dwarf

You did, but you forgot

I'm pretty sure they have to be from current UoM students but if I'm desperate I'll let you know (and I don't mean in the sense that I have to resort to your piddling efforts).

I'm going to be the Games Editor for the Manchester student newspaper this coming year. I've never had an editing role before and I'm aware some of you have some relevant experience, so it would be great to hear some of your advice as to how to manage the whole operation. The set-up I'm taking on at the moment involves: - Meetings with the editorial team - Meetings with Games Contributors - A games section email address for receiving article submissions and for requesting review code from publishers - A Facebook group to advertise the section and to encourage newbie writers. Primarily used for discussion amongst contributors. There will be software training and legal advice for editors prior to publication of the first edition. Snippets from my informal application A mixture of tyranny, hubris, and necessity meant that last year's editor contributed somewhere in the region of 40-60% of the overall content for the section. Maintaining a steady stream of articles is going to be the biggest challenge for me, which is why I'm hoping to set up in the freshers fair in order to scout some talent. There's no doubt we need a larger pool of contributors and I don't want to be designating too much time to the role what with it being my final year of study 'n' all. When there's a slow week and I'm not receiving enough submissions, I'm going to need quick and easy article ideas which can be written in advance and published at any time. Under last year's regime a sizeable chunk of the section was reserved for retro games reviews (Retro Corner) but that apparently proved to be a burden to the editor because few students wanted to contribute 800-1200 word pieces of that kind. I'm thinking of having a 'Moments' segment, or something with a similar title, where multiple students contribute a small paragraph each about a 'moment' e.g. a time they raged out, a memorable online session they had, their favourite level etc - something which makes for interesting reading but doesn't take a great deal of effort to write. It would also mean I could set out a schedule so that contributors could work towards dates. I might ask for the odd cartoon as well. Despite having the biggest (potential) reader base of any student newspaper in the country, distribution is still pretty poor. On that basis I won't be killing myself over the role, I won't be taking it overly seriously - it isn't, after all, the grandest of projects - but at the same time I want the section to be of solid quality because it carries my name with it into le public domain every week. If I'm to achieve only one thing with the paper, I hope it is to provide students with a much needed dose of levity on Monday mornings, thereby distracting them, however briefly, from this shit-house world we find ourselves living in.

Networking. Kojima's trying to get balls deep in the TV/film industry and he doesn't care about shafting fans by replacing a beloved voice with one that is droller and infinitely less iconic.

@Goafer Those are some elite photo tekkers. Hype train has just arrived at the platform.

Yeeeeah bled, trains booked and all. It is happening. Any group pics of everyone with annotated forum/real names? I'll be getting into Kings Cross at half 1-ish.

Emphasis on the 'man'. /// I've just booked a room at the same place for £29, so I've had your lives there! (not really, but still) Look forward to seeing some IRL NE-ers. What's the crack with meeting and what sort of stuff is lined up?

This could be interesting. I'd love to see a Quake 3 remake. Those maps were the bomb. Edit: watched the first few minutes of this, it's nuts

The Unfinished Swan is little more than a solid tech demo.

Hannibal is a pile of pretentious guff. It's initially passable, mostly due to Mads Mikkelson's magnetism, but Will Graham's instability grated on me so hard by the end. Repetitive as fuck. The writers probably wank off to themselves in the mirror.

Does anyone watch Utopia on C4? Saw in the ad that Ygritte from GoT was in it, but didn't realise it was in its second series. I'm catching up with S1 on 4oD, no signs of Ygritte so far but it's pretty fucking cool. Check it.

I'd definitely be a bit sheepish. Will see how the money situation is looking closer to the time.

Was really pissed off at missing out on an opportunity to take a sick module on beat writing this year. Spaces filled up too quickly so I asked the course administrator to put me on a waiting list, half-knowing they never amount to anything. As it transpired, some douchebag decided to drop the module AND I NABBED THAT BITCH, DIDN' III? Details?

Fucking hell. Good things don't happen to people, ever. Godspeed, old bean.

Only available for a very limited time if anyone's interested: http://www.theyetee.com/ & Regrettably as an ebook. There are references to the reader holding the book in their hands, the fibrousness of the pages etc which made me feel like a morally repugnant person for not owning it in paperback. There have been some exquisite passages in it thus far.

'Unworldly biology'

If there wasn't already an air of respectability and awesomeness that emanated from your username whenever I scrolled across your posts, there most definitely is now. What a player. What a hunk.

@The Bard I should really be using words like 'didactic' (and 'readerly'/'writerly' would've been useful there too, good ol' Roland (I hate him)) considering I'm a soon-to-be final year student. I blame having only taken English for one year (missed a year by transferring from Economics) and only really trying in the second semester. Gah. The codex thing is exactly it. A great deal of the time the information is simply a given and is sourced from nowhere, or it is delivered in a contrived fashion. And it's something most games don't even care about - as you say games often just subsume filmic apparatuses as if they function exactly the same in both mediums. The games deny anything is amiss with their approach. Half-Life was superb, but so few developers can match Valve's pool of talent. There is obviously a gap between the desire for a purer form of game, and the ability to code it. For example, as is demonstrated in that video, characters address you and speak to you in a normal conversation in Half-Life even when you're dicking around on the other side of the room. Now, to do that is foolish of the player to an extent, but at the same time, the player shouldn't be restricted from doing that if that is the form the game is using. When I played Half-Life, I made sure I was a polite Gordon who would stand to at every cue and pay attention to all conversations and story moments, but even so, there was always the niggling feeling that, were I to piss off, the characters would still go through the same motions without me. That game doesn't treat you as if you are real, in other words. Now, Valve coders, if they were suicidal, could have spent ages programming NPC responses to players who fucked around. NPCs could bark at you to be more polite, grow animated if you threw something at them, ad infinitum, but it would be painstaking, laborious, and it wouldn't be worthwhile. No matter how many responses the world had for your transgression, it would still be imperfect. Besides, the developer commentary run-throughs you could play in The Orange Box showed how much thought went into the design of the game. Fascinating and mind-bending. The general player comes across as some enormously fallible tit in need of permanent care. The Half-Life form can't help but be imperfect. Yet, it is preferable to cut-scenes. The most effective moment in Half-Life 2 Ep.2 (mostly due to the nuts-and-bolts narrative rather than because of the form, I'll admit) is the ending when you are pinned against the wall and you're forced to observe the unfolding horror. Not sure if that reveals anything about this case.

To be fair that was a bit flippant of me. I remember being wowed by Tekken 3 whenever I went to my cousin's house, we'd play that and Driver with all the cheat codes. Tekken 5 was really late in the PS2 cycle and received plaudits for graphics back in the day. Aside from those two, I don't think the series has been too hot. Possibly due to the series being simultaneously tied in with the arcade.

@The Bard No, because I haven't written it yet. It’s a vague and jumbled idea about the agency of the reader/viewer in literature/film and how successful examples in those media, which intimately and more obviously involve the audience within the narrative, could be used as inspiration to make games a 'purer' and more intelligent art form. That’s not to say any conclusion I or someone else makes should funnel all future game development into a certain direction – there will always be room for the entire spectrum of games we have now – but I think the form does need to advance or at least focus on its strengths, its transcendent aspects. Indie developers are peeling the perimeters back all the time. Strap yourself in for some trademark Jayseven quasi-coherent babble. So, the article. I’d possibly mention the way early novelists like Richardson/Fielding made direct appeals to their readers, entreating them (ironically in the latter case) to use the text for their own edification, and the way authors of that ilk try to jump out of the book and clasp the reader’s hand in a bid to win their trust – this isn’t so much about agency but myeh. Then there are the subtler ways of engaging with the audience in books, and I think this was one of the catalysts for my idea, whereby the reader takes on the role of a faceless character in the story. I recently read The Reluctant Fundamentalist which consists entirely of a dramatic monologue. Back story is piped in through a Pakistani’s account of his life, and the reader is restored to a sense of place and time when the speaker (Pakistani man) interrupts himself to 'talk' to the figure opposite him at a restaurant table, offering them food and querying their mannerisms and attitudes. The reader there (in the way I engaged with the text anyway) takes on the persona of the faceless character at the dining table so that the author can probe his/her sensibilities through the eyes and words of an accusatory character (the Pakistani bloke). Sometimes the artifice reveals itself too readily but it also builds tension and can be used very cleverly. I guess this feeds into the silent protagonist we see in games, the way you assume a template. On the film side of things, you’ve got first-person films like Cloverfield and documentary film in general, which creates a highly subjective and engaging viewpoint. Cloverfield might well have been influenced by games but I still think there are lessons to be learnt from the film industry as a whole. I haven’t ploughed much thought into this part to be frank (probably shows). The games that showcase or hint at the sort of purity in form that I’m after are those that offer a strong sense of agency. Early text adventures with multiple paths and outcomes have this, Gone Home (while the writing was sub-par) presented a scenario for you to go about at leisure and it allowed you to piece together the story. Journey represents to me something very pure in the medium. It is very self-contained and free-flowing, it isn’t a rush and ushers you through many moods. I’d love to see something as beautiful as that game but with more substance, something that is more substantial and delivers you a slightly more concrete story in a way that doesn’t seem artificial. None of these games ever take control away from you (in Journey instances of that are very minor and the camera never cuts to a place you aren’t in touching distance of). Also, these games are short but rich, and don’t insist on failure as a mechanic. There are no gameovers, they just go on in tandem with you. Games that transition between gameplay and cut-scenes feel imperfect to me. No matter how smoothly the transitions get, something about them screams imperfection. They take control away from you, and the characters are suddenly put in action mode as soon as you’re in charge - you can only perform actions at a fraction of the level of complexity that you’ve just been forced to witness in the cut-scene, and a HUD has popped up to spoil the screen. There are also issues of agency in games like The Last of Us, which can be seen as strengths, but do not necessarily fit in with my fuzzy ‘vision’ of an alternative form (please don’t mistake me for a snob – I’m not one to turn my nose up at fantastic action/adventure games with elite cinematography and tense zombie stealth shizzle). I’ll quote myself from TLoU thread to illuminate a little about what I’m getting at:

Tekken 6 was indeed wank. The loading times alone were so abysmal I decided to can it. All about Tekken Tag though, a royal hoot that was in multiplayer. When I was a young doyle I'd repeatedly chug my way through the campaign using Gun Jack's 'Piston Gun Assault', performed by waiting for the AI to move forward and timing Left & Triangle, which makes him sit down and pump his iron arm forward to blast any muppet onto their arse. King's wrestling move command list was always a good spectator's sport in practice mode. What a player. Also: lol at Tekken ever being at the cusp of what is graphically possible

Is that Wolfenstein on the left Ash?

I had a good day today. I feel as if everything will turn out just fine. I started out by reading the last third of Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, the only novel of his I hadn't finished (he's got a new one coming out in September, fellow fans). I then had my first driving lesson in over a year. I ran out of time to pass my test last summer so I've picked it up again, and hopefully I'll pass late August/early September. Pleasantly surprised to find I wasn't too rusty. Then Grandma and Granddad dropped by for a quick cup of tea. Grandma had become a little gaunt since I last saw her, but she remains plump and maternal all the same. Her memory's been deserting her of late but she was fine today, and I can't ever imagine her losing the ability to make a treacle tart like the one she delivered to me today. She churns them out perfectly every time. Granddad was a tad grumpy about not being served tea immediately upon his entrance, and he was as uninterested in me as ever, an attitude I don't begrudge him for. He never spurns our handshake, which is all I need. They left to visit my aunt in London. I then shared some nutty Milka chocolate with Mum while she unhooked washing in the garden. She brought it back from a school trip that she helped to supervise in France. It reminded me of the Austrian chocolate my Dad got me in Austria back when I was ten or eleven years old, in a cafe you could ski into half-way down a red run. I walked around the garden in my socks, enjoying the calm and pensive mood which had swept over me. I was at one with nature, of course. Speaking of nature - when I was reading in bed last night a spider caught my attention, and I must've stopped for a good couple of minutes just to watch its pointless, unfathomable journey across my ceiling. Every now and then you are reminded of nature and the way it just goes about its business without considering yours. And then I thought about the thoughts of everyone else in the world during that moment (there's a foreign word, possibly Japanese, reserved for that sort of realization but I cannae recall it off the top of my head). On a related note, Attenborough's Frozen Planet was repeated the other day, so I stuck it on HD like a wise gentleman, and I actually started to tear up at the story the producers had woven about the life of a certain moth. The way, as a caterpillar, it freezes and ceases to breathe for months on end before stoically coming out in order to weave the next chapter of its life, cocooned. It was sort of pathetic of my eyes to glaze over but hey. The music on the series always captures the mood of the nature so adroitly, and the sped-up cycle of the seasons is breathtaking. Might have to shell out on a blu-ray collection of Attenborough's work. He's phenomenal. Back to my day – I returned to my room, picked up Black Swan Green again to finish it off, but stopped thirty pages short because, like a COMPLETE PUSSYHOLE, I teared up again. It wasn't the kind of dubious cry you get where your eyes water up slightly, but in a way that makes you doubt the sincerity of the tears and wonder if they're artificial. I knew this because one drop managed to roll down my nose unprompted. I've read a few novels that take the perspective of teenage boys, and have enjoyed them and related to the central character before (e.g. Holden in Catcher in the Rye, Gordie in The Body) but David Mitchell absolutely nails it in BSG. In an interview I saw a while ago he mentioned about a third of it is autobiographical. The relationship that the character Jason has with his older sister is fairly similar to my own, and likewise his experience of bullying has parallels. It is done so fucking well. I stopped reading and looked out of my window and just ruminated over my own childhood, and my present situation - the bumbling and relaxed transitional phase I'm in, the pioneering gaming article I want to publish as Games Editor of my student newspaper (a weak gloat, if it can be called that – I’m not terribly proud about winning the position because I doubt many applied for it), the salsa dance lessons I'll be taking with a delectable Latvian lass I grew intimate with over Easter (albeit not infatuated with – strictly friendly and randy), the summer readings I'm going to do to get ahead for next year, the brilliance of novelists like DM, how sweet it must be to be paid for your thoughts, the hope that I will be paid for mine one day, and the satisfying thought of, in a week's time, helping a bunch of strangers clear up a serene little alcove in my village which has been overgrown with vegetation, I having by chance passed a humble volunteer's notice near the hushed and concealed area when taking an obscure path up to the local church to earn a few quid catering at a wedding party. I finally thought of N-E, the decade I've spent on here, and how absurd it is that I should choose to share my twee anecdotes with people I've never met. I only infrequently share my personal life on here and there's no real rhyme or reason to it, but the forum is a reliable old rock, and it won’t be going anywhere soon. And then I thought, well, maybe I will meet ReZ or Daft one day, piss around on the Playstation 4, or 6, or whatever, and that made me smile. I'm sure they'd be tickled pink by that admission. Life.

The planet isn't 'yours' per se, but you are the first inhabitant. Presumably you can destroy some of it if you have no heart.

You also spawn on your own individual planet, so you don't have to be Christopher Columbus to really achieve anything.