anything else: their thoughts do not have sub-clauses. Another species of simplicity, on the other hand, is hard-won, the result of thoughts triaged and chiselled. Continued →

The snob defence

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter
by Steven Johnson (Allen Lane)

I read this book while chain-smoking, glugging whiskey and eating massive quantities of dairy products; now I feel I’ve been had. Not everything bad is good for you. Steven Johnson’s fizzily readable little polemic actually consists of two separate arguments about popular culture. First, he rails against the notion that our culture is dumbing down; he says that TV, films and videogames are better than before. Secondly, he maintains that these things are actually making us more intelligent.

Johnson makes a persuasive case for the first claim. It is true that TV shows such as The West Wing are more complicated than Starsky and Hutch. It is also true that videogames such as SimCity are more complicated than Pac-Man. The uninitiated may learn a lot from Johnson’s entertaining and clever account, in the first section, of the sheer hard work and problem-solving required to navigate a modern videogame. His fine analyses of obscure in-jokes in Seinfeld or the confusing jargon of ER are also illuminating, and he makes the good point that the era of DVD aftersales encourages more subtlety and complexity in television programming. So far, so good. But perhaps these scattered observations do not cohere well enough into a headline-grabbing thesis. So let’s say in addition that this stuff is actually making us smarter. And here the problems begin. Continued →

Faster pussycat, more, more!

American Mania: When More Is Not Enough
by Peter C Whybrow, MD (Norton)
Extreme Cuisine
by Jerry Hopkins (Bloomsbury)
Amped: How Big Air, Big Dollars, and a New Generation Took Sports to the Extreme
by David Browne (Bloomsbury)

It is historically a common complaint that the world is faster, more vulgar, more difficult to cope with, in short more extreme, than at any time previously. And yet those who most loudly decry such perceived changes often seem half in love with them. At least, if you criticise a culture of excess and yourself use sensationalist language with which to do it, you’re part of your own problem. This is the most salient stylistic feature, for example, of Peter Whybrow’s American Mania.

Whybrow diagnoses the whole of US society as suffering from mania. Since he is a practising psychiatrist, he should know better than to apply such medical concepts to a whole culture, but no matter. There is a “frenzy that grips America”. Computers and mobile phones force everyone to work harder and lose sight of the good things in life. “In the lexicon of America’s Fast New World,” the author intones, “the word technology has replaced tranquility.” (Do modern American editions of Wordsworth really speak of emotion recollected in technology? Interesting if true.) People don’t hang out enough with their friends and family, thus ignoring the social bonds that Adam Smith said were a necessary corrollary to the free market. They overeat in compensation, so that “nearly one-third of the U.S. population now struggle[s] with the complications of obesity”. Continued →

Extra final chapter from the 2004 US edition of Trigger Happy

Over the last four years, as the new generation of videogame hardware — Sony’s PlayStation2, Microsoft’s Xbox, and Nintendo’s GameCube — came to maturity, there were a handful of standout videogames. One of the most heavily anticipated was Japanese master Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001), and it represented an ultra-refined concept of the much-hyped though problematic “convergence” with cinema.

As we saw in Chapter 4, the marriage between Hollywood and videogames is an uneasy relationship at best. Since this book was first published, newer examples have only confirmed the problems. Two Tomb Raider films (2001, reviewed here; 2003), starring the admirable Angelina Jolie, destroyed all the dynamic, gymnastic grace of the digital heroine in a mash of fast-cut editing, while ropey computer-graphic special effects and insultingly bad scripts ensured a thoroughgoing cinematic farrago, of which the second iteration was even worse than the first. Meanwhile, Japanese videogame-makers Square spent a reported $80 million on a movie of their long-running Final Fantasy. The new-agey computer-animated feature that resulted, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), was so poorly received that Square had to shut down their newly created film studio almost immediately. Continued →

Chess, art, and literature

One evening, a week into his marriage, Marcel Duchamp stayed up late studying chess problems. The next day, he rose to find that his wife had glued the pieces to the board. From that moment, the marriage was doomed. The young Tolstoy, as a gunnery officer in the Caucasus, deserted his post one night in order to play a game of chess and was arrested; he thus missed out on the St George Cross he was due to be awarded the next day.

The deepest and most inexhaustible of western games has exerted a peculiar fascination for artists. Many of them have designed chess sets; a number of 20th-century examples are now on display in an exhibition at the Gilbert Collection in London’s Somerset House. Continued →

Thomas Pynchon’s glorious invisibility

Thomas Pynchon’s career as one of the 20th century’s most elusive celebrities began in 1963. The 26-year-old’s first novel, V, received a rave review in the New York Times, and Time magazine dispatched a photographer to Mexico City, where the author lived. According to legend, Pynchon jumped out of his apartment window to evade the snapper, and took a bus to the mountains. From then on, he systematically evaded the public eye, refusing to talk to journalists or be photographed; he did not even turn up at the ceremony where Gravity’s Rainbow was honoured with the National Book Award in 1974.

And so the literary genius became a near-mythical figure, a counter-cultural shadow who could never be tracked down. The stories of people who knew him, and people who wish they had, are collected in a new documentary film entitled Thomas Pynchon: A Journey into the Mind of [P.], directed by Fosco and Donatello Dubini. The interviewees cannot even agree on what he looked like: some remember his eyes as green, others swear that they were blue.

One writer, Jules Siegel, tells how his wife ran off with Pynchon in the 1960s, and alleges, bizarrely, that Pynchon was involved with the US government’s LSD experiments on unwitting subjects. Others tell anecdotes of Pynchon haunting bookshops in disguise, or turning up incognito at Pynchon-lookalike parties. The man himself, of course, is nowhere to be seen. Continued →

Towers in imagination

To Reach the Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers
by Philippe Petit
American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center
by William Langewiesche

These two books tell the before and after of a catastrophe. Philippe Petit narrates the almost unbelievable story of how, one morning in 1974, he walked back and forth for an hour across a tightrope illegally rigged between the summits of the World Trade Center. American Ground, meanwhile, is an account of the politics and logistics of the massive clean-up operation after the twin towers’ fall. From walking in the air holding conversations with birds, to tunnelling through the rubble finding charred body parts: such is the change wrought by a handful of fanatics.

The tower of Babel is the ghost that haunts all tall buildings. “Come, let us build ourselves a city,” say the leaders of men in the book of Genesis, “and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.” If I let them do this, thinks God, there’s nothing they won’t stop at, and so the tower is struck down, and the confusion of language begins. Continued →

Exploring sound art

Browsing in a record shop one day, you might come across a CD called Ticker. It’s an album-length recording of a ticking clock. The tick is fed through an echo, and the echoes get faster or slower depending on the body temperature of the artist, Alvin Lucier. He made the recording with thermal sensors attached to his body. Sometimes, perhaps to avoid charges of anthropocentrism, he puts the sensors on a potted plant instead.

This is sound art. Normally, I prefer to listen to music. Shostakovich, Rage Against the Machine, Ibizan trance. Just listening to interesting sounds has struck me as the sort of thing an ultra-stoned hippy might do, pushing a door back and forth for hours and swaying in addled wonder to the melody of the creaks. Continued →