There’s an argument I’ve heard many times before. In fact, I’m sure it’s something that we’ve all heard at some point:

It’s just a game. It doesn’t have to mean anything.

I would hope that everyone reading this article, on this website, would be more than equipped to shovel away at the prejudice surrounding that statement and lay some tru-facts on the interlocutor; that taste doesn’t dictate value say, or perhaps that what counts as serious artistic work is highly subjective and historically-dictated. After all, we mouth, two hundreds years ago Jane Austen and Henry Fielding were regarded as lowbrow culture—simple entertainment suitable for the soft and impressionable minds of womenfolk, but scarcely appropriate fodder for scholarly inspection.

The correct response

So far, so fitting. Gaming is a young art form, and as the new kid on the block is subject to the same dismissal that most other mass media have long grown out of. We are used to hearing it castigated roundly as childish and lacking in depth on the one hand, and just as vehemently defended as a cultural flowering worthy of our consideration on the other. Refusing to engage is beside the point: by enjoying this practice, you’re part of the argument, making a point about its worthiness just by doing it.

There’s another side to that tricky little assertion though, and it’s one that I think a few too many of us have internalised. Games, we are told, are just meant to be fun. They’re not meant to be poked and prodded at, deconstructed and put back together. Whatever else they are, they’re certainly not carriers of meaning.

You know what? That’s horseshit.

Narrative, meaning, subtlety and stories – these aren’t things that get in the way of play. They’re the very heart of it. They are the way we make sense of the welter of sensory information screaming in from everywhere around us all the time, and put it into some kind of order. Someone once called the experience of playing a game as a form of tidying up: performing the right set of actions to make the messy reality of an incomplete game into a tidily completed one. Whoever that visionary was (if anyone remembers, I’d be grateful for the heads-up) they were more right than they knew. Not only are we deriving pleasure from the ‘tidying’ process, it’s fundamentally how we sort through the mass of data to even understand the way things around us work. We need to slot experience into a story – a set of perspectives, ideas and causality – for it to become understandable at all.

A great example of what I mean struck me while I was playing the puzzle game The Room on my phone while lying in bed (I work nights, don’t judge me). It’s a nicely-constructed little oddity, a series of spacial and pattern-recognition challenges that progressively unlock more material to work on, elegantly dragging the player onwards by solving the smaller elements of a larger meta-puzzle. It speaks to a deeply neurotic part of me, the part that doesn’t like leaving any task half-done, even when the rewards fail to match up with the effort expended on getting there. That’s not the case with The Room, thankfully, but I fully expect other people to tell me how boring they found it, simply because our mental statuses don’t entirely match up.

The artistry of The Room

What’s interesting about the game is how much the narrative structure informs and enriches the play. The story, expressed through set-dressing and exquisite design touches just as much as through the infrequent notes left by a possibly-mad previously inhabitant, saturates every part of the experience. It bleeds through the choices that the developers have consciously made, whether it be building a particular puzzle out of gears and hidden wooden panels rather than plastic and chrome, or the references to astrology and alchemy that become progressively more esoteric towards the end of the lamentably-short running time.

The narrative drive helps make sense of the world that the play-space inhabits, positioning the player in a definite relationship to what could be a simple block pushing pastime. Not only that, but it draws on a set of cultural references that help expand the story in our minds, enlisting us in building our own airy towers of story: the blood-and-guts-and-clockwork grit of Hellraiser, the science-and-magic-synthesis of every ‘hard’ fantasy world from Garrett’s City to New Crobuzon. By the time we begin to understand the rambling, lacuna-filled notes that spell out the ‘official’ mythology, we hardly need their guidance. We’re already up to our eyeballs in the mass of signification that I like to call implicit story.

That’s an important point to stress. The Room is, like many mobile games, almost entirely free of explicit dialogue with the player. It follows the old film-maker’s truism that it is always better to show, rather than to tell. There are no helpful NPCs to explain away any unevenness in the process of telling, no cut-scenes or elaborate introductions to mechanics. And that’s not in any sense to say that implicit story is less narratively complex than more explicit examples; indeed, the very process of hand-holding, constant backtracking over turning points and the attempt to build empathy with wooden placeholder stereotypes that characterises much big-budget action gaming is in my opinion far less interesting, and concerned with tropes that are at base utterly braindead.

A simple premise: Open the box

Good guys shooting bad guys is ground that we have covered so many times it’s turning into quicksand.

So here’s the thing. Story is not an optional add-on, a feature that it’s nice to have on the back of the box along with the obligatory multiplayer—it’s a fundamental facet of what we are and do as human beings. Every game, to a greater or lesser extent, has story. It’s in the design decisions that are made on whether to use one texture over another, it’s in the choice of palette for the grass. It’s the filter we use to interact with the world and society around us, and if it’s not there we’ll damn well make it up for ourselves.

That said, there are better and worse ways to use that tool, one of the most powerful in the box. You can choose to concentrate on making shinier guns, and relegate the motivations and ideological landscape of play to a lesser priority. And indeed, that tells its own story. Or, you could choose to breathe it into the development process, imbuing each separate part with the feeling of a cohesive whole, using it to pose niggling moral quandaries and create worlds that extend out of the game world to reference our lived experience. It’s my feeling that most individuals who want to make games do so because they see it as a way to connect with other people, share something of what makes them tick.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we’re all just in it for the money. I think I’ll take the faith I have left.

Sus laws

Hungerstrikes

Apartheid

Malvinas

Belgrano

Orgreave

Liverpool riots

Pinochet

Iron lady

Clause 28

The happy Leninists over at Marx21 were kind enough to host some more of my wittering, this time in print form as well as tiny electric imps living in telephone wires. I tackle the ideological import of the upcoming GTA V in a hilariously compressed and shallow format, written for an audience that may not be totally familiar with the series (they don’t even react to random screams of GOURANGA, the Philistines). Fill in with your own imaginations the missing links between crashing neo-liberalism, the death of the individualist hero and the waning of social solidarity.

Enjoy.

Running on Empty

Rockstar have returned to us once again, cradling a new Grand Theft Auto game like a heavily armed infant with a string of previous convictions. Already one of the most-hyped media properties of 2013, the marketing machine for GTA V has been churning out hyperbolic statements for months: this will be the biggest open world game the company, already known for their expansive design, has ever created.  It is also unique in having been the subject of a call for a ban by a US Senator after a high school massacre, despite not being scheduled for release until this summer.

Carefully staged releases through high-profile gaming magazines have fed us scraps of information, such as the fact that we will play three characters whose stories intertwine, or that it will be set in an idealised vision of Los Angeles.

 So, now we know where we are. But why are we here? Or, to put it more accurately and less like a French post-modernist, why should socialists be concerned about the twists and turns of a media industry that so many among the intelligentsia and bourgeois press have pronounced beneath their notice?

If that ringing endorsement were not inducement enough, one might refer to simple numbers: to the untold millions who play video games, of all classes and with a roughly even gender split; to the tens of thousands worldwide who work within the gaming industry, driven rarely by the promise of material gain or even stable employment; and above all, to the extracting classes who reap such huge benefits from their position, dwarfing the receipts of the intensively studied movie industry.

There is a quite separate, and perhaps more useful line of inquiry for Marxists who are also game critics to pursue — the critical ideological dialogue that goes on between a major entertainment property and the player. The struggle for cultural hegemony is perhaps never better expressed than through the critical player of a game like GTA, simultaneously intellectually pulling apart the spectacle, but complicit in an active way in the narrative in the way a consumer of passive media cannot be.

So what is it that Rockstar is saying to us, and what signs of resistance and reality can we divine? The defining event of our times is the capitalist crisis, the age of austerity and the rage against it, bringing with it a ferocious rear-guard action fought by the defenders of drooping neo-liberal fervour. GTA 4 was in many ways a weathervane for the creeping uncertainties of the pre-crash era: ostensibly an American success story, not only does the immigrant hero Niko Bellic thrust his way to the top with a cocktail of thuggery and knives in the back, but finds that prosperity and happiness eludes him while real power stays with the mafia elite. While it would be easy to see the arc as a glorification of violent conquest, in the end it is an indictment of the figures who raise themselves out of the ghetto while forgetting their collective responsibility.

 The forthcoming game shows the developers have learned much from the times we have lived through. Instead of the solitary anti-hero on his quest for power and revenge, we have dregs and outcasts who have been dumped by the ladder of wealth they sought to control. While the demands of a blockbuster action game will force each to become a killer and wanted man, gone is the triumphal sense of an outsider who can upset the power structure through physical force.

Like all art forms, video games must relate to their audience to prosper. It’s easy to interest someone in shooting aliens, but rather harder to induce them to shoot starving children. The psychic effect of the end of a phase of capitalist development casts a long shadow, even into the apocalyptic gun-fantasies of major corporations.

There is a house. It stands, an expression of its former glory apparent in the monolithic stonework of its facade, amid the desolation of decaying grandeur and wealth. The people that inhabit this region of cold, lonely partitioned space do not see the futility of their existence, of the mindless struggle that makes them seen like so many ants, boiling out of  a kicked over hive. They work, they sleep, they consume, they breed. Long ago, a single wealthy family would live in one of these places; fill it with their laughter, their sorrows and their tenuous link to each other. Now the only sound that echoes down the empty stairwell is the cacophonous chatter of so many televisions, overlapping and drowning out the sense of their words in a squeal of voiceless noise.

In the house there is a man. The space he lives in is almost bare, only the bare minimum of material for life, but at the same time manages to appear squalid and cluttered. He slumps upon a ragged couch, staring at the ceiling while in front of him, images of violence and death play out endlessly for easy consumption.

They can fire missiles down chimneys, did you know that? Did you know that they can see you from space?

He wants, deeply. In the past he was something different, some kind of functioning man. He had people around him; he sees dreams of voices and laughter, smells flowers and wax. He loved and was loved in turn. He can’t remember ever thinking that one day this might end, that he’d be alone, left with the yawning chasm that comes of perfect isolation. All that lives inside him now is the need, the want that takes him over. If he doesn’t satisfy it, it will punish him.

There are voices in the walls. At times, he will listen intently for hours, seeking out the meaning in fragments of conversation, of argument, that float down to him. Screams, pain or rage or pleasure, laughter and song filter to him, made incomprehensible by the intervening distance. It is like a melody remembered from childhood, one that is incomplete, that he lacks the key to unlock from its hidden place. He might begin to wonder why he is alone, begin to feel the pain of separation, yearn for some kind of companionship. His need takes over at these times, forcing his body through the grotesque motions of satisfaction, and he sinks back into the deep cushion of base desire.

In the time before, people needed him, wanted him around. He remembers no specifics, only the feelings, devoid of context. He remembers a girl, her tears running like tiny rivers down her silk smooth cheeks. He remembers an old man, his father, sunk into a chair, his face seamed and cracked and gray with age. These people seem to call out to him, to call him back down a road that is too painful for him to walk. No one needs him now, not a single person disturbs his waking sleep. The hope inside him is frustrated, strangled by unbreakable chains, and so it turns on him. He lurches out of his chair, stares at his reflection in the cracked mirror. Is that really me? But the reflection fades, as does everything else, dissolving into the white-hot cauldron of his compulsion.

So, he goes. He goes every time, always to the same place, drawn back by something he cannot explain. It is as if the degradation of this place mirrors that inside him, feeds from him, and he from it. It is always the same place, true, but always in a different location. If he were to go looking for it, he would never find it. The streets themselves would twist out of sight, hiding it from his eyes like it had never existed. He does not know how he knows this, the knowledge worms its way inside his head, a warning from somewhere out there. His feet find it, though his head could never hope to penetrate this labyrinth.

In the shadows cast by broken machinery and dirty glass, along with the shapes of things that have the outline of nothing that should ever be, he waits. He knows they are already here; they like to toy with him this way. He is their creature, shackled to them so tightly he cannot even begin to think of escape. No, he is their pet, grateful for whatever attention they choose to turn his way.

He waits even longer. In this place, time has no real meaning. The shadows move across the empty floor, but there is no light to cause their endless shifting. He can see, but he does not know how. Eventually, one of them comes to him. His feet make no sound on the hard ground, and his clothes do not move in the slight breeze.

“So.” This one looks like a young boy, a boy with a smile as wide as the spray of stars in the night sky. A patch covers one eye, the other glimmers faintly with infernal glee. “You agin, eh? Whut you want?”

The man looks up from where he has been staring, at the concrete beneath his feet. He gives the boy a feeble, pleading smile. The effort of looking at him seems to suck all the energy out of him and the smile quickly crumbles. The begging in the eyes remains though.

The boy laughs, quick and harsh.

“Ma’ fuckin fiends! It gets so easy, I almost don’ see the point.” He throws a package down in the dirt in front of him. “There. Go on, bitch. That’s what you want, ain’t it?”

The man drops thankfully to his knees, hands trembling as he seizes the tiny packet. The boy reaches down and pats his head, almost tenderly. Then he raises a foot and kicks him onto his back.

“Hear me, man of echoes! Y’all think you rule the damn world, but you ain’t shit. You remember nothing, but we remember, oh yes we do. An’ it’s nearly our time. So you be ready, yeah?” The boy stops for a moment, coughing and spluttering in his excitement. He hawks up a wad of phlegm, with a tooth embedded in it. It makes a hard, cracking sound as it hits the concrete. “Won’t be long now. And you know what the best thing is? Y’ did it all to yerselves.”

The next time the man looks up, the boy is gone.

The television is on. There is a war going on, somewhere, people running and screaming from the bombs that seek them out wherever they hide. A city is in flames, all the energy of its construction coming crashing down in the orgy of destruction. Planes scream overhead, and soldiers shout orders, their faces cloaked by insectile masks. The next shot is a row of graves in the sunlight, bodies without names piled into a massive, gaping hole. The man stares at the images without emotion, the pattern of light and dark playing across his features. A press of a button changes the scene, flashing to happy, smiling faces preparing for a party. They say it will be the celebration to end all celebrations. Just an arbitrary date, partying hard to disguise the absurdity of still being alive at all.

They built a palace in the waste, did you see? And when it was done, no one cared anymore.

One day, a woman appeared at his door. She was shaking, and the bruises covered her face, obscuring whatever tawdry beauty was left. She wailed, there had been some sort of fight, she needed a place to stay. It might have been a stranger, it might have been her pimp. It might even have been the police. She didn’t know or care. All she wanted was to run, to hide.

He recognised the feeling. Some part of him surfaced, from where it had been hidden for so long, like a rotting ship arising from the depths crewed by the corpses of memory. He let her in. He gave her tea. She was grateful, tears welling up from her red, inflamed eyes. While he sat, and looked on in silence, she told him. Her life, her past, her pain. It was no special story, nothing to trouble the councils of the mighty. She had been on the run for most of her life, first from the people she was told were her parents, and then finally because she did not know what else to do.

She talked on, and the waves of her emotion crashed against him, and rebounded. When she finally fell asleep, exhausted by the outpouring that she did not seem able to stop, he was afraid to touch her. In sleep, her face had lost some of its hardness, the veneer of controlled anguish, and it made her seem more childlike. There seemed to be something around her, a light of some kind, as if whatever was inside of her had burned out and dissipated into the night. He fell asleep, really asleep for the first time in as long as he could remember, watching her breath sigh in and out.

When he woke in the morning, the girl was gone and so was what remained of the package that the one eyed boy had given him. He did not begrudge her that, at least for a while, she needed to be numb far more than he could imagine. The spark of empathy, withering already, made him feel that he owed her that much. But nothing could overcome his need for long.

Before long he would be scrabbling at the walls, blindly searching for some way to ease his rising tide of fear and self loathing. For now though, he sits, and watches the patterns emerge and disappear on the walls. A bird, a tree, clouds moving across the sky. How strange, called the thought wandering lazily across his fevered mind, I don’t remember the last time I saw a clear blue sky.

The sounds in the walls play on, a veritable symphony of discord, playing out scenes of a life that he can never return to. And as he sinks down towards unconsciousness, an echo of that noise, that life arises inside of him. As the sound of his heartbeat slows, he seems to see fireworks exploding in front of his eyes. They are dancing, he sees, whirling madly to the beat of that eternal drum. The echo becomes clearer, a clarion call pealing out, a cry of universal humanity. And as easily as that, he drifts away, joining his voice to the choir singing out in mingled loss and joy.

It is days before the smell alerts anyone else to his presence there, or rather his absence. When the police finally arrive to break down the door, it is almost overwhelming, souring their already aroused temper. They carry his body out into the sun, his skin rippling and threatening to split at their rough handling. A sun he will never see, because he is gone. Gone, as if he had never lived. As if the entirety of his existence was nothing more than waste to be flushed away and forgotten.

I was thirteen years old in 1927, in the year when we left our old home to come to England. My father had been very successful in banking, as many of our people were, before the Crash, and he made the decision to uproot us all and move to a land free from the fear and disgust we were held in.

I remember my Bar Mitzvah, back in the old country, when I was so proud to be in front of all those people, leading them in worship. My father wanted me to become a Rabbi, and I had studied so hard to please him, that I was sad to see him looking so troubled. It did not occur to me that it could have something to do with the fact that I had not seen my uncle for some time, or that my mother and sisters were so silent around my father.

When we came here, he promised each of us, that we were safe and that we would live and prosper here. For a while, that was true, but the Great Crash ruined him, and he could no longer protect us. I think that was what did it, in the end, the thought of us being unsheltered from a world that hated us. They found his body in the winter of ’31, months after he had left us to fend for ourselves. The snow had frozen him solid, so when they tried to cart him away they had to get four men to pick him up.

I think that moment was when my faith left me. Seeing the marks around his neck where his fingers had dug into his skin, frantically tearing at the rope that had shut off the air like turning off a tap, I knew that everything they had told me about life was a lie. There was no glorious heaven awaiting us, no happy place where we would all be united, only this cold hard emptiness forever and ever. I would have screamed then, “God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, if only I had known the words. I didn’t. I stood there, with my head lowered and my mother screaming and crying beside me, cursing God in my heart.

Of course, anger at God cannot sustain one alone. So, all unknown to me, I set out on a quest for answers, for a meaning to existence. I had abandoned my faith, but I could not abandon who I was. Everywhere I went, I was reminded that we were different, tolerated but only just. In 1932, just as a new wave of refugees came streaming out of Germany fleeing the fighting on the streets, I went to university. It was enthralling to me, to be immersed in a world of ideas so far outside my experience. To the greatest extent, my classmates ignored me, as if I were a bad smell to be endured politely.

My mother could not afford the money to support me, even though the other families on our street helped her as they could, so I was obliged to take a job. I remember the humiliation of walking to my work in a packing factory, knowing that the other students were laughing at me behind closed doors. The anger grew in me again, the same I had felt on seeing my father’s body laid out in front of me. I was their equal in every way, in fact, was I not their better having to fight for what I wanted rather than to be given it by right of birth?

The men in the factory where I worked were not so different, ignoring me in a polite way, keeping their distance. I never truly felt one of them either, until I happened to meet a man called George Stanwell. Stanwell was an assembly line worker, like me one of the lowest in the chain that stretched down from the manager’s office. Unlike the others though, he was willing to overlook my relatively privileged background and converse with me as an equal. He seemed a friendly sort, so we fell into a rhythm of talking of things from history and philosophy to the smallest details of our lives. I found him a stimulating man, with deeply held opinions on many things that I assumed a simple manual labourer to be ignorant of.

One day, during my second year of work at that dank institution, Stanwell appeared more nervously agitated than before. Excitedly, he pulled me to one side, and invited me to a meeting which he had heard of. It seemed the workers of a nearby steel mill were discussing whether to strike, and a Communist activist had come to give a secret talk to some selected members of the union. I pondered long and hard over whether to attend, but I think the thing that finally decided me was my father’s lifelong aversion to Communism. I had heard him say once, that the reason Jews were so hated was because of these sinister men and their divisive ways. I could not admit it to myself at the time, but the idea of doing something that he would have abhorred held a certain sick thrill to me.

So I joined the crowd of men nervously shuffling and smoking in that empty hall, and watched with bated breath as the man took the stage. His speech was short, and not well delivered, but I left the place with my mind reeling from the implications of what he had said. A world freed from the distinction between rich and poor, between rulers and ruled, between man and his neighbour? This was not only possible it seemed, but already present. From that day on, I read voraciously any works that came my way, and gloried in the achievements of modern socialism. I was a believer again, and my life became filled with purpose. I could brave the cold stares in the classroom because I knew that soon we would all be as brothers, and those whom I was sure had derided me in private would come to know the error of their ways.

I had left university, and had been teaching for some two years when the war began. As the Germans continued their relentless march, I rushed to join the thousands of others clamouring to join the righteous fight. It was the cause of all mankind was it not, the battle against fascism, to ensure the inevitable victory of civilisation over barbarity? I argued with many in my Party branch, that this war was not the imperialist conflict that had so scarred Europe decades before. This was a holy quest, to defend freedom and the revolution.

Imagine my disappointment then, when Stalin did not immediately join with me in ridding the world of evil. The mighty Peoples Republic stood idly by, while our Czech and Polish brothers suffered. I could not reconcile my faith in the nobility of the Free Russia, with the ugly politics being wrought on the battlefield. Nevertheless, I was determined to be a true soldier for humanity, fool that I was then.

The Army swiftly disabused me of any notions I might have held of the glory of war. Shoehorned into a tiny barracks with countless other enlistees, treated like filth by officers, given some rudimentary training, and then packed off to that indispensable cog in the great war machine, Supply Division in Hartlepool. It seems my training officers had decided that I was not the stuff of which soldiers were made, and instead assigned me to becoming a clerk, filling my days with boots and bullets flowing endlessly past me towards the battlefield.

There was one other Jewish soldier in my unit, a fat Corporal who had come from the same village as my father. He tried often to insinuate himself into my confidence, insisting on drinking together or giving me things he had obtained through the black market. The man was probably only trying to be a protector to me with my obvious youth, but the fact was that he appalled me in his ordinariness. This was not how it was supposed to be, fat reactionaries sitting around drinking tea and watching others go off to do the fighting! And so, I made the biggest mistake of my life, the one that more than any has conspired to blight my days.

After forcing me to sit in that same blasted office year after year, orders finally came down the chain. My request for a transfer to a combat unit had been approved. I suppose that they needed all the soldiers they could scrape together for that ‘final push’ into Normandy. Even with the Americans, it was going to be one hell of a close run thing. Of course, nothing of this had reached my ears yet, and I was jubilantly expecting a posting to Africa perhaps, or the Pacific Rim. I saw a film once, and it said it quite well I thought. I was going to ‘travel to distant exotic lands, meet exciting unusual people, and kill them’.

I have remarkably few memories of that hellish time. When my regiment was deployed, the invasion of France had already begun. We marched, we slept, we broiled in the summer and froze in the winter. When we saw the enemy, we fired and they fired back. My enthusiasm at finally getting to grips with the murdering Hun waned almost immediately, and I began to miss the very things I had been running away from. My family seemed now to be the very epitome of safety and comfort, my lecturing the pursuit of a cultivated man. My fellow soldiers were not the paragons of virtue I had expected, but the sweepings of city streets, sucked along in the wake of the tidal wave of battle because they had nowhere else to go.

I finally snapped out of the dream that had sustained me for so long, the dream of standing in Berlin before adoring crowds and proclaiming the end of suffering forever, when I found the man half buried in the snow with his face missing. It was not the horror of the scene that appalled me so, I had seen worse already, but the fact that I could not tell if he were friend or foe. Who were these people I had been shooting at? Had I killed any, any of these boys and old men?

Only one thing about those times remains in my memory with any measure of freshness, perhaps because it unnerved me so at the time. I remember the shadows hanging long and low over the fields of the village we had come to, and the people staring at us with weary, empty eyes. I remember the filthy ragged man, laughing with grim insanity, his only remaining eye glinting in what was left of the sunlight. He spoke to me in Yiddish, and the others could not understand what he said. I barely understood myself, rooted to the ground with the fear of him. The details have left me, but it was something about a great and evil wave rising to cover all the lands. I was afraid as I have never been before or since; I would rather have faced a thousand German soldiers than this one stinking peasant. At last, I broke free. I smashed him in the mouth with the butt of my rifle, and ran to rejoin my unit. I never looked back.

His farm burned that night, along with the rest of the village. I never knew if it was us, or the enemy, but I can’t say that I was honestly sorry.

I will not talk about some things that I saw during that time. This is not so much because of the horrors of war, though that cannot be overstated, but rather because I still do not have them straight in my own mind. I went to Europe full of idealism and fervour, and came back confused and lost. When my unit was demobilised after the surrender, I went back to my college. I taught there for some years, but my former surety was gone. What was the point in all of my theory and politics, when things like Belsen and Auschwitz could be perpetrated by people just like you and me?

Every little event that occurred after the war seemed to conspire to shake my confidence in my former beliefs. When those three vultures came together at Yalta to carve up Europe as their personal fiefdoms, it made me sick to my stomach. There was Stalin, hero of the revolution, strutting about like a disgusting and decadent bourgeois dictator! I could no longer be privy to the betrayals of a world that seemed to me soured with the death of belief. I could no longer bring myself to care about revolution, about the masses rising to free themselves. If this was the world they wanted, let them have it.

Eventually, I left my cultured isolation at the University, and returned to London. I moved back into the house my family had lived in before the war. The people living around us had used to say that the house was unlucky, cursed perhaps. A rich English man, before the first war when there still were such living around here, had died in this house. They said he was mad, that no one had seen him for years, and that when he died a great black wind had shaken the windows of all the houses around. I cannot tell you the truth of these stories, but I do know that it was far from unlucky. Of all the grand mouldering buildings in the neighbourhood, it was the only one that escaped damage from the bombs. It was quite a sight, standing there like a solitary monolith, or a single tooth in a rotting gum, where the houses on both sides had been totally destroyed.

I lived there alone for a long time, among the remnants that make up my history. I gave lessons to make ends meet and keep alive my old passion but saw few people and wanted less. That changed when the when the Ahmed family moved in, only a few streets away from me. It was quite the momentous occasion, the first Asians moving into an area that had been all white before. The excitement rather passed me by, sequestered as I was with my solitary thoughts. I knew of them, of course, but had no call to interest myself in their affairs. They, it seems, had heard quite a lot about me, the eccentric Jew who taught the classics to bored children of the middle class.

They came to my home one day, the whole family trooping in as if being sent to the schoolmaster’s office. The father explained to me, that as his son would soon be going to university, he wanted him to have the benefit of my expert tutelage to acclimatise him to our English manners. The others did not speak, merely listened with polite expectancy. Of course, I took the lad on, and he proved himself a worthy seeker after knowledge indeed. He mastered the few introductory exercises I set him with frightening ease, and always with a playful smile as if he knew how well I was impressed.

I found him easier to talk to than almost anyone I could remember. His mind was a beautiful thing, matched with a curiosity about the world that I had rarely seen before. If he had lived, he would have been great man by now. As we talked, it began to be more of a sharing experience rather than the simple dynamic of pedagogy. We discussed many things, history and religion, culture and science, and finally politics.

My young pupil was fascinated by my early life, and especially by the circumstances that had made me turn towards socialism. As I thought more deeply about it, I realised that my father’s death had left within me a void, a void that could only be filled by faith of a different kind. I think I was always supposed to be a teacher, it is the only way that I have of reflecting on myself, of looking through another’s eyes. I explained to Salim about how I had been so driven by the thought of revolution, by the freedom to be won for all the world’s souls. It seemed that he was beginning to understand, to share my feelings which to my surprise, still burned within me.

It was then that the world interposed its ugly hand in my affairs yet again. Salim came to me one day in a panic. It seemed that his family had been receiving threats for some time, which they had ignored as the work of lunatics. Last night however, a note had been tied to a brick thrown through their window by one of a group of unseen figures looming outside. ‘Out by tonight’, it said, ‘or there will be trouble’. He begged me to intercede on their behalf, to talk to my fellows. I explained that those who hated his people would most probably hate mine as well, in the way that the low creatures always hate those above them. I sent him off with some vague reassurance, and the promise to see them tomorrow.

God! Why did I not do something, anything to help them?

By the time I was awakened by the shouts in the street, their home was already ablaze. I could not save them, it was already too late, but I still ran from my house into that hell, screaming I know not what. I would have plunged myself into the fire, I do not think I was in my right mind at that moment, but strong hands held me back. The last thing I saw before I collapsed, and I am as sure of this as I am that true evil exists in this world, was the face of the one-eyed farmer, staring down at me as he held me with uncanny strength. I cried out, in pain and fury, and he laughed.

The first time it happened, was in his club. In the midst of a hazy fug of cigar smoke and the smell of old leather, a moment of startling clarity sprung upon him like the jaws of a steel trap snapping shut. In that single moment, the world dropped away, the bottom fell out, and slightly more prosaically, the glass of brandy clutched tightly in his right hand slipped out to spill its contents on the thick, warm Axminster.

It was simple, really. A realisation so intense, that he couldn’t believe he had never thought it, never sensed it before. It was as if the whole world became suffused with that certainty, that expectation of something so awe-inspiring, so inevitable that… and then it was over. The world returned, at least the view of the frescoed lounge ceiling, with a circle of worried faces looming over him. One face, saggy in the jowls and imbued with the rosy vigour that only comes from a truly first-class scotch, swam closer.

“Carstairs? Are you all right old chap?”

He rose carefully to his feet, and rather more slowly recovered some of his dignity. He clapped the red-cheeked gentleman on the shoulder in a comradely way.

“Quite, quite. Forgive me, sirs, I seem to have taken a rather funny turn.” He gestured towards the wide open doors to the dining hall. “Perhaps a spot of lunch will restore my spirits.”

As the men trudged dozily, it being after all past noon on an especially warm summer afternoon, towards their seats at the vast table, he tried to recapture what it was that had been so apparent to him before. It was important, of that he was sure, but his mind slipped around the edges of it, unable to capture anything but a smell, perhaps the scent of autumn bonfires. He had never been a religious man. He had performed the ceremonies, spoken the words, carried out the appropriate actions at the opportune moments, but without any real hope for their efficacy. He was no true believer.

And yet, was this not some form of revelation? He turned the subject over within his mind, as the mechanical action of eating turned food into energy and waste.

The conversation of the hearty, untroubled sorts around washed over and around him, while he remained mute, transfixed by memory. It had been some time since he had been so startled, perhaps not since his childhood, away in a dimly remembered prehistory. Or then again, perhaps not. He recalled suddenly the meeting with the evil-smelling, one-eyed vagrant that had occurred so shockingly in the midst of a perfectly normal afternoon some months before.

He had been about his usual business, on his way to hail a cab after discussing matters with his shipping agent. He had been meditating on the possibility of stopping at the shop on the end of the road, proclaimed by the hanging sign to be that of Joseph Roundwood, purveyor of fine tobacco products, when a sudden terror gripped him, halting abruptly his forward momentum. He had drawn abreast of one the innumerable alleys in the vicinity, and all at once a sickening compulsion came upon him to turn his head to peer into this passageway.

The buildings here huddling so close together created a sort of cavern, with little or no illumination reaching the floor of the narrow alley. This may have been a fortune however, as the most vile scent arose from the recesses of this place, stretching itself across the street in front so that passersby quickened their pace to avoid it, all without the slightest notion of what it was they were fleeing. Very little could be distinguished of the passage itself, although some bundles of what appeared to be rags gave notice of inhabitation.

All at once, as he stared helplessly into that maw, the sound of shuffling movement reached his ears and the sight of something hunched and dark began to shamble towards him. As the figure approached, growing more and more visible with every step, the nameless horror inside him lessened, but did not wholly evaporate.

“Who… who is there?” he called out warily. The evil-smelling entity paused, and a grin split its filthy face in two. As the light from the gaslights in the street glanced off him, Carstairs could make an ancient beggar, dressed in rags and squinting at him out of one eye, with a sharp and piercing gaze.

“So, he comes, does he? Waiting a long, ain’t I, but does he care? Not a bugger,” mumbled the old man, in a softly sibilant hiss. He continued to study Carstairs, his breath soughing in and out in a painful wheeze. “Many things I could tell him. Many, and more, but damned if they ever want to know.”

“Are you addressing me sir?” asked Carstairs. “I’m afraid I carry no moneys, so charity is quite beyond me at the moment.”

The ancient continued to ignore him, raising a hand to the approximate location of his forehead, where the matted and tangled locks stopped short of his beady eye.

“Listen ye well, ye man of the setting sun. Its words I’ll be giving you, the words of one who sees long, and knows many a thing, things that are needful to be known.” He reached out a crusty, long nailed hand and grabbed hold of Carstairs’ arm in a vicelike grip. “I see a storm growing, aye a storm of black crows, spinning like the gyre in the mind of the Black one hisself. And there will be a mountain of corpses, an ocean of blood afore it’s done, afore you and yours are satisfied. And ye shall lose that which you prize the most, and the world you know shall be ripped away from its moor and cast into the outer darkness, never to return.”

Carstairs shrank back, shivering uncontrollably. “What mean you by this, old man? Unhand me at once, I will hear no more.”

“Oh ye shall hear, alright, hear and remember true. He shall come to you in the night, and ye shall turn away from him, before he goes into that forge of the damned. For it is ever the way, and the Dancer laughs at us all from his prison ‘neath the waves. Now go, go and be cursed, fool.”

So saying, the degraded creature spat upon the paving before Carstairs’ feet, and faded back into the darkness behind him, which seemed to bell out like a sheet in the wind to receive him. Carstairs stood for a moment, shocked into immobility by the monstrosity that had forced itself on his equilibrium, before turning to stagger out of the mouth of the alley and sag gratefully against the brick wall.

A moment’s breathing sufficed to steady him, and begin the work of deadening the terrifying experience in his mind. It could not have been real, that much depravity lurking only feet away from this busy thoroughfare, crowded with people going away their daily duties with infinite care and nothing approaching a notion of the hideous unknown that stalked them, like a predator slinking around the feeble embers of a dying fire.

Home. That was it, he had to get home. If he could once again sit within the sanctuary of his study, with a glass of strong brandy in one hand, and a fine treatise from his library in the other, he would know that it was over. Perhaps he had imagined the whole thing, a bout of hysteria brought on by his worry over the troubles to his business in Africa, or an over-rich luncheon. And even if he had not, where lay the root of his discomfort? A half-blind, clearly insane old beggar had accosted him, nothing more.

Since that day however, he had been unable to totally erase the presence of that short interlude from his memory. It was not so much the words of the man, if man he was, for he had ceased to recall them virtually as soon as he had left the area; rather it was the feeling of unexplainable terror he had experienced, seeming to well up from a place outside of himself, then seep in through his very pores he could not forget. And so, the fainting spells had started, quietly at first, as he had dozed off for a few moments while alone in the parlour. The affliction had grown steadily, and now was beginning to hit him in public.

There were already whispers among some of his acquaintances, that he knew. They would never have been so indiscreet as to mention it in his hearing, but his son had come to him one day with the rumour. James would never have approached his father in the normal course of things, but on this occasion he had a special motive. He wished to join the army, not as a career officer, but through the ranks. He came with the idea of bullying his father into allowing it, but when he was refused on the grounds of the shame to the family, heated words were exchanged.

“Perhaps you are a coward father, is that it?” James had said, face knotten up in anger. “You cannot stand to see a real man making his own way in the world.”

“My boy, you are a fool if you think that. My concern is only for the propriety of the thing…”

“Is it true then, what they say? That you have succumbed to some illness that blights your mind, that has twisted you into an old man already? I could not have believed that such were true, but perhaps I was mistaken. They talk of you, did you know that, those disgusting old souses that you call friends.”

“Pay no attention to rumour! You idiot, can you not see that I do this for you? Your mother…”

“My mother is dead. And it would make her sick to see what you have become.”

At that, Carstairs slid into his armchair aghast.

“Go. Leave this house and never return.”

James opened his mouth, his jaw tight, as if to say something, then turned and stomped out of the room. The door slammed shut behind him with all the finality of nails in a coffin lid. Carstairs head sunk into his hands, and he sighed long and low. It had been years since he had been able to talk to the boy; it seemed as if since his wife died they had been living in completely different worlds. Now he was gone, and his rash words had sent him away.

Yet, could he stay away forever? He was his son after all, and a month or so in the army would teach him the error of his ways, and send him crawling back, begging his forgiveness. It was the way of the world, was it not, for sons to quarrel with their fathers and in turn to for their fathers to be proved the wiser. James would undoubtedly come to realise this, and one day might even value the experience when the time came to chastise his own son. He was not Abraham, was he, to sacrifice his son for God and duty. If only he had chosen something more in keeping with the family tradition, instead of haring off to seek wild eyed adventure out in an ugly world.

Yet time had passed inexorably without James’ return and with not a word from him. Carstairs’ condition worsened, leading him to remain in his house, wandering about the halls cursed with insomnia, unable to control the spells of unconsciousness that sometimes came upon him unawares. He could not stand for others to see him this way, and refused all company, even avoiding the ministrations of servants, who grew fearful of his strange ways.

Although he rarely ventured out, his business affairs still required some oversight, and to that effect a factor was employed, a firm of London solicitors to act as agents for his various concerns. It was through his weekly meetings with one of these worthies, a certain Mr. Temple, that news came to him that further troubled his mind. During their conversation, the subject of the territories of the Eastern Adriatic came up, one in which Temple, as a man of business had seen himself well informed.

It seemed that tensions, ever present in that land of bulwark between the great empires of Europe and Russia, as well as shield against the Mohammedan Turk, had been fanned suddenly into flame. An Austrian, a count or some such, had been killed by a grenade flung by an angry young man, and the vultures were circling.

“Political, I don’t doubt,” remarked Temple pompously, leaning back in his chair as was his wont. “A terrible business, indeed, and it seems the Russians have become caught up in it. Of course, it is ever so far away, but such things do have a way of wreaking havoc upon the export business.”

Carstairs waved a pale hand languidly. The man was insufferable, but he knew his business. He was beginning to lean towards the notion of leaving all of his affairs in the hands of such capable minions, and devoting himself to his learning. He could send a letter to James; perhaps attempt some kind of reconciliation. His mother would certainly be pleased, she worried about him so…

Wrapped in the pleasant folds of rosy futures, Carstairs caught a word of Temple’s unending disquisition that made him take notice. He sat forward slightly, assuming the aspect of a stick thin buzzard sighting a rabbit limping below.

“What? What did you say man?” He panted slightly, exerted by the emotion in his speech.

“War, sir. I have heard it whispered, by certain of those into whose confidence I have been taken, among them certain prominent members…” The look in Carstairs’ eye caused him to drop his customary blustering and speak more plainly. “Well… if it comes to blows between the Austrians and the Russians, honour obligates us to join our allies in battle. And let us not forget that the Germans are waiting in the wings, ready to swoop upon France at the slightest provocation. I don’t mind telling you sir, if I were a younger man, I should like to have a go at the Bosch myself. Show them the taste of English steel, what?”

Of course, events do not always follow the predictions of even such learned men as Mr. Temple. There was indeed a flurry of diplomacy, followed by the declaration of war between all of the major European powers. In the great scramble to arms, ideas like peaceful coexistence and non-violence fall by the wayside even more easily than the pathetic outcry of the League of Nations. What young man, hearing his country’s call, would not answer?

The British Expeditionary Force landed in France with pomp and ceremony befitting the conquering heroes who had never yet fought a battle. Along with the horse and cannon of that ill fated band, landed Lieutenant James Carstairs of the Grenadier Guards. A mighty inspiration to his men he was, and a mighty fool to boot. He fell to German guns in the battle of Mons, lying face down bleeding his last into alien dirt.

His father, grown old in the past weeks, did not even answer the door any longer, and left it to the remaining servants to send callers packing. He barely left his study, with the drapes closed to tight to prevent the light from shining in upon his unending gloom. When the man from the army came calling, he would not see him. He knew already what the news was, and preferred the darkness inner and outer to that final clarion call of doom.

When the letter arrived, a week later, he let it lay on his desk for an interminable period, staring blankly down at its stained creases. It was as if his limbs had ceased to obey him, his eyes would not focus. When he finally managed to stretch out a hand and caress the cheap paper, he felt nothing, no imprint of a soul so dear. There was nothing left but to read it, read it and be damned.

From the Desk of Lt. Carstairs

1st Battalion, Grenadier Guards

Charleroi, France

22nd August 1914

Father, there is not much time, for any of us. I hear the German guns starting again, and fear that the promised attack may come soon. I write these words not in the hope that you will understand, but in the full expectation that you will curse my name as I have cursed yours in the past. I have been told that before the warriors of the Orient go into battle, they compose for themselves a Death-Poem, which I believe is what I am doing for myself. For the lack of any other to send it to, I entrust it to you.

I have been many things in my life, most of them useless, I see now. Shall I leave my mark upon the earth when I am gone? I do not think I shall. No one will honour my name, only the wind. But do not weep for me, for I was doomed from the start. God has chosen us as sacrifice for all the wicked sin of the world.

Know this then, that I do not hate you, and never did.

I must go.

Curious about what Molyneux’s been up to? So was I.

I put my world-renowned investigative skills on the case. Journalism away!

My latest piece of disposable games criticism is now available in print and online in Germany (german only), many thanks to the editors of Marx21 for publishing that. I include here the original Englsih text of the article, considering the release Spec Ops from the perspective of the ongoing struggle over the ideological heart of gaming. Read away.

Fighting the good fight

Every work of fiction occupies a strange and uneasy place, a half-life world poised between the lives that we live every day and the ab-world of its creators – a place that could be, or might have been. At one and the same time, it is both a commentary on our reality and an escape, a document of both civilisation and barbarism, a selective and partial understanding of society that cannot help but refer outwards from the reader into infinity.

Games layer additional complexity on top of the already dangerous reader/creator dynamic. It is not possible to passively consume video games; the player is deeply implicated within the narrative to a greater extent than any other medium. Which is why it is so confounding  that, when it comes to political criticism, so few artists take the opportunity to call foul on the process of enfolding and naturalising a highly ideological vision of the world that so many popular game franchises employ.

Spec Ops: The Line is not the game to overturn that process —indeed, no individual work of art is capable of doing so, even created by artists who are conscious revolutionaries in a way that the team at Yager most probably are not. What we are faced with here is a work that moves in the same medium as Heart of Darkness, its most obvious influence. Works like these, created within and intended for consumption in capitalist society, are capable of great clarity of criticism of the contradictions of that society; forced at times to throw light on the great weight of filth that underlies high-minded ideals, in a process that Alan Sinfield memorably characterised as revealing the fault lines that rive the apparently stable basis of class society.

Spec Ops showcases the exploits of a group of American special forces sent into a post-catastrophe Dubai to investigate the disappearance of a US Army regiment and the civilian refugees they were tasked with ‘rescuing’. Like most big-budget releases, it sticks very closely to an established formula—kill all the men until there are no men left, then move forward and do it again. The question then is: which men are you killing, and why? The game may share the precoccupations of modern blockbusters with terrorism, resistance and imperial control, but it plays tricks with their character stand-ins. Begin the game shooting down Arab assailants you may do, but before long the player will face people who look and act far more like themselves. Ideologically, the game plays more like Apocalypse Now than Battle of Algiers, standing against the horrors of war, rather than than war itself.

Most interestingly from a ludological perspective is the way the player is invited to criticise, and even feel revulsion for their actions, even as they carry them out. In a neat movement that carries something of the mark of Irrational’s BioShock, the player must perform the same hackneyed set of goals common to the genre in order to progress, while concurrently being constantly reminded to consider the moral consequences. Even if at times the justification for killing hundreds of characterless enemies may be murky, there is no way to break out of the cycle – other than to switch off and step away. One might draw a parallel to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, in that the work directly questions one’s motivations in continuing onwards, although the argument could be made that video games require even greater implication on the audience’s part. The violence is not simply there to behold—without your input, there would be no violence at all.

Spec Ops is not the game an industry with a vibrant current of radical production would make; it’s the game that an industry fat on the spoils of endless bloated blockbusters has been forced to concede. It is at least an indication that the art form is not structurally immune to critical reflection, and we should celebrate the opening of a new front in the ideological struggle.

Valve are shooting announcements out left, right and centre right now, with wearable computing and Linux support getting neckbeards like myself hotter under the collar than cosplaying a Gorn at a Star Trek convention. Still, the brave new feature that is probably going to make the most difference to sensible non-basement-dwellers like yourself is Steam’s new Big Picture Mode—essentially a specially-altered version of the digital download store’s UI designed specifically for HDTVs.

Play this, idiots

This could a big moment for PC gaming. While the upsurge in digital selling has meant an underground renaissance in access to AAA-published titles and bedroom-built indies, the sheer faff associated with installing, configuring and running PC games has proved harder to shake. Like a particularly unwelcome venereal disease, getting an actual game to run on our towers of power has often meant installing new drivers and software environments, making sure that the multitude of options are correctly set up to avoid the dreaded dodgy PowerPoint slideshow of maximum visual settings and crucially, a lot of mouse and keyboard-centric mucking about that demands you have your nose parked about 10 inches from the screen. Steam has played a part in cutting down the frustration involved in driver and software installation, offering auto-detection of AMD graphics updates and checking for the correct versions of DirectX and the like when installing a game. But the mouse and keyboard thing, that’s remained a pretty knotty problem.

Big Picture Mode is an audacious grab for that 10-foot-interface field that the consoles have lorded it over until now. Its shiny, friendly icons allow you to sit much further back, and the simplified control scheme favours game controllers like the Xbox 360 pad over the point precision of the mouse. Even better, real thought has been put into the differences between how people want to control a user interface on their televisions and on their home PCs. Take the library listing, for example; rather than laying out the content in a simple list with images, text and links in a secondary pane, which is how the standard UI handles it, Big Picture instead presents a Cover Flow-like stack of game cards that promotes easy flipping through. Secondary information is automatically displayed once you select a cover from the list, divide into tabs which cut down on the amount of information displayed on any one screen.

A pwetty fwower

Real praise deserves to be showered on the text input feature. Named Daisy Wheel, it’s an elegant solution to a problem that has dogged consoles ever since the advent of internet connectivity made typing a desirable thing, and proved a tough problem that none of the big three platform owners have come up with a satisfying answer to. Current platforms use a flat list that mirrors the layout of physical keyboards, meaning users have to scroll through all the letters to reach the one they want; unfortunately, this can often be a frustrating experience, since most typists use more than one finger to pick keys, boosting their speed. Daisy wheel breaks that keyboard out into eight ‘leaves’ of four letters or symbols each. The user can select any one of the leaves by pushing the controller’s analogue stick in the direction they like, then pressing the face button that corresponds to one of the four keys. Take a look at the video below for a better explanation of how this works:

Valve have also built some interesting features into the integrated web browser, but without more websites that are optimised for larger screens in the way that mobile devices are catered for today, I find it difficult to see this as a major selling point.

Is this the dawn of an age where we can happily hook the gaming PC up to the living room screen and go about our business without constant disappointment? It may be. If XBMC could do it for media playing, Valve seem like the very chaps to do the same for gaming.