(A Blog Essay Thing, with no pictures, and some harsh language)

When I was attending university, in the summer of my intellectual arrogance (I sometimes consider doing a second degree in order to find it again) I wrote an essay examining the very first season of Big Brother (The one with Nasty Nick, 2000 I think) via Freud’s theory of fetishism. In short, Freud, god-bless him, decides that a fetish is any sexual act that doesn’t result procreation – as such it is given all the meaning and importance of procreation, but is essentially a false interaction, one with no chance of a meaningful result. My theory was that this was essentially the function of Big Brother, but with social interactions substituted for sexual ones. Big Brother gives the viewer the feeling of engaging in conversation, having friends, reacting emotionally to social situations with no risk of any real interaction, of having to develop or display real feelings or opinions. Everyone thought it was quite clever and I got a good mark for it.

This was a long time ago; Big Brother season 1 was essentially the ground zero of a terrorist attack that almost killed television, or at least televised fiction. Suddenly, that fucking boring uncle you had who as a kid told you that he hated stories because they ‘weren’t real’ had suddenly ‘won the television’ in the same way that posting a particular lol-worthy image to a message board might win one the internet.

The most public casualty of the realitypocalypse was poor old MTV. Do me a favour; go watch some 80′s MTV on Youtube – go on, I’ll wait. Right, did you notice how not only were there music videos, but there may have been several in a row, and the handsome young person that spoke between the videos may have said something interesting or at least cogent about the artists involved. This all seems a lot more like the remit of ‘music television’, for sure, but that well-worn point is not what I’m going for here. Back then, the face, the voice of MTV was an equal, our partner in consuming the rockin’ – sure, a ‘VJ’, but essentially just a hip young thing who loves music, just like us. Now, the faces of MTV have shifted along with the majority of its programming into the reality-show wasteland that is modern MTV. Flavor Flav, Brett Michaels, Reverend Run, the Osbournes, Hulk and Brooke Hogan, Paris Hilton, Tila Motherfucking Tequila. Three of those people are musicians? A similar number are the same age as the target demographic (maybe), or came from a similar economic background.

The weird thing is, these shows have reached a kind of critical mass of artificiality where, like the spaceship in Asteroids, they go off one side of the screen and re-emerge on the other (or like how Gears of War is so straight it is in fact really gay), and the real becomes the unreal, the common, uncommon and so on. To appear on a reality show, I think it’s fair to say a person must have a certain hyperreal quality about them (in this sense, a terrifying epiphany for comics fans – Tila Motherfucking Tequila is the real life Jenny Sparks), or to be more modern, a certain ‘truthiness’, a desire to project their own personal reality onto those around them, and through the TV, into the reality of the viewers living room. This is why Nasty Nick was so compelling in BB1 – unlike the others he didn’t submit to Endemol’s artificial reality, he gamed the system, usurped reality as his own (in BB1 you can see the guy working out where the cameras are, and repositioning himself for dramatic effect). These people, these crazy, fucked-up people, are now all over the television, which rather than portraying reality, is now a scrying pool into their own divergent reality that bares only a cursory resemblance to the parents that spawned it. For a particularly traumatic glimpse at this, try one of the MTV reality shows that don’t feature a celebrity, like Exposed for instance, where two whores of gender (a) attempt to woo a self-obssesed uber-prick of gender (b), while being spied on with complex and probably fictional lie detecting equipment. The ensuing reality battle is pretty explicitly there on screen: Uber Prick presents a task, let’s say it’s ‘paint a picture’. Whores paint pictures, and then Uber Prick makes some kind of arbitary judgement as to which attempt confers more sexiness on the winning Whore. Cut then to the losing Whore re-establishing her reality with some soundbite that, regardless of the task, suggests that she is in fact the sexier; usually it’s like ‘So, Brad didn’t like my painting – pity in wasn’t a cum guzzling competition, or I’d have cleaned up, if you know what I mean’.

When we look in on this hyperreality, inhabited by these beautiful terrible deviant quasi-men, we have a new viewpoint character to guide us, to look into this world through the eyes of somewhere there, at ground-zero. This person is no longer ‘one-of-us’ (we don’t remember what that is really), but the only figure in the narrative that is not ‘one-of-them’ – the rockstar, the faded celebrity, the hieress, whoever sits presiding over the whole thing with the Jeweled Crown of Aquilonia on their troubled brow. Compared to the strange menagerie presented to them, Paris, Brett or Flav is now an easier point of identification for the viewer than any of the ‘real people’ in this world. It’s easy to sit back after watching Brett Michael’s closing statement on Rock of Love 3: The Bus and think “Man, it is difficult for him to choose which one of these 20 strippers to fuck more than 5 times after only fucking them less than five times. It must be rough, I feel for him” because his dilemma is so much closer to the average person’s experience than the bizarre vision-quest being undertaken by the girls – he’s from our world, he only works in outer space, to misquote the warrior poet Kirk.

The flipside to this is that TV now has an insatiable appetite for ‘real people’ that can only be satiated by celebrities; we can see this reflected in the fact that the internet acts as if Linsey Lohan’s Twitter, and by extension her extremely interesting meta-porn relationship with Samantha Ronson is a reality show itself, not just a person utilising an internet site the way it was intended. I also think we’re going to see more shows like Top Gear in the coming years as this style burns itself out. Top Gear is essentially professional wrestling with automobile appreciation substituted for ritualised combat. It’s real, in the sense that we follow the adventures of three guys using there real names, essentially not playing characters, doing real-things, recorded as if live or semi-live. There is however an obvious narrative, and the situations they encounter are obviously unreal, a deception the audience is deliciously complicit in (This also makes Hulk Hogan’s Celebrity Championship Wrestling possibly the most post-modern TV show ever made). The funny thing is, this format is not massively unlike MTVs The Real World, which though many credit as being the first reality show in the Big Brother mold, it eschewed a game-like, task orientated narrative and a microcosm style environment in favour of a reality-documentary feel that simultaneously made it ahead of and behind its time, and without the constraints of this format allowed for greater narrative control via editing. It’s almost like the fiction is coming back. Until then, I need to engage with someone who feels my pain. Like Brett Michaels.

I might as well get the guys from Scritti Polliti to bone me, because I ain't getting any dick from Jackyl with a Y

There’s a game on Xbox Live Indie (nee Community) Games called Onslaught – it’s not to be confused with the WiiWare FPS Onslaught, made by Hudson, which is an interesting game in it’s own right; this Onslaught, by Hewson (no relation) is a port of an 1989 Amiga/ST game, a weird hybrid melange of a game from when Western developers (esp. in Coninental Europe, which is where Onslaught hails) were being brushed against creatively by Japan but hadn’t yet began the full on aping that would eventually melt the life out of the Japanese games industry (see Tokyo Game Show 2009) as the Western industry refined into the myopic knife-sharpening murderist it currently is. To give you a brief picture, somewhere in the vast digital wilderness between this Onslaught and Koei’s Dynasty Warriors series is the game I’m looking for, and that game might be called Peter Jackson’s JRR Tolkien’s Aragorn at Helm’s Deep The Game, the sequel of which, Peter Jackson’s JRR Tolkien’s Gandalf at Minas Tirith will have a really broken magic system and generally not be quite as good.

Hudson’s Onslaught, before I forget it, is an interesting little game. Mainly because it’s a Japanese first person shooter, and it’s weird seeing the Japanese influences that burst through the cracks in the pavement of this quintessentially Western genre (pattern based enemy encounters, aliens not army men to be slaughtered, squad mates who are more like Options, in the Gradius sense, than like Tom Clancy squadies), but also since it’s interesting to see whether the Wii audience will bite given the bare bones of a hardcore genre for five quid or so, kind of a test to see whether the Core Game can still talk politely to girls after a 48 hour Warhammer 40k marathon. The game’s spiritual successor, Water Warfare, which asks the same questions but voiced by Stephen Fry rather than Noel Gallagher (and about multiplayer FPS, which I can’t find an appropriate metaphor for) is a funny little thing too, it’s also better, if you don’t mind me saying.

A Video Game, Circa 2009

But back to the other Onslaught. So, ignoring (in an abstract way since I am going to write about it, right now) the fact that this is a decades old European platform/shootemup/wargame available for a couple of Euro to a massive audience who largely don’t give a shit, from a staggeringly deep library of games just like it that could theoretically follow in it’s bloody and muddy footsteps (I’ll take Metal Mutant, Tanglewood and Pandora to start, thanks), what got me thinking about this game is just how massively more appealing it is to me to play it with a Xbox 360 pad.

Shigeru Miyamoto recently said that he thought the key problem of Natal (and I guess that means EyeToy before it) is that the gamer needs something in his or her hands to experience any meaningful tactile feedback from a game. I agree (to an extent), and wonder out loud just how much this kind of thinking was effecting me as I played Onslaught again for the first time in nearly twenty years (Christ). Anyway, I was never really a home computer boy – I was a console kid. Sure, there’d been an Apple II in my house since I was born, but it was the Master System that made me a gamer. Spectrums, C64s and Amstrad CPC464s were all thinks I played at friends houses, and generally thought were alright. When later on I got an Atari ST, it never really eclipsed the Master System for me, and the Megadrive and SNES came swiftly to kick it out of the limelight. The main reason I didn’t play many games, certainly many arcade games on the ST that is that the various joysticks for the system just never felt right. Control was always a little sluggish, a little simplistic, leaving you with the feeling you were imposing on the computer, asking it to do something which it just didn’t feel comfortable with. Pads (which back then were one of the things that distinguished console play from home computer play) were the default and propper way to control the Master System, and in comparison felt responsive and empowering. I still feel the same way about PC games, and I play emulated games largely on a modded Xox, which despite not being their native platform, makes them feel better – on a console – with pads.

Mylo, more like LIE-lo amirite?

Somewhere in all this is the idea that there is some kind of distance between the player and the console (be it digital, physical or cognitive) when playing with a non-native controller – EyeToy always felt so clunky navigating the menus. My ST always seemed to want to tell me that though it loved me, it just wasn’t into joypads in the same way as I was. Try playing SFII on a keyboard and, if there’s any justice in the world, a flock of screaming robot harpies will rend your heretical flesh. Don’t worry, there’s no justice and as such no harpies, but I wonder aloud to myself whether Natal games, or Sony Wand games, will ever really feel right on there non-dedicated hardware. Maybe in the future they’ll be some kind of CamToyBox (don’t google that if you’re not looking for porn) that we’ll download old Natal games onto and say “man, this is more like it, this is how it’s meant to be played”. Or maybe I’m wrong.

Street Fighter II, Home Computer Version

SquuuuEEEEEEeeeeeRadiosyncracies,broadcASTINGFRomPrAGUEeeeeeeeee

Nanashi no Game: Open Your Eyes sounds like a videogame version of Haruki Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

Andrew Rilstone, a very clever gentleman who apparently gamed with some people I gamed with a long time ago has written a fanzine-like collection of articles on Watchmen, which also touches on the weirdness of being a fan of American superhero comics in the 80′s and 90′s in the UK. Also, also, also, it is very good indeed. Also.

Data East is releasing a collection of arcade games for Wii. This is super-cool because it might contain Edward Randy and will certainly include a bunch of awesome games that you should play. Part of me would rather have seen these separately and cheap on Virtual Console Arcade though.

Other things happened too, for it truly was a Mystery Cave.

But they were awesome.